CreativePro Forum

Return to Member Forum

• Author
  Posts
• • May 13, 2011 at 2:01 am #59591
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Hi :D

    At work we make a lot of businesscards after a 2-page template (one side norwegian and one english).

    The orders are recieved by e-mail in “pure text” (not sure if this is the correct name/phrase) and we use a lot of time simply going back and fourth between InDesign and Outlook copying one and one line of information (name, cell number, phone number, faculty, department, e-mail, etc…).

    Is there a way to automate all or some of this work so that we can spend our time doing other jobs?

    The info is recieved like this (translated to english):

    First name: Winnie
    Last name: the Pooh

    Title norwegian: Bjørn
    Title english: Bear
    Academic title norwegian: PhD
    Academic title english: Ph.D.

    Department norwegian: Institutt for honning kultur
    Department english: Department of Honey culture
    Faculty norwegian: Mat fakultetet
    Faculty english: Faculty of food

    Mailadress: N-8899 The Woods, Norway
    Visitt adress: Third tree from the right 2B
    Phone: +47 77334455
    Fax:
    Cellphone: +47 22334455

    …etc…

    We use InDesign CS5.5

    Hope this was understandable :-)

    In advance thanks for all help :D

  • May 13, 2011 at 2:25 am #59592
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    It's called “plain text”. ;)

    No, InDesign cannot pull in plain (unformatted, untagged etc.) text automatically. You say you are copying one line at a time, and I think that says enough. Even if you select all text in the e-mail at once, then copy it and paste into your InDesign, that's not good enough, right? You have to paste each line at a special place?

    InDesign can work with database formats — you might want to Google for “indesign data merge” — but that doesn't help you here, because you'd only move the same problem to another place.

  • May 13, 2011 at 4:33 pm #59600
    Tom Pardy

    Member

    This is somewhat out of my depth but it occurs to me that a find-and-replace could insert a tab after each colon. That could allow a text-to-table conversion that would be a step towards data merge.

    Just a thought.

  • May 16, 2011 at 1:15 am #59616
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Can you give any indication on how you want it to look?

    You could use GREP styles or Object Styles or Paragraph Styles with Apply Next Styles etc.

    I understand what you want to do but I don't understand what you want it to look like.

• Author
  Posts