EP/Kit

Contents of very different kinds stream in from very different countries and institutions to be merged into one publication – these are complex documents of several hundred pages with a multitude of statistical data in the form of tables and charts, especially economic and financial reports.

In 2004 ECFIN was looking for software tech support for each phase of this quite extensive publication process, particularly for:

• the merging of the individual contributions into a uniform presentation.
• homogeneous assembly of document parts delivered by various authors.
• automatic numbering and complete indexing.
• incorporation of Excel objects.

DIaLOGIKa developed an add-in to Microsoft Word that offers specific functionalities for each phase of the publication workflow:

• In Phase I the publication designer creates the structural design for the entire publication on the basis of a universally available structure definition. Further, pre-formatted documents are created for all individual contributions.
• Each author uses the pre-formatted document for his or her contribution as just a part of the whole publication (Phase II) – EP/Kit supports the authors in their work with various functionalities: complex operations such as the insertion of charts or tables from Microsoft Excel are automated, standardized, and thus simplified. Paragraphs are automatically numbered, and the formatting is likewise performed automatically according to a pre-defined style guide.
• At any point along the way, the publication manager can, in the background, automatically merge the currently available contributions into a complete publication (Phase III). EP/Kit does the work of adding cover pages and tables of contents itself.
• In addition, EP/Kit keeps the publication manager informed of any changes to the Word and Excel contributions and thus the current status of the entire publication.

EP/Kit ultimately not only supports the uniform formatting and simplified creation of large-scale publications, it also controls their architecture throughout the entire production workflow. And EP/Kit can be configured very flexibly.

EP/Kit is meanwhile used as the standard framework for all major ECFIN publications. In addition to the main publications of the Economic Series and the Economic Forecast issued regularly three times a year, it is used for a growing number of individual publications.

Besides providing support and maintenance, we continue to develop this Word add-in and its workflow components further.

There are other departments of the European Commission besides DG ECFIN that regularly use EP/Kit as well.