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

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...

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