Windchill SIM and InDesign

Hi Pascal,

Sounds like a pretty unique setup, as we haven't had any other clients with this, so I'm not surprised at the lack of response. First step you may want to try is a little testing to make sure that inDesign files are compatible with Editor. Theoretically, the XML should be no problem, I'm more curious about the additional files, such as stylesheets and such.

Hi Pascal,

We have some experience working with InDesign, Arbortext, and Windchill.

I'm not quite clear on what you are trying to achieve. It sounds like you want to store InDesign documents in WC and then publish them through PE? Is this correct? What is the format of the InDesign files? .indd? IDML?

Windchill can store any file type as a Document, but Arbortext won't support .indd files as this is unique to Adobe. If you want to move from InDesgin to Arbortext, IDML will be your best bet, but you'll need to do some specialized processing on the IDML before Arbortext can handle it.

Pascal,

Was the information Jeff provided what you were looking for, or could you elaborate on your business needs perhaps?

Hello everyone,

I have finally managed to find a post related to InDesign and Windchill. My company as InDesign but use it as standalone (eg they copy paste screenshot of the 3D models).

I am in the process of evaluating solutions to improve the management of our Knowledge Work and PLM processes.

Ideally, I would like to move to Windchill (not that I have 8 years experience in implementing in another company) but that I know it will fulfil many of our requirement.

However we use Inventor at the moment (so we also consider PLM360) If we select Windchill, there will be new questions.

Do we keep Inventor or do we move to Creo (Inventor was selected in 2012 and only 6% of our CAD data are in inventor so for me moving to Creo is an option).

The other case I have to made is, InDesign vs Arbotext within Windchill.

While I appreciate Windchill will "digest" any uploaded file, depending on the format we lose all the benefits of integrated format.

I have struggle to find good presentation video about Arbotext vs InDesign. (PTC VAR I contacted do not seem to know much about Arbotext and its competitors). Actually is InDesign a competitive product of Arbotext or Arbotext light years ahead of InDesign.

Any help welcome.

Best regards

I think I am reading your request differently from the others. so here is my interpretation:

1. First you want to store InDesign files in Windchill (this is fine) and then manage versions and use workflow. True there is no direct interface now to automatically work on InDesign from Windchill, but you can check out the file and download. Then you work on it in local mode and then check in the file when you are done. This way you get versioning. I did not read in your note that you wanted to use InDesign with PE. We use this process for Illustrator files. Note on InDesign all files must be in the single file, this process does not support links to outside files, graphics, etc. This is why we do not store InDesign files in the system.

2. Arbortext uses XML to encode text with command that define the data. These commands (tags) are then used to drive styles that are created separately and drive the Arbortext publishing Engine to automatically make up pages without manual layout or intervention. If your pages can be logically defined and are of a consistent design page to page then Arbortext and PE batch composition may be the way to go. We used to use InDesign to manually layout our Instructor led in-house training materials. Once the data was authored in word, it was imported into InDesign and then manually layout and this process took many weeks. Now the material is authored in Arbortext and run though PE and it is done, one pagination run produces the instructor books with both instructor notes and student notes and then a second run, changing the book classification generates the student materials, no manual layout.

I do not know if this answers the question any better than the others, but this is our process and one way to look at the problem.