Draft:InDesign Markup Language

Submission declined on 1 June 2026 by ChrysGalley (talk). This draft is not adequately supported by reliable sources. Wikipedia's verifiability policy requires that all content be supported by reliable sources. Reliable sources include: reputable newspapers, magazines, academic journals, and books from respected publishers. Unacceptable sources include: personal blogs, social media, predatory publishers, most tabloids, and websites where anyone can contribute. Replace any unreliable sources with high-quality sources. If you cannot find a reliable source for the material, it should be removed. If you would like to continue working on the submission, click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window. If you have not resolved the issues listed above, your draft will be declined again and potentially deleted. If you need extra help, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. Please do not remove reviewer comments or this notice until the submission is accepted. Where to get help If you need help editing or submitting your draft, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. These venues are only for help with editing and the submission process, not to get reviews. If you need feedback on your draft, or if the review is taking a lot of time, you can try asking for help on the talk page of a relevant WikiProject. Some WikiProjects are more active than others so a speedy reply is not guaranteed. How to improve a draft Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia – a basic overview on how to edit Wikipedia. Help:Wikitext – how to use the markup Help:Referencing for beginners – how to include references Wikipedia:Article development – how to develop your article Wikipedia:Writing better articles – how to improve your article Wikipedia:Verifiability – make sure your article includes reliable third-party sources You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Add tags to your draft Editor resources Easy tools: Citation bot (help) | Advanced: Fix bare URLs Declined by ChrysGalley 2 months ago. Last edited by ChrysGalley 2 months ago. Reviewer: Inform author. Resubmit Please note that if the issues are not fixed, the draft will be declined again.

• Comment: Rather a lot here is sourced to Wikipedia, Substack and Github. See WP:RSP and WP:CIRCULAR.
  What also appears to be missing is independent reliable sources - so not Adobe, not Scriptorium - discussing this markup code in significant detail. ChrysGalley (talk) 11:46, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

InDesign Markup Language (IDML) is an open, XML-based file format developed by Adobe Inc. for representing the contents of Adobe InDesign documents. Unlike InDesign's native binary format (INDD), an IDML file stores a document's text, styles, layout and other properties as human-readable XML, allowing InDesign documents to be created, inspected and modified by third-party software without InDesign itself.^[1][2] Files in the format use the .idml extension.

An IDML file is not a single document but a package: a ZIP archive following Adobe's Universal Container Format (UCF), a container technology from the same family as the OCF packaging used by EPUB, and comparable in approach to the Office Open XML (.docx) format.^[3][4] The root of the archive contains a designmap.xml file that specifies high-level document properties and references the other parts of the package, with additional folders holding resources (such as fonts, graphics, colours and styles), spreads and stories.^[2][5] Adobe provides a Relax NG schema for validating IDML files.^[3]

Because the content is stored as structured XML rather than a proprietary binary, the format can in principle be read and written by any software capable of processing XML and ZIP archives.^[1] IDML represents a complete InDesign document and supports round-trip workflows, in which a file is exported, modified by external tools and reopened in InDesign.^[1] The same markup underlies several related variants defined by Adobe, including InDesign Snippets (.idms), InCopy Markup Language (ICML), which describes a single text flow rather than an entire document, and InCopy Assignments (.icma).^[3][6]

Adobe introduced IDML with the release of InDesign CS4 in 2008.^[7][8] It replaced the earlier InDesign Interchange (INX) format, which had been introduced with InDesign CS2 primarily to allow documents to be saved for use in a previous version. Like INX, IDML is a Document Object Model representation based on InDesign's scripting object model, but Adobe states that INX had been difficult to write or edit because it was designed to be written and consumed by InDesign alone; IDML was created in response to requests from third-party developers and system integrators to make the format more readable and easier to assemble and modify using XML tools.^[3] Adobe has published a formal IDML File Format Specification—version 8.0 of which, corresponding to InDesign CS6, runs to several hundred pages—as well as a companion IDML Cookbook documenting the format.^[3][9]

