XML Publishing with Adobe InDesign

Looking Forward: InDesign as an XML "Skin"

If it has not already occurred to you, consider this: if you have a number of XML documents, all based on the same tags, you can make them look completely different just by using a different style mapping and page layout.

For example, in template A.indt, you have 3 columns, justified text, with Caslon Old Style as the base font. In template B.indt, you have a single wide column of left-aligned text with a narrow side bar, with Helvetica as the base font. In each template, you have mapped the XML tags to paragraph and character styles of the same name (but different definitions) and applied tags to text flows. By importing the XML of the same tags structure into the different InDesign templates, you will get completely different-looking documents.

The power of this technique is only beginning to be appreciated. It is held back by the fact that there is so little standardization of XML that people use in InDesign. I expect that the next development will be the introduction of XML standard tag sets (DTDs) for publications that are rich enough to describe information usefully, but not so deep that they are difficult to use. Eventually, there will be methods to create, tag and flow XML content into InDesign that are seamless compared to the state of the art when CS5 was released.

If you want to explore this concept now, it is easy to try out.

1. First create an IDD template with styles, column layout, etc. that you like.

2. Use an XML file as the basis ...