Thread

Has anyone ever migrated their EE content to a print medium?

At some point in the near future I’m going to take a stab at importing some EE content via XML into a print document and I’d like to know if others have done it and what the basic approach was: XML schemas, tools, etc.

Here’s where content management jumps to a new level!

I messed around with this a couple of years with Quark. It was set up so that the web output went to a different template, which had all the Xtags for each field. I could save it as plain text and import it into Quark.

This was for a simple listing, only 3 fields. But it worked. XML is probably a much better way to do this now.

I’ve done a couple of neat things with XML tags and EE content variables in past projects, but its always stayed on the web side. I was just working with an API.

I know there are some powerful ‘conversion’ tools out there, I’m just wondering what others have tried, whether it be other XML conversion code, a tool like FrameMaker, or even whether it’s possible with something like Illustrator, which apparently allows you to import variables into Illustrator from an XML file.

At any rate, thanks for the reply.

In answer to my own question, I found a solution to this with Adobe InDesign. I had a need to import content from an EE site into a print document and found a really easy way to do it.

InDesign CS3 has a XML processing engine that allows you to import XML files and style the content based on the XML element tags.

Basically, all I needed to do was write a really simple XML schema, create an XML template in EE, and wrap the tags around the weblog variables that generate the content I wanted to export/import for print. The template behaves in much the same way as EE’s RSS or Atom templates, to give you a hint about how works.

Then, viewing my special EE XML template, and saving the output from my browser to my local drive, I used InDesign’s Import XML function to pull the content in and style it en masse once I had it in InDesign.

It worked well. There were a few little tricks I had to figure out, but now that I know what makes it all work this ad hoc cross-media content management system is going to save me many, many hours.

Where I had a little trouble was getting some of the data into tables, but I’m getting a better handle on the technique all the time.

Drop me a line if you want to know more about my experience with it. I might be able to help you save a lot of time by sharing some of the things I learned in my first crack at this.

I have done a web to print product before that could be applied to EE using PDF and FDFs. Basically I created a PDF form and used a FDF to automatically populate the PDF. An FDF is is just an ASCII based data file. It was crude but effective and cheap.