Hi, Im looking for help/guidelines regarding InDesign. I'm a software architect working on a line-of-business application that will eventually require printing about 5 hundred thousand personalized report (of about 20 pages each) over a couple of days (and many other smaller jobs), and my client requires that this job be executed by a third party. Think of the document as a fairly standard financial report printed once a year for each participant. The application is built in .net, backed by a sql database. Once a year, the data is mined, computed, and outputed in a format acceptable by the supplier (who is chosen through a public tendering process).
So from what I've learned thus far, to be complient with most suppliers, I must use some file format like postscript or eps, and to do this, it looks like InDesign Server might be what I'm looking for.
So here is what I've figured out so far (and where I will need your help if I'm not making sense) :
- Create a kind of IDML template using InDesign on a desktop computer
- in our .net application, modify the IDML for each participant to personalize it (a lot of conditional code to remove sections of text, and inject numbers, etc).
- Send each (or a batch is feasable) to the InDesign Server to prepare for publishing into postscript/eps files
- and if feasable, also create a PDF of each because we need to keep a digital version of the document on the client's corporate SharePoint (for legal reasons).
Is this how InDesign should be used? Am I making any sense?
Thanks in advance for all the answers.