For the past 25 years, Silicon Publishing has been at the forefront of database-driven content automation. We power a wide range of content solutions—catalogs, directories, personalized marketing, cruise booklets, financial statements, and more—across nearly all vertical markets. This area accounts for roughly half of our business, with our other major focus being online design.
The essence of database publishing lies in the separation of content and presentation. Our software, Silicon Paginator, has two primary inputs:
Templates are built so designers can make them data-driven by marking up variable content, from an individual word (i.e., “{{Fname}}”) to larger chunks of content. We leverage InDesign snippets to allow for complex output that goes far beyond a simple mail merge.
Once a template is built, the Paginator application will flow data through it, to render data-driven output. In some cases, it will render a single document with many pages (such as a catalog), while in other cases it will output many documents (such as a million-piece mailing). The basic flow is reflected in the diagram below:
While the high-level process of database publishing is extremely simple (templates plus data turn into output), serious database publishing is a very fine art. Solutions have to take into account:
In addition to the basic inputs of data and templates, complex solutions may require another input: business rules. For example, a catalog may be produced in multiple variations based on language, distributor, wholesale vs. retail, etc. In such a case, a table or XML file serves as a “rules database” that controls the production of the different output variants.
With Silicon Paginator, we empower template designers to generate content at scale—sometimes tens of millions of documents with a single click—while maintaining a hand-crafted look. This fully automated, lights-out process ensures efficiency without sacrificing design quality. We’re grateful to have built the first Paginator around Adobe InDesign, which excels at core page composition better than any other software in history. Now, we’re excited to see Adobe Express emerging as another powerful composition engine that seamlessly integrates with InDesign and other Creative Cloud tools.
I have written about the power of Adobe InDesign here, and there is a case study of core Silicon Paginator here.
These are exciting times for composition technology, as a number of technologies are coming of age or enjoying a renaissance:
We are continuously updating Paginator to add these capabilities, and it continues to offer more creative power and greater efficiency.
Thanks to machine learning, 3D models are easier than ever to create. With the proliferation of GPUs and the ubiquity of WebGL (now in every web browser), 3D visualization is fun and easy. We added a 3D rendition engine to our Designer product and have begun to offer model creation services.
With Paginator, we use 3D imaging to create data-driven, personalized images of 3D scenes; putting names, photos or logos onto targeted mail pieces. This tactic is well-proven to increase response rates. Now, Paginator can dynamically create such scenes with a 3D rendition engine, then use this in InDesign Server output.
AI has many roles in Paginator automation, from AI-generated content (which is not really a Paginator feature, but increasingly part of upstream data workflows) to image processing (cropping, resizing, filter effects, etc.) to template design based on learning from libraries of templates. Increasingly, we use AI to assist with programming Paginator as well.
One of Adobe’s greatest new imaging features is generative fill, which can intelligently extend out an image. We can do this dynamically by calling their Firefly web service: this can fine-tune the output in cases where there is just so much whitespace available. It can help immensely in the case of images near the edge of the page that bleed. Rather than cropping the image to allow sufficient bleed area, we use the Firefly engine to generate the bleed content dynamically.
Express is a great new authoring tool, but it is increasingly capable with data-generated content. We are in the process of reconciling the InDesign and Express object models (as we did with HTML5 and InDesign in our Designer product), and believe that Express has a major role in the future of database publishing.
These are exciting times to be alive. If you want to learn more about Paginator, or just have questions about this topic that we live and breathe, feel free to contact us.