CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pdfadobe-indesign
daxu
daxu

Reputation: 4084

indesign server pdf creation

My company uses pdflib to generate pdf and now they are thinking of moving to indesign.

I am doing some initial evaluation, this is our normal process:

  1. designer designs the layout of a pdf.
  2. developers put real texts in. Text lengths can vary, so developers will call some function to determine how much spaces it need and if it is over a page, developer will create a new page with some pdflib api.

Can I do the same thing with indesign server?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1643

Answers (1)

Max Dunn
Max Dunn

Reputation: 56

You can certainly do what you're doing in pdflib and then some with InDesign Server ("IDS"). IDS has minimal "server" features and is mainly a headless version of desktop Adobe InDesign. There are basically two parts to making a PDF from InDesign Server:

  1. Call the server and tell it to make the PDF (this is typically a SOAP message that tells IDS what script to run and what data source, possibly passing data and/or job parameters with the SOAP message).
  2. Run a script with ExtendScript (while there are other languages you can automate IDS with, this is far and away the most common).

You can find the scripting documentation for InDesign CS6 and earlier scripts here:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/indesign/sdk.html

Download the Adobe CS6 Scripting SDK (and possibly the InDesign CS6 Server SDK, though really the Scripting SDK and the IDS documentation installed with IDS is all you need). The Scripting SDK includes the "InDesign Server Scripting Guide" which includes a "Hello World" example that makes a document and exports it to PDF.

The scripting in InDesign CC is available only through the pre-release program: you need to apply to Adobe to get access if this matters to you. CC is actually extremely similar to the CS6 version--the main difference is in added features. A script that works in CS6 is likely to work in CC.

Upvotes: 3

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