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Concepts for the conversion

Owned by Bram Verniest (Unlicensed)
Apr 22, 2020
4 min read

Getting Started

A good starting point might be to take a look at our own InDesign Extension, which converts an Adobe InDesign document to CHILI XML: ?CHILI InDesign Extension. We've also described the general steps performed by our own InDesign Extension to help you get started: ?Steps followed in the InDesign conversion process

Next to that, you'll of course need to familiarize yourself with CHILI's XML format: ?General XML Concepts

Package vs. Live Connection

One of the first decisions you'll need to make is wheter you are going to export directly to a CHILI server, or export a (standalone) CHILI Package. Most of the basic concepts (and most of the XML structure) is the same, but there are some differences when it comes to resources (most importantly assets and fonts) which might have to be synchronized with the CHILI Server.

When connecting to a live CHILI server, you can check whether certain fonts and assets already exists, and not upload those again. In addition, you can (and have to) use the webservices to get some metadata for those resources (eg: font family and style as CHILI would use it online). When converting to a CHILI Package, these resources would be embedded into the package, and they are referenced slightly differently in the document XML.

see ?CHILI Package file format for more information.

While a CHILI Package does contain more file information (fonts and assets, regardless of whether or not they already exist on the server), it does offer several advantages:

  • The user does not need to be connected to internet in general, or a specific CHILI server, during the conversion process
  • The Package can be archived in other workflows directly
  • Some information can be skipped in the document XML (eg the correct font naming, image metadata, etc), as those will be included server-side
  • The package can be uploaded through a page of your own web portal, where you can perform additional processing on the document's XML:
    • Add additional information
    • Perform validation on the document content (eg: check for certain fonts, check for names of layers, etc...)

Connecting to the CHILI Server

When connecting to an existing CHILI Server (or connecting to your own portal, which in turn can return live CHILI information), you'll need to access CHILI's webservices. These are documented throughout the API Guide. You can get started with:

The most important steps you will have to perform in this case are:

Locked Layers

Similarly to our own InDesign Extension, you might decide to "lock" certain layers. Elements which cannot be converted to CHILI (because they aren't supported in the Editor) or which you don't need to have editable online (to simplify the conversion process, for example) could be converted to a PDF (or image), and placed on a separate layer. That layer could then also be "locked" for editing in the editor, so that the image can't be moved by the end user. See ?Layers XML and ?ImageFrame XMLand ?Constraints XML

If CHILI will be required to generate high resolution PDF output of the online document, it is of course prefered that you convert the locked content to high resolution PDF. Otherwise, an image export might be just as good.

Preflight and ImportWarnings

When converting a file format to CHILI's format for online editing, it is highly likely that not all features of the source format are supported in CHILI. The locked layer concept (see higher) might already be one solution to resolve that. But to make the life of the designer easier, and to prevent future issues for the document, you may also provide the designer with a preflight report. During conversion, you can check on common functionalities which may not be supported (or which may behave slightly or a lot differently in the online context). Here again, you can check out the functionality of our InDesign Extension for an example.

In addition, you can include the generated warnings inside the document's XML for future reference: ?ImportWarnings XML

Variable Definitions and References

CHILI's online Editor allows editing either inline (much like any page layout tool), or through input in variable data input forms. Working with Variable Data has some advantages (you can perform easier input validation and transformations, apply rules on content, in an easier way import/export values, etc.). If you own system also contains such settings, you can create variable text frames, images, etc. directly in CHILI's XML format as well: ?Variables XML and ?TextFrame XML will provide you with some more information on this.

Private Data

For various reasons, you may need to include "private" information (from your perspective) into CHILI's XML. This can be used to influence your own online workflow (eg: private XML on variables, to let your web portal know what type of variable it is, which validation applies, etc.) or to have information to tie the CHILI information back to your source file (eg: the "ID" of the frame being converted, or maybe even advanced/unsupported layout features to recreate a source document with more functionalities than CHILI itself supports). See ?PrivateData XML

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