glacial906
Technical User
Hello,
I have a pretty detailed question that I hope someone out there may take the time to read through and answer. If no one does I understand, because it is one of those problems that is specific to one shop, but if someone enjoys a challenge and wants to offer any advice they may have, it would be greatly appreciated. I am including a link to an example page of the file to show what I am talking about.
I am a graphic designer at a printing/production shop. One of the jobs I handle frequently is the layout of a folded booklet for a large gas station corporation. The booklets are intended for truck drivers to use while out on the road and contain a listing of all the fuel stops that the drivers are allowed to use while on the road. These booklets contain information about each fuel stop, such as the city the stop is in, directions, phone #, fax #, and amenities. These books are set up in InDesign CS3 and use tabbed text boxes to display the fuel stop info.
The customer wants a way to make the production of these books go by faster. Whenever they need a new guide, they typically send us a hard copy of a previous guide with the stops they want deleted "X'd" out, and the stops they want added written in. And different guides feature different fields of information for the stops -- for example, one fuel guide may have the Comdata code for each stop; another may not. There is little to no consistency from one book to another. So this requires a lot of editing to these text boxes and takes a long time.
I have considered the possibility of creating a database for them with ALL the fuel stops listed, and ALL fields of information, every field they could possibly want. Then it would just be a matter of doing a data merge into the InDesign document. However, after I started down this path I discovered that there is no way to display MULTIPLE RECORDS OF ONE SPREADSHEET in a SINGLE TEXT BOX in InDesign. It would defeat the purpose to feature one text box for every record from my spreadsheet.
I have read a bit on using XML documents to import data into InDesign, but don't know much about it. Would this be a viable solution to my dilemma? I would basically need a database that could be edited and then output to an XML file to import into a text box in InDesign. Also, the resulting text would have to be able to be styled in InDesign -- like making some text bold, some red, etc. Does anyone have experience in this type of thing? Specifically, I would like to know what program I would need to write an XML document, and if there are any programs out there that can format XML information in a spreadsheet-like format.
Any help/advice would be tremendously appreciated!
I have a pretty detailed question that I hope someone out there may take the time to read through and answer. If no one does I understand, because it is one of those problems that is specific to one shop, but if someone enjoys a challenge and wants to offer any advice they may have, it would be greatly appreciated. I am including a link to an example page of the file to show what I am talking about.
I am a graphic designer at a printing/production shop. One of the jobs I handle frequently is the layout of a folded booklet for a large gas station corporation. The booklets are intended for truck drivers to use while out on the road and contain a listing of all the fuel stops that the drivers are allowed to use while on the road. These booklets contain information about each fuel stop, such as the city the stop is in, directions, phone #, fax #, and amenities. These books are set up in InDesign CS3 and use tabbed text boxes to display the fuel stop info.
The customer wants a way to make the production of these books go by faster. Whenever they need a new guide, they typically send us a hard copy of a previous guide with the stops they want deleted "X'd" out, and the stops they want added written in. And different guides feature different fields of information for the stops -- for example, one fuel guide may have the Comdata code for each stop; another may not. There is little to no consistency from one book to another. So this requires a lot of editing to these text boxes and takes a long time.
I have considered the possibility of creating a database for them with ALL the fuel stops listed, and ALL fields of information, every field they could possibly want. Then it would just be a matter of doing a data merge into the InDesign document. However, after I started down this path I discovered that there is no way to display MULTIPLE RECORDS OF ONE SPREADSHEET in a SINGLE TEXT BOX in InDesign. It would defeat the purpose to feature one text box for every record from my spreadsheet.
I have read a bit on using XML documents to import data into InDesign, but don't know much about it. Would this be a viable solution to my dilemma? I would basically need a database that could be edited and then output to an XML file to import into a text box in InDesign. Also, the resulting text would have to be able to be styled in InDesign -- like making some text bold, some red, etc. Does anyone have experience in this type of thing? Specifically, I would like to know what program I would need to write an XML document, and if there are any programs out there that can format XML information in a spreadsheet-like format.
Any help/advice would be tremendously appreciated!