Why does InDesign put "c_" before literal text?

Question

I'm working with the old interchange format of Adobe InDesign (.inx files).

This XML file has text contents like the following:

<pcnt>c_Stackoverflow&#13;&#13;</pcnt>

Which results in

Stackoverflow<CR><CR>

Question: Why does it put c_ before the actual value and not simply use CDATA in doubt?

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 03 '16 at 16:03

Adobe has been encoding everything.

The reason they prefix the payload is because you can have several values in a single field, hence, CDATA would not be working.

c_ indicates a string

x_ represents a list (enum)

x_a represents a list with 0x0a items (a = 10 hexadecimal)

l_ represents a long

See a full list of all prefixes in the PDF:

1 Answers1