The DEMO package may be switched from ‘Standard’ to ‘PRO’ mode. The PRO version exports a lot of additional informattion about the original document content. See pages 15 and 28 ff.

An example: Let us assume, that we want to publish our Newspaper or periodicals on the Internet.

What material do we have to start:

«BatchXSLT for InDesign» runs with Windows XP, Vista and 7, OSX 10.4 and newer and with InDesign CS4, CS3 & CS2

«BatchXSLT for InDesign» does NOT run with older Java-Versions!

http://www.downloads.epaper-system.com/download.php?f=BXSLT4IND.dmg

Software downloads+The «BatchXSLT for InDesign» software package may be found on the web site www.aiedv.ch or with the following links:+For Macintosh OS X as a disk image:+http://www.downloads.epaper-

I suggest, to directly make an export as a first test. The following articles discuss the program installation and the export of a document. If the subsequent examination of the data is unsatisfactory, starting from page 9, many articles describe the rules to observe when writing and designing documents which must be exported.

The «BatchXSLT for InDesign» software package contains all tools to start a document export with a mouse click.

Easy to operate InDesign scripts control the whole export procedure: All required output format files are produced and then «BatchXSLT» automatically is called to create the desired core data – the XML file. This file, as well as the HTML file with the same name, may be opened in a browser as a navigatable flip page eBook.

If you are updating from a previous version or just want to test a new version, do not trash or overwrite the two main application folders mentioned in the following installation procedure! Rename the two core program folders “BatchXSLT4InDesign” and “BatchXSLT4InDesign Scripts” to “BatchXSLT4InDesign_OLD” and “BatchXSLT4InDesign Scripts_OLD” or store them aside, until you are sure, that you no longer need them!

Keep track of any made changes in the software you made which you will need in the new version too!

JavaScript programs are contained in the package to automate and enable the export procedure. The path to these scripts is:

BatchXSLT4InDesign/BatchXSLT/Utilities/Scripts/BatchXSLT4InDesign Scripts/

This folder contains all export control scripts.

2.

To install these scripts into InDesign, you have to copy the folder "BatchXSLT4InDesign Scripts" from the opened disk image into the InDesign Script Panel folder. You also may copy it from above mentioned path to any other InDesign application:

Mount the downloaded disk image with a double click to see
the disk image window containing the software:

1.

Drag/drop the ‘BatchXSLT4InDesign’ package icon (a folder) from the package into your system’s “Applications” folder.

If you do not have such rights (administrator rights are required) copy it to your user HOME folder.

The Windows Installer installs the «BatchXSLT4InDesign» application folder into the system’s “Programs Folder” and will let you choose the InDesign to install the exporter scripts.

Start the downloaded installer package “BatchXSLT4InDesign xx-xx-xx Setup.exe”. (xx-xx-xx is any version number).

Choose the installer language and click [ Next > ].

Accept the License Agreement and click [ Next > ].

You are now asked for the path to your InDesign application to install the InDesign exporter scripts:

Click [ Browse... ]

To install the scripts for InDesign CS3 and CS4 locate the folder “Scripts Panel” within your InDesign application folder. This will be a path like:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe InDesign CS4\Scripts\Scripts Panel

For InDesign CS2 this must result in a path like:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe InDesign CS2\Presets\Scripts

Click [ OK ] button if the path is correct and then click [ Next > ] to continue installation.

Click [ Next > ] at the following dialogs and then click [ Install ].

After installation has completed, you may view the online manual and «BatchXSLT for InDesign» is started automatically.

Click [ Finish ] at the last installer window.

To enable you to immediately export a document, the software package contains an example document.

The previously installed folder „BatchXSLT“ contains the sub-folder „_TestData“. Therein find the folder „in“ with several files:

Just a simple example on what can be done with XML data: display it in a browser as a navigable eBook.

It is not the XML data itself behaving like a flip page eBook. This is done by external programs: Javascript programs linked into the XML file, as well as the browser’s internal XSL transformer.

Change the Firefox internal settings zu view exported XML on the local machine. This is no problem when displaying html or XML from a web server.

How you can change this setting is described on page 21.

An XML file must be displayed with a suitable Browser:

You may find all exported data below the folder

Export/out

which may be found in your personal directory, your Home folder!

Make a visual check of all exports until you feel confident, that editing was done according to the rules!

Whether the data subsequently will be used to show an eBook in a browser currently is of no importance. To display as a flip page eBook is one out of many possible ways to use and visualize such XML data.

Particularly check the correct boundaries of the articles on a page.

Moving the mouse over an article on the page preview, the blue frame shows what elements belong to this article and also reflects the separation within the XML file

If you know, that the document contains very special characters (fonts), then check the correct drawing of these characters in the browser.

