Scholarly Digital Editions has released Anastasia, their next generation XML electronic publication system.
Anastasia — which stands for Analytic System Tools and SGML/XML integration applications — lets you publish documents in identical form both on CD-ROM (for both Mac and Windows) and on the Internet, from identical scripts. You could think of Anastasia as a supercharged SGML/XML translation system, which you can use to translate the source SGML/XML into any format you want. Anastasia is touted as being completely aware of the SGML/XML structure of your document, and allows you to perform (if you wish) the most complex transformations on it.
Anastasia been designed for handling large and highly-complex XML documents and document sets, where extremely precise control is required over their presentation, according to Scholarly Digital Editions. It can purportedly create output in any format, and is optimized for HTML output direct to Web browsers.
Anastasia works with a document model that sees text not only as hierarchically organized, but also as a stream. The folks at Scholarly Digital Editions said this means it can achieve arbitrary document chunking, starting from any point of any document and carrying on to any other point, with full understanding of all XML encountered. This permits the creation of effects such as “key word in context” search hit displays, or search hit highlighting in full text, which other XML publishing systems find difficult or impossible.
Anastasia includes support for all valid XML and SGML documents, and a fully XML-aware search engine. It can handle documents over 2GB in size, and uses pre-built indices for speed. An evaluation version (limited to documents of less than 2000 Anastasia elements, or about 1MB) is available for download for both Mac and Windows. The full publication system is available in prices ranging from US$5,000 to $10,000 depending on configuration. An academic site license is available for $1,000.