Overview

SCENARI is an open source application suite for designing publishing chains, used for creating professional standard multimedia documents.

An publishing chain is a technological and methodological process, a product of document engineering research. The publishing chain approach is to create a document model, to make content creation easier and to automate formatting.

What is the advantage of a publishing chain? To reduce content production and maintenance costs, and to ensure better quality control.

Why use a SCENARI publishing chain?

To bring focus to your organization's identity

One of the advantages of this process is to obtain rationalized organization and management of the multimedia objects you create. Thanks to a document model, all of an organization's documents can be structured in the same way. this homogeneity promotes strong identity and encourage the reading of documents whatever their mode of distribution.

To distribute content in different formats

In general, a given content (for example, a presentation of a company and its services) can have several complementary uses: a client Web site, investment brochure, trade fair presentation etc.

SCENARI makes the most of all the possibilities that documentary technology can offer for publishing in a variety of media, so any user can benefit from a rich array of publication means.

To keep documents up to date, no matter how they are published

If a piece of content needs to be revised, it is edited only once, in a centralized document bank, and these changes are carried over automatically to every multimedia type that draws on that bank.

This document bank is long-lasting, as content updates stay independent from technological progress (new software versions, evolution in Web formats etc.). The organization always has its reference content in a perennial XML format, which describes its logical and semantic structure.

The primary role of SCENARI is to let your organization make the most of document technology through multimedia publishing possibilities, so that content is produced and updated in a single task, but it can still be used in any media you desire.

How does a publishing chain work?

A SCENARI publishing chain is a process that allows you to:

Create documents according to a document model (of a structured design)
Publish them in different ways (multi-media)
Adapt them so they can be used in various contexts (multi-use)
Maintain them easily over time
Integrate content that is space-based (graphics, tables) and time-based (video, audio) etc.
Configure it so that it meets the specific requirements of each special professional context

To do this, a publishing chain is based on the separation of storage formats and publishing formats: storage formats describe the structure of the document library and the publishing formats define the document's physical layout, as seen by the user.

The document bank is described as follows:

its logical structure (paragraph order, large chapters, different parts etc.);
the meaning given to content (headings, important paragraphs, definitions, comments, examples and so on). etc. ;
its nature (text, video, sound, diagrams, animations etc.).

The computing syntax used is an open format, that respects the XML standard, easy to read and modify by a developer: the content produced is not dependent on the software used to produce it.

SCENARI editing environment for XML content The user-friendly SCENARI editing environment allows the author to create and modify content. It can combine text, images, sounds and videos according to the rules laid down in the model. XML managed by SCENARI, hidden from the author Apart from the multimedia resources (image, sound, video), all the information managed by SCENARI is structured in an XML format. This content stays accessible and can be used outside of the SCENARI system.

Content creation occurs independently of the final support formatting that you wish to obtain. From the structured document content, the software program will then automatically generate the different multimedia products that are needed in the adapted publishing formats: Web site (HTML), paper document (PDF), presentation (Flash), etc.

Publishing on the Web In one click, the content produced by the author is transformed into a Web site that respects HTML standards that can then be transferred via FTP to a Web server. The page organization, navigation and formatting can all be configured. Publishing on paper in one click, the content produced by the author is transformed into an OpenDocument format document. It can be opened and edited in the OpenOffice application suite and can be printed or transformed into a PDF file. Publishing as a projected slideshow In one click, the content produced by the author is transformed into a Flash animation that can be projected during s speaker's presentation. Advanced features such as on-demand display of an outline for navigation or complementary items are also available.