XML export

[eddieb212@adobeforums.com]

I am using InDesign CS.

(1) Every time I do an XML export, all basic text formatting (e.g., italics) is lost. Is this normal?

(2) I tried a workaround: I created a character style called "italic." I then did a search to find all italic text and change to italic character style. Next I created an XML tag called italic. Good so far. Then, every time I try to map styles to tags (to hopefully put an XML italic tag around everything italic), InDesign crashes. Every time.

Question: Is it impossible to do an XML export and keep italicization? If not, what should I do to make it happen?

Thank you.

Eddie

[Jacob_Stevens@adobeforums.com]

I very much hope this is possible: I used a Woodwing plug-in to do this in ID 1.5, skipped 2.0 because of lack of support for XML tags for character styles, and have just upgraded to ID CS because it claims this support. I'll let you know how I get on: I should have got to testing the XML export by the second half of next week. (Still setting up the document templates at the moment.)

[eddieb212@adobeforums.com]

Yes, please let me know how you get on with it. InDesign CD does have great features, but I am having trouble with its XML export, right now with the problem mentioned above.

I do know one thing: I should not be crashing when mapping character styles to tags (paragraph styles to tags is not a problem).

[pjredman@adobeforums.com]

I've seen the character style-to-tag mapper crash on a number of files and have been unable to figure out why. Some files that are quite complex will map with no problems while others crash. Looks like a bug to me, which is too bad, because this is a critical XML-related feature.

Phil Redman

[eddieb212@adobeforums.com]

Yeah, this is too bad indeed. I feel there is absolutely NO typesetting software that can really handle XML all that well. So far, my best solution is still to export things as html and then run some macros. This keeps the italic tags, as well as a great many character entities, something else I can't seem to get InDesign to do yet.

I have no problem with the paragraph style to tag mapping, but, as we said, the character style to tag mapping just doesn't work, a sad bug.

Eddie

[pjredman@adobeforums.com]

I should clarify that the character style-to-tag mapping works well on most of my documents, but it does fail once in a while.

Phil

[Jacob_Stevens@adobeforums.com]

Ok, I can confirm this one too. And I had such high hopes: I was able to import the DTD I use (TEI), and successfully mapped paragraph styles to tags. I also successfully mapped one character style (superscript) to tags: maybe 30 in the document (this is to try and get enough info out to restore footnotes in the XML document). ID XML export produced a valid XML-TEI document, which was a first. But every time I try to map character style <italic> to to tag <hi>, which of course has hundreds of occurences in every article, ID crashes. This makes the whole structure useless, intricate and impressive as it is: I can't replace italics by hand!

As I noted above, I had this working in ID 1.5 using the Woodwing plug-in. But I would rather not go back to using 1.5! Has anyone hassled Adobe about this yet? I might try to get them to reproduce it. It looks rather like it is the volume of tags that is defeating it. Or perhaps it can't deal with a clash of character tags somewhere?

[eddieb212@adobeforums.com]

I don't know, but it's sad and you are correct: These problems pretty much render the XML function useless, unless what you need is all plain text and very simple.

I was at a publishing seminar last week where the main push was InDesign CS. They really don't have any involved XML setup. Woodwing has something called XML module coming on July 1, but I don't know that it will solve the problems we are discussing. I really think it will be a while before any typesetting program can work effectively with XML. Until then I guess it's still HTML with macros all the way.

[Jacob_Stevens@adobeforums.com]

Well, I've reported the problem to Adobe and they've opened a case. For me, so far, the character mapping for italics all works if there is only one story in the document (I tend to set academic articles, with one story for the main body and one for footnotes). I did get it to work exactly once with both stories in place, although I'm not yet quite sure why. The things that I had tried were:

1. Deleting the character style 'italic' and re-creating it, then re-applying it to all italic text with a find-and-replace.

2. Removing all pictures and other text boxes from the document (leaving just two stories, bar the author and title).

3. Ensuring that none of the header/footer information had character style 'italics' applied.

I think that the problem arises when it has instances of character styles to tag, but no place to put them (within the structure, or within paragraph tags). But that is a guess: I'm not sure.

I have this document set up with a DTD: I'm not sure if that is relevant. I have also, before attempting to map styles to tags, put in place all of the DTD-compulsory structure.

But I will get this working ... If it worked once, it should be possible to get it to work reliably.

Incidentally, has anyone found the ID/XP preferences file? I did the search recommended in Knowledgebase, but it didn't turn anything up.

[pjredman@adobeforums.com]

Jacob,

For what it's worth all of the work we've done in this area has been without the benefit of a DTD so I don't believe that DTD's have anything to do with the character style to tag mapping problem. Thanks for reporting this to Adobe by the way.

