Best Practices for editing

I have a large document (college course catalog) that I need to produce. I have a previous version in publisher. I need to have various individuals edit specific sections of the catalog. I am wondering if anybody has any suggestions on the best way to do this. I have Adobe CS4 and plan on producing the new catalog using InDesign. I have the ability to use a share drive, website, email, or snail mail to deliver the files. Should i break it out by section, send via Word (tracking), and insert the sections in ID? Other ideas?

There are several 3rd party options that heavily utilize two Adobe apps: inDesign and inCopy. The 3rd-parties add the functionality to allow various levels of collaboration. I've been doing demos with several companies, and each takes a different approach. Here's part of my list: Woodwing, K4, Doczone with TopLeaf (not an inDesign solution), Atomik/easypress.
All these are xml-based, which basically means you are driving an editable database that feeds into inDesign. Through various tools (some are web-based, for instance) authors can make revisions to words while you work on layout. Again, each company has a different approach to be ready to be blown away, at least temporarily.
Best part of many of these tools: If you create the data for the print book you also have the data for the school's website and internal class database.
It also seems that there should be solutions already developed specifically for the school market, but maybe my imaginination is just getting the best of me today.

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    -Observable is a class, not an interface; since most of my Observers already extend JPanel (or some such), I have had to create inner classes.
    -If an Observer is observing multiple Observables, it will have to determine which Observer called its update() method (by using reference equality or class comparison or whatever). Again, a very minor issue, but something to keep in mind.I don't deem those issues are minor. The second one in particular, is rather annoying in terms of maintenance ("Err, remind me, which widget is calling this "update()" method?").
    In addition to that, the Observable/Observer are legacy non-generified classes, that incurr a loosely-typed approach (the subject and context arguments to the update(Observable subject, Object context) methods give hardly any info in themselves, and they generally have to be cast to provide app-specific information.
    Note that the "notification model" from AWT and Swing widgets is not Observer-Observable, but merely EventListener . Although we can only guess what reasons made them develop a specific notification model, I deem this essentially stems from those reasons.
    The contrasting appraoches are discussed in this article from Bill Venners: The Event Generator Idiom (http://www.artima.com/designtechniques/eventgenP.html).
    N.B.: this article is from a previous-millenary series of "Design Techniques" articles that I found very useful when I learned OO design (GUI or not).
    One last nail against the Observer/Observable model: these are general classes that can be used regardless of the context (GUI/non-GUI code), so this makes it easier to forget about Swing threading rules when using them (essentially: is the update method called in the EDT or not).
    If anybody has any information on the performance or efficiency of using Observable/ObserverI would be very surprised if this had any performance impact. If it had, that would mean that you have either:
    - a lot of widgets that are listening to one another (and then the Mediator pattern is almost a must to structure such entangled dependencies). And even then I don't think there could be any impact below a few thousands widgets.
    - expensive or long-running computation in the update methods. That's unrelated to the notification model itself.
    - a lot of non-GUI components that use the Observer/Observable to communicate among themselves - all the more risk then, to have a GUI update() called outside the EDT, see remark above.
    (or whether there are inbuilt equivalents for Swing components)See discussion above.
    As far as your remark 2 goes (if one observer observes more than one subjects, the update() method contains branching logic) : this also occurs with the Event Delegation model indeed: for example, it is quite common that people complain that their actionPerformed() method becomes unwieldy when the same class listens for several JButtons.
    The usual advice for this is, use anonymous listeners, each of which handles the event from only one source (and generally very close in code to the definition of that source), and that simply translates the "generic" event notification method into a specific method call of a Controller or Mediator .
    Best regards.
    J.
    Edited by: jduprez on May 9, 2011 10:10 AM

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