Well well.. I’ve been out of touch with the InDesign stuff I was really getting in to last year. Other projects, as well as the restructure and fallout from that. I did however pick things up a little just recently, and finished making a first draft front end to display the Study Guides from InDesign.
As you may/may not know, part of our InDesign process with the study guides allows us to export XML from the Table Of Contents (TOC). This is a great spot to get some really usable data about the document, for instance, how many chapters and what are the chapter titles!
After creating the PDFs, and exporting the XML from the TOC, we simply dump it all on a web server. I made a nice little PHP page that takes requests and displays an interface for students to download those PDFs – the PHP reads the requested course’s XML file, creates the list with the chapter titles and so on.
Why’d I bother doing this? A couple of reasons really… Well okay a few:
- Its fun.
- It saves academics time by setting up a page for them where students can download the chapterised PDFs for their Study Guide.
- It also saves the academic the time of splitting their whole document PDFs up in to chapter PDFs, because we do it.
It works well for us really, I mean, all we do is export the goods and throw it on a server, it couldn’t be more simple. The outcome is really quite nice. Next challenge will be how to integrate this more with the new LMS, Moodle.
This is the end result, the web front end for the InDesign XML & PDFs
In terms of the web front end, it was quite easy with PHP to read the XML. I didn’t need to do anything fancy at all, I suppose it is pretty simple XML. In fact, I used the simpleXML php module.
By parsing in the courseID as a variable in the URL, the page loads the requested XML file
//capture courseID from URL $courseID=$_GET["courseID"]; //load the xml that contains the info on the documents $pathExt = ".xml"; $docInfoPath = $courseID . "/eStudyGuide/" . $courseID . $pathExt; $docInfoXML = simplexml_load_file($docInfoPath); $docTitles = array();
Then looping through to display the docs was easy as this!
$i = 1;
foreach ($docInfoXML->TOClev1 as $docTitles) {
if (strlen($docTitles)!=3) {
echo "<li>
<a href='" . $courseID . "/eStudyGuide/" . $courseID . "_" . $i . ".pdf'>" . str_replace(' ', ": pg", $docTitles) . "</a></li>";
$i++;
};
};
