Neither QuarkXPress 8 nor InDesign CS5 is a fully-featured web editor or IDE, nor are they fully-featured Flash authoring applications. The result is that neither program will be able to deliver a dynamic, database driven web site. However, QuarkXPress has some limited capabilities to refer dynamically to objects such as video clips and images, and can also load text from a data source to display variable data or calculate URLs to automatically display images. These are some of the limitations of InDesign CS5.
When a user exports to SWF or FLA, InDesign spreads become separate clips in a timeline, like slides in a slideshow. Each spread is mapped to a new keyframe. In Flash Player, end users advance through the spreads of the exported document by pressing arrow keys or clicking interactive buttons.
This behaviour comes close to what end users are used to when they leaf through a “digital magazine”. Adobe seems to have developed InDesign’s Flash capabilities to cater for this kind of output only, as evidenced by the limitations of InDesign’s Flash capabilities as a whole.
Consider for example buttons, page transitions, hyperlinks, animation, and media files. They can all be included in exported SWF and FLA files. For buttons in an exported SWF or FLA file, some actions that will work in interactive PDF files have no effect in Flash Player.
Navigation buttons can be pre-formatted with Go To Next Page and Go To Previous Page actions, making conversion to digital magazines much faster.
Page Transitions appear when a reader turns the page, including the obligatory interactive page curl that lets users drag corners of pages to turn them.
Even with the rather obvious limitations that suggest a system targeted at digital magazine publishers, InDesign CS5 has some serious shortcomings. For example, hyperlinks are broken in FLA files.
Movies and sound clips are included in an exported SWF file if they’re in a supported format, such as SWF, FLV, F4V, and MP4 for movies and MP3 for sound clips, but when exported to FLA, only the poster image is included in the FLA file. The supported media files will only appear in a resources folder saved in the same location as the exported FLA file.
InDesign CS5 also has limitations with regards to colour, mainly because the way interactive web content has been implemented reflects a concept that seems to think of it as a secondary choice to printed output.
SWF and FLA files use RGB colour. When a document is exported to SWF or FLA, InDesign converts all colour spaces (such as CMYK and LAB) to sRGB, and spot colours to equivalent RGB process colours. It lacks an option to set a colour space specifically for Flash output.
Consequently, if a user is to avoid unwanted colour changes in artwork with transparent text they will have to remember to convert the transparency blend space into document RGB. To avoid unwanted colour changes in images with transparency, users should also avoid using lossy compression during export.
InDesign users have a lot of things to try and remember in order to succeed at creating a Flash file that is reasonably sized.
When exporting images to FLA, an image placed multiple times in your InDesign document is saved as a single image asset with a shared location, but a largenumber of vector images in the InDesign documents may cause performance problems in the exported file.
In order to reduce file sizes produced by InDesign CS5, users will need to do something which is somewhat counterintuitive. They should place repeating images on master pages, and avoid copying and pasting images altogether. Images that are copied and pasted are treated as separate objects, adding to the file size.
By default, a placed Illustrator file is treated as a single image in the FLA file, whereas an Illustrator file that’s copied and pasted generates many individual objects. If the Illustrator image is placed as a PDF file instead, an accompanying change in the Preferences both in InDesign and Illustrator ensures Illustrator objects are pasted as one object instead of a collection of small vectors. The user does have to remember to set this Preference correctly, but doing so will result in losing transparency support for placed Illustrator files. (In Illustrator File Handling & Clipboard preferences, users should select PDF and deselect AICB.)
In InDesign CS4, users could not let a transparent object overlap an interactive object when exporting to SWF. The penalty for doing so was loss of the interactivity of the element. In InDesign CS5 this bug (?) still exists.
The Palette Syndrome
InDesign users can have up to nine (9) palettes open at any time when creating interactive content. One of these palettes is the Preview palette that can be resized until the content becomes big enough to see the result.
The other palettes an InDesign user will need are Timing for setting timed triggers, Button for setting button behaviour (which cannot be multi-state), Animation for controlling moving objects, Object States for controlling varying states of objects, Media for setting up video and sound, etc.
Web page development
InDesign CS5’s Web page design support is limited as well.
In Adobe’s approach, exporting to XHTML is only a way to extract content out of an InDesign document and hand it over to a web developer who can repurpose it using a web application such as Dreamweaver.
When users export content to XHTML, they should be able to control how text and images are exported. However, InDesign does little more than preserving the names of paragraph, character, object, table, and cell styles applied to the exported contents by marking the XHTML contents with CSS style classes of the same name. None of the design itself is kept intact, e.g. a two column layout is not automatically styled as such in the Web output.
In other words, users are forced to use Dreamweaver or any CSS-capable HTML editor or IDE, which makes it hard to quickly create a web layout that closely resembles the print layout.
InDesign exports all stories, linked and embedded graphics, SWF movie files, footnotes, text variables (as text), bulleted and numbered lists, internal cross-references, and hyperlinks that jump to text or web pages. Tables are also exported, but certain formatting, such as table and cell strokes, is not exported.
InDesign does not export objects drawn in the program (such as rectangles, ovals, and polygons), movie files (except for SWF), hyperlinks (except for links to web pages and links applied to text that jump to text anchors in the same document), pasted objects (including pasted Illustrator images), text converted to outlines, XML tags, books, bookmarks, page transitions, index markers, objects on the pasteboard that aren’t selected and don’t touch the page, or master page items (unless they’re overridden or selected before export).
In the XHTML export process, XML tags and generated indexes and tables of contents are also ignored.
Furthermore, users must determine the page order or XML structure of the InDesign document themselves to determine the reading order of page objects. In some cases, especially in complex, multi-column documents, the design elements may not appear in the desired reading order.
Users can however structure the InDesign document with XML and then the XML Structure panel controls the ordering of the exported content and which content gets exported. If the content is already tagged, users can drag the tags in the XML Structure panel to set the XHTML export order.
InDesign CS5 also supports output to EPUB. This is the digital editions export capability of InDesign CS4, which in fact is the same export feature to support the EPUB standard. In tests we performed however, the support for EPUB is weak and often creates more problems than it solves, especially when the document hasn’t been properly structured with XML tags.
Of course this is likely to be an issue in any environment where you are trying to convert unstructured, design first publications into a structured format.
Next part: QuarkXPress 8′s limitations
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