Getting Started with XML in InDesign Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, you learned about some of the exciting possibilities of XML and InDesign. You started on a sample project, using XML to create a training workbook in multiple languages. In Part 2, I’ll examine unique advantages of this XML workflow, demonstrate how to edit the English text to create content for the Spanish and French versions, and finally flow these translations into the original document.

XML Document Structure

Let’s look at the document you created in Part 1. To reveal the XML structure hiding in the document, open the structured version of your workbook—either the one you created in Part 1, or the file Participant Guide-1. indd, which you can download along with other relevant files from https://creativepro.com/supportfiles/XMLPart2ExampleFiles.zip. If the Structure pane isn’t displayed on the left side of the document window, select View > Structure > Show Structure. You can also summon the Structure pane by clicking the double-headed arrow at the lower left corner of the main InDesign interface, or by clicking the left edge of the InDesign document window. If tag markers are invisible, go to View > Structure > go to View > Structure > Show Tagged Frames. If the Tags panel is invisible, go to Window > Tags. With all the XML structure now visible, you can see which frames and text elements are tagged with XML (Figure 1).

In Part 1, you added those XML tags by mapping the Paragraph and Character styles to XML tag names in the

Tags panel that had the same names. While it took a little work to manually create the tag names for the first guide, you could then use these same tag names for the other five workbooks in the project. In other words, a little bit of work and planning at the beginning of the project pays off with significant productivity gains later.

Trouble with White Space?

Zoom in on a text frame—or better yet, open one of the text stories in Story Editor by choosing Edit > Edit in Story Editor. This lets you take a closer look at how the tags were applied within the existing text frames (Figure 2). Notice that the tag markers include not only the text, but also any tabs and paragraph returns within the text. Tabs and paragraph returns are just two of more than a dozen kinds of white space InDesign can produce. As long as these items are within the styled paragraph, they will also be within your XML. However, in some cases, this white space can cause trouble.

Certain kinds of spacing and characters are not supported on the Internet or must be created using special coding. For example, there’s no such thing as a tab in HTML. While Web browsers can ignore the extraneous paragraph returns in your XML, you may see strange results with other characters (Figure 3). If your XML is being employed outside of InDesign, always test it to discover any problems. In most cases, the XML Export dialog can solve white space issues by remapping the hidden characters to compatible encodings (Figure 4). Fortunately, the XML created from this file will be re-imported into InDesign, where all the spacing and hidden characters are supported and will be reapplied.

Untagged Graphics

As you study how the text on each page was tagged with XML elements, note that the graphics are not tagged. While InDesign has an easy method for tagging text automatically, based on styles, only graphics that are anchored within text are tagged—free-floating graphics are ignored. Of course, that doesn’t prevent you from manually tagging pictures or other objects on your page. To tag a graphic frame, you can select it with the Selection tool and click on a tag in the Tags panel. However, for this project, the fact that these drawings were not tagged suits my purpose because I’ll be using a different method of importing new, translated images.

Working with XML

Using a text editor such as TextEdit, Notepad, or Text Wrangler, open the English.xml file that you exported in Part 1. (Don’t open it with an XML editor like Oxygen, which could make your file useless.) If you don’t have English.xml, use the file of the same name It’s important that your XML match the structure of your layout exactly. If you didn’t export the XML from the document yourself, be sure to use both the XML and the InDesign files in XMLPart2ExampleFiles.zip. Deviations in the structure of either file will cause the XML to fail when it’s re-imported later. Examine the XML code. You’ll notice the key English phrases nested snugly between XML tags (Figure 5). Note that the tag names are the same as the Paragraph and Character styles from the original file. While it’s not strictly necessary to do it this way, it makes it simpler later to remap the data elements back to the correct styling. As you can see in Figure 5, XML doesn’t store any formatting information.

The next step is to use File > Save As in the text editor to create two new files: Spanish.xml and French. xml. Of course, this doesn’t create the translation (that would be real magic). But saving two files with these names will create the files that you will send to the appropriate translator so they can replace the English content with the equivalent phrases in Spanish and French. When you save each file, be sure the file retains the “XML” file name extension (Figure 6). If the extension does disappear, just add it back to the file in the Finder or Windows Explorer. See the “Plain Text” sidebar for more information.

Editing XML

Normally, XML editors, such as Oxygen (Mac and Windows) and XMLSpy (Windows only), are an invaluable tool in an XML workflow. For this project, stick with TextEdit (Mac) or Notepad or Microsoft Word 2003 or higher (Windows) (Figure 7).

