RE: [docbook-apps] DocBook with InDesign for PDF

We've been struggling with exporting InDesign to XML for 
several months. It is, as you say, not very sophisticated. The biggest problem 
we have is that data is not always exported in the same order as it appears on 
the page, e.g., a figure caption that appears before a figure will sometimes be 
exported preceding the graphic and sometimes after; if there are two objects in 
the block, we might get both captions preceding both graphics. We have a partial 
workaround in that the InDesign InBooklet addin fixes some of the ordering 
problems, but not all. We do not want to manually move items in the Structure 
pane as this obviously adds time. We are working with Adobe on the problem, but 
my opinion is that  this is not really an XML aware 
product.

 

Marc

From: Hendy Irawan [mailto:] 

Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2007 9:07 AM
To: 

Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] DocBook 
with InDesign for PDF

On 3/22/07, Bob Stayton < > 
wrote:

Hi 
  Hendy,
You could import DocBook XML into InDesign, just as you can any 
  other XML.
But you have to set up all the styles in InDesign for the 
  elements you
import.  I don't know of anyone who has done 
that.

I'm currently learning from the PDF documentation provided by Adobe. 
For now it seems that their XML feature isn't as sophisticated as would be 
required for this kind of task. :-(

It may be just easier to render to 
HTML first then import the resulting HTML... :-( 

Regarding 
  using InDesign as a design tool for an FO stylesheet, I don't see 
how it 
  would be much help.  The XEP tools doesn't create an 
  XSL-FO
stylesheet, it creates XSL-FO from InDesign content.

I'm not 
  clear what shortcut you are looking for here.  InDesign is 
  great
for one-off documents, DocBook is better for producing larger volumes 
  of 
content in a standardized format.

Yep, I agree with you fully.

I have no complaints with writing 
DocBook documents. What I'm trying to do is easier way to design rich XSL-FO 
stylesheet(s) for our DocBook documents. 

Editing XSL-FO stylesheets 
manually is very complex and painful. I wonder whether a visual tool such as 
InDesign can be used somewhere in the toolchain... 

-- 
Hendy Irawan
Web: http://hendy.gauldong.net
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