README

Bit&Black IDML-JSON Converter

Convert Adobe InDesign Markup Language Files (IDML) into JSON and JSON into IDML.

Motivation

Using this converter allows a simple handling of IDML files in PHP.

Extracting information is easy, because you only need to navigate through an array, that holds the whole content of an IDML file.
Manipulating information is easy, because you can change all values by your needs. This allows handling of placeholders, that have been added in Adobe InDesign.

Please note that the IDML-JSON Converter doesn't interpret the values inside an IDML. That means that you, for example, need to calculate positions of elements by your own.

Example

If you want to have a quick look at how the JSON looks like, navigate to the example folder and take the output.json file.

Installation

This library is written in PHP and made for the use with Composer. Be sure to have both of them installed on your system.

Add the library then to your project by running $ composer require bitandblack/idml-json-converter.

Usage

From command line

This library comes with two commands that allow the conversion of IDML into JSON and JSON into IDML via CLI.

The CLI is located under bin/idml-json-converter or, if you installed the library as Composer dependency, under vendor/bin/idml-json-converter.

Use the command

idml:convert:json to convert an IDML file into JSON.
json:convert:idml to convert a JSON file into IDML.

Add option -h to get more information about the usage of a command.

Custom

Instead of using the CLI, it is also possible to converts the contents manually.

Converting an IDML file

Use the IDML class and initialize it with the path to an IDML. Calling the getContent() method will return its content as an array.

<?php

use BitAndBlack\IdmlJsonConverter\File\IDML;

$idml = new IDML('/path/to/file.idml');
$idmlContent = $idml->getContent();

The array contains the name of each file and its content then. For example:

[
    'mimetype' => 'application/vnd.adobe.indesign-idml-package',
    'designmap.xml' => [
        '@name' => 'Document',
        '@attributes' => [
            'DOMVersion' => 18.0,
            'Self' => 'd',
            'StoryList' => [
                0 => 'ufa',
                1 => 'u126',
                2 => 'u97',
            ],
            'Name' => 'file.indd',
[...]

You can use the getJSON() method to return the content converted into a JSON string.

Converting JSON content

Use the JSON class and initialize it with an array of your content. The array needs to have the same structure a shown above. Calling the getIDML() method will return its content as an string, that can be saved as IDML file (for example by using file_put_contents()).

<?php

use BitAndBlack\IdmlJsonConverter\File\JSON;

$content = [
    'mimetype' => 'application/vnd.adobe.indesign-idml-package',
    'designmap.xml' => [
        '@name' => 'Document',
        '@attributes' => [
            'DOMVersion' => 18.0,
            'Self' => 'd',
            'StoryList' => [
                0 => 'ufa',
                1 => 'u126',
                2 => 'u97',
            ],
            'Name' => 'file.indd',
    [...]
];

$json = new JSON($content);
$idmlContent = $json->getIDML();

file_put_contents(
    '/path/to/file.idml',
    $idmlContent
);

Other Tools

Bit&Black offers some more tools to handle IDML files:

The IDML-Creator library that allows creating IDML content natively in PHP in an object-oriented way. (A demo is available here.)
The IDML-Writer library that can write IDML content into a valid IDML file.
The IDML-Validator library that allows validating IDML files against the official schema from Adobe.

Feel free to visit www.idml.dev for more information!

Help

If you have any questions feel free to contact us under hello@bitandblack.com.

Further information about Bit&Black can be found under www.bitandblack.com.

bitandblack / idml-json-converter

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