It’s been a while since I’ve done a live ePublisher demo, so I must admit I was a little nervous about the webinar presentation I did for the fine folks in the North East Ohio chapter of the STC last week. The opening presentation on “Why Publishing is No Longer the Last Step,” is one I’ve done several times so was I was comfortable delivering that, but when they asked for a demo of ePublisher to close out the proceedings I had to give it more than a little thought.

It’s not that I don’t use our own product, in fact I use it on a regular basis – no the real stumbling block was what to show in the 15 or so minutes I had available.

There is so much that ePublisher can do, it would be impossible to show everything

Instead of showing everything we already had, I decided the next best thing would be to demo what’s new. With the release of ePublisher 2009.3 just a week away, I already had a Beta version on my laptop and could quickly show just a taste of some of the great things we have coming in the next version.

So I sat down and worked out a nice short demo for the NEO-STC webinar that would both introduce people to the ideas and concepts of the ePublisher Platform, the workflow and a couple of best practice hints for existing users in the audience; followed by a preview of some new features.

Like the new Start Screen and new fine typography and print controls in the PDF XSL-FO output format.

I’m happy to say it seem to be well received – and I had fun playing around with the new features.

Following the official launch of 2009.3 this week we will be scheduling some more webinars to discuss the new features in depth. The first 2009.3 webinar is already fully booked, but we will be announcing new dates and times soon.