Creating a print to Web workflow

Nik - 07:41am Oct 29, 2004 PST

On Oct 28, 2004, at 8:23 AM, Paul Guinnessy wrote:

What would be one good ebook is how you can use InDesign or Quark to do a complete workflow process from the point of conception for a news story, to print, to web, for a small magazine. All the books I've read on the topic assume you have at least a $100,000 budget and a very simple design for your copy and web site. I've been extremely disappointed with the html and xml tools in Quark.

I've been looking into this quite a bit, myself, and I have a few suggestions. (None of which, I fear, will make you any happier.)

Firstly, I agree that the XML export from Quark or InDesign is regrettably bad, unless you tediously and carefully tag each and every element which you intend to stylize. Even then, adding an XSL stylesheet to the resulting output is less than satisfactory since it's supported in all of two browsers (Mozilla and IE 6). Useful elements such as paragraph breaks (!) font styles and complex character sets (the XML support in the aforementioned browsers seems to crap out on Unicode text) don't even make it to the XML file.

Obviously a less than ideal solution.

Then there's the option of using BeyondPress or some other tool to create a web page. (There's various other plug ins for newer versions of Quark/InDesign, as BeyondPress is mired entirely in Quark v4, having never been upgraded since Quark added their own mediocre HTML export tools.) On this front, InDesign wins out with its excellent "Package for GoLive" function, which converts your graphics and text into a GoLive "library." Once in this format, they can be dragged & dropped into a new web layout. Quark has similar abilities through creating a new Quark web page document, which also forces you to re-create the whole file, and creates some truly craptacular (if you'll pardon the term) HTML in the process.

None of these tools work terribly well if your goal is to go to a custom web layout that doesn't particularly match your printed page, or a dynamic website where you want to pull content from a database (as with most modern sites). To do that, you're really best off working from the original document source (or an RTF export or cut & paste from Quark/InDesign).

The best solution I've found is to truly decentralize your workflow. If you intend to move to different media, you should prepare your original copy in a flexible format and import this format into Quark/InDesign to create your layout, and do the same into your web tools/content-management-system. For this purpose, XML works quite nicely, and there are excellent tools to convert MS Word styles into XML. InDesign and Quark can deal with an XML import slightly more intelligently than they can with styled text (albeit with a bit of an initial setup headache), and most content management systems for websites and convert XML to XHTML at the server-side.

Naturally, some measure of tweaking is required for optimal web and print output, but it does seem to be the easiest route to take.

--Nik