Script for converting InDesign files into XML

We are an IT book publishing company. We use InDesign to layout our books and prepare them for publication. Our books are in English and they contain text, graphics, and tables. Our InDesign template contains about 25 styles. Each book consists of a number of separate InDesign files.

We need to convert our books into XML, and we have been using InDesign to do that. InDesign’s XML conversion tool involves some manual work. It also has limitations that force us to do a consider amount of manual work on the generated XML file to make them comply with our XML schema.

We would like to automate the process of converting our books into XML using an InDesign script in one of the languages supported by InDesign. This would mean the automation of the following tasks:

1) Mapping InDesign styles to custom-named XML elements.
2) Assigning custom-named attributes to XML elements.
3) Changing the default names that InDesign gives to certain attributes.
4) Giving fixed and variable values to certain attributes.
5) Implementing a specific nesting structure of XML elements.
6) Converting certain special characters (InDesign’s XML tool usually ignores these).
7) Exporting index entries (InDesign’s XML tool ignores these).
8) Producing one XML file from the separate InDesign files of the book.