• Adobe InDesign

  Import XML to InDesign, with flowing pages, tables and if/logic blocks?

  Posted by Matthew Hall on May 28, 2009 at 5:19 pm

  Hi,

  I am fairly new to InDesign, however I have picked up the basics quite quickly and I have a strong experience in programming.

  One of the things I hate doing is making proposals, as I find myself repeating the same thing over and over.

  So I was thinking of making a little program that asks me a series of questions, takes some defined text inputs and then saves that to a database from which an XML file is generated.

  The XML file would contain the information I typed in, along with the ‘options’ I chose.

  So for example, I will have written in the introduction as a text input, and I might have chosen three out of four pre-defined items to appear in an estimate table. I would imagine the XML something like this:

  (View XML Sample)

  Firstly, I want to import this file into InDesign, and then have InDesign place in the data from the tags into defined sections of the document, which is the easy part I suspect.

  Secondly, I wondered whether InDesign would be able to look at each node and where it exists, then it should show that section in the document (which I have already prepared). Then within each section, it should hide all items in a table that don’t appear as nodes within the XML. Probably a lot harder, right?

  Anyway, if somebody has some useful pointers or information I’d be really grateful.

  Many thanks,

  Matthew

  Matthew Hall replied 17 years, 3 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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