Can I automate specialized, detailed, rater-like fonts in PS and ID?

Question

I'm trying to create a mailer for a group with about a thousand members, and the client wants to have each image personalized with the member's name such as you may have seen on those "my name in the picture" calendars. Here's an example for clarification:
http://www.americancalendar.com/intheimage/
The graphic design is no problem, but I'm certainly not getting paid enough to manually arrange every name on the list. I'm sure these companies have some way of automating the process. They must create the "font" then be able to auto-fill the right name/messages, but I can't figure out that workflow in my head. If the names were written in simpler fonts this would be a cake walk, but some of these fonts look more complicated than I know how to easily automate (in the example above, the blocks-of-snow and hay bale fonts, and I think there are environmental lighting and shadow effects on the lilypad and apple fonts).
Creating each of these images alone is well within my ability, but I've never really worked with font creation and, as I said, the automation in this project is throwing me for a loop. Can anyone help me figure this process out? Can I do it with just Photoshop and InDesign?

Answer 1

What you referring to is otherwise known as Variable Data Publishing in the industry.
In its simplest form, it is a mail merge or data merge feature such as you have with Word or InDesign.
For more complexity, there are excellent commercial solutions that work as plug-ins to InDesign (optionally in conjunction with Photoshop) that do this automation. The output is typically a PDF/VT file. One of the best examples of such a commercial solution is from XMPie.
Note that in the general case, you really don't want to rasterize text, but rather maintain the text using the fonts themselves.
          - Dov