How to enter a bookmark intended for HTML output

Report · Sep 24, 2025

Hi. Using ID 20.5 under Win11.

Maybe I'm not seeing something that's directly in front of me. I need to use ID to output existing documentation as a set of HTML pages. (So I'm clear, we're not dealing with fancy stylistic high-concept web page development, here. It's a lot of text and a few graphics.). In those HTML pages, I need to embed bookmarks at specific places. Typically, a named bookmark in HTML looks like:

Let's talk about the Fubar Function.

I'm able to create both a named text anchor and a named hyperlink destination in the ID source doc, but they don't seem to show up in the HTML output. For example, when I mark the very first word in some Lorum Ipsum text as both (that is, as both a bookmark and a hyperlink destination, just to be sure I have the bases covered), output that text as HTML5, and then display that text in an HTML editor, I see the first word -- the word I have marked -- of the Lorum Ipsum as:

Andis

The named destination and the named bookmark appear nowhere. The id that does show up... well EVERY SINGLE WORD has an id assigned by InDesign. Any suggestions here? What am I not doing or not seeing? I need to put bookmarks into the HTML at specific locations so that the software developers can link to specific places in my doc from the web app they're building. I therefore need to be able to supply them with the id codes for the bookmarks they need to link to. Could I give them the randomly-generated word-for-word ids that InDesign generates...? Could I manually insert my own ids...? I could. It wouldn't be efficient, though, nor survive revision. And picking word by word through an entire book to place these ids would be exhausting.

Before the expected comments show up, I fully realize that ID is not a web development package. However, as I mentioned, I'm not trying to produce a "fancy website" with handsome interactive features. I am only trying to output existing techical documentation. ID can produce a decent ebook (which itself is HTML code)... but apparently cannot produce HTML code proper from a relatively simple document. This is one of the reasons I think I'm missing something. I will note with alarm that ID wraps each individual single word in the entire document, one-by-one, rather than grouping them in the paragraphs they were born in. That just cannot be efficient. A browser has to interpret all that.

And I still don't know how to insert a named bookmark...

I have looked at the In5 add-in and it is very impressive... but does anyone know if it produces the same inefficient word-by-word wrapped output that InDesign does? If I give him that level of inefficiency, the project manager will have my skin.

Thanks as always to the community.

-j

Report · Oct 02, 2025

Hi j

You’re not missing anything InDesign’s HTML export is very limited. It was never built to give clean, developer-friendly HTML with custom IDs or anchors. What you’re seeing (every word wrapped in a with inline styles and random IDs) is unfortunately “as designed.” InDesign is positioning text for layout fidelity, not efficient markup.

Bookmarks / Hyperlink Destinations: these will carry across to PDF or EPUB, but not HTML export. InDesign simply doesn’t convert them to <a id="..."> tags in raw HTML.

Workarounds:

Export as EPUB, then edit the HTML files manually (anchors survive better there).
Export as HTML, then run a post-processing script (for example, a search-and-replace batch to insert meaningful IDs where you need them).
Use a plugin like In5 (which gives more control), though yes, even In5 tends to generate verbose markup since it’s still about preserving layout.
For large structured docs, you might be better off authoring in something like FrameMaker, MadCap Flare, or even Word + conversion tools, which are designed for documentation to web.
If you hand the developers those random per-word IDs, it’ll be a nightmare to maintain. A scripted clean-up step after export is usually the most efficient way.

So in short: InDesign can give you content, but if you want clean anchors you’ll need an extra step outside InDesign.