DPS tip: auto-populate article info from InDesign metadata

Here's a neat workflow trick. In some workflows, designers create the InDesign files for each section of an Adobe Digital Publishing Suite app, but someone else in the workflow creates the articles. This means that the designer creating the InDesign file can't enter the title, byline, or description of the article, since this is added in the Folio Builder panel when the article is created later.

But, as it turns out, three of the metadata fields from InDesign map to DPS article fields. In other words, if you open an InDesign file and choose File > File Info, you can enter information in this dialog box that will be extracted by Folio Builder when an article is created from the InDesign file.

Specifically, these three fields are transferred:

• Document Title transfers to Title
• Author transfers to Byline
• Description transfers to Description

 

After you create an article from the InDesign file, choose Article Properties from the Folio Builder panel menu, and you will see that the appropriate fields have been populated from the InDesign file information.

This workflow is also useful because if you need to rebuild your Folio and recreate your articles, the article titles, bylines, and descriptions won't be lost.

Another way to do this is to use the very useful sidecar.xml generator.