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Frederick Yocum
MemberThanks David. I will check out emsoftware.com. For some reason, I keep hoping I can use XML, it makes so much sense to me as a concept, but using it is complicated . . .
XML is good if you like taking ibuprofen;
MemberA word of warning. If you or your translators have not worked in an XML workflow before, leave plenty of time and have a backup plan. This spring, I attempted handling translations of a document from English to French, German and Spanish. Each translator got an XML document editable in Word.
Two translators simply refused to use it, the third sent a translated document so badly formed that it could not be imported. I ended up cutting a pasting the content from the XML document. The XML was useful in that it broke the information up into descrete chunks, but outcome of simply pulling the information into the InDesign document did not work.
There is a reasonably priced plugin called Story Tweaker which is specifically designed for translation work, but again, you need to educate your translators. Difficult to do when working with freelancers who are used to their own methods and in my case, behind a firewall of editors.
Member@David pointer to Anne-Marie’s article is a good read – read it to the end, there is good stuff there.
@collywolly suggestion of A Designer’s Guide to Adobe InDesign and XML is also good, though the focus is on getting XML into InDesign rather than out of it. It is the only indepth resource I have found dealing with InDesign and XML.
In order to find the right process it helps to ask for or look at the specifics of their website. If they have a fairly developed Web site contained in a Content Management System, like Drupal or WordPress, you may have to break up the content you are adding into bits and won't need to export complete HTML pages or on the other hand, you might need to add class styles to the HTML tags you create, in which case XML transformed by XSLT may be the way to go.
Taking time to think it through will save hours later. If they have a sympathetic web developer who is not threatened by your possibly taking work off their roster, making friends and getting their help is also a very good thing . . . There is more than one way to skin a cat, and on the web it could be a cougar, a chipmunk or a great dane, etc.
Member@David pointer to Anne-Marie’s article is a good read – read it to the end, there is good stuff there.
@collywolly suggestion of A Designer’s Guide to Adobe InDesign and XML is also good, though the focus is on getting XML into InDesign rather than out of it. It is the only indepth resource I have found dealing with InDesign and XML.
In order to find the right process it helps to ask for or look at the specifics of their website. If they have a fairly developed Web site contained in a Content Management System, like Drupal or WordPress, you may have to break up the content you are adding into bits and won't need to export complete HTML pages or on the other hand, you might need to add class styles to the HTML tags you create, in which case XML transformed by XSLT may be the way to go.
Taking time to think it through will save hours later. If they have a sympathetic web developer who is not threatened by your possibly taking work off their roster, making friends and getting their help is also a very good thing . . . There is more than one way to skin a cat, and on the web it could be a cougar, a chipmunk or a great dane, etc.
MemberI am fairly new to InDesign’s XML so take what I say with a large pinch of salt.
Moving the placement of text frames in the layout will not shift the content in the xml structure. However juggling the some elements within the XML structure using the Structure View will change the order of the XML and MAY affect the placement of content.
This is because InDesign tags not only content but also the objects that contain content, these have special meaning for InDesign. If you look at the XML in the Struture Pane you will see different icons for different 'types' of XML elements. Text frames or threaded text frames (which are treated as one XML element) by default are usually called 'story'.
My experience is that you can shift elements around in the XML structure without moving things in the layout — as long as you avoid moving things at the text element level eg. elements that contain sentences or words. If these are moved elements will change relationship in the page layout.
As an example. You have a 4 page spread in a magazine layout. The main content is in a threaded set of frames. The pages also contain photographs and captions which were imported much later in the design process. At the end of the editing process, you map paragraph and text styles and tag your photographs.
Everywhere text is autotagged the text frame/s will also be tagged with an InDesign XML story element. Wherever there is tagged text it will be enclosed within the story xml element, which you can rename, but it remains a story element. The large threaded story will show up contained within one long story element, your captions which are tagged will show up in different parts of the xml structure in story elements and the photograph details will be in photo or image elements.
You can now manipulate the XML, create a new element and pull all of the tagged elements of 4 page spread into this new element and order the story and other element to the way you want them to appear in the XML output, even placing elements such as images and other 'story' elements within the flow of enclosing story elements all without changing the appearance of the layout. As long as you do not move text elements around, the appearance of the page layout will not change but exported XML will have the same structure you see in the structure pane.
This is my experience, big caevat, I have not had any experience with XML tables in InDesign.
Essentially you manage two separate documents, one is the page layout, the other XML layout. You cannot juggle the page layout to affect the XML structure, you can, within restrictions, juggle the XML around without affecting the page layout.
Member@David
What you're wanting is for InDesign to be a page-layout tool, an XML editor, and an XML database (a place to hold all the XML content so that you can do stuff with it, such as give it different forms, export it, etc.).
