[Framers] Importing InDesign IDML into two tools. Was RE: FM 10 on a new computer.

[Peter Gold]

Hi, Robert!

For whatever reasons, I never needed or wanted to go to Github, until
now....!!! Egad!

Now that I’ve seen this, I’m not going to wonder about it. I am sure I’m
not going down this rabbit hole. It reminds me of the scene in the Tom
Sawyer movie I saw as a kid, when the string ran out and the candle died,
and I was sure if I were with Tom and Becky, I'd never get back outside the
cave. ;)

But, this peek answers some of my questions about the problems being
discussed here.

The real issues, IMO, is which FrameMaker document properties an author
expects to preserve when converting to another application, and whether the
goal is to return the transformed and modified document perfectly
re-interpreted to FM from the foreign application. Basically, two different
universes need to be preserved - text and objects. Each application
describes text and object properties with different languages and
structures. And, just as in human languages, some ideas don't translate
directly. Over FM's lifetime, some later releases had problems supporting
structures from earlier ones. If this stuff were easy, it wouldn't have
taken so long for some seemingly-simple feature requests to have been
honored.

So, in this branch of the thread, I wonder if converting a document to a
competing layout application preserves layout features, does FM or ID text
that's copied and pasted into the converted layout survive well, or is it
also garbled as described? Does RTF work better or worse? Remember that
InDesign has one of the most sophisticated text composition engines. So,
perhaps the competitors don't compute text properties as well, or they lack
some comparable computed properties.


On Thu, Aug 19, 2021 at 4:22 PM Robert Lauriston <robert at lauriston.com>
wrote:

> Did you try exporting from InDesign as RTF?
>
> Even if they're not using the same library, such as
> https://github.com/jorisros/IDMLlib , other applications will
> inevitably have trouble reading IDM if they can't do everything that
> InDesign can.
>
> On Thu, Aug 19, 2021 at 2:12 PM Syed Zaeem Hosain <Syed.Hosain at aeris.net>
> wrote:
> >
> > A last update.
> >
> > Reading the IDML back into InDesign worked fine - looked like the
> original!
> >
> > So, both these other tools have some limitations importing IDML.
> >
> > Although Affinity Publisher was a small amount better (not enough to
> justify my getting yet another editing tool - I will get the trial lapse).
> >
> > So, they are clearly fine for *new* work, but importing IDML from
> InDesign would require repair to fix some errors - which errors, as
> mentioned earlier, surprisingly overlapped in the tools.
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