PDF Name--1st part static, 2nd part unique

[susanf55698309]

I either need to post here or INDD. I'll start here. I'm creating 200+ certificates in INDD. I'm importing a CSV list to populate the names. I need to save each PDF separately with a unique name: "Company 2024 Blank Certificate Person's Name". So the only thing changing over 200 times is the person's name. Is there a way to easily do this? Right now it's only saving each person's individual name not the static part "Company 2024 Blank Certificate." Thank you.

[try67]

This is possible if you perform the merge in Acrobat using a script. I assume it's also possible in ID, but you'll need to ask in that product's forum about that.

[Abambo]

I suppose you are doing a datamerge for getting the name on the certificate. And each certificate is one page?

I'm doing this the following: My initial data is an Excel spreadsheet. I export that to a text file (or CSV file) for doing the data merge. The datamerge creates one PDF file with 200 pages.

I extract all the pages as separate files. I get a list of sequentially numbered files. The first file is the first name.

In my Excel file, I combine strings to get for each certificate a source file name: like "cert1.pdf", and a destination filename like "cert-last-first-unique-ID.pdf". I combine those in a new cell to get something like "rena cert1.pdf cert-last-first-unique-ID.pdf". Copy/paste the 200 rena commands into a Command window (on macOS you would do mv instead of rena and open a shell window). The commands get executed on the fly.

There is no programming knowledge required, you just need to construct the string in Excel. If you have an issue of any sort, you can delete the renamed certificates and restart with the extraction. 

The unique ID is necessary, when you have two persons of the same name, like John Doe. Any data you have in your Excel file and any data you can calculate (like a counter!) can be used as a source or target indication.