Really Strategies is supporting the creation of an open-source, community-developed DITA-to-InDesign plug-in for the DITA Open Toolkit. We are donating a small amount of existing code (some early XML-to-InDesign transform experiments) and development effort over the weeks and months to come, as well our existing expertise and experience with both DITA processing and getting arbitrary XML into InDesign.
The project is managed on SourceForge as the DITA2InDesign project.
There's nothing much there now: we're just getting started with development and are actively soliciting contributions from others in the community. See the project's Web site for details on the project and how you can help us move it forward.
Our goal with this project is to help make it easier for Publishers, in particular, to take immediate advantage of DITA, or at least experiment with it with a minimum of up-front effort, by fostering the creation of a print production tool chain that uses tools both familiar to Publishers and capable of meeting Publishers' typographic and composition requirements.
With DITA today you can create printed output using the XSL-FO-based plug in. That plug-in is adequate for technical documents and, with a little effort, you can customize and extend it to reflect corporate branding and specific page layouts.
However, the inherent limitations in the XSL-FO standard and its available free and commercial implementations make it incapable of producing the more sophisticated layouts required by most commercial publications and more heavily-designed technical documents. Thus the need for something like the DITA2InDesign plug-in.
The goal is for the DITA2InDesign plug-in to help bridge the gap and make it as easy as possible to use InDesign with DITA-based content.
NOTE: While the plug-in will go long way toward automating the layout of DITA-based content with InDesign, it won't be able to do everything. There will always be a class of documents that require more automated layout sophistication than the plug-in could hope to provide. For those documents, the Typefi product offers a very attractive solution. Typefi provides very sophisticated automation features for rendering XML content into InDesign layouts. While one doesn't exist today, it should be fairly easy to create a generic DITA-to-Typefi "CXML" process that would allow you to use existing Typefi-based InDesign layouts with any DITA-based content.
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