support

What we offer

We offer free basic technical support for our products, along the lines of

  • answering simple pre-purchase product selection questions;
  • strategizing about the best way to solve a given problem with our tools;
  • dealing with installation problems;
  • providing post-purchase general help and orientation;
  • diagnosing product crashes, freezes, and error messages, including possible product bugs, etc.

If you need in-depth consulting, such as someone to write your InData prototype, or someone to develop a detailed strategy for deploying InCatalog in a larger workflow, etc., we can recommend other developers.

That said, our main goal is to get you up and running, and we have a great record with tens of thousands of successful installations world-wide, since 1990.

We also have various ways you can keep in touch with us, making sure you’re up-to-date with product releases, updates, new products, and general news.

We can provide a free pre-purchase project evaluation when you’re looking for a publishing automation or editorial workflow solution based on our products.

Getting support

  • If you’ve already successfully downloaded and installed your Em product (see our product installation help otherwise), and are having trouble, first check the relevant product page on our site (using the plugin’s Visit Home) to make sure you’re running the very latest version; if you’re not, download and install the latest version and try again. Doing so very often clears up problems, and all updates are always free.

  • Then check in the “Troubleshooting” section or chapter of your product manual or user guide. You will often find the answers to common problems there.

  • If that doesn’t help, please try to reduce the size of the data and documents involved to a minimum, narrowing the problem down to just the failing elements, if you can.

    Then, make a .zip archive containing

    • your InDesign document;
    • any input data files (InData or InCatalog), tagged text files (Xtags), or Word/Excel files (WordsFlow);
    • any configuration files like DD sets (for InCatalog) or translation tables in use (for Xtags);
    • any graphic files that are relevant to the problem;
    • fonts, if required to show the problem (rarely);
    • anything else that’s relevant, such as scripts (AppleScripts, ExtendScripts) you’re using, etc.

    It’s important to send an archive, even for a single file, to protect the contents from any changes made by email packaging and transmission.

    If the archive would be too large to email (more than say 10MB), you can upload it to one of the free file sharing services, and send the resulting link in your email.

  • Select your plugin’s Contact Support to start an email with the relevant licensing and contextual information already filled in—this is critical and is required (we’ll just ask you to do that if your email doesn’t start this way).

    In the body of the email, please provide a detailed outline of the problem or question, along with the steps required to reproduce the problem, and attach the archive created earlier, or point to the shared file.

    If you’re using DocsFlow, then please use the Google Docs sharing tools to share the document in question with support@emsoftware.com (read-only).

We will always respect the absolute confidentiality of any files you send us. We’ve never had a problem in 30+ years of handling confidential customer data.

We pride ourselves on our small-company personal touch (see “People” sidebar), so you’re welcome to call us (see our contact information at the bottom of every page on thisour web site). However, we often don’t have phone coverage, but you can leave a message. If you do reach us (or we call you back) and the problem isn’t quickly answered over the phone, we’re going to request that you follow the email directions above in any case.

Interactive support

In rare cases, if we can’t reproduce your problem on our systems, we can schedule an online screen-sharing session to see the problem on your machine. (This method does requires a decent uplink speed on your Internet connection to be practical.)

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