XML and InDesign

Dorothy Hoskins is an XML evangelist, always learning new things to help her play with XML (like podcasting and AJAXian web development), but her true love is the development of processes that tie together various applications for publishing XML to both print and web. From her initial career as a graphic artist and designer/illustrator, she has been lead far afield by her interests in holography, interactive multimedia and all things XML. Besides creating server-side XSLT for a global corporation's website, she has created publishing workflows for importing database-derived XML into Adobe's FrameMaker and InDesign CS2 products. She has presented numerous times on XML and XSL for the Society for Technical Communication and SUNY/Higher Ed groups. She resides with her family in western New York, where she finds the weather a refreshing change from her native Florida.

Chapter 1 A Brief Foray into Structured Content (a.k.a. XML)
Chapter 2 InDesign XML Publishing: College Catalog Case Study
Data-Like Content Example: The Course Description XML
Topical Content: The Handbook XML
Chapter 3 Importing XML
Doing It Adobe’s Way: The Placeholder Approach
Mingling Non-XML and XML Content in a Text Flow
Doing It Your Way: Using the Options for Your Own Process
Understanding InDesign’s XML Import Options
Importing Images
Chapter 4 Tagging XML in InDesign
The Case for Tagging Content: Why You Need XML
Tagging for Import
Tagging for Iterative XML Development
Chapter 5 Looking Forward: InDesign as an XML “Skin”
Chapter 6 Exporting XML
Marking Up (Tagging) Existing Content for XML Export
The Special Case of InDesign Tables (Namespaced XML)
Tagging Images as XML in InDesign
Chapter 7 Exporting ePub Content (InDesign CS5.5 and CS6)
Export in XML Order Compared with Page Layout and Article Pane Order
Alternate Layouts and XML Are Not Compatible Features
Chapter 8 Validating XML in InDesign
Why Validate?
How to Validate XML in InDesign
Authoring with a DTD
Fast and Light Credo: Develop Now, Validate Later
Chapter 9 What InDesign Cannot Do (or Do Well) with XML
The 1:1 Import Conundrum
Bad Characters
Inscrutable Errors, Messages, and Crashes
InDesign Is Not an XML Authoring Tool
Chapter 10 Advanced Topics: Transforming XML with XSL
XSLT for Wrangling XML versus XML Scripting for Automating XML Publishing
XSL: Extracting Elements from a Source XML File for a New Use
XSL: Getting the Elements to Sort Themselves
XSL: Getting Rid of Elements You Don’t Want
Creating Wrappers for Repeating Chunks
Making a Table from Element Structures
Upcasting Versus Downcasting
Upcasting from HTML to XML for InDesign Import
Downcasting to HTML
Generate a Link with XSLT (Not Automated)
Adding Useful Attributes to XML
A Word about Using Find/Change for XML Markup in InDesign
Chapter 11 Content Model Depth Issues and Their Impact on Round-Tripping XML
The Challenge of Mapping Deep DTDs to Shallow InDesign Structures
The Challenge of Mapping Shallow Structures to Deep DTD Structures
Use of Semantic ids and Style Names (Expert-Level Development)
Chapter 12 Brief Notes
A Brief Note about InCopy and XML
A Brief Note about IDML and ICML
Summary

Appendix Resources
InDesign Resources
XML Resources
XSLT Resources
Colophon