This is the app I made for a Serbian well known publishing company, named “Sluzbeni Glasnik”. It was a custom project for their encyclopaedic section, aimed at collecting data for encyclopaedias and lexicons.

As you may know, encyclopaedia is usually written by more than one author, where each one covers a section of the book he’s most prominent with. On the other hand, all these entries can be interconnected, point to one another, etc – as you would expect from a good encyclopaedia in printed form. The board of editors needs to list entire collection from time to time, to see if it fits the required form, control the text etc. Each entry needs to be checked by the editor, lector, copy editor and each one of them needs to give his approval to the text. Lastly, board of editors needs to check the total number of characters and words in all entries, to see if they fit in the predefined format and size of the book.

Well, this app covers all of that. It was made in Clarion for Windows, so it’s a native Win32 app. It uses MySQL as a common backend, and every author or an editor has a copy of the client app installed on his system. All apps communicate with one common MySQL server, using a database for the specific book that they’re working at. A client can communicate with alternate databases, if the author is working on more than one book at a time. The app collects the data for each individual entry, and the author must give his approval after which he can’t modify the entry any more.

The editors pick up from there, and each one controls the entry text and gives his approval. Once all approvals are collected, the entry is marked as finished.

Once all entries are finished, entire text is exported to MS Word format, that is used for prepress in InDesign and similar programs.

During data collection, board of editors can check the number of letters and words collected at any point in time, so they can react if the book starts to grow more than acceptable. Also, each term that is to be defined has a size limit, so author is warned in time if his text contains more than allowed number of characters.

The app was initially used to collect data for a series of major town lexicons, so it initially had more than 250 concurrent users. After that, it was used for several large encyclopaedias, with smaller number of concurrent authors but larger number of entries per book. And it still works successfully.