Importing Html into Adobe Indesign

Question

We are currently working on an pdf version of a newspaper at work, we have a .net website which captures the articles to publish, storing the content entered as html, so we can maintain styles like bold, underline, strike out.

Once this is stored in the database we are planning to use Indesign to create the pdf. We currently we have a template built, but when we generate an xml document and import into Indesign the html tags are just written out. Is there a way around this, to get Indesign to maintain the tags as they would be in html? We just need some simple ones, like bold, strikeout, underling, center align.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Pandoc now support export to ICML (Adobe InCopy's XML format that can be "placed" in InDesign documents). To convert HTML to ICML:

pandoc --standalone -o output.icml input.html

See Importing Markdown in InDesign in the pandoc wiki for details around the workflow.

Answer 2

You'll need to translate the HTML tags into CharacterStyles, and apply those to the XML on import.

The tricky thing is that CharacterStyles can't be applied nested like HTML can, so you need to make a CharacterStyle for each combination that might be present. Or you can apply styles to the specific run of text, with a script.