InData 4.1.2 review
DownloadInData works like a bionically-enhanced mail merge, freeing you from endless manual formatting.
|
|
InData works like a bionically-enhanced mail merge, freeing you from endless manual formatting. Using an English-like scripting language, you define the rules that format your text and graphics.
Based on the rules you write, you can include or exclude information — parts of a field or the entire field — and create sophisticated design templates. For example, you can apply different formats to a field based on its content, or based on the content of another field. When you’re ready to build your document, simply point InData to your ASCII text file — and it will produce pages at jaw-dropping speeds (up to thousands of pages per hour).
Here are just a few things you can produce with InData: catalogs, one-to-one marketing, TV guides, directories, real estate guides, trader and swap magazines, phone books, classified advertising, and much more!
InData lets you import in-line artwork, apply master pages, create headers and footers, and is Applescriptable for even more automation control. It integrates with InCatalog as well, allowing you to build a document and then update your data at any time without having to rebuild your document.
What's New:
Fixed a problem where scaling images using "Size to Fit Horizontally, then Size Frame Vertically" was occasionally failing.
Fixed a problem with the open statement where providing a data file name (e.g. open "mydata.txt") in the prototype wasn't finding the file in the document's folder unless its specification contained an initital path separator (e.g. open ":mydata.txt"). (Mac OS only)
When putting tagged text, paragraph and character overrides are no longer cleared when a paragraph marker is encountered. Instead, applying a paragraph style will clear all paragraph and character-level overrides as well as reset the active character style (to No Style, currently). Applying a character style will now clear only character-level overrides. Otherwise, extant styles and overrides persist across paragraph markers.
Fixed a problem where manually updating headers/footers associated with a text frame on the pasteboard might result in a crash.
All InData scripting events' story parameters now accept either a story name (which can be an InData-applied label, an InDesign-native script label, or an InCopy label), a story object, or an arbitrary text-based story element object (any element of a story resulting in a text "selection"). So you can now do something crazy like:
import data from myData using prototype story (line 1 of myProtoStory) into story (character 5 of myTargetStory)
When scripting, InData will now work properly with window-less documents. Since there's no concept of a front-most document in this case, however, you'll need to use the import event that now sits on the document object. (So all of InData's events now sit on both the InDesign application object and the document object.) For example:
tell myWindowlessDoc to import data from myData using prototype story "proto" into story "target"
NB: an import event sent to the application object will always attempt to use the front-most document (i.e. AppleScript's document 1), while an event issued to a particular document will always attempt to use that document. Additionally, the specified prototype and target stories must exist within the target document.
When scripting, InData will now obey the user interaction setting.
For scripting, we added an optional "showing dialog" boolean parameter (default: true) to the import and headers update events which may be used to block the display of the import dialog without changing the user interaction level. For example:
import data form myData using prototype story myStory into story myTargetStory without showing dialog
Note, however, that if the user interaction level is set to never interact, then this parameter will have no effect (i.e. never interact always wins).
When scripting, not showing the import dialog will inhibit document updating and scrolling.
Added "using InData" suffix to all scripting event descriptions to make InData-specific events easier to find.
Importing InDesign tagged text containing mark reference tags (used in headers/footers) will now import without issuing an error.
Fixed a problem where InData could crash when inserting continued text in a header/footer.
An extant selection is now properly restored after manually updating headers/footers.
Expanded the import dialog slightly to better display the names of data files with long paths or filenames.
The "About" dialog entry in the InDesign (on MacOS) and Help (on Windows) menus has been moved from an "About Plug-ins" sub-menu to a new "About Em Software Plug-ins" sub-menu.
Requirements:
Adobe InDesign 2.0 or higher.
InData 4.1.2 search tags