ITU: new layouts for Technical and Service publications (Flagship)

Ronald Tse

Alexander Dyuzhev on 14 Mar 2024

Introduction

ITU originally developed a unified branding style for its publications in 2021, and this style was finally applied towards all technical publications in late 2023.

In response to this need, Metanorma for ITU now supports the new ITU publication layout for Technical and Service publications in PDF.

Note	Special thanks to Anibal Cabrera at ITU for advising on the intricacies of the new ITU layout.

ITU publication types

The new branding style applies to all ITU bureaus, including its R-, D- and T- bureaus.

It distinguishes the following types of publications:

Standard publications. Such as those published by ITU itself, ITU-D Thematic priorities, ITU-D regional reports and Country profiles.
Flagship publications. Such as RR (Radio Regulations), WRC (ITU-R), WTDC (ITU-D), WTCA (ITU-T) and other reports.
Technical publications. Such as ITU-{R,T} Recommendations, Technical Reports, Resolutions, Reports, Handbooks.
Periodicals. Such as the ITU News, ITU Journal.

The full list of the categorization of publications is reproduced below.

Table 1. List of publication types (from ITU Guidelines, 4.0 "ITU Publications — Visual guidelines for ITU publication covers", 2021)
Document Type	ITU-D	ITU-T	ITU-R	SG
Standard	All, except the ones mentioned below	All, except the ones mentioned below	All, except the ones mentioned below	All, except the ones mentioned below
Flagship	Measuring digital development Yearbook of Statistics WTDC Final report	WTSA proceedings Collection of ITU-T Recommendations and selected handbooks	Service publications Regulatory publications Conference pulications Collection of ITU-R Recommendations, reports and selected handbooks	Resolutions of the Council Final Acts of the Plenipotentiary Conference Collection of the basic texts
Technical		Recommendations Technical Papers Technical Reports	ITU-R Resolutions ITU-R Recommendations ITU-R Handbooks ITU-R Reports
Periodicals		ITU News		ITU Journal

Supported ITU publications in Metanorma

Metanorma supports the publication of a vast number of ITU document types, and all document types now support the new ITU cover page layout.

In line with ITU policy, Metanorma supports the internalization of the cover page into all 6 official languages of the ITU, namely, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.

For details on how to create ITU documents in Metanorma, refer to the Authoring for ITU page.

Table 2. List of supported ITU documents in Metanorma
Document type	ITU-D	ITU-T	ITU-R
Technical	Recommendations	Recommendations Technical Papers Technical Reports Supplements Handbooks Focus Group publications Resolutions Implementers Guide	Recommendations Reports Handbooks Resolutions
Flagship			Service publication

Note	The "Recommendation" type includes the related types such as amendment, supplement, etc.

Note	See ITU document attributes for full details.

New layout document attributes

Metanorma supports the "document scheme" concept for a number of organizations, allowing documents to appear in different layout schemes. This is now implemented for ITU differentiating the pre-2021 and the 2021 layouts.

The document attribute :document-scheme: allows to specify the layout of an ITU document:

current (new default) identifies the 2021 ITU layout.
legacy identifies the pre-2021 ITU layout.

The new ITU cover page contains some new elements not previously in the legacy layout. The corresponding document attributes that affect those elements are now present in Metanorma.

The following document attributes are now supported for all documents:

:collection-title:: The collection of documents that this document appears in. Accepts a text value. Appears on the top left of the cover page.
:sector:: Standardization sector that publishes the document, if the document is published outside of the defined bureaus. Only use this attribute if it does not belong to the ITU-{D/R/T} sectors, otherwise use :bureau: instead.

Flagship publications require a few additional document attributes.

Note	The only flagship publication currently supported in Metanorma is the Service Publication.

:coverpage-image:

Cover page image for PDF output. Accepts comma-delimited list of image locations (and title page for logos). The first image will be applied on the cover page. The second image will apply to the inner cover.

Recommend using a one-paged PDF for the cover page image.

Image files referenced shall be in supported image formats including PNG, JPEG, GIF, SVG, or in PDF. The image locations are relative to the source root document.

The cover page image should contain also event, partner and co-publisher logos (if applicable). There is no need to include the ITU logo at the right bottom corner as it is inserted by Metanorma. If there is insufficient space on the cover to include all the logos, then specify the second image location to render them on the inner cover page.

:presentation-metadata-color-cover-title:

Title color on PDF cover. Valid values are black (default) or white. Select depend on the contrast with the background.

:presentation-metadata-cover-header-hide:

Whether to hide page header titles. The header titles are the "ITUPublications", "International Telecommunication Union", with the Sector or Bureau name on the cover page. Valid values: false (default) or true. Some Flagship publications opt to omit the cover page header.

:presentation-metadata-color-cover-itu-logo:

Color of the ITU logo. Typically #1DA0DB (default) or 'white' depending on the contrast with background.

:slogan-title:

Slogan that this document is branded with, in connection with an event. Some Flagship publications allow the slogan title.

Note

When using the slogan title, be aware that the ITU official style guide specifies proprietary fonts for the slogan title that are not freely available cross-platforms.

"Adelle Italic" for Latin and Cyrillic scripts;
"Traditional Arabic" for Arabic;
"STKaiti" for Chinese.

These are fonts that Fontist cannot directly install, and the user is responsible for pre-installing them on their machine.

Working with proprietary fonts for the Flagship slogan title

Flagship publications are allowed a "slogan title" that utilizes proprietary fonts.

Fontist is unable to install (does not support) those fonts since they are only available on proprietary platforms.

Specifically:

"Adelle Italic" is a proprietary font on all platforms. On macOS, the macOS-licensed font "Adelle Devanagari" can serve as an identical and free substitution of "Adelle Italic". "Adelle Devanagari" has to be installed via the macOS Font Book as an add-on.
"Traditional Arabic" is a Microsoft-licensed font that comes by default on Windows and Office;
"STKaiti" is a Microsoft-licensed font only provided by Office.

This means in order to comply with the ITU branding guidelines, the user must pre-install these fonts on their machine manually. Once these fonts are available in the system, Fontist will find these fonts pass them into the Metanorma PDF production tool (mn2pdf).

Since the slogan title is rarely used, these fonts are not specified internally in the font manifest of Metanorma for ITU, and require manual specification via the :fonts: document attribute.

Example 1. Using proprietary fonts for the Flagship slogan title

= World Radiocommunication Conference 2019 (WRC-19)
:slogan-title: Provisional Final Acts
:fonts: Adelle Devanagari, Traditional Arabic, STKaiti

// body content

Examples of rendered cover pages

Here are the examples of the new ITU cover pages for Technical and Flagship publications.

Figure 1. Technical publication via Metanorma (ITU-T Recommendation)

Figure 2. Flagship publication via Metanorma (Service publication)

Conclusion

Metanorma for ITU now supports the new ITU cover page layout for Technical and Flagship publications in PDF.

Please report at the metanorma-itu issues page if you have any questions or need assistance with your ITU documents!