Re: DTP DTD?

[Stephan Albers <Stephan.Albers@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Jean-Marc,

sorry for answering that late, but it's an interesting question, and I
think I have some answers.

> Before I bravely reinvent the wheel, is anyone aware
> of DTDs describing the underlying layout models of
> Adobe InDesign or Quark XPress, as exposed by their
> scripting APIs (at least on the Mac)?

No, I'm not aware of such a DTD. We have created an API, which is
basically a set of java classes like Table, Frame, Style, Paragraph etc.

We have implemented this abstract API for QuarkXPress, Framemaker and
InDesign and think about doing this for Ventura, too.

Depending on the target publishing system we do different things:
- for QuarkXPress and InDesign we create "meta files" that are read
through an extension within the DTP application,
- for Framemaker (and perhaps Ventura) we create tagged files (MIF for
Framemaker and the Ventura tag format), so we have a direct
representation.

The API is a set of classes and it should be possible to transfer this
into a DTD (it's like tranfering a static UML class diagram into a DTD).

Also the API abstracts from the fact that Quark and Indesign don't have
support for tables. We create tables automatically by using Tabs and
breaking long informations into multiple lines, so the output is pretty
close to a "good" manually constructed documented.


> The aim is
> to apply XSL-transformation to a XML content file
> towards an intermediate tree representation, then
> create DTP files from this tree using the scriptability
> of the DTP program.

We thought about doing this, too. We started to create script files as
the representation for the documention, but as I said before we are now
using a different approach.


> (I'm not talking here about FO.)

We also did FO. We take the fo-file into FOP, take the rendered output
tree together with the original FO tree and transfer this into our API.
This is nice because you now know about the structure of the page before
you go into the DTP application. Since FOP is not ready for commercial
use yet, we consider this as a prototype.


I would be VERY interested in working together with you in these areas.
What do you think of getting into direct contact? I could send you an
email with a proposal of how we could get together.

Stephan Albers
jCatalog Software AG


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