Data Check with a Browser+The visual data check is important!+Make a visual check of all exports until you feel confident, that editing was done according to the rules!+The check is simple and may don

Open the previously exported file „DB_20080628_01_FrontCS3.xml“ in an XML-aware Browser (see the frame with the title „Please Note“).

An HTML version of this XML file has been created too and is named „DB_20080628_01_FrontCS3.htm“.

You should see an eBook with flippable pages which is navigable with the mouse. Flip the pages by clicking the mouse on the corners of the page previews.

An article is marked (framed) by moving the mouse over it and a short text preview is shown. Clicking on an article shows it in a readable form on the right side of the pages.

Don’t expect your readers to see and to read adds running in multiple columns over an arbitrary number of pages!

Separate the text boxes for example at each section boundary.

Document exporters are able to merge – to catch – elements like text and image boxes into one single unity.

To find components belonging to the same group, they pay attention to:

InDesign Documents to XML, XML- and HTML- ePaper
www.aiedv.ch

The blue background box of this page for example does NOT try to combine all articles into a single large article.

The reason is simple: the blue colored box is defied to have content type “Unassigned” (not Text and not image box.

There are several box types which are always exported as a standalone object:

A page with a background image, like shown on the cover page of this document, can be created with a special master page.

Avoid too large text and image boxes!

On this page, the blue background shows, that each article has enough distance to his neighbor.

No box of one article should touch or even cover an other element of an article next to it.

The article below, titled “Too Large Title Box” and marked red, shows the importance of such article gaps.

The browser view - the blue marker around the article - immediately shows, that both articles were merged into the same article unity. Click on the article and you will be able to read the text of both articles as a single article.

Don’t just «paste over» the images provided by your advertisers with new text!

The read-flow and color fidelity of text and images may be lost!

The

is not only very important for your readers, but especially for full-text search engines.

In order to be able to deliver relevant results, it is most important, that a textual section covers one theme only like “cars to sell”.

elements will be placed anywhere in the exported text – for example at the text end. In any case, they will not appear in the desired read flow

You even can add a caption to the image, group both and then anchor the whole group.

Using the Anchored Objects Options palette, you may position the image anywhere on the page – even outside the parent text box.

The three boxes of this article:

are chained with each other.

Chained text boxes assure that the correct read flow of an article is preserved even when it is built from a more complex box structure.

Articles running over multiple pages are NEVER separated and are exported as single text flow.

The box chain also guaranties, that the box on the right side having a lot of space to the title, is attached to the correct article.

Chains are not useful in all cases! Often enough, especially in automated ads production, text is filled into chained boxes in one piece.

In these cases it is of importance to physically split sections. Your readers will be happy not to read thousands of lines with any number of sub-sections as a single article.

Document indexes whose page numbers are acting as active links and actually flip to the chosen page make your readers happy!

Create a new Character Style named

gotoPage

and mark the page numbers in the index lines with this style.

You may create any number of such styles as long as their name starts with ‘gotoPage’ like ‘gotoPage bold’.

When the reader clicks on one of these page numbers the desired page is shown.

The document index entries on the 2nd page of the front cover of this document exactly work like this.

A lot of ads are placed into a document as plain images. A stand-alone image box containing an image (the ad) positioned anywhere on a page.

To make such images more attractive for readers and advertisers, an interactive and informational part may be attached to it.

Using InDesign’s Script Label palette, information for active links may be attached to image boxes:

How to achieve this, is described in the chapter „Tips and Tricks“ starting on page 19.

Particularly in an automated production environment it is very convenient to define web links using style sheets.

Create a new Character Style named

wwwLink

Links with style sheets+Links to external web sites like www.anydomain.eu +Particularly in an automated production environment it is very convenient to define web links using style sheets.+Create a ne

Links to external web sites may be achieved using InDesign‘s Hyperlinks Palette.

Use InDesign’s “Table of Contents” palette to define and create your TOC.

Nothing special: add all the styles which should go into the index, set the index level and set the style for this level.

As mentioned in an article on the previous page, we need a character style to mark the plain page number. It’s name must be ‘gotoPage’.

Set the style for the ‘Page Number’ to ‘gotoPage’ like shown in the image below (marked red). This may be any character style who’s name starts with ’gotoPage’ like ‘gotoPage bold’ or ‘gotoPage_12pt’

Now save and create your table of content. Put it on a ‘normal page’ – do NOT put it on a master page! Objects located on master pages are not exported.

You now may check the page numbers in the table of contents: it’s character style must be set to ‘gotoPage’.
As browsers can not display ‘tabbed text’ like page layout programs can, you might want to reformat your TOC as a real table. Like this the TOC shown in a browser will be a nice looking formatted table.

