Stylesheets for converting Adobe's InDesign INX documents to XSL FO

Publicly available stylesheets can be used to convert Adobe's InDesign documents to XSL FO

Background

These stylesheets were prepared by RenderX's development team for general use. They are used to convert documents in Adobe InDesign Interchange (INX) format into documents in the W3C's XSL FO vocabulary. These generic stylesheets produce XSL FO suitable for RenderX XEP Engine.
The primary purpose of these stylesheets is to fasten the generation of the dynamic PDF documents, originally designed in a widely spread powerful designer application Adobe InDesign CS2. The stylesheets were designed to create XSL FO files that are suitable for the RenderX XEP Engine. These stylesheets will also support the ability to make use of the dynamical data bound with InDesign data binding mechanism.
These stylesheets are available for download. You can also get it from this page directly (see form on the left). RenderX encourages any developer interested in providing suggestions or enhancements to subscribe to our xep-support list and submit comments. We will collect any and all suggestions and provide feedback to all interested users.

Possible Use

In the InDesign CS2 Adobe implemented a new feature that allows users to export their documents in a XML based format the Adobe Interchange format (INX).
The primary purpose of this format is backwards compatibility. But because of its XML nature developers acquire the ability to use documents created in InDesign on any platform without knowledge of the binary structure of the INDD (INDesign Document) format (“native” format of Adobe InDesign files).

Technical Notes

Both XSL FO and Adobe Interchange are expressive XML vocabularies for describing richly-formatted content.
Their respective scopes overlap but do not match precisely.
Therefore, in order to achieve the highest fidelity in layout patterns it is important to have a clear understanding regarding the capabilities and limitations when transforming documents from one format into the other.
The structure of the INX format reminds a structure of the code on some programming language and not a common XML document structure. Still we used the most effective ways to implement all the features of the INX format.