Creating a catalogue from an image bank and excel data
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Tagged: automation, catalogue, Data Merge, Scripting
- This topic has 4 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 7 months ago by Tabrez Ahmad.
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August 25, 2016 at 3:41 am #87796Tabrez AhmadMember
Hi all,
At Mondottica, we continuously create ‘Linesheets’ for our customers to showcase the latest eyewear. I’ve attached a to an image to give a brief overview of our current process https://www.dropbox.com/s/kv5cvup04xm558x/Process%20Overview.jpg?dl=0, and a video illustrating a simplified example of the way our final PDF outputs are created
link here: https://youtu.be/Px1Apqt5sY0
At any one time, we could be working with more than 100 eyewear frames to be flowed into an InDesign document so something which takes several hours, I know can be reduced to minutes.
I suspect InCatalog and/or XCatalog could be the answer but before going down a rabbit hole, I would like to hear from others. I know I’m not the first person to come across this problem so I know there’s answer out there.
Thanks in advance!
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August 25, 2016 at 6:51 am #87800David BlatnerKeymaster
There are many options you might consider, including:
https://creativepro.com/creating-a-contact-sheet-or-yearbook-page-in-indesign.phphttps://creativepro.com/the-ultimate-contact-sheet.php
But yes, you would get more control from a tool like indata, inCatalog or easycatalog or datalinker, etc.
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August 25, 2016 at 7:42 am #87804Tabrez AhmadMember
Thanks David,
They’re really good looking tutorials for what I’m after. Sometimes though, as you’ll see in the video, our sheets are maybe 4-up, or 5-up, and can range from 2-up to 8-up on a page. This depends on grouping certain eyewear frames according to their filenames.
For example:
EyeWearImage00001A
EyeWearImage00002A
EyeWearImage00003A
EyeWearImage00004A
EyeWearImage00005A
EyeWearImage00001B
EyeWearImage00002B
EyeWearImage00003BSo the above list of images would be 5 to one page, and 3 to another. Do you know what I mean?
How can I control how many images appear on a page?
Thanks again!
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August 25, 2016 at 8:08 am #87805David BlatnerKeymaster
You would probably need a more powerful commercial plug-in such as the ones I mentioned to do that. I believe InData, for example, can insert rules based on text (such as “page break when the number changes”)
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August 30, 2016 at 2:04 am #87892Tabrez AhmadMember
Thanks again David!
I’ll have a look at InData (and possibly InCatalog) and I’ll post my results here for the rest of the community once I’ve explored all options.
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