Press Release

New Wordbank automated typesetting tool cuts DTP time from 30 minutes to 30 seconds

17 June 2003: Leading marcoms localization specialist, Wordbank, has launched a DTP automation tool called SpeedArt which reduces the time to typeset pre-defined artwork such as data sheets from around 30 minutes to 30 seconds.

Designed to speed up the process and reduce the cost of producing or updating multi- lingual sales and marketing collateral, SpeedArt has been developed in-house by Wordbank’s DTP localization specialists who typically spend around 20-30 minutes typesetting product sheets for clients such as HP, Tenneco and Agilent Technologies.

SpeedArt has been designed for documents such as data sheets, sales leaflets or fund fact-sheets which have a specific design format or template which dictates the position of logos and illustrations and the fonts for headlines, body text and other copy. SpeedArt works in all European languages including Russian, Hebrew, Greek and Turkish and produces QuarkExpress and Adobe Acrobat PDF files in whatever resolution is required.

For each type of document, a template is built from the client’s original design. This fixes the location of as many elements as possible such as logos, graphics, icons, tables, product names and section headings. A rule-set is then defined which determines how an element may appear and text and copy boxes are created in the blank document template to define where the content will be placed.

As long as the data s tructure is pre-defined, SpeedArt can extract its input from a Content Management System (CMS), database or FTP or file location. It can separate the text and images from the layout and ensure that the content for translation is held in a simple localization-friendly format so that translators can easily work on the text and conventional quality tools can be applied.

Once the text has been through the localization process, SpeedArt will automatically select the right font for each language, place images and graphics, and flow the localized text into the predefined placeholders. It will also apply the right styling to individual copy blocks and resize fonts and line spacing to accommodate language expansion and customer hyphenation rules.

Gordon Husbands, Wordbank VP Worldwide Sales and Marketing, commenting on the launch of SpeedArt said, “The beauty of this tool is the distillation and synthesis of decades of multi-lingual DTP good practice that lies behind the development of SpeedArt’s rule base. It has been developed internally by our DTP specialists whose localization expertise and multi-lingual typesetting speed is already way beyond that of most conventional design agencies.

“With SpeedArt, the time usually taken by our DTP team to typeset a two page datasheet can be reduced from 20 to 30 minutes per language to between 20 to 30 seconds thus saving around eight hours on a 19 language job. The documents produced are of publishable quality which only require a final proofreading by a linguist.

“From the client’s perspective, SpeedArt not only represents significant time and cost savings but the automation dramatically reduces the opportunities for human error and makes regular collateral update much more viable.”