Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Inventive Designers has issued a new release of Scriptura, its XML-based, multiplatform document design and output management tool. With Scriptura 1.1, the company has enhanced the Scriptura Designer with new features such as print preview and improved text control. The Scriptura engine has undergone an overhaul as well, as Inventive Designer has released a new Enterprise Edition of the engine designed for high-volume printing, with new features such as intelligent data caching and support for the PCL5 print data stream.

Based in Antwerp, Belgium, with United States headquarters in Sedona, Arizona, Inventive Designers is best known for Evergreen/400, its e-mail and calendaring application, and for DTM for iSeries, its XML-based data-text merge offering. In July 2002, the company issued its first release of Scriptura, which also uses XML technologies to build templates, or XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) stylesheets, into which companies can add personalized information from their database applications and export in just about any way imaginable. Sort of a multiplatform, 21st-century version of IBM's OfficeVision/400 data merge capability for generating form letters, purchase orders, invoices, or any other type of business document.

Scriptura consists of two components: the WYSIWYG Scriptura design tool, which can be loaded on Windows and Linux PCs, and the Scriptura engine, which will run on any server that supports Java. The Scriptura design tool allows users to drag and drop their page elements, such as text, lines, boxes, tables, lists, datafields, and barcodes, onto the page. Then, to populate the fields that need personalizing, the Scriptura design tool uses wizards to guide the user through the process of pulling data from JDBC-compliant databases or from XML documents (using XML Path Language). Once the page has been designed, it's sent to the Scriptura engine, where the product's deep reliance on XML technologies gives the user a plethora of output options, including posting to the Web, distribution as an e-mail attachment, or being sent to the local printer. Before Scriptura 1.1 was released, the product supported output in XML, HTML, XHTML, and PDF.

With the Version 1.1 release, Inventive Designers now offers two versions of the Scriptura engine: Professional and Enterprise editions. The new Enterprise Edition was created to support Inventive Designers' clients with requirements for high-volume printing and close integration with existing applications. To support high-volume print environments, the company has added an "intelligent" caching system and support for Hewlett-Packard's PCL5 (printer control language) print format, as well as the World Wide Web Consortium's relatively new XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) 1.0 standard. All TrueType fonts with Unicode coding are supported on PCL5 with the Enterprise Edition of the Scriptura engine. Other Scriptura Enterprise Edition enhancements include new control language commands for the OS/400 platform and a set of new simplified Java APIs for integrating with existing applications.

The Scriptura designer has also been enhanced with this release. Scriptura 1.1 supports a new preview function that allows users to see their PDF, XHTML, or XSL-FO documents after being populated with dynamic data. Users have the options to set text conditions for a range of characters, such as font color, font size, and text appearance, and the designer supports the splitting and merging of cells (or "cell spanning") and the sorting of XML data.

Klaas Bals, Inventive Designers' technical project leader, says the improvements in Scriptura 1.1 are the result of feedback from Scriptura users around the world, including software vendors that have embedded Scriptura into their applications. "This newest release is significant in a number of ways, which will revolutionize the way documents can be easily designed and produced within IT shops in the future," Bals says.

Scriptura is available now. Pricing starts at $2,070 per user for the Scriptura Designer, which includes a license for the Professional Edition of the Scriptura engine. The Enterprise Edition of the Scriptura engine starts at $3,000. For more information, go to www.inventivedesigners.com.