Adobe's InDesign is widely used as a layout program by publishers. For those of us who want to simultaneously update the content online on a website that makes things very tricky, especially if 95% of the content being worked on either sits in InDesign or is being worked on. using InDesign makes it extremely hard for us to work with the online version of the content.
Couple of months back we finalized our process of going from PDFs to a Docbook XML file and then transforming that to HTML. This is a very useful process since it not only helps you go from InDesign -> PDF -> HTML but also it can work with almost any kind of PDF document which may have been generated from any other layout program.
Now we are trying to finalize a process to go directly from InDesign to our Docbook XML using a Word Export. What makes this really tough are the scheduled monthly updates which must be merged back in.
We also tried writing our book completely online first using the Drupal Book module. The trouble was that the editor didn't insert all the variety of styles and when we converted the book to DocBook and then HTML it didnt have a nice structure to it. Then there is also the problem of taking that XML and converting that to a PDF using another stylesheet so it can be printed.
I have heard of CMSs and tools which work with XML directly as well so that updates can be merged in real-time, marked up and then the PDF for printing the book can be generated from that. With a lot of sunk costs in InDesign training, software etc I am not sure how you build the business case for that. After all, the customer gets the same thing and this will lead to a lot of cost savings (cost savings by themselves are the achilles heel of a business case ...). Any ideas...?
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