Posted by stdbrouw@groups... on October 7, 2008 at 11:02am
I promised I'd share some of my web-to-print and indesign-related modules by september a while ago. By now we're october so I thought I'd elaborate a bit on what exactly I'm trying to accomplish and why you might care :-)
- Chimp: a layout tool in InDesign that allows for semi-automatic page layouts. Chimp has little to do with Drupal per se, but it has a lot to do with making print media more accessible for low-budget organisations and newsrooms. The beta we're running locally has cut about a third off our layout time, and we're aiming at chopping a full half of our time spent layouting. It's different from PrintCasting in that it's intended for small newsrooms (locals, student newspapers, ...) that have a layout-staff and want to be more productive, rather than providing a fully-automatic solution for people who can't afford designers. It's different from other automatic layout systems (like DTI PageMagic, the ISI docuboxx, ...) in that it'll be free rather than unaffordable for us mere mortals.
- The InDesign Integration Kit provides an interface for Chimp: a way to enter the layout parameters Chimp needs and a way to automatically export XML files of your articles and images that InDesign/Chimp can use. It also provides some InDesign scripts that can communicate layout previews and information about overset text to Drupal, thereby providing some two-way interaction between Drupal and InD.
Here's a (rather amateuristic) video that explains the basics (< 5 min; 60mb): http://www.schamper.ugent.be/iik-preview/chimp.mov
It'll probably be a few months before I can open this stuff up for testing and opensourcing, because I want it to be really solid before I release anything into the wild. Any thoughts, questions or ideas are welcome though.
Comments
Very promising
It looks very promising... Thanks for sharing
Yes... I agree! It DOES look promising!
I'm keeping my eye on this one:) Thank you.
Chimp? where is it?
Hi,
I'd love to take a look at Chimp. Is there a Link to a you can give us?
next week
There are some bugs left I'd like to squash before I release a beta version of Chimp - should be done by wednesday next week (we need the new version by that time for internal use) so check back around that time. By itself, though, you won't have much use for it, except to test its capabilities on dummy xml.
Chimp Release
Hello,
We are a newspaper group that is currently doing our layouts in Adobe InDesign I was wondering if you have the chimp beta version available yet? We are very much interested in testing it out with our Drupal development.
Thanks,
Joe Barron
Joe Barron
Joe Barron
Joe Barron
Joe Barron
some delay
It still needs a few days worth of work. I've been busy working on other parts of the integration so I haven't had the time to squash a few remaining bugs in Chimp. Do note, though, as I've said before, that Chimp (the layout automatisation) is independent of the InDesign Integration Kit (the interface for and integration with Chimp from Drupal) and without that kit, you really won't be able to test out how it works together with Drupal anyway. The IIK will be released somewhere in december most likely. Also note that I'm doing this in my spare time, so if you really like the approach, the project could definitely use some sponsoring or somebody who wants to help with development.
exciting.
This is really exciting. The work you're doing would have a huge influence on a couple of publications I'm working on. How are things going as of now? I'm working on moving a student newspaper over to having its first full news website, and something like this would have an awesome effect on our workflow. Let me know if there's any need for helping to look for bugs, or anything else.
Progress
Looks like days turned into weeks into months... I hope you're still making progress?
Update
See this update http://groups.drupal.org/node/20700