Opening .indd file in a text app to make amends

Hi Shane,

can you tell more about your workflow?

E.g.: Can you formulate a recipe indepentendly of the individual InDesign document's contents what should be added?

If not, means, you, as an author, have to look into each and every contents and then decide individually on the contents what to add, then automation is not doable.

But if you were able to write your text amends by scripting in e.g. ExtendScript (JavaScript) you could use Peter Kahrel's Batch process script to run a custom script on InDesign documents automatically:

http://www.kahrel.plus.com/indesign/batch_convert.html

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

"More than InDesign can handle" would surprise me. I have worked with InDesign for almost two decades and must have handled many thousands of files. Or do you mean you need to open them all at once?

There is no other application that can handle binary InDesign files. You may be mistaken by reading about IDML, which is a plain text format – XML, to be precise – but, like a Word .docx file, this is composed of multiple separate files and packaged in a zip wrapper. But IDML is not really meant to be 'editable'; surely, it can be done but you won't be able to 'see' what you are doing, and things such as text wrapping and line breaking are not implemented. These only come alive when you open the IDML inside InDesign again.

Look into how to write scripts for InDesign. It's a series of basic operations to open each file in a folder (one at a time, or a whole bunch if you think this has any advantages), perform a certain action, and then save it again.