XML Professional Publisher
 | This article contains promotional content. (December 2007) |
XML Professional Publisher (XPP) is a high-end publishing system which developed out of a proprietary typesetting system.
XPP is described in its product literature as a “standards-based, high performance, content formatting and publishing application for the automatic composition, transformation, and rendering of XML content into high-quality output in PostScript and PDF format.”
XPP is used to produce a wide variety of publications including Technical Documentation, Scientific, Technical and Medical Journals (STM, such as Physical Review Letters or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science), Directory, Dictionary and Legal loose-leaf publishing.
XPP came out of the Xyvision proprietary system. Xyvision was one of the first systems to combine batch compostion with an interactive mode displaying WYSIWYG pages, allowing for last minute corrections. Xyvision was forced to build its own display hardware as the off the shelf hardware at that time was not up to the task of rapidly displaying pages. Over the years as off the shelf hardware became more powerfull, Xyvision moved away from its own hardware to become a software-only vendor.
The distinctive factor in the XPP software is that each page is stored as a seperate file. This allows XPP to open up a document at every page and reformat this page as a seperate unit. XPP can even compose a single line as a seperate unit. The ability to handle pages as individual objects makes it shine in looseleaf publications.