A typical IDML package contains:

• a META-INF directory, including a container.xml file identifying the package's root content;^[5]
• designmap.xml, the root file referencing all other parts of the package;^[2][3]
• a Resources directory containing files such as Fonts.xml, Graphic.xml, Styles.xml and Preferences.xml;^[2][3]
• Spreads, describing the geometry and arrangement of pages; and
• Stories, containing the document's text content and inline formatting.^[5][3]

IDML stores references (file paths) to linked images rather than the images themselves, although embedded images are retained within the package.^[10]

Although IDML originates with Adobe, it is widely used by software and workflows independent of Adobe applications, and it is the format through which InDesign documents are most commonly exchanged with non-Adobe tools.

Adobe's specification states that IDML is intended for consumption by InDesign-family applications—InDesign, InCopy and InDesign Server—and that it is "not intended as an interchange format for use with applications outside the InDesign family of products"; the specification also notes that IDML does not attempt to structure content for compatibility with other XML layout formats such as XSL-FO or SVG, though it observes that IDML can be transformed into such formats using XSLT.^[3] In practice, however, because IDML is fully documented and stored as standard XML, an ecosystem of competing applications, localization tools and open-source libraries has adopted it as a de facto open interchange format, and it remains the principal route for moving InDesign content into non-Adobe software.

Serif's Affinity Publisher has been able to open IDML files since version 1.8, released in 2020; because the native INDD format is closed to other applications, IDML serves as the principal route for migrating InDesign documents into Affinity Publisher.^[11] The free and open-source DTP application Scribus can likewise import IDML files, a capability improved in its 1.6.0 release (2024).^[12][13] QuarkXPress both imports and exports IDML: its IDML Import feature converts InDesign documents (from InDesign CS5 onward) into native QuarkXPress projects, preserving text, images, style sheets, colours, gradients and anchored items, while the application can also export its own projects to IDML—making the format a two-way interchange between competing professional layout applications rather than only a one-way migration path.^[14] Commercial conversion utilities such as Markzware's IDMarkz exist specifically to translate InDesign files into IDML for use in other layout applications.^[15]

IDML is treated as a standard interchange format in the localization and translation industry. Translation management systems and computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools commonly ingest IDML rather than INDD, because the XML structure allows translatable text to be extracted, translated and written back while preserving the original layout, and because doing so requires no InDesign installation.^[16][7] Support is widespread across both commercial and open-source CAT tools, including Trados Studio, memoQ, Phrase (formerly Memsource) and the open-source OmegaT.^[9][17] Much of this support is provided through the Okapi Framework, an Apache-licensed open-source localization toolkit whose IDML filter parses the format and can be embedded in other applications, such as via the Okapi Filters Plugin for OmegaT.^[18][19]

A range of open-source libraries read and write IDML without any Adobe software. Examples include SimpleIDML, a Python library for composing IDML documents from templates that has been used in production at the French newspaper Le Figaro to generate classified-advertisement magazines;^[20] pyidml, a Python library released by The Guardian;^[21] IDMLlib, a PHP library for reading IDML files and converting their tagged content to HTML;^[22] and converters that map IDML to and from formats such as JSON, Markdown and Pandoc.^[23] These tools manipulate IDML purely as XML, enabling automated document generation from databases and templates without the proprietary server edition of the publishing software.^[20]

In structured-authoring environments, IDML and ICML are used as a bridge between XML-first content pipelines—such as those based on the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)—and print or PDF output produced via InDesign.^[6]

The following table lists representative software, outside of Adobe's own applications, that reads or writes IDML.

• Adobe InDesign
• Office Open XML
• EPUB
• Darwin Information Typing Architecture

Category:XML-based standards Category:Adobe Inc. Category:Computer file formats Category:Page description languages Category:Markup languages