FileMaker to Quark; how to get to InDesign?

[Jamie...@adobeforums.com]

After a couple hours of Internet searching, I have decided to post my delimma here.

We publish a newspaper with 7 different editors across the country. We used to import Word files into Quark, but 1) production got sick of being bombarded with Word attachments and 2) importing Word files brings in all sorts of extra styles and screw up our styles.

I found and started using a nifty program called DiStyler from Abstrakt, which lets you export Quark tagged documents from FileMaker to individual text files and thus maintains your bolding, italization, etc, when imported into Quark. We use FileMaker Server for the editors to post their stories and then production outputs them when ready...the system works nicely.

Now the delimma:
We are itching to move to InDesign and InDesign does not accept Quark tagged text (from what I have read).

A member of the Adobe forum said I should just change the plug in to export InDesign tags. The maker of DiStyler has split and his website does not function anymore, so I cannot ask him to do that. If I knew how, I'd open the plug in and change it to the IDD tag structure. Perhaps someone else has already done this? Let me know.

I was also thinking I could get the text to export in styled XML: but I do not know how to do that either (I will inquire at FileMaker)

Finally, I have looked for alternatives to what we are doing now (inCopy, K2), but they all come at great expense per seat (and are somewhat too exactin gfor our uses), especially with the connectivity to serve remote editors. If someone knows of a very low cost alternative, please let me know!

We are but a small grass roots beer newspaper group.

Thanks, Jamie

[Bu...@adobeforums.com]

So are you going to say who made the plugin?

[will...@adobeforums.com]

For our pricing material we use filemaker as a bridge to the servers that house the data. We had a company write a plugin for InDesign that connects to Filemaker, then to the database, works pretty good actually.

[Jamie...@adobeforums.com]

What you are describing here - connecting to FileMaker from InDesign - leads to more questions.

Does it only connect to the story when you want it to?

How do you select the story you want it to connect to?

Will it bring in the style of the text? (Bold, italicized, sepcial characters)

It is not so important that we connect for the purposes of real time data - the paper changes every issue - just that we get the stylized text in there in a easy manner.

[John_...@adobeforums.com]

You might want to look at Database Publisher here. <http://www.pinecode.nl/>

[will...@adobeforums.com]

Does it only connect to the story when you want it to? yes

How do you select the story you want it to connect to? The plugin creates another palette in InDesign where you link fields to the corresponding field in the database.

Will it bring in the style of the text? (Bold, italicized, special characters)
Yes and No, it merely brings the data. We style the data in the InDesign page. Our workaround is to use paragraph styles. So this may not work for your purposes per say. We use this for price-point advertisement.

Right now it works in 2.0.2 and is being ported to InDesign CS. InDesign is very different from 2 under the covers neccesitating a lot of rework.

<http://www.crepsunited.com/circularbuilder.html>

[duff...@adobeforums.com]

Jamie:

You may want to check out Harris & Baseview's NewsEditPro. Used by over 1,500 newsrooms around the US (largest installed base in the industry).

NewsEditPro has a database (IQue) that can be accessed via a web browser (IQueWeb). Your editors could submit and edit stories via the web browser. Pagination would occur in InDesign CS via the DragIn plug in.

It isn't cheap as FileMakerPro, but not as expensive as K4.

The big benefit is that you editors could log in throughout the day, submit stories, search the database, submit edits, monitor workflow status, etc.

Check our NewsEditPro, IQue and IQueWeb at <http://www.harrisbaseview.com/products>

And on Friday afternoon's the staff in Ann Arbor drink beer at club Baseview

S. Duffy

[will...@adobeforums.com]

Here's my take on this:

Ugghhh Harris????? I will not even begin to relate the horror stories of Harris and some of the products that we had at my location over the last 12 years. Suffice to say we could not "un-intsall" it fast enough. Things may have changed, but we had our fill.

I will say one of the best things they ever did was get out of the "front-end" business of DTP. Their DASH and CASH "design tools" were buggy POS "Pieces of Stuff".

