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Participant
October 6, 2022
Question

Injecting content from a CMS to bulk-create 100s of Adobe documents

  • October 6, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 564 views

Hi.

We run an events website with 100s of events, each with information on event date, location, purpose, target customers, speakers, speaker photos, agenda, location maps, image gallery, sponsors, pricing options, etc. This looks great online. We want to now automate the creation of PDF brochures, one for each event, by injecting the content and images from our website CMS into Adobe back-end and designing a standard event brochure template to display it with branding etc. We'd then trigger a brochure PDF to be regenerated whenever any content in the corresponding event changes. We have all the CMS API, so looking to undertand how to feed into Adobe back-end. Any ideas how this might be done please?

Thanks,

Simon.

 

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2 replies

try67
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 6, 2022

How dynamic is this data? Is it just a question of inserting a specific text/image into a specific point in the PDF, or does the entire structure of the field need to change based on the input data? The former can be achieved using a relatively simply command-line tool, which you could run on your server to generate these files and then serve them to the end-user. The latter will require a more complicated solution.

If you're interested in hiring a professional developer to create such tools for you, feel free to contact me privately, by clicking my username and then on Send a Message.

Participant
October 7, 2022

Hi Try, many thanks. There are about 20 different field types, eg title, logo, title image, date, speaker title, session decription, etc, and our template would have a position and display style for each. The nature of the content will not change, ie the image will always be a 1024x800 png, the session description will always be a chunk of HTML text (would need to resize based on the amount oif text), etc. We'd automate the population of the template for each event, and let the marketer tweak the final layout of each PDF brochure so it looks just right. Does that answer ok?

try67
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 7, 2022

Yes, but it falls under the second option I've described, especially if visual adjustments are required...

Legend
October 6, 2022

The Acrobat SDK cannot be used for this purpose. It automates Acrobat, which cannot be installed on a server.

Participant
October 7, 2022

Thanks. So I'd be looking for a tool whereby we'd inject an event's content into a template, the marketer can do some simple manipulation to visually optimise the layout for that event, then the PDF is published, and we'd upload to our distribution platform.