I have just been brought in to a new company that issues one page (and separately saved) biographies using inDesign. The biographies use a standard style, with a great deal of reoccurant information (company details, logo etc) and then some personal info that makes up the biography.
The company recently underwent a re-brand which now means some 1000 of these biographies are displaying incorrect logos, colour schemes, font, watermark, contact information and company details.
I want to amend this, upgrading them to the new style guidelines. And for my personal sanity would like to automate the process as much as possible. Any ideas on how best to tackle this would be greatly appreciated!
My thoughts are as follows:
- Partial Automation: - Perhaps I can export swatches, colour profiles and font settings from the updated templates and retrospectivly apply them to all the old ones. This would get me a good deal of the way there... but would still leave an issue on changing all new company details. If I could apply this in bulk I could flag the files for a small amount of editing next time they're needed.
- Partial Automation: - Perhaps with a better understanding of the master pages tools I could create a default collection of swatches and space layout and import data into certain fields manually?
- Full Automation: - I would love it if some combination of the above and InDesign scripts were possible to use to achieve this... but I am not optimistic. Perhaps the better idea is to use the exportallstories.js script to scrape all the relivant data from my old files. From there I would need to write a python file to identify the relivant fields (namely: Name, Title, biography). I could then migrate these details to a spreadsheet and save it as a .csv file. From here I might finally be able to re-import it back into my new template style using the <<Automated Data merge>> functions! It's a bit hieth robinson and would require some careful thinking on python expressions to get everything into .csv correctly.... but I think it's crazy enough to work. Any assistance on ideas here... or ideas about how I automate this to batch export to RTF (without 1000 tiedious "ok" dialog box clicks) would be greatly appreciated.
Any help, advice or pointers to relavant literature would be greatly appreciated.
Other Info:
I am on CS5
Windows 8 (i know... i know...)
I can get a python IDE up and running pretty quickly
Am happy to migrate this to my native linux for some parts of this process if there are tools/i can use the command line to get things done quicker!
Thanks
aBoL