Exporting plain HTML from Indesign CS3... The hard way?

I don't know why Adobe's workflow starts and stops at the print designer - InCopy should provide a good base for other media. Instead, Adobe provides all the tools for print publishing, but exporting formatted text to plain and simple HTML is nearly impossible with such ancient and important tags such as bold/italic.

I'm using a combination of Indesign, Incopy, TextEdit and TextWrangler(+BBEdit) to get a usable HTML base for an online paper.

First I make sure I grab all my text from the paper layout and place it into a simple, single indd file.
After saving, I open it with InCopy and use it's "Export as RTF" feature.
Then I open up the saved RTF file with TextEditor and "Save As" an HTML document.
It looks pretty good at this point, but I do a little clean up on my system with a little script (removed redundant bold tags and strips the top out -stuff like that).

Once in either TextWrangler or BBEdit, I do a few more cleanups. One, specifically is BBEdit's Tools->Utilities->Translate tool which does an HTML Entity cleanup of French chars.

I'm currently working on a less program dependent method, or something with better automation. I'll post my findings once I do.

Strange that I have to go through so much trouble to export plain HTML. Perhaps there should be a better way, Adobe.

Labels: adobe, cs3, export, HTML, indesign

Wing suit + insanity = this.

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