[Jamie...@adobeforums.com]

Pretty harsh...

Remember everyone, the important thing here is to maintain the bolding, italicization and special characters. If that gets wiped out, prodcution has to go through and re-edit the article and that takes way to much time.

Is there any chance someone from Adobe has anything to say about this?

Jamie

[Bu...@adobeforums.com]

What about InCopy

[will...@adobeforums.com]

Jamie, only harsh becasue I lived it. Happily we are Harris free!

I understand your point about formating but we ran into issues simply due to the fact that we multi-purpose our data (muc like everyone else). In the end we decided to keep the data on a server then reformat it in the application rather than try to carry on formats to different apps.

Buko- I'm testing InCopy now, but the thing that I can see in my set tup is the copy editors balking at is, that it is not Word. They are so used to doing their work there that it will be a tough sell IMHO. InCopy does look good thou.

[Jamie...@adobeforums.com]

Does InCopy work over a server based system like FileMaker>

Do you need to pay the InCopy fee per seat???

[duff...@adobeforums.com]

willmark:

Things change. The Harris portion of Harris & Baseview used to build proprietary systems for publishers (cash & dash). The Baseview portion has always built open systems wrapping around the likes of QuarkXPress, InDesign, InCopy and Photoshop. Mac and Wintel. These solutions have been adopted by a vast, diverse publishing clientele.

All systems across Harris & Baseview integrate open applications.

s. duffy

[will...@adobeforums.com]

Jamie- InCopy does incur a per seat fee check here for details:
<http://www.adobe.com/store/products/master.jhtml?id=catInCopy>

InCopy looks promising but I’m not sure if it is what need, but then againa only you can make that determination. Trying either a download for 30-days (if its available) or buying a single copy may be the best way to evaluate it.

duffjamm-

Obviously you use Harris & Baseview and I will respect that they have new products, and times have changed to some degree, but I will not be saying this again in this thread:
We had a nearly 12 year horror story that was as bad as it gets. We wasted… I don’t even want to comment on how much my company wasted on Harris. Yeah it got our ads out the door, but it was never liked, in fact, was universally loathed by both Advertising and IT and never lived up to its billing. Additionally every designer whoever worked on the system universally despised it. This is my company's story, we used it, we despised it and celebrated whole heartily when it was finally unplugged.

Notice I did not have a comment in this thread about their new products in the arena today. To be honest I have no experience with their new products. I simply commented on our experiences with the company and the products we had used, which left us with a particularly bad experience and one that we were not going to be repeating while I had a say in the matter (I didn't have say in the matter before, Harris predated me where I work). So much so that when we started looking for the replacements to their products we specifically DID NOT look at them.

Everyone has their pet peeve as far as companies go, for me Microsoft is number 1 (and I have 40+ PC in addtion to 40 Macs to manage), followed by Harris, then Chevrolet, but that’s another story altogether :)

Best regards,
Mark

[Jeffre...@adobeforums.com]

Everyone has their pet peeve as far as companies go, for me Microsoft is number 1, followed by Harris, then Chevrolet,

Wondering, where does Quark fall on this list?

[will...@adobeforums.com]

1) Microsoft is love/hate. They do earn me quite a bit of $ outside of my primary job. I do side-work fixing PCs. If everyone had a Mac in my area I'd be the Maytag repairman ;). The Mac BU does make OUTSTANDING software; However Office is rather high priced in my opinion. I run Open Office on my PC at home.

Microsoft is very guilty of "Me Too technology" at almost every turn; this is what annoys me most about them as a company.

2) Harris for the above mentioned reasons

3) Chevrolet, I'll tell you all about it once I replace my S-10.

4) Ahh "Brand X", I used Quark for 12 years, but much like Micro$ its been a love/hate relationship. Hate is too strong a word, how about loathe?

5) Dell. 4 years ago they were excellent PCs. Today just try to get something replaced with them. Customer service is a joke now, after being quite excellent. Hardware flaky.

Plus Dell has done nothing to add to the company industry except sell them cheaply. Can anyone say Wal-mart?

