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I am hoping someone on here can help me.
I have multiple different page designs that I would like to populate with fields from a data merge. The number of fields is fairly small, 11 or 12 short text lines each formatted slightly differently.
I need a way of choosing the right page design before entering the text, as "Line 1" may be located in different places on different designs, and formatted differently too.
Can anyone tell me firstly if this is possible, and secondly how i would start going about this?
So to recap, I need to:
Change Applied master page based on database/csv column data
Change Font type / paragraph style based on database/csv column data
Thanks in advance for any help and guidance.
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One solution is to populate the X number of different designs as one Data Merge template using layers, and pulling the fields into the page X different times, then making visibile the layer that you want. You could script something to make that layer visible using concepts I talked about in a recent post: https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/streamline-printing-process/m-p/11754696?page=1#M410697
Although, in this case, you wouldn't be applying a master page; you'd be making items on one layer visible and hiding the rest; you could go page by page doing this with a script.
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I'm not an expert on populating fields, but to the point of different layouts, I think you can create any number of master pages with different dimensions and layouts with your text fields set up to populate from a database (however that works), and then simply drag and drop the master page ontop of the page you want the master applied to. Alternatively, you can choose "apply master to pages..." from the Links window fly-out menu. I would guess that copying and pasting a text box with "line 1" variable would retain the variable throughout.
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So to recap, I need to:
Change Applied master page based on database/csv column data
Change Font type / paragraph style based on database/csv column data
That sort of fuctionality is outside of the capabilities of the built-in Data Merge function. If you do this often, a utiltiy like Easy Catalog can do that. If Data Merge is all you have, you will need to make a separate docuemnt for each layout, and run a merge of the rows you want to use in each.
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Hello amiec52678565,
You might want to look at the InData plugin, it has such capabilities.....
Note: it's not cheap and does require some complex user interaction\inputs.
http://emsoftware.com/products/emdata/
Regards,
Mike