![]() ![]() The brief from the client is that if the field has a No in it, that the word No now appears in Red and 20% bigger additional text appear in a text box below, and that the background of the page change colour. It can’t parse the data or make sense of it, DM simply puts the results where the placeholders are.įor example, a database has a field where the answers will either be Yes or No. The only thing that DM does understand is whether the data is text or a picture, and that is established in the first line of the database being used, when any fields to contain pictures are prefixed by the symbol.Īll DM does is populate a layout with the data from a database. That is, it doesn’t know if the data is an address, a number, a person’s name, a dollar value, or their favourite colour. Put simply, DM doesn’t understand what the data is. There are many questions posed either on forums or asked of me at work about what Data Merge (DM) can and can’t do, but typically the questions revolve around DM taking data and doing something with it apart from formatting, such as adding text after specific entries, totalling values, swapping backgrounds, etc. 2 Data Merge doesn’t understand the data. Today’s post will focus on InDesign’s built-in Data Merge only. I won’t go into the pros and cons of the different methods in this post but will cover them in another article. For a list of third party plugins, click here. While Excel can export to XML via PC, the quality of the exported XML file is normally bad.Īpart from XML and Data Merge, there are many InDesign third party plug-ins which behave like Data Merge but have more enhanced features such as programming statements to treat merging data more like a database query, and the ability to construct catalogues. The other factor i’ve found so far with XML publishing is that very few finished projects supplied to me to format are ever supplied as XML files, but rather Word or Excel documents. InDesign CS5 Automation Using XML & Javascript by Grant Gamble.A Designer’s Guide to Adobe InDesign and XML by James Maivald and.There is also little information about using XML with InDesign in the public domain, and the only two reliable sources I’ve found so far are: However, the interface for XML within InDesign is difficult to grasp and quite frustrating. Yes, it is the only FREE tool, but InDesign also allows XML support. 1 Data Merge is not the only VDP tool available using InDesign. ![]() It is not a tutorial as there are plenty out there on the internet, but more a guide before embarking on using Data Merge for a project. Nevertheless, this article is a quick overview on the built-in Data Merge function shipped with Adobe InDesign. I do love a good pun in the title, and anyone familiar with Family Guy episode “I dream of Jesus” will know how a classic song such as “Surfin’ Bird” by The Trashmen can become annoying in a short space of time. ![]()
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