Exporting a layout from InDesign and importing it in Inception as a Story

Stories that have been created as a layout for use in a print workflow can be turned into an Inception Story by exporting the layout and importing the generated file into Inception.

Figure: Example of an InDesign layout (left) imported as a Story in Inception (right). Imported are the title (A), subtitle (B), author (C) and body text (D). Images are currently added as attachments (E) and can be manually added.

Before you start

Before you start, please familiarize yourself with the following topics.

The concept

This feature is based on an InDesign Article that contains all content that needs to be exported.

Figure: An InDesign Article in the Articles panel, containing all layout items to be exported.

The items of the InDesign Article are subsequently used for creating a file that can be imported into Inception.

The whole process can be broken down into the following steps:

1. Preparing the layout
2. Creating the InDesign Article
3. Exporting the InDesign Article
4. Importing the generated file in Inception as a Story

What is exported and imported?

An export is done based on the items in the InDesign Article. From it, exported are:

• All paragraphs of text that have a paragraph style assigned ¹ that is linked to a an Inception component through the configuration file. Bold and italic text is maintained when this has been configured beforehand.
• All images.

¹ Text can still be exported even when no custom paragraph style has been assigned. For this to work, the default paragraph styles "[No Paragraph Style]" and "[Basic Paragraph]" need to be assigned in the configuration file.

Imported into Inception are:

• All exported paragraphs of text
• All images (made available as attachments)

Limitations

Please be aware of the following limitations of this feature:

• Images are added as attachments to the Story. Import of images and their captions into the Story directly is planned for a future release.
• Captions are imported as separate components and are not associated with an image.

Preparing your environment

This process makes use of InDesign scripts. It is assumed here that these scripts have been installed and configured correctly.

The process

The process of exporting a layout from InDesign and importing it in Inception as a Story consists of the following steps:

1. Preparing the layout
2. Creating the InDesign Article
3. Exporting the InDesign Article
4. Importing the generated file in Inception as a Story

See this process demonstrated in this short video: