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Q: What information do you have on converting Adobe PageMaker and Adobe InDesign documents to XML? And how would you rate these products in this area?

A: Adobe PageMaker does not really have support for converting to XML (although you can export to HTML), and Indesign has export capabilities to XML. But my experience is that this kind of support is limited: You typically map paragraph styles to XML tagging, which works in simple cases.

Like most of the publishing tools that have XML support (Quark, for example), the XML support that the vendors supply works for very simple documents and XML structures, but has trouble doing the hard things (such as content tagging, id's, cross-references, tables).

Please note that from our perspective, the DTP package that has the most complete and useable XML support is Adobe FrameMaker (but people normally don't consider its typographic support to be as extensive as some of the others).

At Data Conversion Laboratory, we have our own tools and processes that we've built to help us convert from most of the publishing tools (including Quark, PageMaker, and Indesign). These enable us to produce "industrial strength" XML -- because oour tools can be customized to the needs of individual projects.

We operate as a service bureau. Our clients send us the DTP files, and we return them converted to XML. And we'd be glad to take a no cost look at your conversion needs if you ever get to that point.

To reiterate, InDesign offers considerably better support than PageMaker; but even its capabilities are limited, especially if your documents will have any type of complexity.

12/3/2002
DCLnews

Read more about XML and DTP at DCL Library

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