XML Publishing with Adobe InDesign

What InDesign Cannot Do (or Do Well) with XML

The 1:1 Import Conundrum

It's fairly natural to expect that you could use one piece of XML data in multiple places in an InDesign layout—but that's not at all the way that InDesign works. Once you've imported XML, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the elements in the Structure view and their expression in the layout. If you want an element to appear multiple times, you've got to duplicate the element for each appearance on a document page. (Obviously, you can get around this in some cases by placing the XML element on a master page.)

—Olav Martin Kvern and David Blatner, Real World Adobe InDesign CS4

As the quote above states (and this is still true for InDesign versions up to CS5), the expectation is that you import one XML file to fill one content area (text flow) in your InDesign document. This is contradictory to the spirit of XML, which is all about reuse of content in multiple documents and in multiple ways. For example, you might want a standard warning or copyright or other block of content to appear in many places in a single document of a set of documents collected as a book. However, from the Structure pane, you cannot drag the same piece of structure into multiple locations in an InDesign document. If you drag an element into the layout a second time, InDesign will remove it from its first location in the layout.

Bad Characters

Note regarding CS2 only: InDesign CS2 XML export controls are more limited than those in ...