Validating Data and Comparing Documents within the Typesetting Environment

Background

A number of our London financial customers had the requirement to create a comparison proof between two proof-cycle documents which were held within their Composition platform and step away from the error-prone Word compares, due to inconsistent typeset markup, unreliable clean-ups to second guess structure and containing Word commands and marginal style notes which made the proof difficult to engage with and affect pagination.

CE is a software utility that validates custom non-well-formed ML tagging and provides a controlled lockdown of the financial typesetting data markup. The validation of the data enables compares to be done by the CE software, which would not only be reliable and compliant with the UK Listing Authorities and BaFin regulators but also be typeset as a compared document back in the original composition platform for fully composed compared proofs. The CE software utility has set the London compare deliverable standard ever since.

Introducing CE Data Validation and Comparison Functionality

The Comparison and Validation Engine (CE) is built into the CC software and is a very highly capable solution workflow component with its main principal purpose to validate the structure of Word documents and accurately compare two different data files (<tagged> non-XML markup) returning a compared output file. It has been developed for (but not restricted to) clients who need to file with the Financial Reporting Regulators.

Features and Benefits at a Glance

  • More comparatively accurate and financial document-centric than common XML comparison tools or MS Word comparison solutions.
  • Flexible and configurable for existing bespoke customer tag sets or new custom tag sets can be easily developed.
  • Validates SML tagged data, elements, attributes, attribute values and element usage contexts at all stages of preparation and production.
  • Compares data streams and produces comparison output for web browser output or typeset composition processing.
  • Highly configurable controls including threshold limits to cater to different customer comparison output requirements.
  • Unicode and multi-language handling.
  • Nested table handling.
  • Works alongside a customers’ existing Blacklining (revision marking) and composition solution.
  • Delivers a highly flexible and scalable comparative solution for <element> delimited data streams (non-XML) of any size or complexity.
  • Older versions of Java can still be run which maybe incumbent in the existing workflow.
  • In-built XML export functions to go from non-XML tagged data to an intermediate XML data stream with XSLT options to transform it into an existing customer Schema or DTD.
  • In-built HTML output function for easy to view comparisons through a Web Browser to review all comparison changes.
  • Prior implementations have been integrated with APP (Advanced Print Publisher), however, CC is easily configurable to work alongside other pagination/composition systems too as a standalone software product.

The Comparison and Validation Engine has already been implemented into Financial printing and service companies across London and India.

See more information about the different product options for CC under Products.

* SML is a simple tagged data format developed specifically for typesetting within our financial solution platform and workflow.