Arbortext Layout Developer
(formerly APP or 3B2)

Arbortext Layout Developer (formerly APP & 3B2) from PTC is an advanced print and PDF publishing toolbox wrapped around a core composition engine. The highly customisable nature and large array of vertical specific features enable tailoring to suit almost any publishing environment in both black-box and manual configurations.

The native handling of delimited mark-up such as SGML, XML, HTML or users bespoke ML, together with its own powerful macro, formatting object model (FOM) API and scripting languages, coupled with an array of standard technologies such as Perl, XPath, JavaScript, XSLT, SVG, CGM, CALS, Unicode all available from within the application, make it a favourite of solution developers all over the world facing complex publishing challenges.

The powerful nature of ALD enables great flexibility when building solutions or integrating it into your workflow. The ability to automate all of your composition and reduce or eliminate manual composition can bring significant savings.

Layout Developer was renamed from 3B2 when the original developers Advent Publishing Systems became part of Arbortext and then PTC. With its roots in typesetting, ALD is still attributed with high quality and finely controlled typographical features which enable good quality output along with the dynamic composition flexibility.

  • Increased efficiency by automating processes and eliminating content conversions, you can improve productivity and increase the efficiency of your publishing process
  • Reduced production costs by reducing manual effort and eliminating unnecessary tasks enables you to reduce your publishing costs
  • High quality and consistency by automating, single source publishing ensures that your information is consistent across all types of documents and media, and Advanced Print Publisher’s high-quality output ensures high-quality, professional publications.
  • Desktop:
    • Attended desktop deployment for composition.
    • Template/stylesheet developer interface for building manual, semi-automated and fully automated templates to run on the ALD desktop, ALD Server or within Publishing Engine.
  • Server:
    • Unattended fully automated black box capabilty.
  • Enterprise:
    • Publishing Engine scalable multi process composition with job/queue management.
  • Web-Service:
    • New Web-Service version of ALD-Server for online solutions.
      Contact us for more information.
      Release date TBC 2024.

Further information sources for ALD:

  • Further information on APP can be found in the Arbortext APP Datasheet.
  • See also ‘Evolution of Arbortext Advanced Print Publisher’ article as published in the UK ISTC Communicator Journal (English/Italian)