We are finding that uptake of CS4 is very sluggish, especially amongst the printing firms we deal with. Typically they have to upgrade many machines, but in the current financial climate are watching every penny. Consequently, being able to retain as many CS4 features as possible during a backsave is essential.

I feel that if Adobe provided more robust backsaving features to Indesign, people would be less reluctant to upgrade — but in the meantime scripts like this are the only answer…

Whilst we are on the subject of CS4 to CS3 back saving, this may be a good place to link to another Applescript I wrote that people may find useful.

Turn Grep Styles to Character Styles.scpt

This script gets round the problem that the formating of any Grep Styled text disappears when you use INX to backsave it to CS3.

The script works by searching for any Grep styled text and applying the specified character styles. Once it has been run, the document can then safely be exported to INX CS3 format with the formating preserved. If you are planning to keep using the CS4 version, it may be sensible to run the script on a copy of the document, so you do not end up with lots of extra character styles (although they can easily be removed).

The usual words of caution apply: the script was written for my personal use, and appears to work without problem on my system, but please use at your own risk.

Anyone fancy making a Javascript version? (I will get round to learning Javascript one day…)

Below is a link to download a simple javascript which toggles the setting. (I couldn’t get the code to “stick” in the comment window.) Now, why couldn’t Adobe just include both formats as export options?

http://in-tools.com/indesign/scripts/freeware/ToggleCS4SnippetExport.zip

I think Mike’s point is an important one, however, on a more conceptual basis: INX was a way, in XML, to describe how to build an InDesign object or file. It was like writing a script in XML. IDML, however, actually describes the file itself — its contents, geometry, flow, and so on.

That’s why I think its extremely unlikely that someone could write an XSLT to convert from one to the other. Maybe someone will prove me wrong, but the two formats are really pretty fundamentally different, as Mike pointed out.

tell application “Adobe InDesign CS4″
set oldSEF to snippet export format
set snippet export format to inx traditional format
set mySelection to selection
set mypath to (choose file name with prompt “Save Snippet As” default name “Untitled.inds”)
export mySelection format InDesign snippet to mypath
set snippet export format to oldSEF
end tell