Hi,
I can place short variable things like addresses, street names, and "Dear X", as well as images referenced in a CSV with the @IMAGE row header, but it's unwieldy to place several long paragraphs of text from a field in a CSV.
What I'd like InDesign Data Merge to do is to say "Hey, I'll take all of the plain text from mytext01.txt, mytext02.txt, mytext03.txt and so on and put it in a text box with the variable <<mytext>>, when this guy selects Export to PDF in the Data Merge panel."
I've tried adapting a script outlined here in the Adobe forums to do this, and got it to work... but it only does one record at a time and it's not making PDFs and I have to trigger it manually, rather than, say, 20,000 records on its own.
I tried using a trial version of EasyCatalog with the Pagination Module plugin. There's a lot of time that I'd need to put into studying how EasyCatalog works with Templates, Libraries, Rules, and Pagination in order to do this one thing. It's not rocket surgery, but then after I learned how to do this I'd have to pay over $1000 for the full version.
I tried another plugin called InData, but it seems to require you to be able to script stuff, only add InData functions on top of that.
It seems like there's gotta be an easier and less expensive way to go about this. We can do it with external images and I'm guessing that Microsoft Word has the capability.
Has anyone else been down this road? Did it end well for you?
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