Can Indesign be used to create on-demand calendars - what technologies are required?

[Paul 1982]

Dear community

I was thinking of creating an on-demand print product with high online customizability, ie something like plumpaper.com where one can customize a printed product via fonts, custom texts, custom layouts, colours, etc. - so basically templates which are dynamic where it makes sense.

Does anyone know which technology stack would be required to a) build a webfront and b) connect it to a template where I can define what can be changed c) get it printed on-demand?

I suppose strongly that Adobe products would be used a lot to create these dynamic template - I am new to layouting, dynamic PDFs, etc. so would appreciate any pointers to resources, services and maybe a high level description of what technologies, SDKs, libraries etc. are involved in dynamically changing templates, collating them to an individual PDF (when you add individual modular pages to the print product), etc.

Many thanks in advance

Paul

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

It's possible InDesign could be set up with enough scripts to do something like this, but given the very narrow nature of the production, something that assembles/rewrites layout code on the fly would be... better? easier to implement?

My first thought is guided scripting in Postscript, or perhaps SVG. I think there are better layout languages as well, haven't done anything like that in a while. Others here might have more specific, relevant experience, but in any case, I think you are looking at a highly customized application with perhaps off-the-shelf database and print management components.

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[Test Screen Name]

InDesign (and the other CC apps) can't be used in a web solution (not suitable & not licensed). Adobe do have a (perhaps) suitable product - InDesign Server, which is InDesign with all its automation features but no UI. They also have a web based PDF library https://developer.adobe.com/document-services/docs/overview/ and a host-based product for server use, Adobe Experience Manager. Neither of these integrates with templates or apps from Creative Cloud, but they do provide low level PDF creation or Office document conversion.