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Can InD be automated like THIS?

Community Beginner ,
Aug 08, 2020 Aug 08, 2020

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I work for a yard card / sign company. We make a TON of letter sets, decors, etc. which require manual, tedious placement on 4x8 sheets in CorelDraw. Then we print those out on a FB500 and cut on a huge CNC machine.

We're assigning SKUs to our online products, and I got to thinking -- can't a data merge using InD place images (PDFs with cut contours) onto the sheets? At the very least, pop them into a 4x8, so I don't have to go hunt and find every single file?

 

So, the path would be: 1. order from website, CSV generated from customer order, data merge to InD pulls files renamed with the SKUs, Tetris the result to minimize waste. Has something like this been done? Are there systems out there that we could invest in to do this? If so, what would they be called?

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Import and export , Print , Scripting

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Community Expert ,
Aug 08, 2020 Aug 08, 2020

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Not entirely clear, but you can do data merge to an InDesign document from a CSV data file.

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Contributor ,
Aug 08, 2020 Aug 08, 2020

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Lets go through this step by step from data merge point of view:

 

Import CSVs to merge data. Check. Can be done - the csv should then contain the path to the images you want to place, then images can be placed. Still unclear: Do you have the image pathes already or does the CSV from the order only contain order relevant data?

 

As it sounds like pathes you need for CNC cutting the images should be able to keep the pathes (like eps or one-page-pdf). Check. Can be done like that.

 

I assume you want to place multiple images on one sheet. Check. Can be done.

 

Ordering them automatically in Tetris style to minimize waste. Nope - might be doable with custom scripting but not with standard data merge.

 

Additionally - if every order creates 1 CSV and you want to process many you need to merge them before (keep an eye on UTF16 encoding)

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