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© 2001 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
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“We use several chapters for each book, just so we can get around the 128-tag limitation.” It was then that it became clear to me that this would be a substantial project. It was then that I knew that this would not be a simple conversion.
Nicholas-Applegate Capital Management is one of the premier investment consulting firms in the country, based in San Diego, CA. Is is also one of the more prominent VENTURA houses around, producing over 200 publications each week, all with VENTURA. This was not completely by chance—when NACM hired Jorge Jiron to lead the graphics department, he was fresh off of a six-year stint with Ventura Software, Inc., the Xerox subsidiary that was in charge of Ventura Publisher. Jiron knew the program about as well as anyone, and he formed his team at NACM around that expertise.
But with NACM’s success came the need to produce more proposals, more client portfolios, and more reviews. Jiron and company were barely able to tread water, let alone swim upstream a bit to see what the potential of the software offered. Before long, they found themselves three versions behind, using Ventura 4.2 for all of their work. It is a credit to the software that it could hold up to such extreme demands, and a credit to the people using it that they could improvise so cleverly. But the strain was evident. Convoluted stylesheet schemes, elaborate template control, non-existent tag management, and an interface that only allowed one file open at a time—it was like seismic pressure building up, heading to an inevitable release.
NACM is an ambitious and focused company, but its wheels turn at a decidedly corporate rate. It took Jiron almost a year of persistence until his supervisors agreed to review the graphics process and bring it up to the modern age. Jorge contacted me for assistance, but it all had to be done through proper channels, and my first contact was with an administrative liaison who all but spoke a different language.
Figure 1 shows you how the current process was described to me; if you understand any of it, you are a better person than I. Nonetheless, the mission was clear: To go from the morass that is Figure 1 to a turnkey system whereby the software all but reads minds to deliver a finished book. My job was to get as close to mind reading as was possible.
Once we cut through all of the bureaucracy, Jorge and I spent an entire day reviewing the current process, and it was then that I began to see what he and his team were going through. Some of you may not even be able to remember back to Ventura 4.2…
Jorge was delighted when I told him, “Moving to VENTURA 8 will cut your time in half, even if we don’t change your workflow process at all.” He was not nearly so happy with me when I also told this to his superiors. “They’re going to hold you to that, you big dummy!” Indeed, the bar of expectation was raised quite high, and I had only one month…
Our first focus was the prospectus that NACM representatives take with them to meet with prospective clients. The company offers dozens of different portfolios, and each prospective client fits a particular type. But within that type, there are countless permutations. Therefore, each book contains a bit of standard text and graphs, customized charts and tables, various disclosure statements, and then more boilerplate.
Figure 2 on the next page shows a sampling of pages from a typical book. When the marketing team feels that a specific emphasis is warranted, it asks the graphics team to create a custom book. And because Ventura 4.2 is not modular (i.e., it does not allow you to take bits and pieces of a publication and move them around), custom books needed to be built essentially from scratch.
Each of the pages in Figure 2 could potentially be customized for a particular client type. That means that Jorge and his team needed to have many different versions of graphics available, track several text file “one-offs,” as they liked to call them, and keep careful watch over each units.
Adding to the complication was keeping straight when a change was for a particular client, for a category of clientele, or for the entire organization. We devoted an entire day to determining those variables, after which I still didn’t totally get it.
But what was becoming clear was the undeniable notion that this project needed a library of elements—a reservoir from which the graphics team could pluck out the various elements asked for and assemble them into a book. The key word here, of course, is library, and I began the mission with the firm notion that we would build libraries of elements. We would determine:
Figure 3 shows the fruits of this effort with the Emerging Growth book, one of over three dozen specific client proposals that NACM creates. In Navigator, you see the permanent parts of the book; in the corresponding library, you see the parts of the book that are ordered a la carte off the menu, if you will. In other words, for each book, the marketing team asks for a specific variation of the customized pages, and graphics picks the appropriate chapter out of the library.
Like showing a cellular phone to scientists of a century ago, you can only imagine the kind of reception this technique drew. When I first showed this to the team, jaws were dropping all over the floor, as I effortlessly dragged pieces of a publication from the library into Navigator—each one taking its rightful place, page numbering accurate, formatting in place.
Remember, this group had never dragged and dropped anything—they were
forced to build the book as one entire chapter (until they ran out of tags and
had to build a second chapter, with a second stylesheet). When they first saw
how modular a VENTURA 8 project could be, they were amazed.
It was a most impressive demo, and Jorge asked his superiors to watch. To simulate
the process, we asked the marketing team to pick a few variables, we dragged
and dropped them from the library into a fresh copy of the template, and five
minutes later, the book was done. It was revolutionary. It was dramatic. It
was incredible.
It was also a total failure.
Alas, we learned something very important about VENTURA’s libraries through this process. The chapters stored in the library contained frames that hold external text and graphics. These external files are crucial, as they maintain the global links to text that is organization-wide. When, for example, the three criteria for divesting of a fund become four criteria, it is crucial that every element referencing those criteria be current.
Well, guess what—while frames with external graphics behave just fine, frames with externally-linked text lose their links during their journey through a library. Whenever we dragged a chapter from a library into a publication under development, the text automatically became embedded. This was a dangerous failure, because it required close inspection of the file in Navigator to even see that anything was wrong. The demo looked great, and the text came in just fine, with the correct filename and everything. But with its external link lost, catastrophe awaited the first time that boilerplate text was updated.
