The airline industry needs a simple, reliable publishing solution. A solution that allows for concurrent development of multiple publications, streamlining the many phases of content development, creation and configuration and provides easy distribution of content to personnel over a wide service area. Collaboration and review of the publication is easily shared with subject matter experts, and control and management of the publication is assured. Above all, the solution must be easy to use, reliable and save you time and costs.

The Dynamic Publishing System completely automates the publishing process. The quality of your information is dramatically improved, letting you combine text, tables, graphs, illustrations and images into rich, interactive documents that are updated automatically each time a component is changed. These attributes combine to ensure high performance and interoperability.

Content Import and Export
FlightPubs Structured Authoring is particularly efficient with import and export of aircraft, engine, and component content, flight operations and internal SOP manuals. Because the system knows the internal structures of the manuals, new and revised versions can be imported in their entirety, while legacy data is kept in traditional non-XML formats. Fragments changed by the airline and the OEM are automatically marked for review by appropriate tech writers via workflows.

Rather than re-creating the content of your publications, use your existing content with FlightPubs’ Dynamic Publishing system. Convert your current information easily to XML content, or alternatively, an XML document can be converted to Word and other non-XML formats.

Content Creation and Editing
Using FlightPubs’ Structured Authoring environment for your information, the accuracy, consistency and flexibility of your information will be greatly improved. You can reuse content throughout your organization, create and edit both XML and SGML content, and use your content as components or as compound documents.

FlightPubs’ Dynamic Publishing System looks and performs like typical word-processing software, yet provides authors with the power and flexibility needed to create customized publications for your end-users. Information from your database, business systems and other data sources can be embedded into your publication.

FlightPubs FlightComply Regulatory Plugin
FlightComply, a member of the FlightPubs family, offers conversion tools, compliance verification tools and DTDs, tailored for the specific needs of the airline industry. These tools are described below.

Conversion Tools
Using the Arbortext Import/Export tool, existing documents are easily converted to equivalent XML files. Our Dynamic Publishing system also allows additional formats along with Word, such as Frame Maker and PDF, when importing documents.

After a XML file has been created, the content is then further enhanced using Arbortext Control Language (ACL) scripts. This removes unnecessary content, such as “page intentionally left blank”.

Finally, a side-by-side comparison of the original and the new content is performed. This visual inspection ensures the XML document is tagged correctly, is free from basic organizational problems and contains the intended content and meaning.

Data Modeling
Most airline operations manuals have content that is ideally suited for the Docbook standard. Operations manuals are largely SOP and are not highly technical in nature, so a subset of Docbook tags will generally be used.

Specific manuals, such as MEL and CDL, have different characteristics. Therefore, these manuals will likely be based on DITA specializations so their content can be reused in other publications.

While Docbook is the base standard for technical documentation, additional features are needed that are unique to the airline business. TechPubs fulfills this need with FlightBook, a specialization of Docbook.