Auto aligning objects dynamically

[John24391902flpl]

Is there a script or some kind of addin to make objects automatically align when I add object to a column or take objects away.

We have a 300 page catalog with 2 columns of products on each page. Sometimes there is  need to move products around, take products away or add products etc.

I would like to see the movement flowing through the document just like when you add text to a text frame or delete some.

Any help or guidance would be appreciated.

[Shivangi_Gupta]

Hi John,

We appreciate you writing in. We believe you're using Adobe Acrobat. We'll be moving this discussion to the Adobe Acrobat community for the experts to help you with the query.

[Document Geek]

In which forum was this question originally posted? It's hard to beleive that he is trying to accomplish this in Acrobat.

[try67]

What application are you referring to, exactly? And what kind of "objects"?

[Document Geek]

You should really make these types of changes in the original program that created the PDF. Acrobat is not designed to have complex layouts autoflow, and it cannot autoflow across pages.

InDesign however, can handle this with ease. Do you know what program the document was originally created in?

[John24391902flpl]

I'm sorry about not clarifying.

I am using InDesign

[Document Geek]

Can you post a screen shot or a sample section of the document for us to work with?

[John24391902flpl]

Attached is a mockup file of hw our catalog will be layed out.

Now, I hope I can explain this in a way that makes sense to you and maybe I'm asking for more than InDesign can do.

So I have a graphics box and a text box gouped together so I can work with each item easier. The graphics box will hold the photo of the product and the text box will hold the description and price.

From one catalog to the next we add more items, take away items, and move items around.

(The catalog is approx. 300 pages)  If I delete an Item, the rest of the items should move up and align automatically or I would like to be able to drag and drop to move them around and they would automatically align and compensate.   When adding an item I would grab it and hover between two items and they would automatically move to make room for the new Item.

The auto align would somewhat work for this but would require more manuual work.

We just brought our designing In House. The company we worked with prior to, used a third party software to import all the photos and descriptions then did the artwork in InDesign,and if that's what we need to do that's fine. We're just exploring InDesign to see if it could suffice for all the data that needs to be put in.

[Document Geek]

Please takea look at the attached document. I've done a few things:

1. Set up the document as threaded, 2-column text frames
2. The leading is set to (Auto) so that when the item is copied ans pasted onto a paragraph, it will have adequate height above it. If you don't ever change the size of the height of your group, you'll never need to worry about things not aligning. But if you do change the high of your group, then the paragraph will automatically expand.
3. I turned on hidden characters and text threads, so that you can see what you're doing and how the text frames are connected one to another.
4. I've set up some conditional text.

• Eachproduct needs to be on it's own paragraph. The photo and product description need to be grouped together and then pasted into that paragraph.
• To move a product group, you can to cut it from one place and paste it into another. InDesign does have a drag and drag within Layout mode (within the preferences). Preferences > Type > Drag and Drop Text Editing > Enable in Layout View. But cutting and pasting also works well, especially if you're moving the product onto another spread.
• Regarding the conditional text (blue squiggly underline), if there are products that you want to delete from this catalog, but keep around for future use, you can simply add the condition to them (including to the paragraph return before them), and then hide them. That is easier than digging around on your servers or within the databases to try and find the product description and photo that you already had set up at some point.

Hopefully this will get youheaded in the right direction. Please refer to the updated sample document to see the chages I made.

[John24391902flpl]

Ok that looks like a start but I'm confused as of exactly what you did or how it works.