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• • October 1, 2010 at 11:57 am #57208
    brownaldo

    Participant

    Hi all

    I work for a publishers in England and have a query you may be able to help with.

    We have recently taken on a new client who typeset a number of their driving manual books using Filemaker files (.fp7) from a database. These are imported into QuarkXPress somehow however the client wishes us to use InDesign :-) to perform the same task.

    Can anyone advise how Filemaker files be imported into InDesign? Do you know if a plugin is required for instance?

    We have InDesign CS5 as well as CS4 if needed.

    Unfortunately in our design studio we have very little knowledge of XML so am hoping for an easy-as-possible solution.

    Many thanks for your time
    Rob

  • October 1, 2010 at 3:32 pm #57210
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    If it's relatively simple, it may be able to be done with Data Merge, which is built into InDesign. (Do a search on our site for data merge, and you'll find quite a number of articles about it.)

    Most catalogs need more, though, and you can find more in a plug-in, such as those from emsoftware.com, teacupsoftware.com, or 65bit.com

    (It would be interesting to know how they imported it into QuarkXPress. For example, if they used the xData Xtension for QX, then it might be relatively straightforward to port those templates over and use xData for InDesign (from em software).

  • October 1, 2010 at 11:19 pm #57213
    brownaldo

    Participant

    Hi David

    Many thanks for taking time to reply.

    It seems the client used xData for QuarkXpress to achieve this task. I'm currently speaking to the good folks at Em Software to see if they can help me using InData for InDesign. (Is InData the equivilant of XData for QX? I presume so)

    I've just read through some of the Data Merge blog posts on this site, thanks for the tip

    The client has supplied me with a .csv file and I have attempted to import this into InDesign using Date Merge however I'm getting the “The selected data source has one or more empty field names…” error.

    I suspect the InData plugin will be the way to go. Many thanks.

    Love the podcast btw!

    Rob

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