Exporting XML Files

When the InDesign document has the proper elements properly tagged to the document's content, you're ready to export it to an XML file for use by a Web site's content-management system or other XML database. Choose File ‚ Export, or press z +E or Ctrl+E, to open the Export dialog box. In this dialog box, give the XML file a name in the Save As dialog box (InDesign automatically adds the filename extensions .xml), select a folder in which to place the file, and ‚ most important ‚ choose XML from the Format pop-up menu. Then click Save.

You now will have the Export XML dialog box, which opens with the General pane. This pane is simple:

• Check the Include DTD Declaration option to include the DTD information in the exported file. Otherwise, the XML database will need to import the DTD file separately.

• Check the View XML Using option and select a Web browser in the adjacent pop-up menu to preview the XML file in that browser.

• If an element was selected in the Structure pane, the Export from Selected Element option will be available; it exports the XML file only from that element on.

• Use the Encoding pop-up menu to choose the text encoding mechanism ‚ a way of representing international characters across different computer systems. Your content engineer or Web master will tell you whether to select UTF-8, UTF-16, or Shift-JIS.

In the Graphics pane, you tell InDesign how to handle the output of any tagged pictures. Figure 34-4 shows the pane. Your options are:

• In the Image Options section, indicate which images to copy to the Images subfolder that InDesign will create. Your choices are Original Images, Optimized Original Images, and Optimized Formatted Images. You can select any or all of these. The optimized images are converted to GIF or JPEG for use on the Web unless you specify GIF or JPEG in the Image Conversion pop-up menu rather than leave the default setting of Automatic; the formatted images crop the images to reduce file size .

• In the GIF Options section, you can choose the color palette in the Palette pop-up menu, with choices of Adaptive (No Dither), Web, System (Mac), and System (Win). Ask your Web master what to use; usually, you select Adaptive (No Dither). For very large images, interlacing can make on-screen display via the Web seem faster (by building the image line by line rather than waiting until the whole image has been transferred to the browser before anything is displayed); if you want to have such interlaced display of GIF files, check the Interlace option.

• In the JPEG Options section, there are similar options for JPEG files. In the Image Quality pop-up menu, choose the desired image quality (Low, Medium, High, and Maximum). In the Format Method, choose Progressive to have the file displayed progressively (similar to the interlace option for GIF files) or Baseline to display it all at once. Unless your images are very large, keep the default Baseline.

  New Feature ‚  

  When you export an XML file with pictures, InDesign automatically embeds XMP media management properties with the pictures' tags. You can view those properties by choosing File ‚ File Info and then choosing the Advanced pane. This information may be of interest to your content engineer but has no real meaning for the page designer. However, the content engineer may want to fill out the information in the File Info dialog box's other panes ‚ Description and Origin ‚ into which you can add comments, creator information and contact details, copyright information, credit and source information, keywords, and copyright URLs.

  New Feature ‚  

  InDesign CS provides another way to generate XML files: Choose File ‚ Package For GoLive. This option creates an XML file preformatted for Adobe GoLive 7.0 or later. You'll make adjustments to the XML file and choose image settings such as those in the Export XML dialog box in GoLive rather than in InDesign.

Figure 34-4: The Export XML dialog box and its Images pane.