I work for a small publishing company, and our current workflow for articles is:
• The manuscript editor applies styles in Word (2011 for Mac) and saves as a docx (and some styles are applied by a third party, before the manuscript editor sees the file).
• The production editor (e.g., me) reviews the docx file and saves as a doc.
• The production editor imports the doc file into the InDesign (CS5) template, where the Word styles map to Paragraph Styles. (If we try to import the docx file, the style mapping fails.)
• Possibly more information than you need to know: After proofreading, author proofs, etc., articles are published online (as PDF and as full text, pulled from the PDF) in weekly batches; we print monthly editions of our journals that don’t necessarily correspond with the weekly batches (i.e., articles are processed individually until the print editions, at which time they’re put into book files).
We know that our printer can take our docx files and convert them to xml files that import properly into InDesign, but we don’t know how they do that (and they’re not telling us!). But we would like to move to an xml workflow, in part because we’d like to tag items (automatically; someone else has got that part under control) in Word with unique identifiers that would carry through publication process and be accessible in our online publications. We also believe (hope!) that an xml workflow would reduce the number of corrections we have to make in the full text articles that are pulled from PDFs. But everything I’ve read so far has either not worked or been discouraging. Can anyone recommend an xml process, or is this something for which we need to hire a script writer, etc.?
Thanks!
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