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[Implemented] Data merge


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22 hours ago, Johannes said:

It's called #ADOBYE :10_wink:

well, then I'd spell it "hey-dont-buy"-Inc :22_stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I'm using the different Serif applications for over a decade already, and it's quite simple for me: No mail/data merge, no buy.

As such, I guess I'll stay with my DrawPlus X8/PagePlus X9 combo for now (which works good enough for me anyways), thank you very much.

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Yet another +1 for data merge in Publisher.

Coming from Adobe Creative Cloud, just purchased Photo, Designer and Publisher and now in the process of making the full switch from Adobe to Affinity.

Data merge would be extremely useful, as it's currently one of the very few features that I still need and miss from Adobe.

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@SirAnoke, @paull, @GWLT_LCD, @Peter Pan, @IgorRock, @Antioche & @R_G

Welcome all of you to the Serif Affinity forums :) :) :) 

With so many people, like yourselves, enjoying Publisher but joining the forums to specifically request this feature and others like it, be aware that we very clearly aim to add this . Delaying launch of Affinity Publisher until it performs all the features of competitors' products (that have been around in some cases for decades) would have meant an unnecessary delay to Publisher to those for whom the current feature set is sufficient for their jobs. Be reassured the developers understand what is required of this product. Thanks for your valuable input and your patience while the addition of this important feature is addressed.

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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I am delighted to see this response and understand completely where you are coming from.  

 

I cannot wait and have created a Python Script, which allows me specify the fields from a tab delimited  file, define the x,y coordinates on a page, plus font name and font size.  I can select a Word or PowerPoint document as output (and am sure could extend to other doc types).  The script runs extremely quickly and I end up with an extremely professionally formatted document.  A big advantage of using PowerPoint is that I can create a Powerpoint template, with text and image elements predefined. My script can select from a list of my frequently used templates. The PowerPoint is saved as a Powerpoint File and a PDF file.  I can then always customise the PowerPoint file created.

This is so efficient for me that maybe I will find it difficult to use your products later.

Both Microsoft Mail Merge and Adobe InDesign/ Photoshop make it way way way to difficult to handle basic mail merge of data to a templated document. 

If and when you do release this product with this feature set, I may not use it myself now, but will be delighted to show others who need this functionality but do not have the skills to work with existing Microsoft and Adobe product sets.

I can place text or images. For images I use the url of the image file on disk (plus width / height required of image on the page.

Regards.

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I’m absolutely in with Data Merge. But PLEASE do it the Affiniy-way, and not the Adobe-way. 

InDesign has huge problems with Encodings and simple things even MS Word can do (I’m speaking of things as soft spaces that vanish when there is no data for a field – not possible in InDesign). 

I’m sure you can turn Data Merge into something pleasant!

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Microsoft makes it very difficult and non intuitive to dynamically merge text and images. 

Adobe has its own clunky and error prone process for merging text and images. The benefit over Microsoft is that merging images dynamically  is more reliable.  

Whatever solution is adopted, make sure that tabbed delimited files and or native excel files can be used to store the text and url of the images to be inserted. A workflow based on csv is a disaster, as normal text punctuation gets mixed up with  commas, or other delimiters, resulting in corrupted merged documents.

 

 

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I signed up today just to upvote this feature request. I'll probably get Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer now, but I'll have to hold off on Affinity Publisher until Data Merge is available because I need something that will help me to address thousands of postcards and newsletters for the USPS, and InDesign does that.

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Just signed up to get new and notifications on this product. I think it'll be an easy leap once this feature is implemented. Make sure you make a notifications splash when you do, so I (and it looks like many others here) come back and check it out for purchase!

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Been keeping an eye on this extremely long thread, and now want to add a comment.

Somewhere way back in the conversation someone said that data merge is needed in AF Publisher, BUT done much better than Adobe InDesign. Quite right. InDesign's implementation works OK for me a lot of the time but what it can't do is double-sided AND multiple records to a sheet AT THE SAME TIME. It can do double-sided VDP if it just means repeating a single sheet for each record, and can plan up multiple records across a page, but not both at once. 

In the studio I work in we quite often get jobs requiring data merging small sized documents like vouchers/coupons/business cards etc. Sometimes the VDP needs doing on both sides. This needs some crafty work-arounds in InDesign to get the jobs done. We used to have a very expensive Acrobat plug-in which did all this and more, including conditional logic processing to place images and so forth. Sadly we lost this capability through system upgrades and incompatibility and cost issues. Oh well...

I'm not suggesting AF Pub should have all the conditional variable data processing capabilities; that would be bloat, and best left to specialist software, but the double sided, multiple records to a sheet would be a winner.

So when Affinity includes data-merge, a capable, well-implemented, but not over-complex tool would be great.

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On 7/29/2019 at 9:57 PM, GeoffM33 said:

Been keeping an eye on this extremely long thread, and now want to add a comment.

Somewhere way back in the conversation someone said that data merge is needed in AF Publisher, BUT done much better than Adobe InDesign. Quite right. InDesign's implementation works OK for me a lot of the time but what it can't do is double-sided AND multiple records to a sheet AT THE SAME TIME. It can do double-sided VDP if it just means repeating a single sheet for each record, and can plan up multiple records across a page, but not both at once. 

In the studio I work in we quite often get jobs requiring data merging small sized documents like vouchers/coupons/business cards etc. Sometimes the VDP needs doing on both sides. This needs some crafty work-arounds in InDesign to get the jobs done. We used to have a very expensive Acrobat plug-in which did all this and more, including conditional logic processing to place images and so forth. Sadly we lost this capability through system upgrades and incompatibility and cost issues. Oh well...

I'm not suggesting AF Pub should have all the conditional variable data processing capabilities; that would be bloat, and best left to specialist software, but the double sided, multiple records to a sheet would be a winner.

So when Affinity includes data-merge, a capable, well-implemented, but not over-complex tool would be great.

Maybe this can help you: I've done similar things before in the past. Hundreds of name variations that all had to be integrated with the document and couldn't just be a quick-dry overprint at ink-time.

I've always placed the main PDF as elements in a LaTeX document (often background + generated text + overlay) and wrote a small script to generate and process the tex files. Those either were generated codes from a database (or the script generated them on-the-fly and appended them to a CSV for later import to either a spreadsheeter or a database. In terms for flexibility, my more off-beat use cases were: Generate lettering from text in string variables. All glyphs were stored as press-ready CMYK images in a folder and named to their ISO name making it easy to grab. The run-time for a 400+ entry data set (names to glyphs, names to characters, address, gender based layout variant switcher) was like half an hour give or take to final PDFs. Probably because I was doing other stuff on the same machine as well. That was years ago though. These days I'd write it in Go and run it multi-threaded instead, cutting the time down to about a quarter of that. It's all just simple loops of if… then instructions. Anyone can do that after a short Udemy class (how I learned Go).

Especially for clients who just discovered digital offset printing and want to talk to the recipient directly using their names like 20 times on a single page that's pretty much the only way to go.

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13 hours ago, Frank Jonen said:

I've always placed the main PDF as elements in a LaTeX document (often background + generated text + overlay) and wrote a small script to generate and process the tex files. Those either were generated codes from a database (or the script generated them on-the-fly and appended them to a CSV for later import to either a spreadsheeter or a database.

There is actually a mailmerge package for LaTeX: https://ctan.org/pkg/mailmerge

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