InDesign Server Automation

I'm looking into purchasing InDesign Server for the document automation features. One feature, Data Merge, would be a tremendous help for our company.
I'm having some trouble setting it up with a script.
Here's what I have running, just a basic test.
var myDocument = app.open(File("C:\\inetpub\\wwwroot\\indesign\\test.indd"));
with (app.dataMergeOptions) {
linkImages = true;
removeBlankLines = false;
createNewDocument = true;
documentSize = 100;
} // (end of dataMergeOptions)
myDocument.dataMergeProperties.mergeRecords();
myDocument.exportFile(ExportFormat.PDF_TYPE, File ("c:\\inetpub\\wwwroot\\indesign\\merged.pdf"));
myDocument.close ();
In the file I had it linked to a csv that pulled data but it seems the link has been broken (or out of date according to the error).
Can anyone help me with what I am doing wrong or even provide a better method?
I am running the script through PHP via SOAP in IIS running on Windows 2008 R2
InDesign Server CC 2014

Thank you for your post Loic.Aigon.
After I stumbled upon this post javascript - InDesign Script: export to IDML - Stack Overflow I found the option dataMergeProperties.selectDataSource(csv file).
Here's my updated code, sorry for the missing formatting.
var myDocument = app.open(File("C:\\inetpub\\wwwroot\\indesign\\test.indd"));
var myDataSource = File("C:\\inetpub\\wwwroot\\indesign\\test.csv");
with (app.dataMergeOptions) {
linkImages = true;
removeBlankLines = false;
createNewDocument = true;
documentSize = 100;
} // (end of dataMergeOptions)
myDocument.dataMergeProperties.selectDataSource(myDataSource);
myDocument.dataMergeProperties.mergeRecords();
app.activeDocument.exportFile(ExportFormat.PDF_TYPE, File ("/c/inetpub/wwwroot/indesign/merged2.pdf"));
//myDocument.save(new File("C:\\inetpub\\wwwroot\\indesign\\mergedOutput.idml"));
myDocument.close ();
if I run myDocument.exportFile(ExportFormat.PDF_TYPE, File ("/c/inetpub/wwwroot/indesign/merged2.pdf")); then it tries to merge but throws a warning [link manager Link out of date: file: and links the original csv file it was created with (not my referenced data source file).
I believe I should merge on the active document and not the original document.
But if I run app.activeDocument.exportFile(ExportFormat.PDF_TYPE, File ("/c/inetpub/wwwroot/indesign/merged2.pdf")); it throws a javascript error, app.activeDocument is undefined.

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Developer Update for InDesign Server Developers

Hello all,
If you are creating plug-ins for the Creative Suite of Adobe applications, you'll want to attend this ninety minute session for an update on developing plug-ins for Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Bridge, Version Cue, and XMP.
Topics include the C and C++ APIs, Extendscript and other developer details. Dan Brotsky, Chief Architect for the Creative Suite, will discuss highlights of the Version Cue SDK, and the Creative Suite Activation Software. This presentation is not for the technically faint of heart expect high technology at high speed!
This session will be recorded for later review, and a summary document made available for reference.
Who should attend? Any developer that is interested in creating plug-ins for any products in the Creative Suite.
May 3rd. 9:00 am to 10:30 am PST
Free
Online via Acrobat Connect - watch from your desktop - no special software require to participate.
Register at:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=883099&loc=en_us
MNR

I have spent some time geting Java automation to work with InDesign, it's not my favorite language but I learned some things that may help and put them into some course content that Adobe should put out shortly; will post here when it is available online.
Our company, Silicon Publishing, provides general InDesign Server automation training, though we don't have a current offering that specifically targets Java we teach some of the basics of working with Java (many unique techniques!) and could arrange a limited form of training.
The documentation and samples with the SDK should take you part of the way there: for specific scripts, it has been helpful to us to get things working in an easier-to-write (i.e. JavaScript) script first, then translate such a script to Java, taking into account the unique characteristics of the language and various tactics (outlined in the SDK documentation) to address these.
Max
Max Dunn
Silicon Publishing
www.siliconpublishing.com
[email protected]

