Of course, at the time we weren't so well connected with Adobe, and Adobe back then was a profoundly desktop-focused company. InDesign is the ultimate tool for automated page composition.We at Silicon Publishing started to automate desktop InDesign in the year 2000, and within a few hours we realized two things: Why would anyone use another engine for server-based composition? How InDesign Server came to exist The core InDesign product is such a phenomenal success, that it is the tool of choice for the creation of any document that prints, as well as graphics that require deep typography and exquisite graphic perfection. It renders PDF, PSD, AI, and other graphic formats perfectly, and uses the same PDF job options as Acrobat and other Adobe tools, so it has quite an advantage over other engines when it comes to document automation. It lives and breathes InDesign and Adobe graphics formats, just like InDesign itself, so it provides the optimal capability for high-quality output. InDesign Server uses templates built in standard desktop Adobe InDesign. By simply saving the InDesign document to a network drive, InDesign Server can render such output automatically, freeing up the desktop for creative work. Say your design team needs to create three different types of PDF for a given InDesign document. InDesign Server, on the other hand, allows for numerous concurrent instances of the InDesign engine, and can scale to arbitrary throughput and performance requirements, even for the largest sites on earth.įinally, InDesign Server can also offload time-consuming processes for InDesign workgroups. The end-user license agreement for desktop InDesign prohibits direct usage in a web-based application, and in any event, InDesign desktop is not practical for multi-user applications. If you want to send a million personalized letters, InDesign Server can render print-ready files with a lights-out process.īeyond database publishing, online editing solutions that use the InDesign application require InDesign Server. This is required for large-scale database publishing: if you have 300 variants of a 100-page catalog, for instance, automation makes sense. InDesign Server lets you create InDesign documents programmatically. Designers, meanwhile, can focus on their art, rather than receiving an email for every price change or re-worded slogan. But there is an appropriate division of labor: without learning a thing about InDesign, a salesperson can create a gorgeous document using updated information, while adhering to brand guidelines she knows nothing about. This is not to say that InDesign skill isn't required in an InDesign Server workflow: there usually is an InDesign expert involved, building the template that is used by the application. Or, a salesperson can edit just the product price on a spec sheet, calling InDesign Server to update the template (originally created with desktop InDesign) with the latest pricing information. For example, you can have a web page from which you select a data source and a document template, to generate a parts catalog. InDesign Server, on the other hand, can cover a vast range of use cases, most of which do not require InDesign expertise: this allows mere mortals to produce fantastic print output. Power users like David Blatner, Chris Converse, and Bob Levine are rare on this earth. However, the learning curve is steep: I have worked with InDesign professionally for 20 years, and I still feel like a novice-level user of the product. InDesign is extremely powerful, so the very advanced interface allows completely fine-grained control over anything you'd ever want to do with page layout and document editing. With the desktop form of the product, users tend to have to be highly skilled. This can help immensely, for example, if you have multiple users on a web site requesting dynamically-created InDesign documents simultaneously, or if you need to produce a million documents in an hour. Adobe adds a bit of server-specific functionality, such as a SOAP interface for calling scripts.Ĭritically, InDesign Server lets you run multiple, parallel instances of InDesign concurrently, on a single server. Thus desktop and server deployments are really different from each other. You can run it by a command from a command line, or you can call it from your own user interface that you can create: this can be a web page, an application, or even InDesign itself. InDesign Server has no default interface. The difference is that InDesign has a user interface, which is ideal for one highly-skilled designer creating documents and document templates. Conveniently, the primary automation techniques (C++ plugins and ExtendScript coding) are also the same in both desktop and server flavors of InDesign. The common code is the core composition engine.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |