CHILI Publisher's limitations

Workflow

CHILI publisher is an engine to be embedded in (and connected to) existing workflows. These can be created by our customers themselves, or by third party integrators (e.g. the connector for Magento).

CHILI publisher is NOT a web2print solution. It does not contain a storefront, there is no online payment module, status management for documents, and so on. All of those types of functionalities belong to the Portal into which CHILI Editor is embedded.

And while CHILI publisher does contain basic user management, this should only be used for your internal administrators, or for high level administrators working for your customers. They can be restricted only on a general level, so the BackOffice is by no means meant for acces by end users. Loads of functionalities exist to allow the external Portal to apply user-specific logic, of course.

Design Features

For an online document editor, CHILI publisher comes with a truly amazing feature set, going as far as baseline grid alignment, text wrap, paragraph and character styles, lab and spot color support, and much much more.

Documents are often imported from original artwork, for example using the InDesign Extension.

But while CHILI Editor does guarantee a true WYSIWYG experience in the browser (and can generate PDF documents which exactly match the user's design view), it does not guarantee that content imported from InDesign will match 100%. Of course it will offer workarounds and warnings and other functionalities.

Similarly, once a document is inside CHILI publisher, experienced graphic designers will undoubtedly encounter areas where CHILI's editor does not completely match the feature set of a traditional desktop publishing tool like Adobe InDesign. A list of these is hard to compile (especially as we're also continuously adding to the supported functionalities). Rather, you might want to check out the current P/wiki/spaces/CPDOC/pages/1412393.

File Complexity

CHILI Editor is a modern browser-based document editor. While we've managed to push this combination to unseen heights, there are as of yet still some limitations in the complexity and size of documents. An exact number for the limit is hard to give, as it depends greatly on the combination of content complexity and amount of pages. The general rule of thumb is, though: if you're trying to publish documents with large amounts of pages or large amounts of (or very complex) content, test it internally first, before committing.

Files with large amounts of pages (300+ is in production at several customers) are possible, IF the pages don't contain a lot of content (e.g. in flatplanning scenarios, where a few PDF files are placed on each page).

Files with only a few pages might still prove to be slowish, if they are highly complex (hundreds of frames, large amounts of alternate layouts, huge amounts of snippets, etc.)

A normal brochure, without an excessive amount of content or internal rules (autogrow, anchoring) and 16-20 pages should not present any issues.

You might also split up huge documents into multiple CHILI files, and provide your own management interface on top of that, to make it appear as one document to the end user: Composite Documents

Full book publishing

CHILI Editor is currently not suitable for publishing full books. Even by splitting up the book into sections (spreads usually are not possible because of the running text flow), you wouldn't quite get there without features such as footnotes, table of contents, etc.

Some types of books might be possible by making creative use of the API, but the rule of thumb is that we try to stay away from these types of documents for now (but of course CHILI publisher is a continuously evolving product).

And of course, cover design is something which is completely possible (and even has some very nice features dedicated to it from within the editor).

Technical catalog publishing

Most technical catalogs will impose similar challenges. Some customers do use CHILI for this type of document, but we are aware that some feature sets should be extended to allow a wider variety of these projects to be possible.

Retail catalogs (especially in combination with the techniques described in Composite Documents) are already published in production by various customers, though.

One shot documents

The true ROI that CHILI publisher offers to users is when working with repititive documents. CHILI publisher enables you to import and export Adobe InDesign documents but this is a manual process, and each document will demand some kind of optimization and / or templating.