Generating Dynamic PDF Workflow & Appropriate Tools

Question

Hi I’m working with a client who is looking to  dynamically generate a large number of letters for their clients.
Each letter with have a custom image in the letter  head and throughout the letter, depending on the dealer and promotion there is  quite a large amount of text substitution.
The client currently delivers the letter as  indesign files which at the moment we are either using live cycle (which imports very  poorly) or acrobat to go through manually and create form fields for areas that  require image or text substitution.
My largest issue as a developer is that livecycle  doesn’t give you the default text value capabilities to add large paragraphs of  text as default values.. indesign doesn’t let you design or export form fields  and acrobat sits halfway in between.
This is extremely frustrating as it ruins the  kerning and leading set in indesign because we need to text substitute and form  fields have little to no alignment or layout tools associated and so I was wondering  what would people generally use in this instance to achieve the desired  effect..
As it feels like we  have 3 solutions that generate pdfs all have slightly differing features  some better than others and why flip between 3 different tools to try  and do one thing well.. like if you could drag forms into indesign it  would solve everything!
Regards,
Tom
PDF

Answer 1

Unfortunately that doesn't really help because the designer gives
us the files, we need to make a forms based template and then users from different dealerships log in a substitute their info into tags.. so we're manipulating the forms programatically..