Image is in same folder as XML file: file:///image.jpg (or file:image.jpg) Various places online, I have found references (like page 6 of this PDF by Cari Jansen) that say that InDesign expects the href path to be formatted as follows (leaving out the href= bit and the quoting): I then import the XML file into an InDesign (CS6 or CC) document to layout the actual catalogue.Įverything about this work flow works perfectly and very elegantly- except for the fact that InDesign seemingly refuses to find any image whose href path leads to somewhere not on the local hard drive. I work for a small publishing company, and we regularly create catalogues, brochures, etc., where we feature various hand-picked subsets of our available titles.īased on the titles that are to be included in a catalogue, I create (in PHP, on my localhost, so very flexibly) an XML file with all the metadata of each book, including a link to the cover of the book.Īll our cover images, named by the ISBN of the book in question, are located in a folder on a network drive that I log on to via Samba (authenticating with user name and password) and then mount on the desktop of my working machine (a Mac running OS X Yosemite/El Capitan the mount itself is done through Finder’s Connect to server function, not manually through the Terminal). The following is a slightly edited version of the SuperUser question: It is of course rather tech-heavy but on the other hand, biggish XML-import jobs in InDesign tend to be something graphic designers deal with a lot, so hopefully it’s not very off-topic here. So now, even though I think it’s a better fit for SuperUser than here, I’m re-asking here in the hopes that someone here knows the answer. I'd definitely build out all the visual elements in your pre-merge document, though-are you merging first and then going in and designing elements? Master pages will help, but you should definitely have your page & placeholders approximately where you want them to help Data Merge along, especially in your case.I asked this question on SuperUser nearly four months ago, but despite several edits to bump it to the top and even offering a bounty, it has only received two comments (by the same user) and no answers at all. If they don't know InDesign / don't want to call y'all for help, I bet those files look like a real trainwreck in a year. If they don't want to open InDesign at all, they can't generate a file. There's no way to update it without actually updating it, which sounds like a solipsism but it's true. Yeah, unfortunately this just isn't possible. They want to avoid having to update it manually since it is going to be well over 46 pages, they don't know adobe software and don't want to have to come back to us for help. Their goal is to have us set up a catalog design that once we hand off files, the client can go back later on and automate the data without having to go into the artwork. I am not as proficient in inDesign as I am in other adobe software and seem to be hitting a wall with this. And at that point, if the client needed to go back and update any information, they would lose the design work I had created and be back to square one. The data merge is great up until where I need more than just having charts on a page and I need to include section headers and other branding/design elements. Our client is requesting a full product catalog that is built in indesign (which includes a cover, index, section headers, branding elements etc). I don't think I've tried using master pages for this so I will give that a shot first!
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