In the rapidly growing book and journal industry, STM publishing plays a key role in helping scientists and authors communicate their research results and innovations to the society. In order to present their publications in a more precise way, typesetters use different programs such as LaTex, InDesign, and 3B2. Each program has its own unique features designed specifically for the production of technical and scientific documentation.

Among the typesetting programs, LaTex is considered to the most powerful to render math books. Even the most complex equation can be built in LaTeX as it is controlled in coding. Since this program is an open source, many authors prefer to create their content in it. Even content editing can be performed in LaTeX, and the revisions and annotations can be viewed directly by the authors and duly corrected.

LaTeX performs as an engine where we can generate table of contents, list of figures, tables, acronyms, glossaries, bibliography and index along with their page numbers automatically. Any updates in the content at the later stages will also be controlled by user-defined macros within LaTeX. Furthermore, LaTeX has multilingual capabilities for content contributors that go beyond Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean.

In recent months, authors like to have their books designed creatively, which is quite difficult to manage in LaTeX. So, most publishers are moving towards InDesign, which was developed for creative works. The ecosystem of InDesign plug-in contributors have developed supporting math plug-ins namely Math Tools, MathType, PowerMath, and MathMagic, and supports MathML as well.

DiacriTech has gone a step ahead and developed a LaTeX plug-in for InDesign to support LaTeX equations within the creative InDesign environment—and this is an added advantage.

Since customers are demanding digital deliveries along with print products, InDesign has an edge as Adobe is continuously enhancing its features to support XML/HTML. Now XML/HTML contents are imported directly into InDesign so that the content travels along with the XML tags. This process helps in producing the finalized XML/HTML content, which can then be used to generate ePub files directly from InDesign.

Due to technology revolution, the demands and expectations are getting higher in terms of add-ons and quick turnarounds. To fulfil the market requirement, we are upgrading ourselves and implementing lot of automation in our processes. The biggest challenge is the HTML delivery from InDesign and LaTeX platform when working on math-heavy projects.

To manage such projects in LaTeX, we have created a platform which simultanously compile both PDF and the HTML5 files from the LaTeX files at every pass. At the same time, all corrections during revisions are directly taken into the LaTeX files. HTML5 animation and simulations, if needed, are also created and embedded into the HTML5 file. Furthermore, HTML5 deliveries in InDesign are managed with help of InXML workflow, which is our patent-pending XML/HTML workflow. InXML takes in XML or HTML5 as input, and maintains the structure throughout the process and delivers various outputs including PDF, ePUB3, HTML5, and Word.