export publisher assistant file without indesign?

Question

I use parallels to run Paratext and associated software on a Mac. For whatever reason, Adobe will not support indesign in parallels. But they do in macOS (and windows machines, obviously). This means I have been unable to(so far) to get PA to talk to inDesign on the 'Mac side' of my computer.

Is there a way to export or extract the file or whatever PA creates from the Paratext project so that I can use it with inDesign on macOS? Maybe I've missed something.

Answer 1

Hello,

I don't use a Mac, and so I cannot validate the following by experience. I think the main issue is InDesign not working in Windows / Parallels with ARM architecture.

It looks like Parallels 20.2 attempts to support x86_64 emulation for Windows 10, or Windows 11, with some limitations. It sounds like the performance may be quite slow.

https://www.parallels.com/blogs/parallels-desktop-20-2-0

In terms of extracting file(s) which PA produces to use in InDesign on Mac OS --- What PA does is to produce 1) an InDesign book to contain the whole publication (one or more documents), 2) an InDesign document for each scripture book or peripheral book, 3) a collection of InDesign tagged text files which are 'placed' (the InDesign term) into the document. Beyond that, 4) PA manages and validates the placement of content such as notes, cross references, and header texts on each page.

The most relevant aspect of those steps (with respect to your question) might be the 3) tagged text files which PA generates. These are files which can be placed in an InDesign document which contain a full collection of styles for managing all the content. The others aspects of actually creating and managing the flow of the content through a document (1,2,4) are things you would need to manage yourself. (You can see a summary of the things PA is doing on pages for a basic Bible layout here).

Answer 2

Publishing Assistant does two things: (1) It imports text from Paratext into InDesign, and (2) it controls InDesign to make all the text look nice. What you're proposing would cause you to miss out on all of (2), which is pretty significant.

@jmkla suggested running Windows x86_64 in emulation, but that would be extremely slow and you wouldn't actually be able to do any work like that.

Instead, you could try running InDesign in your Windows Arm VM using the process I have described in another post. tldr; It seems to me that, although Adobe does not allow one to install InDesign on Windows Arm, it actually runs just fine. This will allow you to use Publishing Assistant with InDesign exactly as it was intended.