Dallas InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

February 13, 2007

On February 13, the Dallas chapter of the InDesign User Group had a strong start at its first meeting of 2007.

Our host was, once again, the Southwest Pilot’s Association, and instrumental in keeping me in line were Liz Parks & Jana Nix. We had another good show of attendance, with new faces.

Our presenter for the evening was Darrel Eppler with SIL International. It was a great step for the Dallas chapter, as Darrel was our first IDUG member who volunteered to share his expertise and experiences with InDesign. His presentation demonstrated how a company (or individual) can push the limits of InDesign, and the steps SIL International took to extend its functionality. Specifically, Darrel discussed the challenges his company faced in creating an automated workflow for creating books translated to lesser-known languages. The system was described as follows:

“Publishing Assistant” is an interface between the (plain) text files, which are created in—or imported into—a special text editor for Scripture, called “Paratext;” and InDesign, which produces the formatted pages for the print publication. Publishing Assistant actually consists of two parts:

Publishing Assistant (a bunch of Python scripts with a user interface also written in Python), which creates Adobe Tagged Text files that combine the text in the Paratext files with the formatting specs entered by the user via the Publishing Assistant user interface
InDesign Controller (a bunch of VBA scripts with a user interface written in Visual Basic), which runs InDesign to create the document, flow in the text, format the pages, handle footnotes, page headers, illustrations, etc.

Thus, the system is composed of four programs:

Paratext
Publishing Assistant
InDesign Controller
InDesign

The choice to build a publishing system around InDesign stemmed from the fact that it (1) is Unicode-based and (2) allows third-party developers to add functionality. The resulting system enables SIL International to produce formatted pages of Unicode-encoded text in a few minutes, instead of the many hours it would take if operating InDesign manually.

The most compelling part of Darrel’s presentation was not the unique use of InDesign, but learning the process flow of SIL International. The company not only translates into text obscure languages, but creates written alphabets from languages that have none.

During the meeting, Darrel passed around the first publication produced with the Publishing Assistant system. It was a Bible written in the Izere language of Nigeria, West Africa.

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