I prefer to spend as little time in InDesign as possible. My preferred typsetting tools are markdown and Pandoc. This is a description of how I use Pandoc’s markdown syntax to generate pre-styled manuscripts that cleanly import into InDesign.
Pandoc is just a great tool. It can do almost anything with text-based files. For this workflow, we only need to learn a couple of its perks.
Pandoc supports fenced divs with the following syntax.1
``` {some attributes}
I am inside a div.
```Similarly, spans are supported like this:
[I am a span.]{some attributes}Custom styles can be set as attributes for fenced divs and spans.2
``` {custom-style="myParagraphStyle"}
I am a paragraph. I have a special [character style.]{custom-style="myCharacterStyle"}
```Conveniently, Pandoc supports conversion to ICML (InCopy’s native file type).3 Custom styles set using the above method are converted directly to paragraph and character styles. The best part is that the styles are automatically created to reflect the semantic hierarchy of the Manuscript. If you are familiar with HTML, you will notice they resemble well-organized CSS selectors.
pandoc manuscript.md --standalone --output=manuscript.icmlNote: The --standalone flag is required for correct
output.
At this point, you can import the ICML directly into an InDesign story with the place command. In theory, you could make changes solely in the markdown, rebuild the ICML, and never touch your content in InDesign.