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Re: Airtable and Acrobat/InDesign

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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.

22 Replies 22
David_Huck
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

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.

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

Vincent_Tang
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

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
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

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

Sophia_Wilson
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

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
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

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

Mujahid_Powell
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

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
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

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.

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.

I’d really like to see if this is possible, too. The page designer is OK within airtable, but doesn’t provide the professional design capability that InDesign does. I’ve searched on Google but can’t seem to find any method someone has come up with.

I’m pretty new to Airtable but I must ask why no one has simply used the InDesign API with the Airtable API. Is there something I’m missing that prevents this integration?

Matt_Frederick
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

We’ll be rolling this out via EasyCatalog for our next catalog. It’s not a direct connection as we’ll be dumping out a CSV file for EasyCatalog to read. To be honest, that part is not much different than how we did this some years ago with Excel and EasyCatalog into InDesign, but now the content we’re using is being validated in Airtable by a larger team. Much better to have that happen there than in a proof.

Did you ever look more in depth into Adobe API <> Airtable Scripting, or are you aware of any threads that discuss it? Seems to me it should be possible…

I have not - no serious demand for my day job or Airtable users.

Thanks for the quick reply. I understand. I bet requests will pour in soon. As someone who’s worked extensively in the creative industries, Airtable is getting adopted more and more.

That would be great. Knowing that with confidence, you should get in front of that demand curve and have an integration tool ready.

great minds think alike!

Luis_Mendes1
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

I’ve done quite a bit of work with InDesign automation outside of plug-ins, building custom scripts. I’ve used CSV file workflows typically when client workflows require it, but most recently adapted scripts to access Airtable data directly and on demand when the scripts are fun using curl.

So could you generate indd files with info on airtable? Right now we have a template view, download a csv and do a datamerge via mydatamerge, but if you have a way to pull directly from airtable or even sync, I’m very interested.