InDesign Product Catalog Flow

Cool. I'm glad you have things in hand. You'd be amazed at how many folks come around here in really dire straits.

With all the preparations and determination you've offered, this shouldn't be a big deal for you at all. If you're willing to put the effort into redoing it once, this should be easy for you to accomplish.

Setting it up yourself, you can do a lot of the stuff that EasyCatalog can accomplish easily by hand. And since you've already got it broken down into your book setup, all you'd need to do is set up a two-column template. And if you don't have a page numbering/folio setup like your example, it'll be even easier. Just start with the smallest document for your testing/formatting, then apply the lessons learned to the rest, document by document.

I'm going to go on the assumption that each product description/price table is its own discrete block of text you place in your InDesign documents. If there's word processing copy for the product descriptions already, this'll be much easier. Easier still if the line with the product number and the price is included in the same position  If there's not — or over time they've been lost, you'll have to copy/paste from the old document into a new word processing file. Place a single return and a tab after each listing, which will later be replaced by your separating horizontal rule. Either way, you're going to have to copy the individual product descriptions and paste them into one long line of product descriptions for each document.

When you produce the entire catalog, it'll help a lot if the database folks can generate these single long word processing files to generate each document for you. Life will be much easier, and you can automate a lot of what you'd otherwise have to do manually through the document-long text files. But for experiments, it's easier to assemble this yourself. Get your Paragraph Styles down cold — big bonus points if you're formatting the product number/pricing line using Nested Styles. If not, check out this link and it'll automate this part of the job for you forevermore. Create a duplicate paragraph style for that line using a color of [None] for the version where that disappears.

Now you need to create a custom style for the separating rules. Pay close attention to your preferred spacing before/after the rules because it'll not only be important for alignment between items, when you set it as a paragraph style it lets you precisely control the line's Keep Options to set how columns and pages break to your specifications.

If you're willing to simplify the product unit layout — no irregular text wraps, standardized and specified layouts for your inline graphics — it'll make things a lot easier. For every custom thing you do, you're going to have to do that manually. Every automated thing, after you work out the design and specifications, will either happen by itself or require less individual attention when you have to manually modify the file.

There are lots of things you can do with inline graphics when you produce a catalog or directory. The link I provided earlier is a good one, but far from the only one. Don't be afraid to learn about automating and fine-tuning inline graphics from sources other than Adobe, because unfortunately Adobe documentation is really weak in that area. If you can work with your database folks to produce copy with <data tags> you can make a lot of this happen automatically when you place the text files. If you're in an environment where you have to re-create the catalog regularly, working with your database folks can make producing this automatically a snap. Essentially, that's what plug-ins like EasyCatalog do anyway, and you can produce it in-house. If you're going to be cutting/adding individual products yourself, it can still be much easier to build it from one document-long thread of text than to assemble it by product by product. The same rules you create to produce the first run will make it just as easy to align/delete/insert individual products when you modify it.

Your commitment to recreate the catalog to take full advantage makes this possible. The first time may likely take just as long, or sometimes even a little longer, but reproducing it will be so much quicker and easier that you'll quickly save the company time and money and yourself a bunch of aggravation.

Good luck,

Randy