IDML Resources
I finally posted to the IDML Developers Group that I started on Yahoo. I hope this group takes off as developers begin to use IDML more frequently in InDesign automation.
IDML is wonderful, but it doesn’t on its own do quite everything one has to do to compose and edit dynamic documents. While you can define text and formats in a Story, for example, there is not a pure IDML-based approach to managing in-flow continued headers or copyfitting of text. You can’t use IDML alone to conditionally fill space based on how text flowed: IDML essentially instructs InDesign what to flow into a document, but it is not so different than MIF, XSL-FO, or other document descriptions that often require a two-pass approach to document composition (XSL-FO in some implementations does have extensions that go further than MIF or IDML in this respect): flow the content with IDML then clean things up and reflow based on scripting or plugin-based automation. It would be nice to see the page description itself include such state-based features.
While there are tactics that one can use to include metadata in IDML that round trips with documents, it would also be nice if IDML were more extensible in terms of allowing object-level metadata to persist when the IDML document is round-tripped with InDesign.