0

We're trying to provide multiple sales reps customized advertising collateral by updating {{targeted}} content spots throughout PDF documents. These customizations include {{logo}}, {{headshot}}, {{name}}, {{company}}, {{telephone}}, {{email}}, etc.

Logo & headshot are images.

Name, company, tel, email are plain text (but could potentially be converted to images).

The company providing the print ready artwork are designing in InDesign and exporting to PDF. We initially started reproducing the PDFs into picture perfect HTML. It was a lot of tedious work, but that did work.

The client really liked the end result and submitted several more pieces of advertising collateral to convert, which immediately became very labor intensive and time consuming.

The question I've been trying to find an answer to is if it's possible to update an INDD or PDF file through scripting, to dynamically update the print ready document without using InDesign or Acrobat. We're ideally looking for a no/low cost solution that we can automate.

I assumed there might be some third party PDF script that might update targeted content, but I've come up empty handed.

I next considered the fact that INDD files can pull their Linked content in from local files/folders. If we could auto-generate a new INDD > PDF file from the sales reps contact info by having it pull from these matching locations, that would work... but I've been unable to find a solution to edit INDD files without actually opening InDesign.

I've also thought about referencing these files with a URL, which sounds as though it might be the perfect solution... but I haven't been able to find that solution either.

I'm really hoping that someone might have stumbled into one of these scenarios themselves, having input and experience to share.

Thank you in advance!

Improve this question
2
  • Hi. Welcome to GDSE. You should ask your designer about this. It sounds like you are describing Adobe InCopy functionality. It's software which allows clients to update documents created in InDesign, which could then be exported as PDF. Editing PDFs is generally fraught with difficulty as the format is not really meant to be used for editing. Commented Oct 21 at 16:17
  • Not an answer because there are too many variables involved, but if your content areas are e.g. fixed areas, then you can make the custom content and then add the pre-rendered PDF as e.g. a watermark. Commented Oct 22 at 17:28

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
0

InDesign does not have a magic trick built in for this. Maybe with a really experienced programmer you could improvise something with scripting, but don't bet on that being easy. And even with a perfectly working script, somebody still needs to open up ID and run the script.

The more immediate solution is the good old, find somebody to copy paste new content for you into the template :)))

Otherwise change the workflow to Canva which has limitations, but is more user friendly and has collaboration features.

Improve this answer
2
  • Is there any other layout software that might be appropriate to satisfy this problem? Commented Oct 22 at 16:38
  • In my opinion you are looking for InDesign, but need to accept and work with some limitations ... otherwise it sounds like you're looking for an app to do something, without actually opening the app, in that case you're looking for a programmer, not an app. And getting a junior designer to work with INDD for you, could be alot easier and cheaper than working with a programmer on a custom workflow. You can hire people online and they will copy paste text into INDD templates for you all day long. Commented Oct 25 at 7:16
0

I ran into almost the same issue, trying to fill in placeholders inside designer-made PDFs exported from InDesign and other tools.

I tried pretty much every major PDF library (PDFBox, iText, etc.), and none could reliably replace text because InDesign exports everything as positioned glyphs. Once it's a PDF, the semantic structure is gone, so a placeholder like {{name}} might be split across multiple drawing operations and even if not simply replacing it would not work either because of how font embedding works in PDF.

In the end I built my own tool that deeply analyzes the PDF’s drawing instructions to reconstruct a proper, editable document that can actually be searched and modified. Since it works quite well (at least in my humble opinion), I decided to publish it in case it's useful to others. It’s called PDFDancer.

We are currently in an open (and free) beta, would be happy If you like to give it a try. No account needed.

Improve this answer

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.