First, let me clarify the question. I am dealing with InDesign documents and trying to extract information from it. I read it somewhere that Adobe InDesign loads the documents and dynamically calculates some metadata information that is not present in the .indd or .idml files.
For my use case, i need to write a software that loads an InDesign file and extracts all information from it - without any loss. Can this be done using Adobe's InDesign SDK, without actually having InDesign software installed?
Thanks.
I doubt if you can do that -> There are many functions that fetch the INDD file information dynamically from the InDesign app itself. Such information is not a part of the InDesign file.
For IDML files, IDML files are just a view and not a model. They do not contain enough information to be used offline without the app. If your's is a minimal app and you only need certain information from the InDesign document, then it's fine otherwise IDML would not be of much help.