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Before you begin

Before you can import content from Carbon Editor in to Adobe InDesign, you must have a custom InDesign Template.

InDesign Templates must be developed by Liquid State, to match your specific content requirements.

If you don't already have an InDesign template for your content, please contact Liquid State Support.

Editing your template

If you need to make any forward-facing changes to your template, such as the styling of paragraph styles, they should be made to the template itself.

If you wish to make once-off changes to styling, complete your import as per the process below, save the file as a standard .indd document, and make changes to the document.

Changes to content should be made in Carbon Editor so the correct content is available for next import.

If you do edit your template, please send the most recent version to your Liquid State representative, so that it is kept up to date for any further iterations (e.g. mapping a new content type).

Export XML from Carbon Editor

To get started, export your document from Carbon Editor, using the InDesign export option.

The resultant file will be a zip file that must be extracted to access the XML content. Follow the instructions on Exporting a Document to find out more on exporting a document.

To access the XML file:

Download the InDesign export from Carbon Editor
Locate the .zip folder in your Downloads folder or another downloads location
Right click and extract the contents using your desired program (.7zip is free and open source if you need a reliable program)
Locate the extracted folder
Open the folder
An XML and problems.csv will be inside the folder

The problems.csv will detail any problems on a page after an export

The XML file can be imported into InDesign.

Importing your XML in to InDesign

To import a document from Carbon Editor in to an InDesign document:

Open InDesign
In the File menu, click Open...
Select your InDesign Template file, which will be in .indt format
Once your template has loaded in InDesign, navigate to the left-handStructure panel
1. If you don't see the panel, select View > Structure
Right-click on the listed file (ROOT in this case), and select Import XML
Navigate to your XML file located on your computer and click Open
A modal will appear with a variety of XML Import Options. Uncheck all the options
Once the XML has been imported to InDesign, Save the file as a .indd (default InDesign file)

You can then continue to work on your InDesign document.

A template will almost never produce a 100% perfect document. There will still be about a 10% component of manual design, editing, and quality assurance.

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