Release: InData 2.0 for InDesign CS5/5.5/6

December 7, 2012 by car

We’re pleased to announce a major new release of InData, which, along with various accumulated fixes and improvements, finally adds full support for text anchors, hyperlinks and cross-references.

Changes

• Adds support for inline text anchors, hyperlinks, and cross-references in a prototype. Any text anchor, hyperlink (on both text and anchored/inline frames), or cross-reference found in the prototype is replicated during data import. If InData finds that one of the following properties references the name of a field or global variable, then that property is changed in the resulting text anchor, hyperlink or cross-reference to the value of the corresponding field or global variable:
  • the name of a text anchor, hyperlink, or cross-reference;
  • a hyperlink’s shared destination name;
  • a hyperlink’s private destination URL; and
  • a cross-reference’s destination text anchor name.

  The name of a referenced field or global variable may, but is not required to, include enclosing chevrons, like «prod_url».

  For an example, let’s put a URL hyperlink on each part number in InData’s Car Parts sample document. After selecting the segment of the prototype that generates the part number, we use the New Hyperlink dialog (accessible from the Hyperlinks panel, Window > Interactive > Hyperlinks) to create and define the hyperlink.

  

  For this example, we deselect Shared Hyperlink Destination since we won’t need to share URLs between hyperlinks; set the URL to the prototype field name url, which will be changed during the import; and set the appearance to make the link visible.

  

  Now, with the hyperlink applied to the prototype, we change its default name from «char 1 to 3 of...partno» to partno so that InData will change each hyperlink’s name to the part number during the import. Note that if the prototype does not produce a hyperlink with a unique name during the import, InDesign automatically appends a number to the name as it’s created in order to make it unique.

  

  After the import, each part number in the document has a hyperlink (orange) that connects it to its corresponding product URL, and each product is listed by its part number in the Hyperlinks palette.

  

  The steps for creating text anchors and cross-references are similar. Just remember to use the same field or variable name in a cross-reference that is used by the corresponding text anchor. With our sample above, a text anchor named partno could be dropped in front the prototype’s part number. A second prototype might contain a cross-reference to the text anchor named partno, and then be used with the same data snapshot to generate a product list or index.

  Note: Unfortunately, variable page destinations can not be supported because there’s no way to reference a field or variable name in place of a page number. Instead, produce an XPress-tagged snippet to generate the desired hyperlink, like «put xpresstagged "<&Ys>Jump to page 5<&Ye(" & quote & "pg5" & quote & ",5)>"».

• Adds support for the &Y hyperlink family of tags in xpresstagged-styled text. See the Xtags 6/7.1.3.1 Release for details about these hyperlink tags.
• Adds an encoding parameter to the filecontents() function. The filecontents() function has always required that the text file being read be stored as the current OS’s native 8-bit text encoding (either MacRoman in OS X or WinLatin in Windows). UTF-8 was supported too, but required the use of a byte-order-mark (BOM) prefix on the file for it to be read properly.

  Now, the file’s encoding may be specified as a second parameter to filecontents(), like

  filecontents(path, encoding)

  where encoding is one of "win", "mac", or "unicode" (or "w", "m", or "u" for short). If no encoding is provided, filecontents() defaults to its old behavior as described above.

• Adds .tab as a valid snapshot file extension to better support FileMaker Pro 12.
• An import now falls back to the OS’s native 8-bit encoding if Unicode was selected as the import’s encoding but treating the imported text as UTF-8 would cause a decoding error.
• Fixes a problem which was generating an empty record at the end of a pasteboard-based import.