What is EasyCatalog?

EasyCatalog is the most complete catalog automation plug-in for Adobe InDesign

EasyCatalog is a complete database publishing solution, and provides a bi-directional link between data from a variety of sources to content in an InDesign document. Any changes made in the document may be reflected back to the original source of the data.

Document content is constantly tracked, enabling you to determine which records and fields are placed. Document tracking offers a number of benefits:

1. Increased productivity

• Data can be acquired from a variety of data sources quickly and efficiently. Time is not spent re-keying or importing data.

• Errors are reduced, as data on the page is coming directly from the data source without being re-keyed.

• Automatic error detection: EasyCatalog can highlight all fields that differ to the original data, and either automatically correct them or highlight them for manual correction in the document.

• Data can be filtered and grouped to only show data relevant to a particular section of the publication, for instance. Filtering your data reduces the amount of time spent searching through data that is not relevant to the task you’re currently performing.

• Data that has been changed on the database can be updated in the document instantly – ideal for deadline-critical publications.

• Records can be dragged and dropped to the page using pre-defined templates stored in libraries. Placeholders in the templates show EasyCatalog where and how each field should appear, and complex page layouts containing live linked data can be constructed in seconds.

2. Powerful pagination facilities

• EasyCatalog contains of wealth of facilities for both data driven and design driven publications.

• Formatting may be applied to fields, ensuring that all prices, for instance, appear in a consistent format throughout the publication. Any prices that do not obey these formatting rules will be highlighted as part of the error-checking procedure.

• Library styles may be defined for records, ensuring records appear in a consistent manner. See Templates and Libraries.

• EasyCatalog offers powerful tabular data functionality, allowing tables to be created from your data at the click of a button.

• Using the optional pagination module, EasyCatalog can automatically create a flow of several hundred pages.

• EasyCatalog leverages the typographical and layout features of InDesign, so the layout and style of your publication doesn’t have to suffer.

3. Reduced cost of ownership

• EasyCatalog is a front-end for existing databases – you purchase the plugin and we, or a systems integrator, provide Data Provider plug-ins to access your data. Data can be imported from a delimited file (such as a comma or tabdelimited file), ODBC database, Excel files, a or an XML file.

• As there is no new production database to integrate with, there will be no integration issues, or unwanted database licenses.

• As EasyCatalog is tightly integrated with Adobe InDesign, there is no new application environment to learn.