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.

[Mutual_Bank]

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.

[Bill_French]

Andrew_Enright:

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

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]

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.

[Matteo_Cossu2]

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…

[Bill_French]

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

[Matteo_Cossu2]

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.

[Bill_French]

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

[Matteo_Cossu2]

great minds think alike!

[Luis_Mendes1]

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.

[Brent_del_Rosar]

Luis_Mendes1:

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.