The TOC of this document was created this way.

The image’s filename can determine if certain unwanted images should not be exported. Especially useful for head and background images.

Image names starting with excl_ or 555 automatically are excluded from export.

This is configured in the file ‚autostart.jt‘ at the line:

PDF images, most often fill a small part of the drawable part of the paper only. With InDesign, the desired part of the image is simply moved under the cutting rectangle of the image box. This is fine for printing but not for exporting!

Do this: Set the paper size equal to the size of the actually drawn image content. Document exporters usually have troubles to locate the wanted image clip on the whole sheet of paper.

As a preset standard, images are converted to JPEGs. If the majority of your images are black and white line drawings, then you should configure «BatchXSLT for InDesign» to turn the original images into GIFs.

In these cases, GIF images are of better quality and use less space on the disk.

Particularly, when you mainly use PDFs and Illustrator (.ai) images in your documents, you should make sure, that the placed images are cut to the desired snippet.

A bad habit is to simply stick new text boxes over unreadable text in an image.

DON’T do this!

Finish the image in your preferred imaging software: rub out unwanted parts and write new readable text. Like this, the image is complete and a unity.

Many different image formats are used in a printable product: PDF, TIFF, EPS, Illustrator (a PDF derivate), Photoshop PSD and other.

«BatchXSLT for InDesign» uses two external image converters to extract images to a format suitable on the Internet: «Ghostscript» and ImageMagick».

This ‚Team‘ is able to convert original high resolution images to JPEG or GIF or any other format recognized by modern browsers. Some samples are shown below:

The exported XML for all output modes always is the same. However, different XSL transforms make the XML data behave different in a browser.

Two different versions in different sizes of the same image may be exported. To do this, add a second image size separated by ‚//‘.

Image fixed width 150 pixel // second original size:

The first in original size and the second very large:

An icon of 70 pixels in width and one scale by 3.0:

By default, each original image is exported as a JPEG in its original size. See the field ‚Export Options‘ (marked red) in the screen shot below.

The following units may be given for image sizes:

Scale factor: 1.0 for original size, 0.5 for half in size, 2.0 for double size or any other value as x.x.

Absolute width in pixel: 150x for 150 pixels (note the following ‚x‘). Height automatically calculated.

Absolute height in pixel: x150 for 150 pixels (note the leading ‚x‘). Width automatically calculated.

Images can be manipulated in fully automated mode. Separated by a semicolon, commands from the ImageMagick command set may be given. As the third element, the keyword ‚nocrop‘ may be given to indicate, to export from the original image and cropped and shown by InDesign.

Examples:

Enhance contrast: 125x;-contrast

Even stronger contrast: 125x;-contrast -contrast

Image 1 lighten by 10% and removed color profiles//

Image with 200 pixel in width; un-manipulated original:

Chained boxes will not be split (unlinked). The whole story in a chain of boxes is assigned to the first box in a chain.

– Split chained story frames per page:

This will split text boxes of articles running over multiple pages in a page per page manner. This let’s readers step through an article in a browser page by page.

Rotated objects always are exported in the unrotated state. A browser is not able to rotate images or text.

If you have to rotate an image for print output, then do this (in your preferred imaging program) in a way, that your needs for print and the unrotated web output conform to your requirements.

Compared to a printed document, on the Internet a limited number of fonts is accepted only.

For aesthetic reasons people like to manually format text lines.

Such manually inserted line and paragraph breaks are exported too and lead to unwanted line breaks in a browser view: A line break in the middle of a sentence, a single word on a line and so on.

If you have defined recurring elements (like page heads) on a master page but need to export their content, then you have to explicitly place them on the real document pages.

To bypass the problem of inadequate fonts when printing, text often is converted to Outlines and embedded into the document. This mainly is a common praxis when producing ads received from online advertisers.

Outlines, also known as paths, may not be re-translated to browser-readable characters and therefor are lost during the export process and will appear as empty box in a browser!

Distinct, uniquely identifiable document names mainly make sense when data will be transferred into a database, especially to full-text search databases.

Name your documents like this:

A shortcut for the object, for example NYT for “New York Times“ with an added issue date. So: The NYT Newspaper issue on day 14 of September 2008 would have the name:

NYT_20080914.indd

As a separator in the file name always use an underscore.

If you put standalone documents on the Internet, this naming convention is for your understanding and pleasure only.

ALWAYS use paragraph or character style sheets to style your text!

Styles contained in a document are exported into an external CSS file (Cascading Style Sheet), and enables us to let the text look as expected in any medium. Like this, it is very simple for a web developer to modify the appearance of text when viewing it online within a browser.

