XML Publishing with Adobe InDesign

A Brief Note about IDML and ICML

Adobe created new interchange document-description formats for InDesign (IDML) and InCopy (ICML) for version CS4. Both of these formats are written in XML format. So technically, they are XML files. However, just as Microsoft did with Word when creating the .docx file format, Adobe has made the IDML (and ICML) file format a "package" of files in an archive format, which is not intuitive for finding what you want to know about XML content within an InDesign file. One of the best resources to start with is "Adobe InDesign Markup Language (IDML) Cookbook" which tells you which part of the package describes what XML-related features of the InDesign file. For example, in the XML section of the IDML Cookbook, you find:

Adjusting a document's structure

A document's structure is stored in the XML/BackingStory.xml file and within the story XML files that are marked up. The BackingStory contains top-level associations between content and structure. Text that is marked up within a story is in the individual story files. Detailing this relationship is beyond the scope of this document. The Import XML Template sample demonstrates performing the equivalent of an XML import completely outside InDesign."

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Notice that even Adobe thinks that this relationship between XML content and Stories (text flows) is hard to explain and "beyond the scope" of their own cookbook.

Note

An InCopy file is a single file, not a package, saved by default with the .icml extension. ...