Success and Conclusion

Finally, finally, I feel like I’m making progress. Go figure, it comes at the end of my project, but I’ll take it where I can get it! After going through several chapters of the Lynda InDesign Dynamic Publishing Workflows tutorial, then looping back to the XML Essentials section on document type definitions (DTDs), I was able to put together an XML file of my own, then create associated DTD and CSS files to help translate it. Because the XML file I composed was simple, building the other two files wasn’t too complicated, once I got the hang of the different expressions for each. I took some screenshots of my accomplishments that will follow shortly, after I give the disclaimer that my web design skills—which are kind of tragic right now—are not indicative of my print design skills. I promise.

Okay, so:

Here’s the XML (with embedded DTD) file I built in oXygen:



And here’s the accompanying CSS file:



Here’s what the XML file looked like in Firefox (beautiful, I know):



In InDesign, I loaded the tags from my XML document, built a simple template with empty text boxes, and tagged each with a different element in the order in which I wanted them to appear. InDesign does some handy color coding so it’s easy to see which box is designated with which tag.



I then made sure to map my tags to some style sheets I’d created, which help determine the appearance of each different element. When I imported the XML document into my InDesign document, it populated each box with the content from my XML file and styled it according to the style sheets I’d mapped. I think I actually squealed when this worked:



After a quick cosmetic cleanup, I managed to have an InDesign document that looked halfway presentable:



Finally, I exported XML from InDesign to see how well it would translate after all these steps. Much to my great pleasure, it reproduced almost exactly as the original XML file had!



By the way, if you can’t read the text, it’s pasted below. I can assure you it’s completely true.

The Cats That Kept Knocking My Stuff Over
Sarah Weathers

November 2010

When the cats are hungry, the cats are likely to do stupid things. Like knock things over.

The cats are scheduled to be fed at 7:00 PM every night. You might think that after nearly two years of this, the cats would learn that begging before 7 is pointless and only gets them temporarily locked out of my bedroom. Yet here we are, and here my frustration lies. It’s not easy keeping cats from doing stupid things, especially when they’re being driven mad by hunger, but I have found a solution. To keep them from jumping from my bed, over my entertainment center (that would be my little TV and PS3 sitting on top of a bookcase propped up against the foot of my bed), and onto my dresser, I have built a wall. The wall consists of two major pieces: an ancient but suitably large Lite-Brite box and a package of unopened string lights that I hope to hang up one day (today is not that day). I hope that this makeshift barrier will keep my hungry cats from knocking more stuff over.

I’ve also included photographic proof, which, incidentally, I tried to work into my XML file but couldn’t work out for the life of me. Baby steps, I guess.



Given that I’ve finally had a breakthrough—as in, I understand what’s going on and can make it work for my own custom content—I think I’ll end my project here. As I’ve indicated in past posts, I plan on continuing to learn about XML, even if I don’t blog about it along the way.

Best of luck to everyone in pursuing your own XML projects!

A Better-Tailored Resource

I thought I had some great news about the exercise files for the InDesign tutorial being compatible with CS4, but it turns out that my computer only thought they were CS4 files, and so I’m unable to make any use of them. I can use the other files that come with it, though, like XML, CSS, and DTD files.

I’m finding it funny that every time I step back and try a new resource, the content is dumbed down just a little more, like each one is more for us “regular people” than the previous. To be honest, I think that’s great. I like it when the narrator reassures me that we’re on the same page as far as goals are concerned (don’t go too crazy with the code, save time in production). The pattern I’ve experienced, as you can probably tell from my previous posts, is that I’ll think a tutorial is really working for me until all of a sudden it feels like relevance has gone out the window. That may very well happen with this one, too; who knows? But it does feel a little more comfortable playing in the familiar territory of InDesign.

I’ve just completed the introductory section, as well as the section called Creating XML, and I am happy to report that I’m finally understanding how I could take data and produce XML files based off of them without hand coding the entire thing. The narrator showed that Office, at least on Windows, can be a powerful tool for taking data (which we often use Office to store and manipulate) and converting it to XML. He also covered Dreamweaver, as well as the category of dedicated XML editors. His suggested editor is oXygen, largely because it’s cross-platform. He encourages that anyone who’s serious about working with XML have a dedicated editor because they have more features and, often, more checks on your work. You could write an entire XML file on something like Notepad or Text Edit and have it be completely invalid because of a small typo or other coding mistake; an editor like oXygen would know to recognize and inform you of errors like that, however, so that you can make the change immediately. I’ve downloaded a free trial of oXygen and have been happy with it so far, more so than I was with BBEdit. I think I’ll stick with this for this tutorial.

