I work for a weekly newspaper where we have been using an InDesign/InCopy workflow for the past 10 years or more. Until recently all was smooth. As of late, we’ve been seeing some very strange issues.
About a year ago we went to a managed back end so that we could easily integrate print and web without having to repurpose everything. In doing that, we now have a plugin that grabs our articles from the back end of the website and pulls them in all formatted into InDesign. It’s really a fantastic tool and timesaver. To accomplish this, the copy comes in as XML, tagged with styles like Body, p, Title, Subtitle…etc that are mapped to paragraph and character styles. All of that works just fine. The copy comes in formatted nicely. And the tool automatically updates the back end of the website for the editors letting them know the story was placed and on which page.
The problem begins when an editor checks out the story in InCoy and makes changes. They may bold some text, add italics…etc. Back in InDesign, when the article is updated, those changes will either come through partially, or add bolding/italics where the editor did not apply a style. And it happens randomly. Sometimes an entire paragraph will become bold that is two paragraphs away from the three words the editor had bolded in the first place. I’ve never seen anything like this and I can only assume it has something to do with the XML tags, because if I untag the article none of these issues can be recreated. Untagging, however, loses the ability to capture page placements.
Has anybody in your travels/travails come across anything like this? Any XML experts out there who can take a look at an exported InCopy doc and see something that I’m not.
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