To create the Spanish and French content, your translators will open the appropriate XML file and replace the text in place using one of the programs above. The translators should be careful not to change or delete any of the file’s white space characters, such as tabs and paragraph returns. When complete, they should save the file and send it back so it can be imported into your InDesign layout. There’s no magic here; translating the text is all pretty mundane stuff. But the key aspect to making the process work is maintaining both the XML markup and the spacing as it was exported from InDesign. But don’t be concerned if the lines in the new files wrap differently when you’re finished. Spanish and French sentences often end up with longer line lengths than their English equivalents. To give you a better feel for what this process would really feel like, I’ve supplied translated xml files in XMLPart2ExampleFiles.zip, which you downloaded earlier. The file names are Spanish.xml and French.xml.

Foreign-Language First Steps

Before you begin making the foreign-language versions, there are some preliminary steps to perform. 1. Open the English version of the participant workbook. This must be the same file from which the XML was originally exported. If you try to import XML created by another file the import may not succeed, even when the tagging and structure vary only slightly. 2. Select File > Package. Name the folder “Spanish Participant Workbook folder”. 3. Repeat step 2 to create a “French Participant Workbook folder”. Steps 2 and 3 create an identical document collection for each version of the workbook. Do you see the method to my madness yet? 4. Copy the XML translations to the appropriate folder.

Foreign-Language Next Steps

Let’s continue by making the Spanish Workbook. 5. Open the Participant Guide within the newly packaged Spanish folder. Add the word “Spanish” to the InDesign file before you open it. 6. Open the Structure pane, if it’s not already visible. Reveal all other XML features as I described in the “XML Document Structure” section. At this moment, the workbook is identical to the original English version. The file and all the graphics have been copied and placed in the Spanish folder. 7. Click on the Root element at the top of the Structure pane to select it. 8. Select File > Import XML. 9. When the Import XML dialog appears, choose Spanish.xml and select the other options shown in Figure 8. Click Open.

10. When the XML Import Options dialog appears, select the option shown in Figure 9. Click OK. In only a moment or two, the Spanish content replaces all the English text throughout the book. You may see some of the text disappear from the layout or assume the wrong formatting (Figure 10), but don’t worry. When XML is imported it may not automatically assume the proper Paragraph or Character styles at first. To correct this problem there is a simple fix. 11. Select Map Styles to Tags from the Tags panel or Structure pane menu flyout menu. 12. Click the Map by Name button. All the Tags are mapped automatically to their matching style names (Figure 11). Remember in Part 1 how you created Tag names that matched the Paragraph styles? All that hard work pays off here by enabling you to match the styles and tags with one click. It’s a simpler method, but not mandatory—InDesign also allows you to map the tags and styles together manually when the tag names and paragraph names don’t match.

Replacing Graphics

There are two small jobs left. First, let’s replace the graphics with English words and phrases. You could have done this in the XML itself, but instead you’re going to use a more mundane but easier solution. 13. Locate the Spanish Art folder in XMLPart2ExampleFiles.zip. 14. Using the Finder or Windows Explorer, drop the files into the Links folder of their respective workbooks. You’ll notice that Spanish graphics are named identically to the English ones. Have you figured out my little secret? Now that you’ve placed the Spanish graphics in the Links folder for the Spanish workbook, InDesign will take care of the rest of the job. 15. Select Window > Links. After a moment or two, InDesign will report that the linked graphics have changed and need to be updated. 16. Select the graphics in the Links panel that have changed. Select Update Link from the Links panel menu. The logo and other English graphics are then replaced by Spanish-language versions.

Keeping Tabs on Tabs

While your conversion should now be complete, you may encounter a problem that confounds us: Tabs. Or, more precisely, missing tabs. When the XML is imported back into the layout, InDesign occasionally brings in everything correctly except the tabs. The mysterious thing about this is that InDesign did export the tabs. The problem arises when you try to re-import them, whereupon InDesign sometimes strips them out for no good reason. Probably just a bug. Fortunately, it seems to work more often than not—but check your final layout carefully. If you find you do have this problem, you can fix the layout by reviewing each page and manually re-inserting tabs wherever they’re needed. Obviously, this is not a satisfactory answer for long documents, where there may be thousands of tabs in the text. One solution is to recreate the design without using tabs. When that’s impossible, you can work around them by first searching and replacing the tabs with a placeholder character that would not normally appear in your text (or XML code), such as $$ or @@. Then export the content to XML as before to make the changes. When the XML is re-imported, search and replace the placeholders with tabs (Figure 12).

Once you’ve replaced the missing tabs and have a final version of the Spanish workbook (Figure 13), repeat steps 5 through 17 with the French version of the workbook. Aside from the tabs issue, it should take you only a few minutes to complete.

Worth It for the Right Project

XML can save you enormous amounts of time and drudgery when you’re creating a wide variety of data-intensive or specialty documents, like these workbooks. What might have taken you days or weeks without XML can be only a few clicks of the mouse with it. XML is certainly not for everyone, but for many projects, there’s nothing faster and easier.