Creating Journal Article Tag Suite extensible markup language from Japanese language articles and automatic typesetting using extensible stylesheet language transformations

A Japanese-language journal has been converted into the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) extensible markup language (XML) format, and typeset automatically via XSL formatting objects (XSL-FO) to produce both the printed issues and online journals which are published on the J-STAGE e-journal platform in full-text hypertext markup language. As there is no established XML workflow tools available for Japanese language journals, the Nakanishi Printing Company has developed its own workflow using Antenna House (AH) Formatter. AS scientific, technical, and medical journals are by-and-large in international standards even in Japanese-language, typesetting is fairly straightforward. Still, there are several challenges in processing agglutinative languages which are common in Asian counties such as Japanese, such as identifying family names/given names in a name string, or inserting “Zero Width Joiner” to avoid unfavorable line breaks. Also we had to develop individual extensible stylesheet language transformations (XSLT) for each article to position tables and figures rightly. As we go on and work with humanities journals we should face more challenges.