SpreadFlow – Metadata extracting and processing engine

Lorenz Schori

SpreadFlow comes from a Swiss publishing company which produces WOZ Die Wochenzeitung. As their name suggests, this is a weekly newspaper which comes out in print and digital versions, with a tight production schedule. Traditionally, there was a group of workers responsible for the print edition, then someone else translated this for the digital version, which had some different layouts as well as certain licencing issues which affected the layout. Since these were two separate groups, the workers on the print edition would not stay to wait for the secondary digital version to come about, regardless of any issues which might come up. Therefore, an effort was made using a combination of proprietary and open source software to automate this process, so that the print editions would be automatically transformed for the digital version.