XML and InDesign

Originally posted Saturday, July 8, 2006 on another blog site;

One of the issues I’ve been wondering is how well does InDesign really deal with XML and can Docbook be used directly? So, what’s wrong with docbook? For HTML creation, it’s great. For PDFs, it’s good. Compared to InDesign, the PDFs are not higher in quality, but the fact docbook is a free system is nothing to sneeze at. What’s forced me to move, in part, from Docbook to InDesign is because InDesign allows placement of postscript images, where Docbook-FOP does not.

One of the surprising differences, particularly in XML handling, is that InDesign doesn’t handle Docbook out of the box. It can be done, however. But for my purposes, I’m not really THAT tied into Docbook because almost all of my Docbook files that I’m currently using are generated by software. With some changes in the software, a little setup time in InDesign, and a javascript for InDesign, I also automatically layout the same information (with postscript images instead of lower quality jpegs) in a much nicer form and, I think, an easier to control environment.

Where InDesign falls flat in comparison, at least so far for me, is the exporting to GoLive and generating web pages. Not happy with that workflow, at least not yet. Docbook handles this much better. So, I’ll still use Docbook for html layout.