Use textsoap to format pdf for indesign code#

I think, what it actually comes down to, is what the designer is most comfortable with, from a technical sense. My team and I go around in circles about this. I’m interested in hearing what the “best” work flow is for designing and coding a web site. I’m curious to hear about other designers and web developers on this subject. Unfortunately the Photoshop file winds up being extensively edited on each revision of the design. In fact, when I receive an InDesign or Illustrator file, I wind up building a layered Photoshop file from it. I have found properly layered Photoshop files to be the easiest and most accurate medium for converting a design into a web site. The ease (and accuracy) of building web pages from Illustrator seems to depend upon how the Illustrator file was created. My experience with Illustrator files is mixed, and in some cases Illustrator files are just difficult as InDesign files to work with.

InDesign files are often no layered, which requires tedious work to produce things like background images and button effects. CMYK or spot colors are used, making for imprecise conversion to the RGB color space required for the web.

InDesign is vector-based, and tends to produce elements (such as lines, boxes, etc.) that do not align to pixel boundaries.

Use textsoap to format pdf for indesign code#

I code websites professionally, and am familiar with the CS4 suite (Photoshop, InDesign, etc.) I usually work with designers who submit InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop files which I convert to HTML and CSS.ĭesigns built with InDesign are, as Jerome pointed out, quite difficult to build a website from. If you’re also doing the web development then you’re either a masochist or you’re going to use some horrific built-in ‘Convert to XHTML’ doodad, in which case there’s no hope for you :) So, if you don’t want the person who’s going to be responsible for converting your mockup into an actual website to curse your name, don’t use InDesign. I can understand how people who have started off as print designers might think it’s a good idea to re-use their InDesign skills for the web but, apart from anything else, it gives you too much scope to do things that just don’t make sense on the web. You want to be able to happily load the mockup into Photoshop or Fireworks to do the slicing and be guaranteed that what you see is what was intended, with nice layers for rollovers etc. Nice scalable resolution indifferent vectors are not helpful. When you’re converting a design into a website you want fixed, absolute, pixel accuracy. There’s some cross-over but websites are fundamentally different to printed copy. Annotations can either be handled in Acrobat, using comments, or can be handled in InDesign. If then, as a designer, you don’t actually hand-code the database-driven websites yourself (or even if you don’t build static sites yourself), it is very easy to annotate a PDF document for your web developer, giving specific measurements or directions to aid in the production process.

Of course, you can always use Kuler to produce your RGB colour palette and then import it into InDesign. InDesign’s colour palette can be switched to RGB and there is even a swatch book for web safe colours. Its image control saves time by eliminating the need to crop or resize images for mock-ups. Yet InDesign still has its benefits when used to layout small websites. And like CSS, when the client reviews the visuals and, for example, decides that she wants the primary navigation to a slightly larger and for the font to be red - click, click, type, type, type and whammo! Visuals updated. By using the character styles in InDesign, it’s possible to set up styles that are easily transferable to CSS during the production stages. I have found this particularly helpful when designing large, database-driven websites. Through InDesign, I can create layout concepts which can then be exported as a PDF to share with clients. InDesign offers effective design control (in an Illustrator-sense) to make it a nifty tool for laying out visuals to show clients. No, not to create the actual layout in a Dreamweaver or in a hand-coding sense, but as a tool for sharing design concepts and creative ideas with clients. In recent months, I have started using Adobe InDesign to create page layouts for websites.