he only typesetter to have been engaged in software development, TNQ has developed tools that are today used by its competitors in typesetting. With a team of 120 developers, a majority of them XML technologists, TNQ focusses on three areas of pre-press and publishing software:
- pre-press electronic conversion and copyediting tools
- workflow automation and conversion to SGML or XML for publishers
- development and customisation of typesetting and pagination tools
Releasing TNQ MLiFLow 3.0
TNQ MLiFLow speaks the dialects of ML, as in SGML, XML. Acclaimed by an industry pundit as “the Rolls Royce of copyediting tools”, Version 3.0 of MLiFLow works in the unicode (8.x) compliant XML environment.
TNQ MLiFLow is at once an electronic conversion tool and a copyediting tool. At its core is TUD, or the TNQ Universal DTD, which converts raw data to any specified DTD. It enables the specific elements of a given DTD to be applied to the data while at the same time allowing the workgroup to view and edit the document in a tagless environment. A proprietary TUD-editor/browser provides a smooth interface for WYSIWYG editing of hyperlinks, MathML, tables and bibliographical references. A comprehensive QC tool is built in to weed out mark-up errors in the early stages making it more powerful than anything that DTD or Schema could provide.
Tags can be added or created with ease, a freedom that authors, editors and publishers need and value. For copyeditors, TNQ MLiFLow offers automated assistance with tools for checking US / UK spelling, hyphenation and abbreviations. TNQ MLiFlow even checks the bibliographical references in an article against databases like PubMed - so, apocryphs beware. It paginates directly from XML to Word, produces PDFs directly using XSL-FO and creates web pages using an XSLT Stylesheet.
In addition, TNQ has generated considerable amounts of workflow automation, including online file submission and job tracking tools, with built in query and reporting tools.