Live Data Merge

[Frank Jonen]

There's no reason why it can't work with the auto-reflow within the active document. The need to generate a new document to evaluate the dataset just feels clunky. Like using a Microsoft app from the early 2000s. Generating new documents should be optional for the few people who generate entire catalogs with it. But even there it would be faster to see what you're working with.

[Dazzler]

If I understand you correctly this is the feature I came here to request.

Rather than generating a document with all the merged records in, have it so you can directly export to individual files that are copies of the current document, so when you're working with large datasets you don't get the current issue where it can't deal with the document size.

I'm currently looking at a CSV that has 650 records. I can generate documents with 200 in no problem at all, but if I try to all 650 in one hit Publisher becomes extremely unresponsive after generating the document, despite there being plenty of RAM free out of the allocation I've given it, and the CPU isn't particularly busy, so not sure what that's about (they don't contain images as such, just some vector based bar charts that are tiny in filesize). Waiting for ages doesn't seem to reolve it either, and I have to close publisher and restart it and try fewer records.

But ultimately I don't need a 650 page document, I need 650 individual PDFs based on a single page design that has my custom fields in, so having a box in the merge  generate area that you could tick that would allow each iteration to be sent out to a exported file would be so much better in my case (and allowing a choice of export preset would be great). It would be expecially nice if I could choose a field(s) to compose the filename with, or even just an indexed filename would work. That way if you have a 4 page document, with fields throughout you can just run the entire CSV off in one hit rather than batching it up and then having to split the resulting pdf into parts afterwards. It also means there's a lot less strain on the RAM as it can simply trash each cached generation once it's exported the file and start afresh with the original doc template.


 

[wonderings]

Definitely a feature I would want as well if I was using Publisher for data merging. It is not the norm, but it is not a rare time when I have done that in Indesign. It really should just come down to adding that feature in the PDF export option and then when doing a merge allowing you all the options of the PDF export.