An InDesign HTML Import Script

Import HTML is an attempt at implementing a website import function for InDesign

LATEST UPDATE: May 2026

Important Note: This script can now also import offline HTML!

Go to the full product page to find out more and purchase a full license: https://www.id-extras.com/products/import-html-pro/

Instructions

Download the script, and install as usual for InDesign scripts.

Open the supplied HTMLTemplate.indd file and double-click on the script in the Scripts panel to run.

Paste the URL of the web article you want to import into InDesign and wait a few moments for the result. (A default link to an article is provided in the URL field, so you can try that first…)

What you get

You do not get an InDesign document that looks like the webpage!

What you hopefully do get, though, is:

(a) The text from the webpage, with sensible character styles and paragraph styles applied to it. All paragraph-level HTML tags (H1, H2, H3, p, etc.) are converted to similarly-named paragraph styles, and span-level HTML tags (em, strong, i, etc.) are converted to similarly-named character styles.

(b) The images on the webpage (optional).

(c) If there are tables on the webpage, these are reconstructed in InDesign. Very simply, though. So if the entire page is one big table, don’t expect too much!

(d) Hyperlinks. If there are any anchors (<a> elements) in the HTML, these are converted to hyperlinks in InDesign.

Included in the download package is an InDesign file that can serve as a template for importing HTML. It includes pre-styled paragraph and character styles for common HTML tags. Note that the supplied template file is very basic and its use is completely optional. It just provides basic formatting for a handful of common elements.

Download a Free Trial

The trial version is identical to the full version except that vowels and digits are scrambled in the imported document.

A note about privacy

Import HTML Pro processes all imports on our server. This includes both live web URLs and filenames of local HTML files saved on your computer. Since imports are processed remotely, the user’s Adobe Creative Cloud account ID together with the requested URL or imported HTML filename are logged. The actual imported HTML content is not stored permanently. Server-side processing is necessary because PHP provides far more powerful and reliable HTML processing than is possible directly within InDesign. If a fully private solution is required, a self-hosted version can be made available by deploying the processing framework onto your own servers. Please get in touch for pricing and details.