InData, a plug-in for Adobe InDesign, and Xdata, an XTension for QuarkXPress, bring the full layout, design, typographic and picture publishing power of InDesign or QuarkXPress to bear on all your data-driven repetitive publishing tasks.
Simply put, InData and Xdata work like a mail merge on steroids. You create a template in a normal document, with rules that tell it how to format your text and graphics. Then, with a single menu invocation, the plug-in builds your document at jaw-dropping speeds—up to hundreds or even thousands of pages per hour.
Use your publishing platform’s typographic controls for each variable field and for any static text, to get just the right look for your data.
InData and Xdata have a powerful English-like scripting language. You can put any field from your data source in any order in the text flow, force page breaks, generate headers/footers, apply master pages as needed—and lots more.
Use InData / Xdata’s scripting language to build simple or complex rules for including or excluding fields, pictures and static text. And there are no limits on your data: records and fields can be as many and as long as you need.
InData and Xdata are designed to build • one-to-one marketing mailers • product catalogs • financial and legal reports • conference guides • abstracts • real estate guides • trader and swap magazines • classified advertising • timetables • phone books • course listings • TV guides • and much more: just about any job where you’re given variable data to publish.
With InData and Xdata, you can
In your template text, use bracketed names to identify each incoming data field, e.g.«name», «address» or «description», and style each field with appropriate text and paragraph attributes. You can weave in static and dynamic text and pictures, include your fields in any order, or omit fields entirely.
Do simple jobs easily, and still tackle the toughest and most complex jobs with power.
Sort and then export from your database application, spreadsheet applications (e.g., Excel), or download from the web or your corporate information systems, and then import the resulting data file with InData or Xdata, fully formatted.
Use as many fields and records as is practical, with each being as long as needed.
Import related graphics into picture frames anchored in the incoming text. You can size the graphic to the picture frame or the frame to the graphic, using one of several sizing options.
Calculate and store information for later use in the prototype, or for use in later records.
Create more sophisticated record templates that apply different formats to a field, based on its or another field’s value. For example, you can print heads and subheads only when they change, or generate a page break, given a change of value indicating a new section or subsection.
Loop over data elements (character or words or lines), looking for particular information, or even repeat whole portions of the prototype.
Create multiple, independent “dictionary-style” headers and footers on each page or spread, with sophisticated controls over the header/footer contents.
Based on incoming data, use different page layouts by applying master pages.
Drive InData / Xdata with scripts for automation of repetitive single jobs, as well as large, complex jobs involving multiple imports in multiple documents.
Build your templates with InCatalog / Xcatalog links embedded. Later, using InCatalog / Xcatalog, you can update fields in place from updated data, or extract any document updates to your data.
In your data to be imported, use the full Unicode character set in various encodings (auto-detected at input time).