🚀 go-pugleaf

Marilyn,

Excellent question. My approach to XML export has been to do as much as possible in InDesign because I want to utilize the skills of the page designers to the greatest possible extent. If I can get the designer to add value to the document by applying tags and attributes, and correcting the reading order etc. that's of great benefit to the process. Many of the things they do require human judgment and can't be replicated by a computer program (like determining proper reading order for example). My goal is to keep the XML process within InDesign very simple and reliable so that designers can pick it up quickly and it doesn't become a burden for them. I'd rather put a few hours into scripting something--even if it's a simple task like adding alternative text descriptions to Figures--than have the designers spend any extra energy on it.

You can see I'm sort of a duffer at scripting and my xslt skills are nothing to brag about either so there's no particular advantage for me to rely on xslt to do these things. However, we do use xslt for things like autogenerating linked TOC's and xHTML conversion of course. I also find there's a fair amount of cleanup that needs to be done to the exported XML files. Getting rid of sneeky control characters that end up in the XML output stream for example.

The biggest limitation for us at the moment is InDesign's lack of support for XML tags in tables and merged/split table cells. We spend most of our time post-processing tables in HTML. The addition of table headers and footers in CS has been a great boon for us.

I'm currenlty in the midst of updating all of my old VB scripts for ID2 to JS scripts for ID CS. I'd be pleased to share these with you when I'm done as well as our templates and xslt conversions.

Will stay in touch,
Phil