HTML to InDesign

Michael Murphy

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Method #4: Seek Professional Help

Upside

• More automated than any of the other methods

Downside

• Out-of-pocket expense (but relatively low); results can be unpredictable with complex content

Sometimes the best solution is one someone else came up with. No one can know or do everything themselves, and there are a lot of very smart people out there creating solutions that fill in the gaps of InDesign’s feature set. One such solution, Rorohiko’s FramedWeb plug-in for InDesign ($39.00), tackles this very problem.

FramedWeb contains both an HTML parser and a CSS parser, and it allows you to create styled InDesign content from a URL, a local HTML file, or HTML copied and paste
d into InDesign. Of the three methods, the first is the least reliable, which isn’t surprising considering that it’s the most ambitious. FramedWeb allows you to type a URL into an InDesign text frame and then choose Convert Web Content from the API menu (which is where Rorohiko plug-ins usually live). The plug-in goes to that URL, parses and gathers its content, and brings it into InDesign, generating character and paragraph styles in the process. The more complex the page, the less successful the plug-in tends to be.

On the other hand, it does extremely well in parsing source HTML (the actual markup) you paste into InDesign, especially if you grab only the desired content (for example, the body of an article without all of the surrounding web page elements) and run the plug-in on that (Figure 9 and Figure 10).

Figure 9

Figure 10

FramedWeb creates paragraph and character styles from the imported HTML in a way that is very web-like. The “cascading” part of CSS refers to the method of controlling the most text at the root level of a style definition and then describing only variations to that root style where needed. All of the paragraph and character styles FramedWeb generates are based on a top-level style called HTML, and styles are arranged hierarchically using style groups to help make the dependencies more apparent. It’s logical from an engineering point of view, but most InDesign users will probably want to rework those styles to fit their preferred organizational schemes. Another caveat is that tables are not currently converted by FramedWeb. To bring in HTML tables as InDesign tables, you’ll have more success with methods 1 or 2.

FramedWeb does not claim to recreate a web layout or preserve its appearance. In fact, its documentation quite explicitly acknowledges that it doesn’t. There’s nothing out there that will, but FramedWeb is currently the most automated method of handling this kind of conversion. Rorohiko makes the fully functioning plug-in available free for a 30-day trial, giving you ample time to try it out on the kinds of content you may need to deal with and evaluate how well it matches your needs.

All Words and No Pictures?

Getting HTML content into InDesign with its hierarchy and as much formatting as possible preserved is a lot trickier than getting images from a web page, and only Method #4 in this article allows for bringing in both at the same time. The problem with web images is that they are optimized for the screen, typically at a resolution and size that allows for fast downloading and browser rendering. That kind of image won’t cut it for print, however. If you intend to repurpose your HTML content for print, you’re going to need the original images from which those web-optimized versions were produced, wherever possible. But if you’re simply creating an InDesign layout that will never be produced with ink on paper—a PDF, for instance—then maybe those lower-resolution image will suffice. So how do you go about getting them?

Nearly all web browsers share a common feature that lets you right-click any image, then choose an option (Save As, Save Image As, Save to Disk, etc.) for locally saving a copy of that image. That’s fine if you’ve only got a small handful of images to contend with, but if you have more than that, you’ll want to speed up that process. Some browsers have free extensions available that, once installed, will add multi-image saving capabilities. For Firefox, there’s Save Images, and for Chrome, there’s Image Downloader.

Safari has no built-in method for saving all web images at once, but you can quickly cobble this functionality together using OSX’s Automator utility (Figure 11).

Figure 11

From Automator, simply drag three actions—Get Current Webpage from Safari, Get Image URLs from Webpage, and Download URLs (in that order)—from the Internet group of the Actions Library into the main workflow area of the application. You can set up actions to get the images on the page itself or that the page links to, and specify a folder where the images will be saved. Next, make sure the web page you want is in the frontmost active window in Safari, and click the Run button in Automator. Once the Action is complete, you’ll find all of the saved images in the folder you specified.

Choosing the Right Method for You

None of the four methods described in this article is a clear “winner” for every HTML importing and conversion scenario, but one of them—or a combination of several of them—can be applied in a manner that makes the best use of its particular strengths. They’re all meant to simply get you closer to your objective. Every project is different, no one’s work habits are the same, and not all HTML is created equal. The “right” choice is the one that gets you the desired result for a given task at a given time.

The key is to remember that the information you need to repurpose—from HTML content into InDesign content—is already there in the markup. The tags identify the type of content and its place in the hierarchy, classes specify unique formatting changes, and your most direct path to success is to leverage that information to save yourself time and preserve the essential structure and formatting of your content.

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