Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Online sidecar.xml generator

When creating tablet apps with the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, using a sidecar.xml file is an efficient way to enter article metadata such as title, description and author. As an added bonus, it also makes it easy to order/reorder articles within a Folio.

However, creating this sidecar file is left to the user, either typing it in the proper xml format by hand, or entering the data into a spreadsheet and then tagging and exporting the spreadsheet to xml as I've been doing.

Now there's a much simpler way. Johannes Henseler has created the online sidecar.xml generator. This useful site lets you enter information for each article, and then export that as a valid sidecar.xml file. The information you enter can be saved, so you can return to the site later to change the information and generate a new sidecar file. Sweet!

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