The Real World and How It Lost Me

As confident as I felt about starting the XML Essentials tutorial, I was even more encouraged watching the introductory video for the tutorial called Real-World XML. The narrator is the same, but it’s 3 years in the future (2009). The difference in video and slide quality is not only noticeable, but welcome.

On a side note, I am slightly disappointed by the fact that the narrator’s resume includes helping to develop one of my least favorite pieces of software, QuarkXPress, but I will forgive him for the time being and move on to the learning.

The narrator often points out that watching the XML Essentials tutorial first is the way to go, so I may switch back to it if he comes to a topic that I didn’t cover previously. After going through the first 3 chapters, I was still hanging in. The first was an introduction and XML review, which is always helpful, since I can’t seem to have this information reiterated enough. The second was all about sitemaps and sitemapindexes, which are used to help search engines crawl sites (but not, as was heavily emphasized, to affect search engine optimization [SEO]), while the third was all about RSS and Atom.

I am a huge fan of using RSS on the consumer side. I rely on selected feeds and my current reader, Google Reader, to bring me news and entertainment throughout the day. Ask anyone who knows me, and they’ll attest that I love to spread the gospel of using RSS to keep up with everything. However, I’ve never understood the mechanics behind it, so this part of the tutorial was of particular interest to me. The exercise of building a feed—both in RSS and in Atom—felt more like something I might have a chance of doing in the future, certainly more so than the building of the e-business card ever did. One thing that left me curious, though, was how one would maintain a hand-built RSS (or Atom) feed. Obviously, there are mechanisms out there that automate these things, but the narrator didn’t even touch that. Again, there seems to be that missing link to reality, though it’s definitely less of a gap in this tutorial than in the one I was watching before.

Unfortunately, things went quickly downhill after that. I don’t know what happened, but I walked away from the tutorials for less than a day after learning about RSS and Atom, and the next videos (on XML in browsers) sounded like gibberish to me. I hope that it was based in something covered in the Essentials course that I hadn’t watched yet, because otherwise, they just made it very, very easy to get lost. After skimming the remainder of the chapters for this tutorial, I think it’s wise for me to move on (again) for the time being and try a different angle.

I didn’t expect to become an XML master by the end of this project, but I hadn’t realized that learning about it would be so nonlinear. There are just so many offshoots and possibilities that it’s almost (probably) impossible to find a tailored resource that would cover the aspects that are relevant to me, taking complex print articles to the web and beyond. I really would like to continue to learn about XML and all of its related tangential topics, but for the sake of time, I think I’ll turn to some of the InDesign resources, such as the book I mentioned in my Resource Roundup post. Lynda also has an InDesign-XML tutorial, but sadly it’s built for CS5, so I won’t be able to use the InDesign exercise files on my home or work computers (I certainly can in the GW lab, though!).

Now is probably also a good time to update on the progress in the real world at my office. We’re picking up steam as we head into the end of the year, as is always the pattern. I’ve just begun laying out articles, which is enough of a challenge in itself, trying to determine and set up the most logical automation processes to both be thorough and efficient. I’m grateful to have enough past experience in InDesign that this isn’t a painful task, but it certainly is time-consuming and demanding of my full attention (something that is less than convenient, given how many different things I do for my job). As I’ve worked on this project throughout the semester, I’ve kept my boss updated on what I’ve learned and what my feelings are about how we should proceed. If we were to insert XML into our print production workflow, InDesign would probably be the way to go, given that I’m in control of it, and it won’t disrupt the editor’s routine. However, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that just getting acclimated to laying out the material is going to be enough of a handful on its own. Therefore, I think we’ll be seeking out a vendor to convert our content from PDFs, at least to get things off the ground. Per the meeting we had with our web developer, we’ll aim to have HTML full text available on our site by around the middle of 2011, so we need to start researching potential vendors as soon as possible. Just one more task to add to our long list, but it’s becoming more and more of a necessity as customer expectations are raised.

Though I will be ending my official semester-constrained blog soon, I am interested enough in the topic to keep learning. I’ll give some of these InDesign-specific resources a try before I close things out and summarize my experience.

Hitting the Wall

I’ve now made it through about 1 hour and 45 minutes of the XML Essential Training on Lynda.com. The narrator has been using Visual Studio Express for all his examples, but since it’s not available for Mac, I’ve been using BBEdit instead. It has fewer features (the BB does stand for BareBones, after all), but at least gives me the basic functionality I need to work with the exercise files and create new ones of my own.

