XML Publishing with Adobe InDesign

If you are investigating the XML capabilities of Adobe InDesign CS5 (CS4 has many of the sames features but not all), you'll find the content updates for this version include:

• more about exporting XML from InDesign
• new features enabled in CS5 that relate to XML
• overview content about InCopy and IDML (which are not the focus of this book)

XML Publishing with InDesign CS2+

If you are investigating the XML capabilities of Adobe InDesign (CS4, CS3 or CS2), you'll find a case study, and information on import, export and authoring XML in InDesign, plus ideas for using XSLT in conjunction with XML publishing with InDesign. (Note: CS4 release did not sgnificantly change the XML content features of InDesign, although the underlying file format changed from INX to IDML.)

Read our white papers, DITA is Open for Business and Leveraging the Value of Translated XML Content
by Dorothy Hoskins
to understand the expanding universe of DITA XML, and the extraordinary savings that can be achieved with translated XML reuse and translation memory applications.

May 2010 -- DITA has swept the field in technical documentation. DocBook has been modified to support some DITA-like reuse mechanisms. Everyone wants to know how to make InDesign into ePub and where does XML fit in? Framemaker 10 expands Adobe's tech pubs offering with better support for non-expert XML authors. Quark continues to attract new business with their publishing system since acquiring the Word XML Authoring tool.

DocZone has morphed into RSuite Cloud. Componize offers a SaaS on top of Alfresco for DITA especially, using Xproc instead of DITA OT for publishing.

March 2010 -- DITA rising: Quark XML Author for Word to assist MS Office folks with creating DITA, plus IBM Filenet 8, promoted by Rockley Group. DITA for Publishers demo by Eliot Kimber of Really Strategies. Coming up in April, Center for Information-Development Management (JoAnn Hackos) Content Management Strategies/DITA North America 2010 conference. XMetaL, Arbortext Editor, Adobe Technical Publishing Suite -- all featuring DITA features. First major move to semantic/structured content for many companies will be adoption of DITA in 2010.

January, 2010 -- Google is aiming to take away Microsoft's marbles by making their own apps. This looks like more battles of the titans stuff, similar to when Microsoft took on Google with the Bing search app.

XML is underlying a lot of apps, from Open Office to ePubs to Twitter. The best thing to come along in a while is XProc,an "XML-centric" pipelining language for XML and XSL. Put XQuery with REST and XForms and you get the XRX triumvirate to drive XML into new places across the universe of content creation, mashups, social media, transactions, etc. All told, this is a great time to be learning new tricks of the XML trade. Power to the people! :-)

June, 2009 --The technology du jour is DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) for creating topic-based XML technical documents, which everyone is rushing to say they support or have applications to handle. Microsoft's partnering with Quark(!) and others and Adobe has enhanced FrameMaker to make it even more DITA-capable.

All the major player's latest applications suites are based on XML and their file formats are written in XML. Book and magazine publishers, unable to profit from print on paper, are looking for the web+print offering, but will Google beat them to the next version of global publishing? The government is expanding its requirements to receive content in XML for business filings, patents, safety and health, military training and documentation. XML is everywhere, but it's not naked to the world, it's subsumed into myriad applications. Do we still need XSLT? do we still need dedicated XML editor applications? Some new technology is poised to leapfrog everything we currently use for creating and deploying XML, we just don't know it yet.

Meanwhile, if you want to get in touch about XML, XSLT, XSL-FO, InDesign, DITA, or structured FrameMaker, you can still contact us.