So: Do not set paragraph and character formatting ‘attribute by attribute’ but use styles! ‘Manually’ changed attributes like font family, the size, bold and italic are more difficult to customize for browser views.

The CSS file is exported to the folder ‚XSLCSS‘ within the ‚Export‘ folder structure and receives a name similar to the original InDesign document, ending with the filename extension ‚.css‘.

The style names used in InDesign may be found in this .css file as class names but, after all, they are still recognizable.

These style sheets for the browser may be adapted with any standard text editor to match the display need on the Internet: for sure, the original font family used for InDesign will be replaced with a font like ‘Verdana’ which is a save font for Internet applications. No problem to adjust the background color for special titles like the section bars in this document.

I assume that you will not make document exports just because you like it and for your own pleasure, but, that you want to make available your text and images to the public.

The following diagram illustrates, how data is stored into a clear and self-explaining folder structure, so it can simply be copied to any type of publishing medium.

The position of the folder ‚XSLCSS‘ is most important! It contains the programs to turn the static plain XML data into an interactive document for Browsers.

These programs are referenced from the XML and HTML file relatively to their own location in the folder structure. The default setting is:
„../../../XSLCSS“.

Discussing this topic would go beyond the scope of this guide.

Please, read the manual to integrate the full-text search module. It may be found in the software package at the folder

BatchXSLT4InDesign/Docs/FullTextSearch

Also available online HERE

Perhaps you may need to ask your web master for help.

Not everybody knows how to use FTP transfer programs or has one available.

The software package «BatchXSLT for InDesign» contains a Javascript, which helps to load the exported data on a web server. The script is named „ftpToWebArchive.jsx” .

As you already have made it available to InDesign during the previously completed software installation, you now may find a list item in InDesign’s Scripts Palette.

Call it with a double click and you will see the main FTP Transfer window shown below:

Enter the information for the following fields:

for example: www.aiedv.ch

This is the base path to the data folder on the web server like „data/ePaper“ directly below the „FTP Domain Name“.

Box#4: The image on the left as well as this text box are standalone elements.

If the check box “Chained boxes don’t catch” were not be checked, Then these 6 elements would have been merged into a single article. Except Box#5

Box#2: This box should be catched by the combined bounding box of TITLEbox and Box#1. However, in the export dialog we have checked “Chained boxes don’t catch”

Box#3: This box is not covered by any catching bounding box. But, it is grouped with Box#2!

If you have a column with several articles (like ‘Notes’), on a colored background box, then define this background box to have ‘unassigned’ content to export all articles separately.

If you want them to be exported as a single article with several sub-articles, then define the background box as text or image.

Box#5: This box does not touch any of the above boxes or bounding boxes and therefore is exported as a standalone article. It would be catched only if the catch radius would be large enough.

Box#1: This box is chained with the TITLEbox. Each box which catches an other box builds a new combined rectangular bounding box to catch more boxes into the same article.

The rectangular horizontal bounding box (dotted) of rotated objects catches other objects into a single article.

Objects in an article entity are sorted TOP - DOWN if the chain order does not command anything else.

Boxes with ‘unassigned’ content do NOT catch other boxes to an article.

An other non-cathing box is a line.

In this example, the chain order is changed to export a different readflow:

First the lead box, then the title and as the last box the text.

The same three boxes which do NOT touch each other.

Chaining boxes will output the text in exactly the same order the boxes are chained.

Chained boxes NEVER are split – the whole text is exported as one article, even if the text goes over multiple pages.

The three boxes of this small article do NOT touch each other.

One way to export all three boxes as an article unity is to group them together.

We all know it: An article consists of one or more boxes containing text or images. A special system called “Articles Components Recognition” (ACR) takes care to merge boxes into article unities.

Several properties of boxes and their layout are important to help to build an article from single boxes:

– overlapping

– grouping

– chaining

The boxes of this first example article, which we read as an entity in a Newspaper, are neither overlapping, nor grouped or chained.

Each box is exported as independent text. You can verify this by moving the mouse over each box and click on it.

The other examples on this page use the attributes mentioned above to build and export whole articles: grouping, overlapping and chaining.

The background color helps to see the boundaries of the different boxes. The bounding box is THE keyword for building articles.

1. Place an image and convert it to a button.

2. Drag/drop the needed sound and movie files to the spread.

To sell

Excellent condition!

Feature: Power Pack.

For more information: 555-555-55

Click the image to see this racer in action!

Sure, sound and movies are nonsense for printed publications. However, they make sense if an online issue should contain additional information for readers (or shoppers).

Examples:

– Training material with enhanced information from sound and movies.

– Possible positions of a chair should be shown in a sales catalog.

– You want to sell your used car like shown in the following „Mini“ add.