In the light this, which companies do I like:

1) Apple. Jobs is a dictator to be sure but, at least Apple tries a lot harder to keep the masses more happy then Billy and the Borg in Big Redmond. Apple, the little company that could and still does. It’s a great story of a company that many have written off numerous times. Check <http://www.macobserver.com/appledeathknell> for the number of times it’s been pronounced as dead or dying and yet they keep chugging along turning out outstanding products and software that is often emulated and rarely topped.

2) Adobe. Example: Photoshop is every bit as ubiquitous as Office; I mean what else is there? Yet Adobe has not stuck it to the customer they way, say, Quark has. The simply make great products and realize that if you keep the customer at least somewhat happy they will return.

3) Sony, specifically the Sony Viao PC. The Sony Viao is an excellent PC, a bit more more money, but solid hardware. Every person I know who has one swears by them.

4) IBM. ThinkPad’s are my all time favorite PC laptops, solid, dependable and “Just keep on ticking” to borrow from Timex, I believe. If I had to get another Laptop besides a PowerBook, I’d get a ThinkPad. Plus at least they have the
I potential to deliver higher rev chips for Apple, something which Motorola could not do.

5) The entire Open source Linux community: Openoffice.org; Mozilla.org; distributions such as Yellowdog. Etc.. this is what it should be about, Innovation rather than simply trying to protect market dominance, hmmm which company(ies) could that be from the above list?

End of my diatribe ;)

[Zachar...@adobeforums.com]

We needed a way to reuse InDesign templates and selectively replace identified text with FileMaker field contents while maintaining the text attributes. The automated part of our advertising was only at the product level, which was highly design intensive. I can say we were successful at doing the following:

1. Change multiple text lines within the same text block to FileMaker field contents while maintaining InDesign text attributes (or tags.)

2. Generate InDesign tags within FileMaker and selectively replace text within identified text blocks.

Unfortunately we packaged the solution and now sell it. We created a plug-in to InDesign because it provided a great deal of control. However, it is possible to use FileMaker, Applescript, and a lot of elbow greese to directly import into script labeled text boxes Filemaker generated InDesign tagged text. Fairly difficult for the normal InDesign user but not impossible.

Hope this enlightens your view of the world,

Zack

[will...@adobeforums.com]

Hi Zack-

Mark at your favorite upstate NY company... "Mini Me likes Hot Pockets!" :p

[Jamie...@adobeforums.com]

Zach:
What product? What company?

Jamie

[will...@adobeforums.com]

wegmans.com

[Aj...@adobeforums.com]

Zack,

What is the company that "packaged and sells" what you described?

"Unfortunately we packaged the solution and now sell it. We created a plug-in to InDesign because it provided a great deal of control."

Sounds like this might work for people in the FileMaker/InDesign scenario.
--
Aj

[TC...@adobeforums.com]

FWIW, it's pretty easy to export basic, usable XML in FileMaker and import it into either a template with pre-tagged frames, or drag and drop from the structure view into untagged frames. You can map the XML tags to both paragraph and character based ID styles (using nested styles in ID can be really powerful in this context).

One of the XML export formats uses your field names in FileMaker for the XML tag.

InCopy would be a better solution, though, in that it's a real word processor, you can use the same styles you use in ID, etc. It's also less money per seat than InDesign.

[Aj...@adobeforums.com]

TCole,

I'm very glad to hear that you have a successful FileMaker to InDesign solution (it gives me hope ;-), but so far that has not been my experience. Maybe I am going about it the wrong way.

ID2 TO FM7 VIA XML
I figured that the best way to experiment with this process was to create a brief page in ID2 with a couple of para styles. Then I mapped the styles to XML tags that I created in ID2. Then I exported the ID2 file to and XML file. I did not enter any advanced options (DTD, Style sheet, etc.).

