French media group Le Figaro uses Mèthode’s advanced page design features to prepare customized TV pages for 35 regional papers.
As well as publishing France’s leading daily, French media group Le Figaro supplies pages of TV listings and related articles to 35 regional newspapers in France.
The tailoring of the TV listings and articles to the formats for each of the customer publications was a highly labor-intensive task requiring substantial time and resources.
In addition the Quark Xpress™ solution being used did not give accurate previews of the finished pages.
For several years the Le Figaro group had been using Méthode to produce its flagship daily and its TV listings supplement. It was decided to apply Méthode’s automatic layout functions to generate the syndicated pages for each of the 35 customer publications.
The process begins with the creation of a ‘master edition’, incorporating the TV listings pulled in from an external XML feed and the related articles, created by Le Figaro’s staff. Méthode then applies stylesheets and page layout templates to generate a customized edition for each of the customer publications.
This is a completely automated process and the finished pages can be previewed exactly as they will appear when published.
The creation of the customer pages now takes a fraction of the time and resources previously required.
The creation of the customer pages now takes a fraction of the time and resources previously required, significantly boosting the productivity of the operation.
In addition, the flexibility of the Méthode page-generation process has allowed Le Figaro to introduce a custom feature, offering each customer a choice of articles to be included in their selection. Adding an article is a simple drag-and-drop operation and layouts reformat automatically to incorporate the new content.
The move to the Méthode solution has allowed Le Figaro to enrich the service it offers its cutsomers while reducing the time and cost of delivery.