Viewing a page from another Software

Question

Hi,
one of my customers uses InDesign for making the layout of a magazine. Each issue is an own document.
In the magazine there are pages for ads. Ad orders are entered for invoicing in some other (invoicing) software and for the layout in InDesign. Now when a client is on the phone and asks 'can I place an ad half a page in size on page 10 of the December issue?' the invoicing software(!) should be able to look up that page in the InDesign document. Means some window should open showing what is on that page 10 already, so that one can see if there is enough unused space to place the half page ad.
I'm a complete newbee to InDesign, maybe there are scripts or calls the invoicing software could use for that, giving document name and page no. to InDesign and thus opening the page or whatever.
Thanks.

Answer 1

@Dmitry – exporting a PDF could be an event driven thing.
Here an example with an "beforeSave" event, that every time you do a "Save" to the document will export an PDF with a predefined export set to the same location your InDesign file resides. Or to a different location you will define:
#targetengine "exportPDF" 
var myEventListenerVersions = app.addEventListener("beforeSave", ExportPDF, false, undefined);     
function ExportPDF(){
    var d=app.activeDocument;
    if (d.saved == true){
        d.exportFile(ExportFormat.PDF_TYPE, File(d.fullName+".pdf"), false, app.pdfExportPresets.itemByName("MyPDFpresetName"));
    alert("Saved and exported to PDF!");
Start that script from the ESTK (to make it work one session long, until you close InDesign) or put it in the "startup scripts" folder to initialize it every time you start InDesign. Of course you have to change the string "MyPDFpresetName" to a reasonable name.
Every time you save the InDesign file the exported PDF will be overwritten, so do not check the option "View PDF after Exporting" in your own PDF export preset.
An event listener for the "Save As" command will be a different one…
Uwe