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I'm under som stress in a bigger project and insteed of just googling around I thought I ask you stacko's for som advice.

I have built and a big web application that talk to a restful json api. Now the client wants to exort data from the application into indesign for printing of catalouges. I know this is possible, but it can be done in multiple ways. What I'm searching for is something that is fast and extendible in the future. Ofcourse the client has predefined templates for the documents.

I've seen posts on exporting XML for indesign

Getting website data into Adobe InDesign

and I've ssen posts about using Javascript to connnect to the api and do the job:

Is it possible to call a web service with Indesign javascript?

I've also found this github project called exteniables: http://stdbrouw.github.io/Extendables/docs/ but it's also old and not maintained.

All of these solutions are quite old and I'm asking for som advice. Have anyone here done this and can you possibly point me in a good direction?

Thanks!

Community
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Objective Coder
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  • [Pandoc](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) has lots of importers (for example from HTML or DocBook XML) and can now export to InDesign's ICML format as well. – mb21 May 23 '14 at 09:09

2 Answers2

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Personally, I use a modified version of Extendables for communication with our server. Once you get it working it works pretty well, but I did have to spend a fair bit of time debugging and troubleshooting the library to get it working.

Anna Forrest
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There are multiple ways to get data into InDesign, it really depends on your needs what strategy you want to use. You can export XML from your application and import that into InDesign. You can make an IDML file (InDesign archive file) directly from your application and export that. If the data only contains a single InDesign story (linked text flow), you can import InDesign tagged text or ICML. There's also a data merge feature that would allow you to import CSV which might work if the data and layout allow it.

Personally, I find IDML to be the easiest to work with since it is XML already. I've had trouble with bugs in InDesign's XML features in the past and the data merge feature is limited in what it can do.

Josh Voigts
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