InDesign CS4 & XMPIE uDirect Plugin Issue

[MIBUK]

Hi,

I'm using the uDirect plugin trial version with InDesign CS4 for evaluation. At the moment, I'm trying to use uDirect for variable content in a business card. I have a text frame, which contains department, address, telephone, email etc details. I have created rules, so for example, if the fax number does not exist in the test database, then it moves the lines below up on the business card. I used Suppress Trailing Spaces on Empty Content to do this. Sometimes, the department name is very long and therefore needs the font in the text frame to be reduced automatically. I used Dynamic Story Length Handling via Dynamic Story Properties and enabled Copy Fit on for Overflow and selected the middle option and set the min: to 25% at steps of 1% and click OK

This works very well, until for example the fax number does not exist and the department name is too long and Copy Fit is used. Then The Dynamic Story Length Handling stops working and the department name that is too long pushes part of the text to the next line! ie. "faculty of Sciences of Veterniary Blah Blah Sheep" looks like:-
"faculty of Sciences of Veterniary-
Blah Blah Seep"

...instead of scaling down.
Thanks in Advance,

 

[JasonFF]

This is a classic VDP problem. There are a couple ways to solve it. On business cards, I often use individual text boxes for each data type. So for your situation, I would create one box for the name and department name, and the other data in another box. This way, you can strictly control the appearence of Department Name by making the text box just big enough to hold your two lines, and then use copy fitting to shrink the text if the name is too long.

In your other box, the numbers should all be close to the same length, so you don't have to worry about the wrapping issues there.

I guess the summary of what I'm trying to say is seperating the ADORs that may wrap from the ones you know will not need to wrap helps you control them.

The VDP forum is pretty good here so if you have any other questions about XMPie I recommend posting there over Acrobat but clearly you'll get a response either way.

Hope this helps.

 

[MIBUK]

Thanks Jason. When the department scales the text to a lower size, I want all of the text to scale to the same size. Also, this is a business card for a University and they potentially have up to 3 department lines, one after each other and each one can be very long and sometimes they may ony have one/two department lines and so your suggestion will not work as I still need to use "Suppress Trailing Spaces". When I turn off "Suppress Trailing Spaces", it works as it should.

 

[JasonFF]

Did you get it all sorted then? If all the text on the card needs to be the same size, then you might need to just set the starting font size smaller. You dont want to have one business card that has all larger type than the next card, just because one has more department lines, do you?