Static logo and barcode should appear based on customer requirement

Report · Nov 07, 2017

Hi All,

This forum is really helpful for me. Thank you all adobe experts. I really appreciate. I have a doubt on automation in-design not manual.Actually we are using some logos like EGP

and height & weight box logo.

Actually we are doing tracing in in-design and We are using excel form and in that form contains relevant fields. We'll extract the fields using tab delimited format to do data merge.Now issue is we have created field name as "EGP" for egp logo and "height" field for height and weight box.So depends on customer requirement,if EGP is yes,by default entire EGP logo should else if it's NO,then it should not come.So for height and weight as well like customer gives only numeric values for height and weight,then it should appear height and weight box else it should ignore if fields are empty. We have option to keep in multiple in-design templates but our motto is everything should reflect in single template. So it's challenging. We have tried all the possibilities but not able to resolve. Can anyone help me who is having knowledge on automation in-design please help me out?

And we are using barcode as well. previously we have using either UPC or EAN in one template. So we have resolved the issue but one one template need to use both the barcodes i.e EAN and UPC. If Customer selects UPC field,then UPC barcode should generate else if customer selects EAN field,then EAN barcode should generate.Is there any solution for this?

Thanks

Report · Nov 08, 2017

Hi there,

The solution to your problem is scripting.

The main problem with data merge is it doesn't allow you to apply logic: e.g. if the cell in EGP column is yes, use this template, if no, use that one.

I am not an expert in data merge -- I've never used it for real work -- but I consider it a poor man automation feature: it's free, but it doesn't do all that what you want. Scripting, on the contrary, is totally flexible and allows you to achieve exactly what you want, but you usually have to pay to developer, or learn how to script yourself.

Also, there's a number of plugins that may come in handy to you -- for example EasyCatalog -- but I've never used them so don't want to talk about what I don't know. I guess, in essence, they have the same issue as data merge: you're supposed to have identical number (structure) of elements in each record (in Excel) and in the layout (in InDesign).

If you decide to have a script developed, the main difference for you will be that you'll have to use labeled frames (the Script Label panel) instead of field placeholder text.

And finally -- the cherry on the cake -- scripting allows you to read data directly from Excel to InDesign without using CSV or tab/comma delimited TXT as intermediary format. Here I wrote and give away for free the functions that fetch data from Excel. I used the mix of three programing languages: JavaScript (the most popular scripting language for InDesign), VBS (to read data from Excel on Windows) and AppleScript (to read data from Excel on Mac).

Hope it helps.

— Kas

Report · Nov 08, 2017

Kasyan's solution is free. Thank you, Kasyan!

Em Software's InData for InDesign is one such merge solution that one can test the data and only use applicable field values in the merge process. It uses what are called prototypes, which really is scripting that is evaluated and processes the data during the merge. I use their products quite frequently (that plugin and their Tagged Text plugin). these prototypes can be as simple as what you show above to quite complex (complex enough one may have less hair getting it written).

Yep, this option costs money. Some think a lot, some find it reasonable. If you did as much pulling in data from databases of all stripes as I do...I see it as cheap. It's the one of a set of plugins I upgrade religiously.

Mike

Report · Nov 09, 2017

I'm not too sure I completely understood your request, but it sounds to me that it could be achieved in Excel...

What about adding columns with formulas that would say "If customer EGP choice is yes, then return EGP logo path"?

Same with Height and Weight : if columns are numbers, then returns HWlogo path. And 2 other columns to concatenate your text "Height (in): to (value)".

Of course, you can hide/protect these columns.

See example below (but note it's an French version of Excel so french formulas aren't going to help you much):