Still sold on the idea of using libraries, I worked almost 24 hours straight one day investigating alternatives. I concocted elaborate schemes for linking text files and tables through library files, so that they could be updated globally within VENTURA. I disregarded the warnings of colleagues that linking text files through a library is problematic. What was the big deal—after all, I linked the stylesheet through a master library, to be used by every publication in the organization. This should be much easier.
Hah! I learned very quickly that linking text files through a library is the electronic equivalent of a house of cards: If I leaned the wrong way in my seat, VENTURA might crash. Or lose the link…and then we’re back where we started. I learned many things throughout this project, and one of those lessons was not to link text files through the library.
Okay, so VENTURA’s Library function wouldn’t work for this project. Never mind that we had used the word “library” about a thousand times during briefing sessions and never mind that our original demo evoked emotions on par with the Beatles’ appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. The most important factor was a strategy that worked, which we didn’t yet have.
Figure 4 shows Take Three—instead of dragging and dropping from a library to a publication, we would do it from one publication to another. The template.vp file is essentially identical to the library in Figure 3—the chapters simply reside in a publication instead of in the library. They drag and drop just the same.
Unfortunately, they do everything the same—including lose their text links. When you drag a chapter from one publication to another, text files that were previously saved externally are automatically embedded.
You can only imagine our frustration, being so close, only to be tripped up by this same snag. On more than one occasion, I was tempted to shout, “Just forget about the links—who cares if the text is inaccurate!” Good thing the suits didn’t hear; I would have been out on my ear.
I explored the use of a script that would restore the links lost during the transfer, but there was a line in the sand of complexity that I could not cross. This team of nine publishers had never laid eyes on VENTURA 8, and they would be expected to continue, and exceed, the pace they were originally at. No scripts, no automation, no magic...at least not from the outset.
But there were those damn text links. The only way the links would stay live was if the text stayed in the same publication. Dragging across the publication boundary was the poison in the drink. They had to stay in the same pub.
And then the light bulb came on. I instantly thought of the old saying about how a sculptor creates an elephant, by chiseling away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. What if we created gigantic templates, with every conceivable permutation built in. Five “Firm” chapters, three “Process” chapters, four “Characteristics” chapters. Instead of dragging in the chapters that are to be used, we remove the ones that weren’t to be used. Figure 5 shows what the starting point would look like.
Each finished book would contain only about six chapters, but those six would be culled from the boneyard you see in Figure 5. One Firm chapter…one of the Sell chapters…either Process or Characteristics, Performance or Up and Down…and some with Consultant included, some without it.
Deleting unwanted chapters is not nearly as dramatic as a drag-and-drop, but we completely eliminated the issue of lost text links. And each chapter was set with page numbering of N+1, so the book would always stay paginated and chapters could be rearranged at will.
Thanks to VENTURA 8 and its modularity, a book that required two hours and careful editing in 4.2 could now be done in 15 minutes, sometimes less. And you can bet that caught the attention of the higher-ups, libraries or no.
We made liberal use of many of VENTURA 8’s other features, the likes of which had not been seen at all by this group. In particular…
Page Tags: Even something as simple as a landscape page in a portrait book required a separate chapter and style sheet for the NACM group in the bad old days. With V8, however, a few well-crafted page tags completely dismissed tasks that were otherwise quite tedious. Half of the books, for instance, required a page immediately after the title that discussed the objective of the meeting. This so-called Why We Are Here page was the perfect opportunity for a page tag. When the page is required, one need only issue the command shown in Figure 6.
Variables and Conditions: Many of the items that required careful customizations with 4.2 were such arcane items as client names, dates, asset values, and number of people working on a portfolio team. While NACM could have used Ventura 4.2’s Variable Definition function for this, it works much better in V8, and we made extensive use of it. (You can see in Figure 3 “Client Name” on the title page—that and about a dozen other references pivot on one variable.) There is also a collection of fine print in the back of the book that is either used or discarded, based on various conditions. How nice it is to always have the content there and be able to turn it off with the flick of a Condition switch.
Killing Many Birds: Ventura 4.2 formatted tables pretty well, but not like V8. And while the Box Text function allowed the overlaying of text atop graphics, it doesn’t hold a candle to V8’s ability to place text and graphics in the same frame, or to group two or more frames.
Figure 7 shows off both of these features. This table is designed to look like a piece of torn paper (we’ll debate the aesthetic value of this later…), and in Ventura 4.2, it required four frames—one each for the angled headings (which were created as graphics), the table, the torn paper graphic, and the footer text (which was actually placed in a frame footer, but for all intents and purposes, that is a separate element).
But now it could all be housed in one frame. First, the angled header is simply the first row of the table, thanks to V8’s Skew Row function. And the footer is nothing more than the final row of the table, with ruling lines hidden. The torn paper graphic is loaded into the same frame and shifted upward until it sits at the correct position. One frame, four elements.
It’s ironic that V8 could have easily handled the problem of a publication requiring more than 128 tags—with V8, far fewer tags are required to get the job done. Thanks to tag overrides, page tags that contain formatting, better rules, and more versatile shading, you just don’t eat through as many tags as in 4.2.
When Jorge uttered the now-famous quotation that leads this article, I bet him a lunch that we could get inside 128. He accepted, and my conscience has been bothering me ever since. It was really an unfair bet; it would have been even money if I bet him that we could get by with half the number of tags. And indeed, this publication, even with very few paragraph overrides used, now comes in under 60 tags.
Jorge made the bet before learning VENTURA 8’s feature set, but a bet is a bet—I think we’ll do George’s by the Cove in La Jolla…
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