Dave wrote:
Like most magazines, we work with separate InDesign files for each story. I had hoped I could bring them all into an ID book and export to XFL but the only options are PDF and Digital Editions. Is there something I’m missing? Why wouldn’t they include XFL as an option for exporting a book?
It’s an excellent question, Dave. I think the answer is: XFL is really a 1.0 feature for both InDesign and Flash, and Adobe hasn’t gotten around to making it “robust” and fitting it into all the places it needs to go yet.
For those of you who don’t know, XFL is Adobe’s new interchange format that lets you export your pages from InDesign CS4 and import them into Flash. Each page of your InDesign document appears as a single frame in Flash CS4.
Your question sparked a lively email debate among several people I forwarded it to, including Michael Ninness, the InDesign senior product manager, who wrote:
In theory, it would be possible to automate some of this via scripting. Meaning, you could script ID to export each doc in a Book as a separate XFL file. That would help somewhat, but it would not create the single XFL file he desires.
That said, not sure he would want a single XFL file anyway, as it would take Flash a long time to open the resulting file. And in some cases, it may actually run out of memory when attempting to do so. Flash CS4 is doing something similar to what ID does when it opens an INX file. That is, it uses its scripting engine to “rebuild” the document.
That explains why it takes so long to open even a relatively short InDesign document (saved as XFL) in Flash. I’ve walked away from my computer waiting for it to process, wondering whether Flash had just crashed.
Keith Gilbert (who is writing a piece on the XFL workflow for InDesign Magazine) followed up with some more pertinent details:
The root problem is that in the XFL export from ID (or the XFL import into Flash, not sure which), each ID page gets turned into a Flash “symbol.” The first symbol is given the name “Page_1”, the second “Page_2”, etc. This is regardless of the actual page number used in the ID file, by the way, which is unfortunate.
So, if you have two 10-page ID files that you export to two XFL files and open the XFL files in Flash, they will both contain Symbols named “Page_1”, “Page_2”, etc. When you copy and paste the 10 frames from the first Flash file into the second Flash file, the Symbol names “collide” and there is no automatic way to resolve this. So you can’t simply copy frames from one Flash file to the other.
To which the inimitable Chris Converse (who has apparently been coding so much recently to forget his keyboard has a Shift key) replied:
if you take a minute to rename the movie clips in the library, you can copy and past the clips into other flash movies without collisions. this can be tedious, tho…
a swf file can import other flash movies. if i were developing a flash movie from multiple ltile books, i would explore the option of using the “load movie” functionality of flash (swf), where each individual flash movie is loaded into a master at runtime…
Well, if we don’t have a definitive answer, then at least we have some interesting ideas to work with. But I think the key here is that while CS4 is definitely a big step forward in the integration of InDesign into an RIA/RID workflow, much work remains for Adobe before this is really seamless and easy for designer/developers.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on November 6, 2008
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