IDML is InDesign Limitless

One new feature of InDesign CS4 is its ability to import/export IDML, InDesign Markup Language. Basically Adobe tells that IDML is INX, just human readable and documented.

Having this allows developers to automate workflows and speed-up production time and thus limiting costs... Imagine, creating InDesign from XML content without going through the limited XML support of the InDesign IDE... you can even make InDesign documents from a web application that sends XML content... RSS feeds perhaps...

More of the features of IDML in this blog entry from Tim Cole of Adobe...

http://blogs.adobe.com/indesignchannel/2008/10/the_most_important_new_feature.html

What I Do?

I generally do XML stuff like DTD/Schema analysis and design and XSLT transformation. I also create workflow that involves XML and InDesign... automation of the layout. Creation of scripts in InDesign the speeds up the layout and composition work.

I'm currently immersing myself in plugin creation for InDesign... again to help automate the layout process.

Tools are essential in the daily activities of my employer as speed and quality is important to our clients.