InDesign

InDesign is used by le-tex primarily for medical and legal books and journals, as well as other projects with special design requirements. The staff of the InDesign department are trained in typography to a high standard.

Systematic use of paragraph and character styles, object styles, and scripts – as well as the implementation of typographic regulations – also allows a high level of automation. This is necessary to ensure high throughput and exportability to XML.

At le-tex, tables of contents and indexes are dynamically generated from the typesetting data as a matter of course.

XML can be designated as both an input and an output format in InDesign typesetting. We are very familiar with the precise limitations and pitfalls of typesetting from XML. This means we are able to synthesize InDesign files in IDML format completely from XML, if script processing of the XML is likely to be too laborious. This is regularly the case when a large index needs to be processed.

In numerous projects, we have also provided our customers with solutions to other limitations of InDesign, such as the standard restriction to one index or problems with round-tripping.

Our pioneering approach includes incorporating into the production process features from the latest InDesign versions, such as headings spanning multiple columns in InDesign CS5, particularly for typesetting from XML.

In the field of e-book conversion, we are specialists in the processing of InDesign data (we also process Quark data with the help of the Q2ID plug-ins from Markzware). Particularly in cases where a single layout exists for multiple similar titles and these titles have features such as footnotes, marginalia, tables etc., it is worthwhile to write a conversion program in XSLT 2.0 instead of laboriously converting PDFs.