Phil

[eddieb212@adobeforums.com]

Jacob

I also think it has to do with instances of character styles to tag. I simply still cannot get that to work. I had hoped that there could be some setting to preserve formatting when exporting to XML, but I don't think there is any such feature. This would certainly solve the italic problem.

BTW, I only checked with italics, but I assume it may have the same difficulties with bold, perhaps sub/superscript, etc. Don't know.

Anyway, let me know if you get this to work.

Eddie

[pjredman@adobeforums.com]

eddieb212,

Okay. Now I'm a little confused by what you're trying to do. There IS no format in XML documents. InDesign maps paragraph and character styles to XML tags. This is strictly a structural relationship. It will not pick up on the fact that you're using a bold or italic font and map that to anything. It supports a one-to-one mapping of styles to tags.

Phil Redman

[eddieb212@adobeforums.com]

Hi Phil

I know. I was just thinking wishfully really (hoping that I could convert the formatting in Word or something). The problem, as we said, is to figure out how to export XML and have, say, italic tags. Usually, when you export html from, say, Acrobat or Ventura, all italics are kept with the html tags, which is very convenient.

I'm in publishing and we're looking at full-text XML online (as opposed to PDFs). For an article to be viewed as the author intended, the reader needs to see any and all formatting such as bold, ital, underline, sub, super, etc., which obviously can be done with XML tags. Problem is that exporting from InDesign does not seem to be able to accomplish this.

I did do a FnR to tag all italics as (character style) italic, but when I try to map the character italic tag to the xml italic tag, I crash every time. Based on other people's experience, this appears to be some kind of bug (do you know anything about this). Without being able to somehow keep italics (of which there are many in almost any bibliography), doing full text this way would not seem practical.

Eddie

[pjredman@adobeforums.com]

Eddie,

Apparently Jacob (on this thread) has reported this as a bug to Adobe. We'll see what happens...

Good luck,

Phil

[Jacob_Stevens@adobeforums.com]

Hi all,

I've just sent off the document to tech support, who are asking lots of questions about fonts (their stock questions, I guess, I'm sure that's a dead end, but we'll see).

Just to clarify: I think we're all fully aware that XML can't incorporate formatting. However, we need to get the structural information represented by (eg) italics and superscript into our XML documents. The route offered by ID for this is mapping character styles to XML tags, which should be fine (although I, too, would like to avoid the find-and-replace stage of this process, or at least find a script to do it).

I have got this to work fine with superscript, which I use to preserve information about footnote references (Character style: 'Superscript' to XML tag <num>). This works without a problem, in both the story for the main article and the story with the footnotes, with a few dozen occurences in total.

But when I try the same trick with italics (Character style: 'Italic' to XML tag <hi>) it crashes at the same point every time: after clicking 'OK' in the 'Map Styles to Tags' dialog box, once it has got a third of the way along the progress bar. There are about 150 occurences of italics, but the same happened when I radically shortened the document.

Best,

Jacob.

[pjredman@adobeforums.com]

Jacob,

I've seen this problem with both very short and very long documents and have been unable to attribute it to a single style or tag. The one consistency I can identify is that it only happens on files where the text was imported from an MS Word document. This may be a coincidence. Was your text imported from Word?

Phil

[eddieb212@adobeforums.com]

Hi Phil

My text was imported from Word. There really is no way around this, I wouldn't think. Many, if not most, publishers begin with their manuscripts being copyedited in Word (sometimes WordPerfect).

Eddie

[Jacob_Stevens@adobeforums.com]

Phil,

Thanks for that - we could look at saving documents as (eg) RTF, or similar, before importing them. I'll have a look and see if that works. I also got this email, below, from someone at Adobe (I'm just about to try the workaround suggested).

Thanks,

Jacob

_________________________________

Hello,
I am interested in gathering more information, if possible, about the following issue you have been discussing on the Adobe user to user forums.

Jacob Stevens 6/11/04 3:21am </cgi-bin/webx?13@@.3bb48984/0>

1. Is there a possibility that one or more of you can send me a few sample files that pertain to this issue?

2. Is there a possibility that one or more of you can try the following possible temporary workaround and let me know if it works?

When mapping character styles to tags, close the structure view first.
Also, don't switch to any other applications during the process.
I'm told by the product team that this should increase stability for you...but I want to confirm that this is true for you.

Regards,
Laurel

[Jacob_Stevens@adobeforums.com]

No, Laurel's workaround didn't work for me. I have now tried three articles, all set from MS Word documents, and all fail when I try to map character style 'italics' to XML tags. In each case, I saved them locally and then switched off structure view, but got the same ID crash w/o error message. I've sent Laurel my files, and hopefully the case I opened with Adobe is still open.

[pjredman@adobeforums.com]

The workaround didn't to the trick for me either. I got the same email and provided a sample document.

Phil Redman