Adobe InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Tagged Text

InDesign Tags versus XPress Tags

For years we've relied on tagged text documents to ensure that outside files imported properly into QuarkXPress using XPress's style sheets. We gave our writers cheat sheets listing which tags to insert to indicate a headline, subhead, and so on.

Now that we've moved to InDesign, these tagged documents no longer work; they don't import with InDesign styles applied even though the style names are the same as they were in Quark. Isn't tagged mark-up in a text file a generic sort of thing for all page layout programs? I tried searching InDesign's Online Help, but all the information on tags apparently is about XML tagging, which is a different beast altogether.

The concept of tagged text documents is the same for all page layout programs that support it, as is the general procedure, but the actual tags are different, program to program. Luckily, InDesign's tags aren't all that different from QuarkXPress's. The documentation you're looking for is in a PDF file on the InDesign CS installation CD. Look in the Adobe Technical Info folder for a file called Tagged Text.pdf.

However, if you're already using an XPress Tags workflow, you might consider just sticking with it because Em Software's XTags for InDesign plug-in lets you import XPress Tags into your favorite page-layout program. See www.emsoftware.com for more information.

TIP

Contrary to examples shown in InDesign's documentation, where tags with inner caps are used, all tags for paragraph and character styles should be lowercase.

Include Inline Graphics in Tagged Text

Our artists supply charts and graphs as Adobe Illustrator files that we need to embed in the copy flow as inline frames. I read through the documentation but apparently there's no tag available that means "insert X image file as inline frame." That really cramps our style!

If you're on a Mac, there's a freeware scripted solution available. Include the image filename in the text, then run a script called Place Images 1.1, which you can download from the Adobe Studio here: share.studio.adobe.com

The Place Image script scans through a story's text, replacing any image filename with an inline image. Note that XTags for InDesign from Em Software can also handle this on-the-fly when you import the file.