First steps to Cross Media publishing and multimodal documents

In recent years, the printing and publishing industry has become increasingly interested in techniques that support the publication of the same document via different distribution media. The corresponding sector of electronic publishing is called Cross Media Publishing and causes serious challenges to document preparation, structuring, and processing. This paper investigates the field of Cross Media Publishing from an application-oriented point of view. First steps towards the automated generation of printed and electronic publications from a single information source are presented. Our approach is based on the concept of multimodal documents and on a phase model identifying basic procedural patterns (production phases). The usage of our approach is illustrated by considering two examples from the field of mailorder catalogues. Shortcomings and future work concerning multimodal documents are discussed with respect to these examples.