DITA2InDesign Plugin Project Copyright (©) 2008 DITA2InDesign

DITA2InDesign Project

The DITA2InDesign project is an open-source, community-based project to develop a plug-in for the that enables the publishing of DITA-based content using the Adobe InDesign CS3 product.

The project was started by, and is currently being managed by, Eliot Kimber of Really Strategies, Inc. (ekimber at reallysi dot com, user DrMacro on SourceForge).

The project's SourceForge project page is: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita2indesign

Note:

Because of severe limitations in InDesign CS2's XML scripting support, this project is only intending to provide scripts for InDesign CS3 or later. The difference in ease of scripting between CS2 and CS3 is dramatic. It would be prohibitively difficult to implement the needed functionality in CS2 whereas with CS3 it should be fairly straightforward.

Current Status

As of 1 Feb 2008 the project is in the initial startup phase, consisting of a call for participation and some initial design ideas and identification of implementation tasks. The project code library includes a small amount of XSLT code that demonstrates the general processing approach for the XML-to-XML-for-import-to-InDesign component.

A this time the project is a "spare time" activity for those involved and therefore there is no implementation schedule more precise than "as soon as we can".

Call for Participation

This is a community-supported project. The project needs the following contributions:
  • XSLT developers to contribute to the DITA-to-XML-for-import-to-InDesign transforms
  • InDesign JavaScript developers to contribute to the InDesign XML import scripts
  • InDesign layout designers to contribute to the design of InDesign templates to be used for laying out the imported DITA content.
  • Writers to contribute to the project User Guide documentation
  • Testers to test the plugin as it is developed

If you would like to participate as a developer, simply contact Eliot (see contact info above) with your SourceForge user ID.

If you would like to contribute InDesign templates you can forward them to Eliot. All donated templates will be fully attributed although they must be provided with an appropriate open source license that allows unrestricted derivative use of the templates. In particular, it must be allowable for users of the plug-in to use the templates for documents sold as parts of products or to be included with or used by commercial products that use this plug-in.

Contributors

The following companies and individuals have contributed materials or development time to this project: