Naviga Templates overview

Automatically adjust the design to your content

Our first step in print automation is what we call elastification of article layouts - Naviga Templates. Adding design rules to your existing article templates makes them smarter. Your updated templates and the automatic elastification process will adjust your layout elements to make the story fit into the planned area of the page.

The elastification process supports a set of automatic adaptations, like add or remove quotes, change the size of images and add or remove space. The key here is to make your text fit into the planned area of the page without manual editing of the layout. And without editing the story text itself.

The benefits are not only in the area of page production efficiency. As a result of the automation, journalists can focus more on digital content, not on write-to-fit a print article. And that is really the key to move the organisation forward towards a digital mindset and create more attractive digital content.

What can be adjusted?

The Elastic Process manages a set of different adjustments, for example:

• Use an optional fact box or not

• Use an optional image or not

• Change the Image size - by columns or pixels

• Use an optional quotation or not

• Change the size of quotations

• Use optional graphic elements or resize existing ones

• Automatically adjust headline size to the frame

Flexible article text length

As a result of the automatic layout adjustments, your article template will be able to place articles within a text length range into the planned area without the need of manual editing. Exactly how flexible your layout will be depends of the design of the layout and the flexibility you add to the template. Some layouts will be more flexible than others. Here are some examples:

Elastic design

In short, what you need to do is to create a common rule set. This includes rules for article text length (yes, we will not fit 10 000 characters to a space made for 2 500) as well as rules for the elastification (what frames can be removed, resized, in what way, adjustment priority etc). For this to work well, you may need to make adjustments to your design.

With adjustments we mean that the design must allow for changes. If everything in your layout is static, there is no space for adjustments. But this is done in the tool you already know, InDesign.

Adding elasticity also means that you can reduce the number of article templates needed quite drastically. Most of the variations of an article template like with/without image, with/without fact box, with/without quotation, with extra images, with different byline styles etc are achieved by the elastic process.

Two examples:

The article layout before and after activating the Elastic process.

The image to the left: The article text is too short to fit into the planned area and layout. The layout elements, like the small image and the quotation, are prepared with elastic rules.

The image to the right: The Print Automation process has automatically adapted the design to make the text to fit into the planned area. In this case the image size has been increased and the quotation has been moved.