A5 Postcard - Variable text on Front and Back - Printed A3 Duplex

[rdrunner400]

Hi,

New user to the Indesign forum so please be kind.

I have been tasked with setting up a A5 Postcard with variable text on the front and variable text on the reverse. ( name and address on front ) and depending on where the person lives will determine which shop or branch to visit to redeem the offer. so it is important that the details match.

We would like to print these 4up on A3 100gsm Paper.

Not difficult I hear you say. But wait there is more. I would like the data that is on the front of each card to match to the data that is on the back of the card.

My question is how would i set this up.

Should i set it up in Indesign as a A5 Card ??? with two pages and then use some sort of imposition plug in to enable these to be step and repeat ???

We have approx 10,000 to do .... and each of the cards will have different names and address details on the front to what is showing on the back as variable text.

Any help or input as to how to approx this job would be greatly appreciated.

rdrunner40

 

[darryncooke]

wouldn't this be easier to setup into multiple batch processes?

Each set of addresses get the message on the back? I mean how many different messages can you have at 10,000? 3-5 maybe?

Id just create the postcards with the messages on the reverse for however many fall into that batch as far as number of addresses go. Then I will batch the addresses in per message set.

I am assuming that the variable text on the back would be "go to this shop XXX" depending on the city on the front.

Darryn Cooke

http://www.darryncooke.com

| Marketing and Creative Services

 

[spamjim]

An important variable to this is your printer/press. Does the machine have the ability to run both sides at once and resume after misfeeds? Or does the paper need to go through a second pass where a misfeed could get things out of sync?

 

[rdrunner400]

Hi

I will attempt to answer both items at the same time if i may.

The cards HAVE to be run in a single file do to ROYAL MAIL discounts that have been obtained on the entire file being walksorted.

I am able to duplex them on our xerox production laser.

So I was thinking along the lines of creating as a A% and then using imposition to do the N up imposition of the file for me.

I am a skilled PReS Developer so I understand all that is being mentioned but alas the new company only has indesign available so i have to make do with this cool application.

Regards

rdrunner

Any help will be accepted.

 

[spamjim]

Thanks for giving some context with you situation. The "new user" introduction probably framed our responses.

First of all, while this forum has good people in it, there are many more good people at the official InDesign Adobe forums and at indesignsecrets.com. Keep those resources in mind for additional help. There are a few good articles at

http://indesignsecrets.com/tag/data-merge

Unless you are able to use an external data merge tool to add variable data from a template PDF file exported from InDesign, it is possible to do this in InDesign. You'll end up with a 5,000 page document. You may need to segment your source data set to produce smaller (say 1000 page) InDesign documents if your system is light on resources.

Just quarter your A3 page and set up 4 instances of your design on 2 InDesign pages, for the front and back. The data merge function can generate the additional pages from your initial 2 pages.

 

[rdrunner400]

Hi,

So if i understand you correctly ... I would just set up the A3 sheet in quarters each would represent the A5 Card and matching A3 Sheet for the Card Backs.

Okay got that bit ... how would I go about the merge process.... would my data file already have to have an 4up sort on it or will the data merge take care of this as well.

As when i have finished lasering these cards on the laser they are going to be cut into four stacks and stack one on top of each other ... so top card will be number 1 and the bottom card will be 10000.

I are trying some imposition software here currently where i am using a A5 design and then doing stack and repeat but boy is it slow and i am on quad core with 16gb of ram ... taking over 45mins so far....

Any further input accepted gratefully.

 

[spamjim]

As you will cut these pages in a stack and still need order, you will need to prepare data before taking it to InDesign. You might quarter your data source. Assuming the source is already sorted for postal area, copy/paste rows 1-2500 to source file #1, rows 2501-5000 would go to source file #2, etc... Then you do a mail merge with each data source file occupying 1 quarter of your page. The alternative would be to keep a single source file but do some magic sorting so row 1 has the same postal area as row 5, row 2 like row 6, etc...

Here's a good tutorial that covers both single and multiple records per page...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu6nSDQYdgw