Adobe InDesign's user documentation provides some examples of importing and formatting XML. But if you need to wrangle XML that comes from a database or website and make it look good inside an InDesign document, you'll want to dive deeper. (Note: while Adobe made significant changes to the underlying format of InDesign in CS4, the processes for consuming XML content remain similar to CS3.)

Some of the useful applications are importing database content into InDesign to create catalog pages, exporting XML that will be useful for subsequent publishing processes, and building chunks of content that can be reused in multiple publications.

In this Short Cut, we'll play with the contents of a college course catalog and see how we can use XML for course descriptions, tables, and other content. Underlying principles of XML structure, DTDs, and the InDesign namespace will help you develop your own XML processes. The Advanced Topics section gives tips on using XSLT to manipulate XML in InDesign.

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