UCL

UCL is a world leading university with more than 4,000 academic and research staff and over 22,000 students. As a forward thinking institution with a wide international reach, UCL values strong and effective communications, both on the web and in printed publications.

With over 500 programmes of study on offer, the management of this content is not trivial. UCL has already taken the big step forward of backing their course content with a well organised database which serves their website, but now with ReportLab, this set of content is always available in the form of up-to-date PDF fact sheets as well. These can be taken away from any course page as a well designed information pack or generated in a print-ready form by in-house staff.

Behind the scenes, UCL's data is automatically fed into ReportLab's content management and brochure production system. When a fact sheet is requested, the appropriate content is assembled in seconds based on standard templates to produce a PDF. These templates match the design and layout of UCL's course publications and the fact sheets are indistinguishable from manually created documents. The system is even intelligent enough to fill empty space and rearrange the layout to accommodate any variation in the data.

As more content becomes database backed, these fact sheets will become more useful as fully customised information packs will be able to be assembled on demand.

To see a sample programme page with a link to a fact sheet, click here.