InDesign Data Merge - question about parameters

Thanks Joel! i'm going to check it out 🙂

I'll try to answer your questions, but I think that you should tell us more about what you are trying to achieve in order to help you out. But, that being said, here are some answers:. 

- text position?

- text size?

- text kerning?

None of these can be controlled with settings in Excel, so far as I know. Text position, size, and kerning are all set up in InDesign, before you run the merge. So if you had your Unicode CSV set up with your Hebrew/Arabic/English text, you could typeset a single page of signs with Data Merge placeholders, as below. The text values you want to control here are set in InDesign (optimally in paragraph and character styles) before you merge.

-  element rotation? (the arrow direction in this particular example)

- element visibilty? (showing / not showing)

- name of symbol/external ai file (meaning, using one of this icons without place them manually)

You can place images with Data Merge by storing their paths in your CSV, with a header named with an initial @ symbol. (Here's a CreativePro tutorial showing you some techniques.) So no, you can't control the element rotation with Data Merge, but you could have four separate arrows that you made in Illustrator, for example, named "arrow_right.ai" and "arrow_up.ai" and so on. I have, in the past, controlled element visibility by using an Excel sheet that had VBA logic that I could run to remove or add particular fields leading to particular image paths, which I would run before saving out the tab-delimited Unicode text file. So, to supress a given image, you'd simply have no path in that cell in the CSV.

If the Data Merge functionality doesn't cover all of your workflow needs, I typically advise people to look at plugins like InData, which allow rather more programmability in automated document generation. I think you can probably automate your trilingual signage with Data Merge, but your implied desired workflow of doing everyting in your data source seems to be asking for a plugin like InData, or maybe InCatalog.