So far, I’ve been able to follow along and even create my own simple XML and CSS documents, which has been encouraging. However, I’m now approaching what are called data islands and finding that this may be where the tutorial veers off from what is useful for me. This is for a couple of reasons:

First, the tutorial was released in mid-2006, so I’ve been expecting that at least some of the information presented will be out of date. Four years later, enough of the basics are still intact that I can follow the instruction and have my examples work in present-day browsers (I’m running Firefox 3.6.12 both at home and at work). When the tutorial pointed out that, as of the release date, data islands only worked in Internet Explorer, I was curious to find whether that’s progressed in the past 4 years. The results I’ve gotten have been confusing at best, unfortunately. The use of data islands doesn’t seem to be very widespread, so it’s hard to tell if it’s relevant to XML practices today, much less to my own applications.

Second, the tutorial is, as expected, headed down a path where the minute details of coding are explained with no real-world applications to ground them. Based off of the examples the narrator has used, I can create two mock business cards or two tables in a browser, complete with hideous Web 1.0 formatting. But it makes me wonder, how in the world could that be useful for taking substantial real life information and translating it? I’m finding it difficult to make the connection between having large amounts of uncoded data and getting all of that data formatted in a useful, efficient way. As a disclaimer, I don’t want to demean the tutorials; I think they’re great if they’re relevant to what someone needs to know (perhaps as more of a professional programmer than a casual learner like me).

Given that I don’t have a ton of free time to spend watching these tutorials, I think I may pause on this one and try out the Real-World XML tutorial for a bit. I may need to hop back over for essential training on some of the things I haven’t hit yet (DTDs, for example), but I think this might be the best approach for the purposes of absorbing as much applicable information as possible before the end of the semester.

Essentials (and Beyond!) with Lynda

The first couple of videos of the Lynda.com tutorial have been very straightforward, presenting basic information about XML. Once the narrator began talking about XML Related Technologies, though, my eyes started to glaze over. He described the following: XPath, XSLT, XQuery, XPointer, and XLink, all of which he said he would elaborate on later. I’m hoping that it will all become clearer, rather than complicating things in a way that isn’t necessary for my purposes.

He also did an overview of tools that can be used to work with XML, starting with the very simplified Notepad and going up to Adobe Dreamweaver and Altova XMLSpy. Additionally, he showed a free tool from Microsoft called Visual Studio Express. It’s still not clear which tools they use for this course, and what format the exercise files are, so I will wait until they make that more clear to choose which tool I’ll use. I need to take into consideration the fact that I’m working on both Mac and Windows platforms at home and work, respectively, which would rule out Visual Studio Express (at least at home, where I’m watching most of the tutorial videos). He suggested a free program for Mac called BBEdit, and depending on how the tutorials go, that may be what I use most of the time. I also have access to Dreamweaver at home, so that is another possibility, but given that I'm not familiar with it, I'll need to make sure the learning curve isn't too steep.

To comment generally on the experience with Lynda so far, it’s been very enjoyable. The videos are clear and easy to follow, and the narrator does a great job of explaining things just enough to keep up, but not too deeply that you get bored or lost. They’re conveniently split into shorter times, too, so it’s easy to sit down, watch a video or two, and then break to look something up. It’s much less daunting, looking at a run time of a couple minutes as opposed to an hour, even knowing in the back of my head that these tutorials run in full for multiple hours. I’m happy that I gave it a try, and I hope that beyond this project, I’ll be able to use it as a resource for school, work, and even fun!

Beginning XML Essential Training

So far, my self-directed research on XML and where I can take it has been both confusing and overwhelming. As I mentioned in my previous post, not being in the target audience for many of these resources leaves me behind, both in my lack of prior knowledge and my slightly out-of-the-ordinary goal. I feel like I’m pretty clear on the basic definition of XML, and I don’t feel the need to oversaturate myself with the technical details of the language, but I haven’t felt like I’ve made enough of a connection to determine the steps I need to take to get from Point A (where I am now) to Point B (beautiful, functional XML).

After considering my options and weighing the recommendations of friends of mine, I decided to take the plunge and get a month-long Lynda.com subscription (with exercise files) to accelerate my learning. Lynda has a vast library of topics that range from broad to narrow, from blogging to Photoshop, and cover almost anything imaginable. Under the XML category, there are four choices: XML Essential Training, ActionScript 3.0: Working with XML, Real-World XML, and InDesign CS5: Dynamic Publishing Workflows in XML. To start, I’ve selected XML Essential Training, which is an introductory level course that runs for 5 hours and 48 minutes. I’ve enjoyed the narrated video format, and I’m anxious to continue watching. Once I get further into the course, I should have a better idea of whether it’s applicable to what I’m doing, but it seems very promising!