I then started up FileMakerPro 7 demo and went open the ID2 XML file, which gave me a "XML Parsing Error. Unknown element 'bodymain'. Line number: 2. Column number: 859." After reading through the FM Help, it seems to me that FM requires the XML to be in a certain format - what they call "FMPXMLRESULT grammar". From what I read any non-conforming XML can be brought into conformance through an XSLT style sheet, but it didn't elaborate on how to create such a thing. After looking over the web for a way to do this and coming up empty, I decided to browse this forum for answers.

Your response gives me hope and makes me wonder if I initiated this backwards. Maybe instead of exporting ID2 XML and bringing it into FM7, I instead should be creating a sample FM7 db and exporting it as XML to bring into ID2? I will give that a try.

XML WITH STYLED TEXT IN TABLE CELLS
Another problem I came up against was getting ID2 to allow tagged text in table cells. It keeps giving me a "Tagging of Table Cell contents is not supported" message. I assume that there is no way around this? Does anyone know if IDCS supports this?

Thanks for any help.
--
Aj

[TC...@adobeforums.com]

You may need to use an XSLT utility program (www.snapbridge.com for information on theirs) to translate XML back and forth between InDesign and FileMaker.

I'm using the combination of FM 6.x and ID CS. There are differences in the ways the different versions of the apps interface.

However, XSLT is probably something into which you'll need to look.

But, from my perspective the question still remains as to exactly why you're wedded to FileMaker. I don't know enough about the workflow to recommend something other than what you're doing at the moment.

[Aj...@adobeforums.com]

So, TCole, have you created an XSLT to do your import/export between FM6 and ID3? Or, were you able to do this "right out of the box"?

Another big question I have is if you know whether ID3 will allow you to XML tag text inside a table cell? I know ID2 will not, but I'm not sure if ID3 will. An easy way to find out would be to create an XML tag, create table, enter text in one of the cells, highlight the text and try to apply a tag to the highlighted text. ID2 would give you a message "Tagging Table cell contents is not possible." What does ID3 do?

In response to your question, "why are you wedded to FileMaker?". I have a number of reasons...
Cost: it's pretty inexpensive, comparitively
Ease of Use: it is very user friendly and easy to develop in
Great Web Publshing: one of my goals is to allow our employees to edit content via their web browsers. FM's Instant Web Publishing made a big leap in terms of fidelity to the original FM layout with version 7.

Those are my main reasons, for whatever that is worth. ;-)
--
Aj

[TC...@adobeforums.com]

I didn't use any XSLT. I used FM's XML as is. Which works fine with text. Getting paths for graphic links requires XSLT, and if you're storing both articles and their associated images in FileMaker, that's what you'd have to do, I think.

ID 3 doesn't allow you to tag content inside a table cell. That's a big item on the feature request list.

The reason for the 'why' question was I'm wondering what the workflow is...what the workflow reason for that choice is.

You *might* want to talk to Sansui Software (www.sansuisoftware.com) as they have done a lot of work driving InDesign layout from a web browser.

[Aj...@adobeforums.com]

Thanks for the link TCole. I will check them out. Thanks also for the info about no XML tagging inside of tables - that is a big bummer for what I need to do. I saw from other threads that using ID2 tagged text works for tables, but it looks a bit complicated in terms of the number of tags that would have to be concatenated out of FM through calculation fields.

At the moment I am not using any graphics/images - just text. I tried doing and FM7 XML export and ID2 XML import. The text did come through, but nothing was tagged. I know this is because I didn't setup anything in FM for tagging. How did you setup your FM file to bring over the tags?

For example, if I have just two fields - project name and project description - and I want a separate ID2 tag/style for each, what did you do in FM7 to get that to come across? Do you create a new field for each tag?

Thanks for the help.

[TC...@adobeforums.com]

The XML capabilities in InDesign keep expanding from release to release, so keep your fingers crossed.

Set up your fields in FM, and give them the names you want the tags to have (preferrably the same names as your paragraph styles in InDesign to make the mapping process easier).

Use the export command in FM, and choose XML. For Grammar, choose FMPDSORESULT. This will export the file using your field names as tags.

You then import that into InDesign. You can pre-tag frames in a template, or drag and drop from the structure view.