Export Indesign text to .csv

[Guest]

Our company uses InDesign (version CS6) to create and mail a catalog to sell our products.

The text of the catalog includes Product Name, Product Number, Price, minimum order quantity and other detail information for each product.

If possible, we would like to export certain information (mentioned above in italics) to a .csv file. From there we would automate validation of that information against what we have in our database to make sure the catalog and our database agree.

The question is how to tag the relevant data (and automate the tagging process if possible), and export the tagged data to .csv file?

I'm personally not an InDesign user and not familiar with that package, but am a software developer researching the feasibility and practicality for our catalog design team to accomplish the export to .csv. 

If creating the tags and exporting to .csv would be too labor intensive they might not go for it, but maybe there is a methodology or a plugin that would make this easier?

Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Loic.Aigon]

If you have a consistent calalog activity that requires an up to date connection to your database, I would strongly advise looking at EasyCatalog from 65bits software. Not only it will ease your catalog assembly, but it will smooth the updates ensuring that your data are always ok.

If you still want to go "manual", you can think of a script that could turn tables into text then output content to CSV.

For example, given that you selected this table:

var table = app.selection[0];

var st = table.parent.parentStory;

table.convertToText(",", "\r");

st.exportFile (ExportFormat.TEXT_TYPE, File ( Folder.desktop+"/export.csv" ) );

HTH

Loic

[email removed]

[Guest]

Thank you for the quick response!

I'll definitely forward your suggestion about the 65Bit software plug-in to our publishing department.

Our catalog format is not consistent from page-to-page. This is a gardening catalog and due to photos and varying ways we need to present various types of products, there is no standard format that applies the same way to every page, and even the columns I need are not necessarily all going to be always present next to each product (for example, there are some 'parent' product numbers that do not have pricing info next to them).

I'll leave this open a while in case anyone else has additional ideas, and thanks very much for your input.

[Nuria Montero]

• Our company has the same issue with a large catalogue. Did you manage to export to CSV? How you resolved this? 
• Any advice or help
• would be much appreciated.

[Eugene Tyson]

The answers to this was in 2017 - it's 2021.

You're better off starting a new thread. 

The same advice still stands - have you tried it?