Search the Community

I absolutely love that Affinity Publisher now has data merge. It's definitely better than what Adobe was offering a million years ago. But after trying it I realized I was still going to be stuck with multiple text frames when what I really needed was for all of the merged data to flow from one columned text frame to another, page by page. When you're dealing with hundreds of entries, there's nothing quite as mind-numbing as putting everything back together so that you can adjust for pagination, unused space, etc. Well, my husband (who writes code for scientific database uses) offered to make a little bit of Pearl code for me that I could then use to do my own data merge, which results in a simple .txt document being created with all of the info exactly as it needs to be all in one place that I can then copy and paste into Publisher and quickly do a bit of hand formatting (using a combination of find/replace for specific characters and and applying paragraph styles). It has made my life a million times simpler - though it still means if my client comes back to me with a change, I either have to manually go in to make the update (which can sometimes require updated pagination), or redo the entire directory. I realize Publisher's data merge functions are still in beta, but I would be ecstatic to know there's something in the works to have the resulting data merge exist in one continuous text frame. Barring that, would there be a way my husband's code could mark up the data merge in such a way that when I copy and paste it into Affinity, Affinity will automatically apply certain formats? Or is that a bit too outside the box? I'm attaching the little program here. For anyone who understands these sorts of things. It's custom made for me, so don't expect to be able to download as is and use it for your project, unless you know how to change the code. convert_directory.pl