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

[Syed Zaeem Hosain]

I just realized that I am wasting time for you all with an InDesign-related thread in a FrameMaker forum.

Sorry about that! ☹ 

So ... moving on ...

Z

-----Original Message-----
From: Framers <framers-bounces+syed.hosain=aeris.net at lists.frameusers.com> On Behalf Of Syed Zaeem Hosain
Sent: Friday, August 20, 2021 6:49 PM
To: An email list for people using Adobe FrameMaker software. <framers at lists.frameusers.com>
Subject: Re: [Framers] Importing InDesign IDML into two tools. Was RE: FM 10 on a new computer.

Robert, my son checked and could not find an Export or Save As capability for RTF in InDesign. Do you, or anyone else, know if this is possible?

Peter, the readback of the IDML back into InDesign was fine! My son noted that the display looked like the original INDD file. 

FWIW, I also tried opening the PDF (from InDesign) into Word and discovered some of the same errors (for example, carriage returns in wrong places in the text). The only thing I have not tried yet is to output Word or RTF format from Acrobat Pro ... hmmm.

It is possible that our tech writer (no longer with us, unfortunately) who did the InDesign work for this document had extra carrier returns in there - which do not "show" in the PDF or within InDesign, but are present when the PDF (into Word) and IDML (into Affinity and Designer Pro) are imported!

Since I do not have an InDesign license, I cannot verify this myself ... may download a trial to check things out myself, but I am not familiar with InDesign, so this may be slow ...

Z

-----Original Message-----
From: Framers <framers-bounces+syed.hosain=aeris.net at lists.frameusers.com> On Behalf Of Peter Gold
Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2021 7:57 PM
To: An email list for people using Adobe FrameMaker software. <framers at lists.frameusers.com>
Subject: Re: [Framers] Importing InDesign IDML into two tools. Was RE: FM 10 on a new computer.

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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