Airtable and Acrobat/InDesign

[Andrew_Enright]

Has anyone succeeded in merging Airtable data with InDesign CC layouts/style-sheets? :nerd_face:

We’d love to be able to leverage online datasets to populate nicely designed layouts for PDF export. This export will be done both locally, as final artwork files for professional print; and hopefully… automatically.

We’d :sparkling_heart: LURV :sparkling_heart: to be able to generate PDFs, in the cloud, using real-deal layouts, that can then be relayed/ingested via other integrated services like Dropbox, Slack, email, etc.

How would you build an Airtable-InDesign CC-Google Cloud Print-Slack/Email stack?

THANX YALL! :dancer:

A.

[David_Huck]

I too would love to have this integrated into Airtable directly… WebMerge was too costly for our use case and while not attempting the HTML approach (as described in this forum post) with Zapier and cloudprint I am concerned with my ability to pull any of this off successfully.

[Andrew_Enright]

I should have mentioned Adobe Acrobat. InDesign is not needed if we get real-deal integration with PDF Forms.

[Vincent_Tang]

Couldn’t you just use 65 bit catalog software, an indesign plugin? and then use airtable >> export out CSV >> then just use that?

I suggest looking into Adobe Indesign plugins, https://www.65bit.com/

Cloudprint, why not just run phraseexpress (autohotkey application) ? You can port in excel data and automatically generate forms from it

http://www.phraseexpress.com/document-generator.htm

Literally just export out your CSV and integrate it into anything that integrates into a CSV

For slack integration an API should suffice

Email stacks, use API, zapier should have integrations here too

Alternatively, if you can get an ODBC connection, and just mimic that to airtable, you could integrate a lot of things that way as well

[Vincent_Tang]

Also there’s a lot more resources on adobes webpage on here, on these 2 areas where you can see all the potential plugins with indesign

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/plug-ins.html

and

Redokun

40+ InDesign plugins and utilities

A list of InDesign plugins ordered by category that you can install to add features to your InDesign.

[Sophia_Wilson]

I have read this blog, Acrobat Failed to Connect to a DDE Server, they have given solution in a very easy way. You will find solutions of all your queries. Actually, I have also found the solution for my issue.

[Mark_Hernandez1]

So… Is there a recommended way to sync Airtable information into auto generated InDesign pages?

[Mujahid_Powell]

I too would love to hear of a recommended way to import or sync Airtable data into InDesign. The Page Creator block was too clunky to make Pro worth it for my design team.

Maybe Airtable can provide a database connection for EasyCatalog/InDesign?

[Epson_printer_e]

I will tell you more about how to fix technical glitches in your system.
Epson printer is the branded printer, many people use this. If you are facing this Epson printer error code 0xe3 issue means its probably interrupting your printer job.

[Andrew_Enright]

Bumping this… Has anyone found a relatively easy way to pump Airtable data into InDesign layouts?

We could nearly fully automate many laborious documents (catalogs, for instance) if we could leverage Airtable as a CMS for layout content. And ideally, it would live-update, or present a “broken link” within InDesign when the content needs to be refreshed. We would like to use AT as a single source of truth for product info, and not trap versions of half-truth in documents!

Thanks,

A.