Copy and paste font from Web page screen into Quark, InDesign?

Can it be done and still preserve font style, size?

[DeValle]

We have a commercial printer client who wants us to create an online form page whereby his corporate clients can order business cards for new employees.

The form page will be run on a secure server and the output will go into a SQL database. The client will log in to an admin page and access each order.

But he wants to be able to streamline the operation. The major spec is that he wants to be able to copy and paste the font from the order-- as it's displayed right on the screen-- into Quark and InDesign and still preserve the font style and size.

We've tried the cut and paste operation on our commercial printing department's Macs for both Quark and InDesign but it won't fly.

It would seem that simply copying and pasting the names, titles, etc. from the database into Quark and InDesign, and then changing the font sytle and size, wouldn't be that big an issue, but the customer is always right, etc.

Does anybody know a solution to this one? We're baffled.

[icecoldsw]

If you are looking to copy the information found in this database to Indesign I suggest doing this:

• Create a script to make a valid XML document from a record in the SQL database
• Create an Indesign document that matches these tags definitions

Now when he wants to get the information from the online form he can just import the XML document into his Indesign template and the layout will be preserved.

[DeValle]

Thanks icecoldsw for the reply.

But could you elaborate on how we "Create an Indesign document that matches these tags definitions"?
We're not sure about the matching the tags definitions part. We're strictly Web guys on this side of the house with minimum experience with InDesign. I opened it up once and played with it for a half hour.

And then would this same idea work with Quark? The client has both so we could keep it simple and write only for InDesign.

And we use PCs here in our Web division.