Early in 2003, VIVA was approached by the Macmillan group regarding the technology and products for reading and analysing Quark documents.
As is well-known, VIVA’s layout program VivaPress Professional for MacOS 9 has been able to open Quark documents from versions 3 and 4 for a long time, those in the format of version 5 since the beginning of 2003. The technology has already been licenced in the form of libraries to American and European firms producing preflighting products.
Macmillan were looking not for fully fledged and well-known preflighting software but for a specific solution for their subsidiary eMacmillan. The texts of certain of their education books published in England are written by writers abroad. The Quark documents are made available to the writers on a server; the writers “write” the document and upload it. From the printing point of view certain rules and regulations regarding the uses of fonts, attributes and pictures are applied. Macmillan wanted a tool to integrate into their in-house server software that would analyse the document and provide an XML report of its contents, which would be reacted to accordingly by the server software.
Viva were able to build this tool using existing technology and supply it to Macmillan’s programmers in a short space of time. After a brief period of questions and answers during the integration, the completed server software was successfully installed.