One of the recurring issues I’ve had when designing a document is the inability of people to use stylesheets to structure their content.
I’m no longer surprised at the number of clients who cannot, or will not, use stylesheets in Word (“I haven’t got the time to learn all that – can’t you do it for me”), but I continue to be amazed at the number of designers who cannot, or will not, use stylesheets in InDesign/Quark Xpress (‘It cramps my creativity – can’t the setters sort it out”).
I was reminded of this during a recent software presentation that promised to map Word documents into InDesign and then automatically output to print, PDF, web, tablet and mobile. The software used a combination of Extensible Markup Language (XML) and application/device stylesheets, and I have to admit it was pretty fast.
The problem was, that for the system to work effectively, the content in the original (Word) document needed to be structured in the first place – and without that, the mapping software could not map.
(Of course InDesign already has a built in XML tagging option that enables tagged content to be manually repurposed in another file or application. Similarly, you can import an XML file into InDesign and instruct InDesign to display and format the XML data in any way you want.)
To get the benefit of ‘design once, publish many times’, you need to be able to separate the visual style from the document structure – a principle that will be familiar to you if you are used to using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in web design.
The same principle holds true for traditional print publishing, and now that Word 11 has improved the way styles work, including adding a ‘Show Styles’ option that interprets levels of heading (even if an outline heading level has not been specified), there really is no excuse for not structuring documents properly.
Doing this at the beginning of the process means that Word styles can be mapped to InDesign styles using tags, and in the same way, tags can be carried across into Acrobat for creating accessible PDFs or HTML for use online on tablet or other mobile devices.
The whole point of technology is that you use it to make your workflow more efficient, leaving you more time to design.
Better, faster, cheaper.
That’s the future.
