InCatalog, a plug-in for Adobe InDesign, and Xcatalog, an XTension for QuarkXPress, with their easy-to-use data linker panels, enable you to create transparent links between your documents and your databases or spreadsheets. Once you have links in place, you can update prices, graphics, or product information with a simple menu invocation—or even change versions or swap languages.With InCatalog or Xcatalog, you can rest assured—your documents will always reflect your database contents.
InCatalog and Xcatalog are designed to update prices, graphics, or product information with one-click ease, in just about any kind of catalog, price list, travel schedule, directory, one-to-one marketing flyer, etc.
Or, for example, if you have different pricing regions in a catalog, InCatalog and Xcatalog can swap the prices in for each region automatically. InCatalog and Xcatalog can also extract updated document information so you can keep your database in synch with what you’ve changed, if that’s how your work flows best.
With InCatalog or Xcatalog, you can
Be sure that your document shows the latest info and prices in your database, and that your database shows last-minute changes you’ve made to your document.
Make changes in either the document or the database, and push the changes in the other direction with no extra work. (No need for intermediate steps such as report creation and extraction.)
Use off-line simple delimited text data “snapshot” files, on-line FileMaker Pro (and Runtime) databases under Mac OS, and on-line SQL databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and Access, using ODBC under Mac OS and Windows (Pro license).
Use the intuitive linking panel to establish links between any database element and any document text element—from a single character to a phrase to a paragraph to a whole story—or any picture element.Forget about links affecting the printing process (they don’t affect any page layout), but view links on the screen (if you choose) so you can see what you’re doing. Move links between documents and libraries transparently, for ease of building new documents from old document elements with links intact.
Use the linking panel’s interactive update capability to update the current single link, whole frames/stories, whole groups, or the current spread, even update automatically each time you make a change.
With pre-linked modules in libraries, drag a module, fill in a key value in one link, and watch the plug-in fill in the whole module automatically.
With just one menu selection, make sure all linked document elements match their corresponding database elements.
Use multiple open documents and use multiple data sources and destinations for complex jobs, even per-document, switching among them as needed.
Define any number of price styles per publishing project using full tagged text for arbitrary formatting, apply those styles per-link, and have prices fully styled as part of the automated update.
Select different strategies for obtaining a link’s key field value: direct from the link, direct from the linked contents, indirect from another direct link in the current group, or indirect from linked text before or after the current link.
With grouping and indirect keys, build whole modules that require only one key to be set to fully link everything in the module, or build lines or paragraphs of multiple links that are controlled from a single item.
Enable tagged text support on any link, to capture the full InDesign Tags or Xtags document formatting for any data element.
Update graphics, automatically resizing them to fit their destination frame in various ways, or to be left sized as-is.
Point InCatalog or Xcatalog to your picture folders, using aliases/shortcuts in your project control folder. Enable “fuzzy lookup,” which even finds linked graphics files that have filename prefixes or file types/suffixes not given by the data.
Script all updating operations for powerful workflow automation.
Use the full Unicode character set in various encodings, for all data files and ODBC connections.