Josh Faigen

It is with great pleasure that the Board of Directors of the XyUser Group can announce that it has concluded its search for a new part-time Executive Director and is in a position to announce that Josh Faigen will take on this role with effect from the up-coming SPC meeting in May.

Josh will already be known to many of the members of the XyUser Group as he is a regular presenter at the XyUser Group conferences and has presented individual sessions as well as mini-clinics. He has also designed and produced the Conference brochures for many years.

Josh’s background is steeped in all the qualities and experience that members of the XyUser Group have themselves. He started his career, in Pittsburgh, as a typographer and graphic designer working for printers, corporations and design firms. After Pittsburgh he then moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts and started working as a Field Application Specialist at XyEnterprise. After leaving XyEnterprise he became an independent trainer and consultant and still provides this service today for a variety of customers.

What some of you may not know is that as well as his typographic and graphic design skills, Josh is also a writer and has had plays published and performed on stage and radio.

The Board are delighted that Josh has agreed to take on the role of part-time Executive Director of the XyUser Group and we look forward to his input and help in continuing the evolution of the Group to the benefit of our members.

Chris Leggett

The XyUser Group board had its annual business and conference planning meeting in January. We are well on our way with planning another exciting conference which will be held in Charleston during September, as well as planning the SPC meeting targeted for the May timeframe.

An important part of our job as Board Members is to analyze the business and finances of the user group. Based on analysis of the current requirements of managing membership and organizing the conference, the board concluded that these duties require much less of a time commitment than in past years. The Board has made the decision to phase out the position of Executive Director as a full-time employee. Bob Carr has been handling these duties for several years now, and the Board made the difficult decision to deliver the news to Bob at the January meeting. We wish him well for the future and thank him for his input over many years.

The XyUser Group board proposes to create a new post which will be a part-time position and we will advertise details on the website in the near future. We welcome any enquiries from people who might be interested in this part-time position.

We have also noted that SDL is changing and adapting, and we are constantly monitoring that. To reflect some of these changes and to try to appeal to a wider audience whilst maintaining our commitment to existing members, we are planning to rename and rebrand the XyUser Group to align better with the new corporate identity of the software provider that makes this independent user group possible. We are currently looking at ideas and options and would welcome user feedback.

If any one has any questions or wants to discuss this announcement further then please email me directly at chris@letterpart.com and I will gladly answer your questions.

Chris Leggett
President, XyUser Group

I thought that it might be both useful and interesting to hear about how XyUsers have used XPPs ability to easily integrate your own Perl-based Division/ Job/ Site tools to solve a particular problem – whether that be a general purpose tool or solving what might appear to be a very publication-specific problem.

One simple Job tool that we have set up and has proved to be quite useful is named “showpages_snapshot” and it displays page count information for that Job.

The obvious way to show this information in PathFinder would be to switch on “View Page Counts” and then, of course, to “refresh”. That does indeed show us the information we require but it also puts a very significant overhead onto PathFinder as the information is obtained again everytime you move around your structure. I invariably switch it off again very quickly.

What we did was set up a Job Tool that made use of the showpages command – the same command that PathFinder uses.  However in our output we:

• display the page count information
• list the Divisions in DA ticket order (much easier to check that numbering is as it should be when it is listed in publication order)
• list any Divisions not mentioned in the DA ticket (these may be legitimately not in the DA ticket but can act as a warning)
• display some totals

Here is an example of information displayed in PathFinder via “View Page Counts”, and then how the Job Tool displays it.

Essentially the Job Tool will:

• gets a list of all the Divisions in the Job
• runs showpages -job -ds -t  (this outputs information in DA ticket order)
• loop through the showpages output building our own output (in this case an HTML page), and also “tick” that a Division has been dealt with
• keeps a page total to output at the end
• output the list of all the Divisions that were not in the showpages output
• open up the HTML page in the users browser.

And as I write this I can already see an enhancement that would be easy to implement in Perl – to also put out the Arabic equivalent of those Roman numbers…..