🚀 go-pugleaf

Pete--

I think that tagged text is a good way to go. FileMaker is pretty good at writing tagged text files.

InDesign's XML import does support tables (provided they're marked up as table, tr, and td elements), but you'll only get InDesign's default table formatting (there is an exception--when you're replacing the XML elements of a table with new XML content, you won't lose the existing formatting). In addition, InDesign's table support in XML does not cover tables within tables.

Tagged text, however, can completely specify the formatting of the table and of the text in the table. It allows for tables within table cells (in the CS version). Tagged text import is quite a bit quicker than formatting imported elements using a script.

The down side? The tagged text import filter is *very* picky, and more than a little buggy. A misplaced carriage return can easily cause the filter to *crash InDesign*. It can take a fair amount of patience to develop a working automatic tagging system. Once you've got one working, however, it performs quite well.

re: 2.x vs CS

CS improves both XML handling and tagged text import--as well as overall performance. Scripting also improves--we've managed to bring more of the product into the scripting world, and scripting performance has improved (by orders of magnitude, in some areas).

Regarding inline graphic placement--what we've done, several times, in this forum is develop scripts that do this. The usual approach has been to embed tags containing a file name, then run a routine to find those tags and replace the text with the file of that name. It works pretty well.

Hope this helps!

Thanks,

Ole