CHILI Publisher to CHILI GraFx Studio with Automated QA

As many of you know, CHILI Publisher has undergone a major transformation. What was once known as CHILI Publisher (with an XML-based editor primarily designed for print use cases) has now evolved into CHILI GraFx Studio, part of the broader GraFx platform.

This new editor is built on JSON and brings exciting capabilities such as support for animation, interactive digital content, and more — extending far beyond traditional print.

 The Migration Challenge

With innovation comes change. Many customers are now migrating from the legacy CHILI Publisher editor to the new GraFx Studio. However, one big challenge remains:

  • There is no direct migration utility to automatically move templates from the old system to the new one.
  • Templates need to be recreated manually in GraFx Studio.

This manual process introduces risks. Even small changes — such as a paragraph shifting, an image frame resizing, or text repositioning — can lead to discrepancies between the old and new templates. While sometimes these differences are barely noticeable, in other cases they may affect print quality or layout consistency.

Acheron’s Solution: Automated QA for Template Migration

At Acheron, we saw the need for a quality assurance framework to help brands, agencies, and partners confidently migrate their templates.

We built a QA Testing Tool that automates comparison between the legacy CHILI Publisher output and the new GraFx Studio output.

Here’s how it works:

  • The tool takes renders from both platforms.
  • It overlays the outputs and evaluates differences using the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM).
  • A Python-based plugin runs the comparison and assigns a score between -1 and 1.
  • A configurable threshold determines whether the migration “passes” or “fails.”

This process reduces the validation time from days to just 30 minutes, dramatically speeding up template migration without compromising accuracy.

Why This Matters

This automated QA eliminates the need for time-consuming, pixel-perfect manual checks. Instead of manually validating millimeter alignments or testing every variant by hand, customers can:

  • Validate templates faster.
  • Ensure accuracy and consistency.
  • Reduce the risks of layout issues in production.

We believe this tool will revolutionize the way organizations approach migration from CHILI Publisher to CHILI GraFx Studio — making the process faster, more reliable, and less resource-intensive.

At Acheron, our mission is to help customers confidently adopt new technologies without losing quality or speed. If you’d like to see this QA tool in action, reach out to our team.

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