InDesign server crashes every time when calling deleteEmptyPages in script

We are evaluting InDesign Server CS6 on a Windows server environment. We have an idml file, sample xml file that is tagged to specific frames inside the idml file and a script file for execution on the server. This script opens the idml file using the app.open api, imports the xml file and export the ID file to a PDF. Because we have table content with variable row count, we are using the smart text reflow functionality. Setting the text preferences with smart text reflow appears to be working but we also want to delete the empty second page when the content is less than a page. So, we also tried using the deleteEmptyPages property document's textPreferences. When this is set to true and the script is executed on the ID server using the sampleclient, the server crashes with the following message. When I do the same thing in the InDesign UI using the preferences options, it works as expected.
The script looks like below - is this the right way to do it?
var myInddFile = app.scriptArgs.get("idfile"); //"X:/IDFiles/AutoFlow.indd";
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Thanks Harbs. We are looking at full automation and so removing the pages manually is not an option. But I did find a script at InTools http://in-tools.com/article/scripts-blog/script-of-the-day-jan-24-2010/ that helps with automating the removal of empty pages. This script appears to be a nice workaround for server side usage. I used it on my document with multiple column text frames and it is removing the empty page as expected. If there is a better way to do this, let me know. Thanks.

What's needed for a PDF processing module for InDesign Server?

Hello,
After digging through lots of documentation and whitepapers, I am still puzzled about what would be an efficient way to implement a software module that handles some specific processing tasks of PDF output (automatically generated in InDesign Server and targeted for various types of print configurations from small-run LFP up to very high volume commercial printing).
We have a working standalone script that uses Acrobat's preflight and correction functions, and now we would like to port and integrate this into a server-based workflow. Apparently, there is no Acrobat Server product available. Distiller Server does exist, but seems to be limited to converting PostScript to PDF without the PDF-to-PDF processing features we need. Some of the functionality that is typically found in RIPs (e.g. converting colours to a preset output intent with highly configurable options [for pixel/vector elements, black and spot colour ink issues etc.] and flattening native transparency) could probably be implemented using the Adobe PDF Print Engine, but this seems a bit overkill and would probably require extensive programming from scratch. I suspect there should be a smarter way to use existing software – but which? I am not yet familiar with InDesign Server; does its SDK permit full access to the same parts/functions of the PDF library that Acrobat uses for its preflight and correction features?
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Eric

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InDesign Server CS6 (MacOS) - JavaScripting & Troubleshooting "Bus error" or "Segmentation fault"

I'm attempting to convert a workflow from InDesign CS5.5 Desktop with AppleScript to InDesign Server CS6 with JavaScript. It seems most of our templates work fine but every now and then I run into one that seems to work properly but right after we export to PDF and JPG which is the final step in the script I get either a Bus error or a Segmentation fault error. The files do export and the console sits idle for a few seconds then I get the crash. It doesn't seem to give me anything else and I can't find a crash dump or core file anywhere on disk to examine.
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Re: verbose mode. These are not InDesign error messages. They are system errors, saying that an app (InDesign?) crashed, went away, hence could not issue any kind of message. Crash logs are the place to start. If they don't help, and the crash is outside your code, after that it's over to the maintainer (Adobe?)
Worth sharing a suitable crash log, as the list of routines active at the crash can narrow down issues.

InDesign Server as a reporting service

Hi, Im looking for help/guidelines regarding InDesign. I'm a software architect working on a line-of-business application that will eventually require printing about 5 hundred thousand personalized report (of about 20 pages each) over a couple of days (and many other smaller jobs), and my client requires that this job be executed by a third party. Think of the document as a fairly standard financial report printed once a year for each participant. The application is built in .net, backed by a sql database. Once a year, the data is mined, computed, and outputed in a format acceptable by the supplier (who is chosen through a public tendering process).
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So here is what I've figured out so far (and where I will need your help if I'm not making sense) :
- Create a kind of IDML template using InDesign on a desktop computer
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Thanks in advance for all the answers.