Yes please! If InDesign is only for visual display it shouldn't aspire to being a digital hub and may explain why it produces such kacky, kacky markup when it exports to HTML or EPUB. It is not alone, Word is equally grotty. What the world needs is a document processing tool that separates out content from display and holds it semantically so that we can move it from content type to content type effortlessly. I feel a song coming on . . .MemberDo you think this is on the horizon as far as InDesign development is concerned?
There is such a emphasis on epub and xhtml export, which are both forms of xml. There appears to be an interconnectedness between how InDesign handles epub formatting/exporting and the way it handles xml, which gives me hope as well as frustration.
I keep hoping I can push inserting xml in our/my workflow, because it often feels like the missing building block, but the tools used in publishing, at least at the ordinary meat and potatoes level, seem not up to the job.
Member@David
But in general, I maintain that InDesign should not be the container from which you are publishing your XML. Instead, your XML should be coming from someplace else and being dropped into InDesign.
Alas David, we don’t all have that luxury.
The editors I work with think in Word and then they think in InDesign until they think in Web or Epub. Most of the publications are copy-edited in InDesign with the final print version becoming the imprimatur for all the other versions of the document.
Once a document is tagged. I have ended up treating InDesign as an XML editor. Eg add your corrections in the Story Editor with Strucuture/Tag Markers turned on. If you are adding new content rather than simply correcting old content you are left (in my experience) with a tough question. Retagging the text can loose you all the kerning and other subtle alterations you have made to the text.
MemberMarco
Not sure whether you are trying to make the text frames reflect the node order of the xml or the node order of the xml to reflect the text frame order of the document. Are you wanting the xml to cascade in the order of the text frames on a page top to bottom? It might help to describe what you are trying to do.
Is there a way to reposition text frames to match the order of structure pane nodes with the order of text frames on the page?
MemberThanks for your wisdom David. I think I will proceed with the plan (taking account of your advice) and post how I get on, unless includes copious amounts of swearing.
MemberI know this application came to my attention before. . . I think I looked at it a couple of years ago, in with regard to allowing an editor to edit the copy, or perhaps last year when I was coming out of the fire of rapidly pulling together the Annnual Reports! Thanks for the reminder, at $99 USD per copy of InDesign it should fit the organization pocket book.
StoryTweaker’s users include
- editors who want a document translated to another language, ie, English to Spanish
- designers who hand off a finished layout to writers that will provide the content
- writers/editors collaborating on a project
MemberI know this application came to my attention before. . . I think I looked at it a couple of years ago, in with regard to allowing an editor to edit the copy, or perhaps last year when I was coming out of the fire of rapidly pulling together the Annnual Reports! Thanks for the reminder, at $99 USD per copy of InDesign it should fit the organization pocket book.
StoryTweaker’s users include
- editors who want a document translated to another language, ie, English to Spanish
- designers who hand off a finished layout to writers that will provide the content
- writers/editors collaborating on a project
February 16, 2010 at 3:07 pm in reply to: Recommended reading/training for a designer who has to design in Word #54916MemberThanks David, I found that link earlier in prep for tackling the project and took notes from it. I will look at it again.
Both I and the client don't know what we are doing in Word most of the time, so cacky workrounds using multiple text boxes and picture fudges come into play, making it very difficult to a) figure what the client was thinking when they did what they did, b) find an acceptable solution, c) have the moral authority to enforce it.
Perhaps what I should do next is to try and find some Microsft-produced templates of newsletters and brochures and reverse engineer them to see how they put them together.
Alot of the desktop publishing models of thinking are similar, there are character and paragraph styles — but the actual building of the page is very different. One article described a Word document as containers inside containers inside containers, certainly the concept of a page being a finite object of particular size seems to be forgien with the Word document world.
February 16, 2010 at 8:07 am in reply to: Recommended reading/training for a designer who has to design in Word #51919MemberThanks David, I found that link earlier in prep for tackling the project and took notes from it. I will look at it again.
Both I and the client don't know what we are doing in Word most of the time, so cacky workrounds using multiple text boxes and picture fudges come into play, making it very difficult to a) figure what the client was thinking when they did what they did, b) find an acceptable solution, c) have the moral authority to enforce it.
Perhaps what I should do next is to try and find some Microsft-produced templates of newsletters and brochures and reverse engineer them to see how they put them together.
Alot of the desktop publishing models of thinking are similar, there are character and paragraph styles — but the actual building of the page is very different. One article described a Word document as containers inside containers inside containers, certainly the concept of a page being a finite object of particular size seems to be forgien with the Word document world.
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