A

Anonymous

Question

Programmatically Modifying InDesign Files

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
April 16, 2010
2 replies
7914 views

Hi,

I am new to the InDesign world, so looking for some major guidance from this team.

In my current project, we are trying to build a web application, which takes an InDesign template file as input. The template will have areas where the users can enter text data. The customers should be able to login to the application and customize the file (add name, address and some other attributes). Finally when they are done, the system should preview the updated InDesign document with the information and finally the customers should be able to print this document.

Could you provide some information on how these can be done programmatically? What software or API's does InDesign provide to achive this functionality? It is required to have an InDesign server to get this capability?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Scripting

This topic has been closed for replies.

Colin Flashman

Community Expert

sounds like a web to print solution is being made. is this something that has to be built from scratch or something which can be done using an off-the-shelf solution?

the following URL is a list of off-the-shelf solutions for web-to-print providers:

http://www.veedeepee.com/w2p-solutions.html

the market leader is xmpie. i've been using online print solutions which has a solution based on pdfs, so the template art can be created anywhere... but IMO i hate it.

If the answer wasn't in my post, perhaps it might be on my blog at colecandoo!

A

Anonymous

Yes it is sort of a web to print solution. The input to the web application will be an InDesign template. The web application should allow the user to customize some areas of the brochure, view the preview and finally print the document.

Another req. is that the initial brochure template will have low resolution image files. once the user has viewed the preview, when the submites the form for preview, the application should switch the image files to high resolution ones and send it for printing.

To implement these functionalities, do we need an InDesign Server? Our application would be a java web application and based on my research, InDesign services can be called using SOAP.

Is this the only option when the input is InDesign file or IDML file?

Harbs.

Legend

Yes. You (legally) need ID Server.

You should probably research existing products, because you don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel. It could be you can integrate existing solutions...

You would probably use SOAP if you are modifying the InDesign document (template) directly (using the scripting interface within InDesign). If you modify an IDML document, you can change the (xml) data directly using whatever technology you are most comfortable with.

Harbs

Harbs.

Legend

You can probably do what you want with IDML. You would have to

programatically link the input fields to data in the IDML. To do it

directly in InDesign would probably require an InDesign Server license

(see below).

If you need the preview capability, then you need InDesign Server for

legal reasons. (It would be a violation of the EULA to use InDesign

desktop for this.)

Harbs

John Hawkinson

Inspiring

Can't he likely accomplish the same preview function with exporting to PDF? [or is that EULA violation too?]

Harbs.

Legend

Yes. I think that would be an EULA violation...

Harbs

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