Access Adobe InDesign files

Question

I need some directions for the following problem:

I have a lot of InDesign files and i have to setup a process that will track if a certain paragraph or text block has changed between diferent versions of the file. If the text block has changed i want to extract that text block in a "portable" format (html, pdf, txt).

1. Is there an Adobe product that would do that ?
2. Is there any public API to access an InDesign file ?
3. Is there the posibility to export InDesign to, say, html ?

Answer 1

Write a script in “Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit” (or any other editor, although ExtendScript will give you things like code hinting and help about what objects are available) using either JavaScript, AppleScript (Mac-only) or VBScript (Win-only). Apart from syntax all three languages offer the same access to the InDesign objects.

With scripts, you can nearly do everything you could do “by hand”. So you can simply look for the correct text object and extract the text from it. Scripts also allow to work across multiple files, so you can as well compare two versions of a file.

See the InDesign Scripting tutorial (here for CS5) for more information, examples and references.

Answer 2

Yes, Adobe makes InCopy available which is for editing text inside Indesign documents. You can also write a plugin for InDesign (which will ALSO work in InCopy) which will manage text updates and changes in the file.

There is a possibility to export an INX file which, as far as I remember, is XML so you should be able to parse it. There is no public API except if you write a plugin for InDesign itself. And you do have XML export but for it to work properly you will need to tag your document and linearize it (determine the order of text chunks with relation to the XML text order).

However, if you are not completely crazy you should avoid learning ADM and all the Adobe C++ stuff and try Javascript which in recent Creative Studios has become decent. This might be relevant: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596528171