A Stationery designer creates Stationery that identifies the supported output formats and defines the appearance and behavior of the output generated with projects based on that Stationery. A writer creates a project based on the Stationery and identifies the source documents to include in the project. Then, the writer uses the project to generate output for each target defined in the project. A developer can create custom behaviors and formats for Stationery designers to enable and use in the ePublisher Designer console.

ePublisher uses stages, pipelines, and the format.wwfmt file for each output format to structure and manage the processing workflow. A stage in a pipeline runs only once. The stage itself must determine the number of files to process and the number of files to emit. A stage can pass any message to another stage as long as it is emitted to a file first, and then the type and path of the file are emitted in the XML result.

ePublisher processes files as follows:

To fill gaps left by XSL, ePublisher provides several XSL extension objects to support specific actions, such as processing image files, modifying the file system, and writing multiple documents from a single XSL transform.