Trying to help my designer by sort-of-marking-up the text

Report · Jul 03, 2024

I’m not an InDesign user, though I work with a designer who uses InDesign to produce a regular What’s On publication. I pull the events from a database, and supply them to him as plain text, one para per event. He then formats each event with styles for date, title, venue and descriptive text. As far as I can tell (I live a long way away) that is a manual process. Also, I get the impression he is unfamiliar with the use of markup languages.

What I would like to do is pre-process the file I send him, so each record is automatically marked up in an explicit, html-type way. This would be quite easy to do. The result might look like this (the ‘code’ is obviously just illustrative):

<Times, 16, bold, blue>July 1.<Times, 14, italic, red>Event Title.<Times, 12, bold, black>The Venue.<Times, 12, black>Descriptive text.

or, if the designer can map values to placeholder tags, like this:

<Date>July 1.<Title>Event Title.<Venue>The Venue.<Descriptive text>Descriptive text.

I don’t want to get into XTML or IDML, and I don’t want to scare the designer by trying to do his job for him at a distance. Would either of the above methods work in principle? And would someone be kind enough to show me what a single event might look like, properly flagged or tagged or coded or whatever, with a variety of styles?

Apologies for this naive question, but I’m just an editor focusing on trying to get the publication out the door…

Report · Jul 03, 2024

I can't address your question directly, but I can tell you that if your designer knows InDesign in any depth this really is not a problem.

InDesign is style-driven and it is easy to create a paragraph style that formats predictable patterns, such as a date, time, venue, description as long as there is some sort of consistency in the separation of the elements (which needn't be the same separator between elements, so long as it's always the same and does not appear before it is to be used as a style trigger). This can be accomplished using Nested Styles which are triggered by counting something, or GREP Styles which use pattern matching for mor complex constructions. Paragraph styles can be defined to work in cyclical fashion, too, so that a block of text can have styles A, B, C, A, B, C applied automatically ad infinitum

Once defined, presumably in your document template, one need only pre-load the styue before adding the text, or select the added text and apply the style to the entire block in one go.

Report · Jul 06, 2024

Thank you, Peter. I think I understand what you're saying. I will certainly press my designer a little more forcefully to try to understand what I imagine is a fairly basic technique.

Using my second example above:

<Date>July 1.<Title>Event Title.<Venue>The Venue.<Descriptive text>Descriptive text.

Am I right in thinking that the designer might have defined the <Date> style in his template to mean "Times, 16, bold, blue", or something to that effect?

And does the text I supply need to be sandwiched into opening and closing statements to alert InDesign that the enclosed text contains styles, such as <Date>, and that they are not to be treated as literals?

Report · Jul 06, 2024

Am I right in thinking that the designer might have defined the <Date> style in his template to mean "Times, 16, bold, blue", or something to that effect?

And does the text I supply need to be sandwiched into opening and closing statements to alert InDesign that the enclosed text contains styles, such as <Date>, and that they are not to be treated as literals?

By @Nicholas38408755zs9x

There's also Adobe InDesign Tagged Text format. Your designer will have to first style some text in InDesign by applying the desired paragraph and character styles. Then export it as InDesign Tagged Text.

You'll get something like this:

<ASCII-MAC>
<vsn:19.4><fset:InDesign-Roman><ctable:=<Black:COLOR:CMYK:Process:0,0,0,1>>
<dcs:Location=<Nextstyle:Location><ct:Semibold><cf:Myriad Pro>>
<dps:Headline=<Nextstyle:Headline><ct:Bold><ph:0><cf:Myriad Pro><phwt:4>>
<dps:NormalParagraphStyle=<Nextstyle:NormalParagraphStyle><ph:0><cf:Myriad Pro><phwt:4>>
<pstyle:Headline>Renaming and Relinking<ct:Regular>

Then you'll just need to populate such a template with your content inserted between appropriate tags. When your designer places the resulting tagged text in InDesign, the formatting will be preserved. I don't know how efficient this method would be for your specific requirements.

Report · Jul 07, 2024

@Nicholas38408755zs9x

If the data has a constant - database-like structure - records with fields - your colleague can import it as a plain text, convert to a Table, select each column in the Table, apply either ParaStyle or CharStyle - or both - then convert back to text.

The way to convert - separator - and if Char or Para Style(s) should be used - would depend on if the data should be displayed as:

Date

Title

Venue

Descr

or

Date, Title, Venue, Descr

If first option - then separate ParaStyles should be applied to columns and column separator should be Paragraph:

If second option - then CharStyles should be applied to columns and column separator can be any character:

that can be later replaced with something "wider".

Find&Change - "#" -> ", ".

Report · Jul 08, 2024

To paraphrase, you would like to send your designer the text but somehow tag it so that has the intended formats that you want. Fair to say?

InDesign has great control over formatting. I'd suggest reading this link first about how paragraph styles work: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/paragraph-character-styles.html

If the styles are already agreed upon and have appropriate names, something as simple as a tag at the start of a paragraph should be enough information to provide to the designer so they are aware of what paragraph style to apply. They can then apply the appropriate style when taking in the content and remove the human-readable tag to it once formatted.

Either that, or use PDF round-tripping. That is, let the designer prepare PDF proofs for you, and when you get them, highlight them using Acrobat's markup tools (link here https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/commenting-pdfs.html) so that using different coloured highlights can indicate to the designer what styles to apply.

If the answer wasn't in my post, perhaps it might be on my blog at colecandoo!

Report · Jul 09, 2024

Thanks, all, for the ideas.

Robert, your approach is very tempting, but the structure is not 100% constant, so I don't think it'll work.

Colin, thanks for the reading suggestions. I think I'll soon be able to negotiate a solution with my designer.

What a helpful forum this is, and how tolerant of newbie questions.

Report · Jul 09, 2024

Robert, your approach is very tempting, but the structure is not 100% constant, so I don't think it'll work.

By @Nicholas38408755zs9x

Then @leo.r's solution with InDesign Tagged Text would be best.

You can generate such file directly from Excel - or your database.