The publishing industry has shown great interest for techniques that support publishing the same content through various channels of communication. This electronic publishing sector, called cross-media publishing, is the cause of many serious challenges related to the process of preparing, structuring, and processing documents. The digitalisation and appearance of cross-media publishing and the demands of the market have led to the presence of a certain publication in printed form, as a website, and in an electronically distributed interactive form. This is currently becoming the standard in the publishing business and key to surviving on the market. This places a demand on content creators to integrate ‘intelligent’ workflows into their business model. This paper explores the field of cross-media publishing from an applicationoriented angle. The first steps towards the automated generation of printed and electronic publications from a single source of information are presented. The paper uses an approach based on multimodal documents and phases of production. The goal is to find technological solutions based on open-source technologies that can be implemented into existing workflows regarding the production of printed publications. The application of this approach is illustrated on examples of workflows related to the production and structuring of magazine contents in printed form, on a website, and in an electronically distributed form.