Single Source Publishing and InDesign are Incongruous — Here’s Why Hederis Now Exports IDML

“Single source publishing” means, at its simplest, creating all of your output formats from the same text source file (here are a couple of additional resources to help get you up to speed if you want to learn more). It is often presented as an alternative–and improvement–to the InDesign-centric publishing workflow, and the promises are indeed attractive: publish more books, publish books faster, spend the same or less money. The Hederis app was created as an approachable single-source solution for folks who don’t have the time or resources to develop a single-source toolchain themselves, or who want to avoid the roadblocks of traditional single-source workflows (like being forced to give up control over design, and creating a more difficult production process, both of which are solved by Hederis).

In the typical InDesign workflow, the content exists in some sort of text file first, then gets imported into InDesign where a variety of edits happen (including text edits). At this point, that original text file is no longer up-to-date, because the text in the InDesign file has been changed and it is now out of sync with the original. This means that if you ever need to revisit that text file (for example, if you’re preparing a new edition, or releasing a trade paperback with a revised design), you’ll first need to extract the edits you made to the InDesign file and apply them to the new text file before you can begin. Depending on the publisher’s workflow, it could take a week or more to get to the start line for the new edition, meaning you’re beginning your project with a delay.

Here are a couple of slides from a past presentation about single-source workflows. This slide shows the very simplified traditional publishing workflow, where content flows into InDesign, and when the print layout is done, the content is exported to EPUB, with edits happening in each format throughout the process.

This second slide hammers home the point that the original source content file becomes out of date in the traditional workflow, where edits are happening directly to the InDesign file.

Just to emphasize the contrast: in a single-source workflow you would instead only make edits to your primary text file, and then re-generate your export formats as needed. In this workflow, because the page layout is not happening in InDesign but rather as a series of instructions that get applied when the PDF is generated, your page layout instructions are preserved along with the text itself, so that you’ll get the same page layout every time. (This is how Hederis works.)

This slide gives an overview of the single-source workflow, where edits only happen to the source text file, and then all export formats are re-generated as needed.

If you follow Hederis on Twitter or LinkedIn, you may have seen that we just released a new feature allowing you to export your content to InDesign (specifically, InDesign’s IDML file format). But given the paragraphs above, you may be thinking, “isn’t that exactly what Hederis was created to circumvent? Isn’t InDesign incongruous with a single-source workflow?” And the answer is: yes.

We added InDesign as an export option so that folks can use it as a transfer format. A “transfer format” is a file that can be shared with other people. A common use case is foreign rights: many book publishers will only publish a particular book in their home country, and then will sell the publishing rights for other countries to other publishers. And while we would love to see these foreign publishers jump into Hederis and put together their editions right there, we’re not in the business of walled gardens and forcing people to work in only one way (even if we think it’s the best way ;) ). We added the InDesign export because that’s what a lot of people are used to using as a transfer format, and we want to give our users as many options as possible and make sure we aren’t making anyone’s job more difficult.

There are certainly other use cases for the InDesign export — for example, for people who are using Hederis as a CMS for more complex layouts, and have clear breakpoints between their writing and layout processes. And there’s also more experiments we’re doing with the InDesign export, though we’ll keep that a secret for now.

I should note that it is still an experimental feature. InDesign stores design instructions rather differently than Hederis (which uses CSS as our design format), so it’s probable that you’ll notice some differences between what you see in Hederis vs. what you see in InDesign. We made some choices on our end about which design settings are crucial and which aren’t, but please let us know what else you’d like to see in the InDesign export. You can read more about how to use the InDesign export feature here, and as always, happy book-making!