Hi, JP43.
For what it's worth, your question is on the boundary between the scripting forum and the general forum.
So from what I've learned thus far, to be complient with most suppliers, I must use some file format like postscript or eps,
This seems a bit peculiar. The obvious format for your document output would be PDF. PostScript and EPS seem weird choices, though certainly conceivable (well, I don't think you can have multi-page EPS files, but you can certainly have 20 EPS files and you can have multi-page PostScript files, but they tend to be output-device specific, though they need not really be).
What is your supplier doing with the file? Are they a printer? A specialty industry auditor? Or something else? If they're a printer, they should be asking for a PDF, I think.
Though it's also possible what they want is a less final output format that humans can deal with in other applications, such as Microsoft Word. A lot depends on the workflow. Anyhow, back to the main question:
and to do this, it looks like InDesign Server might be what I'm looking for.
Note that it's not a requirement that you use InDesign Server, and at $22,000/license, depending on your volumes, it may make sense to just use InDesign Desktop. The standard InDesign EULA doesn't let you drive its automation remotely, but if you have a human being walk up to a computer and start a script that reads 500,000 input files and produces 500,000 output files, I think that is in compliance.
Replacing your bullets with numbers:
1. Create a kind of IDML template using InDesign on a desktop computer2. in our .net application, modify the IDML for each participant to personalize it (a lot of conditional code to remove sections of text, and inject numbers, etc).
3. Send each (or a batch is feasable) to the InDesign Server to prepare for publishing into postscript/eps files
4. and if feasable, also create a PDF of each because we need to keep a digital version of the document on the client's corporate SharePoint (for legal reasons).
#2 is definitely one way to do it. If you are comfortable manipulating the IDML XML in .NET, and it's not important for you to leverage InDesign's object model in your conditions (e.g., you do not need to know how many pages InDesign would set a particular table at, and that does not effect your decisions of what objects to place where), then this is fine.
If your batch data is fairly simple substitutions, you could use InDesign's Data Merge feature. But that's really just a mail merging feature and it sounds like you have large tables of data and it is probably not sufficient.
The way I would probably implement it is to write code for InDesign's scripting that starts with a template (INDD or IDML or whatever), and then instructions InDesign to place various items in various places, replace/remove conditional items, etc. This allows you to leverage InDesign's knowledge of how the page is laid out and to make layout-continent adjustments in your script. If you tried to do this in IDML, you would have to replicate InDesign's layout engine in your software which is essentially infeasable and at which point you might as well throw InDesign out the window and just use something like iText to produce a PDF directly.
That said, #'s 1,3 and 4 are all trivial.

Indesign server application

I have a separate web application, which among other things works with Indesign files.
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2)replace some specific text content inside document; return output document to my webapplication;
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Is it feasible? How would I go about such task? What bits of Adobe software would I need?
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Any suggestion/links/information is deeply appreciated.

Doing some searching I came across this thread in the Adobe Reader forum which is the first place I've seen a concrete answer, so you might want to give it a try: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/392875?tstart=0

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With that number of produced documents your topmost issue will be speed. For that reason I'd try to not use IDML and outside processing - to open an existing document is much faster than to import it from IDML, and if you can reuse the same template document without close-open, it will be even faster. InDesign has many features such as conditional text, text variables, counters that could be utilized. Your script would then work straight on the document object model, given an input such as tab delimited text or xml.
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Output will work in all mentioned formats. You might get along with a PDF-only workflow, but as you mentioned the print supplier may have special requirements.
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Visual Studio compiling 64 Bit Plugin for InDesign Server CS5

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http://blog.siliconpublishing.com

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