When using the Digital Publishing Tools in InDesign, you edit your article locally in InDesign and change metadata and order of articles on the subscriber-site at digitalpublishing.acrobat.com.

But what if you are not a subscriber to DPS? Then re-ordering articels is currently only possible using a method involving creating a sidecar.xml file. This is painfull if you are not familiar with creating XML files in a text editor.

So I made this tool: sidecar.xml generator for Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite

This webseite has the ability to create the sidecar.xml file for you. Just enter all the metadata for your articles and hit “Generate sidecar.xml”.

The best part: Re-Ordering articles can be done by drag and drop.

The generator creates a unique URL for every change you make to your folio. So save the URL to come back later and make additional changes and re-generate a new sidecar file.

Please keep in mind: I made this tool for myself to get around the awful manual creation of the sidecar file. There might be some glitches in it. Be carefull when deleting articles, always watch your data.

This tool will be obsolete when Adobe releases the next version of the Folio Builder Panel wich will then include changing the order of articles.

Until then, head over to projects.nordsueddesign.de/sidecarxml

No guarantee for anything ,-)

—Johannes