Converting IDML to JSON and JSON to IDML with PHP

The IDML-JSON-Converter makes it possible to convert Adobe InDesign's IDML documents into JSON files and back again with PHP. It can be easily integrated into websites, content management systems and e-commerce systems.

Motivation

Using this converter allows a simple handling of IDML files in PHP.

• Extracting information is easy, because you only need to navigate through an array, that holds the whole content of an IDML file.
• Manipulating information is easy, because you can change all values by your needs. This allows handling of placeholders, that have been added in Adobe InDesign.

Example

If you want to have a quick look at how the JSON looks like, navigate to the example folder and take the output.json file.

Installation

This library is written in PHP and made for the use with Composer. Be sure to have both of them installed on your system.

Add the library then to your project by running $ composer require bitandblack/idml-json-converter.

Usage

From command line

This library comes with two commands that allow the conversion of IDML into JSON and JSON into IDML via CLI.

The CLI is located under bin/idml-json-converter or, if you installed the library as Composer dependency, under vendor/bin/idml-json-converter.

Use the command

• idml:convert:json to convert an IDML file into JSON.
• json:convert:idml to convert a JSON file into IDML.

Add option -h to get more information about the usage of a command.

Custom

Instead of using the CLI, it is also possible to converts the contents manually.

Converting an IDML file

Use the IDML class and initialize it with the path to an IDML. Calling the getContent() method will return its content as an array.

<?php

use BitAndBlack\IdmlJsonConverter\File\IDML;

$idml = new IDML('/path/to/file.idml');
$idmlContent = $idml->getContent();

The array contains the name of each file and its content then. For example:

[
    'mimetype' => 'application/vnd.adobe.indesign-idml-package',
    'designmap.xml' => [
        '@name' => 'Document',
        '@attributes' => [
            'DOMVersion' => 18.0,
            'Self' => 'd',
            'StoryList' => [
                0 => 'ufa',
                1 => 'u126',
                2 => 'u97',
            ],
            'Name' => 'file.indd',
[...]

You can use the getJSON() method to return the content converted into a JSON string.

Converting JSON content

Use the JSON class and initialize it with an array of your content. The array needs to have the same structure a shown above. Calling the getIDML() method will return its content as an string, that can be saved as IDML file (for example by using file_put_contents()).

<?php

use BitAndBlack\IdmlJsonConverter\File\JSON;

$content = [
    'mimetype' => 'application/vnd.adobe.indesign-idml-package',
    'designmap.xml' => [
        '@name' => 'Document',
        '@attributes' => [
            'DOMVersion' => 18.0,
            'Self' => 'd',
            'StoryList' => [
                0 => 'ufa',
                1 => 'u126',
                2 => 'u97',
            ],
            'Name' => 'file.indd',
    [...]
];

$json = new JSON($content);
$idmlContent = $json->getIDML();

file_put_contents(
    '/path/to/file.idml',
    $idmlContent
);