Mail merge in InDesign?

[ianjmonk]

Hello,

I am working with a client that is trying to send several hundred personalized PDFs to their clients.

I used the data merge functionality in InDesign and the plugin from https://colecandoo.com/ to create the individual PDFs, but I'm not sure about the best way to distribute them. Is there a way to send the PDFs directly from InDesign? Is there a way to add PDFs to a mail merge in Word/Outlook?

Is the only alternative a third party application like pdfMachine.

Any guidance or recommendations would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Ian

[Doc Maik]

Mail merging isn't something ID is intended for and that's why such third party applications exist. Looking around this forum there are similar topics where one of them had a different approach to do this in Acrobat. You would then create one template in Indesign, export as PDF and let Acrobat plus a plugin do the work of data merging and sending the PDF via email.

How to - Varibale Data in a PDF for mass email?

P.S. What plugin from Colecandoo do you mean? They offer only scripts.

[ianjmonk]

Thanks, Doc!

I used the Data Merge to Unique Names plug-in.

This let me export each page as a separate PDF with the client's first and last name as the file name. Pretty handy plug-in.

I did look through the forums for a solution, but a lot of the responses were out-of-date. I guess I was hoping to find a more recent workaround or to see if Adobe had incorporated this functionality into InDesign.

Cheers,

Ian

[Doc Maik]

I see. Still a script, not a plugin.

[Dov Isaacs]

There are third party industrial strength (albeit expensive) solutions that you should consider if you need to do such work in volume. Look at XMPie's uPrint products that are plug-ins to either desktop InDesign or InDesign server. Output from this plug-in in conjunction with InDesign is a special ISO standard variant of PDF known as PDF/VT-1. This flavor of PDF is exceptionally streamlined in terms of file size and performance when printing. Stay away from proprietary solutions as well as those based on PPML or PostScript!

          - Dov

[Colin Flashman]

Hi all, Colin from Colecandoo here, sorry I'm late to the conversation.

As stated, my site (it's just me running it) has several javascripts rather than plug-ins but it's understood what was meant. Also, InDesign can do a style of mail merge, it's just called the Data Merge feature. To be fair, it doesn't have all of the features of Microsoft Word's mail merge feature, but I use it successfully for the campaigns that I need to create.

As for distributing the files, perhaps that is a task for a bulk email manager such as Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor. I quickly found this about Mailchimp that may help:

https://mailchimp.com/help/use-merge-tags-to-send-personalized-files/

I know Adobe has a Marketing Cloud much like there is a Creative Cloud and Document Cloud, but I'm unfamiliar with the tools in that particular toolbox.

[ianjmonk · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the response, Colin!

Definitely appreciate the scripts and InDesign support you're offering! I found the Data Merge to Unique Names script to be very helpful for what I was working on. You saved me a lot of time.

Script or Plugin, it doesn't matter to me. As long as it gets the job done.

Thanks again,

Ian