Very messy variable data project.

[mewarren]

Hi, I have been asked to work on a VDP project that is currently being composed in Fusion Pro (Acrobat). The project is a monthly newsletter that includes various coupons and has about 30,000 recipients.

Here's where it gets messy. A recipient will receive either two, three or four coupons in their newsletter. The coupons span the document vertically and are either 5.25", 3.5", or 2.625" tall by 3.5" wide. The coupons on the "3 up" and "4up" newsletters can switch, as well as the discount amount or promotional info. There are 16 possible coupon variations in the newsletter.

We currently have about 35 switch rules set up that bring in the correct coupons for each recipient, but each month we have to go in and edit these rules as the coupon names change. We also are not able to preview the placement of the text field and image boxes until we compose a pdf, so we have to guess and check and repeat until the layout is correct.

I am searching for a more time efficient way of doing this. I thought it would be nice to set up an InDesign document with 16 master pages with the data merge fields and coupon images for each possible combination, but I can't find an information on adding scripts to control which master page is being applied.

Currently, in Fusion Pro, this job takes about eight hours to complete. Most of the time spent is waiting for the program to process changes.

Any information would help. Thanks in advance!

 

[DCurry]

Is it possible to standardize the coupon names so they are the same each month, even if the art is different?

Or, can you make it so that the name of the required coupon is pulled from the data? That way, your 35 rules would always look at the data to get the coupon name instead of you typing the coupon name into the rule.

 

[mewarren]

That would be nice but the coupon names are embedded in the .csv file that the client provides.

I was looking around and found this post which is almost identical to our project.

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Not sure about your idea of massive but have run 100,000 + data and image merges to printer and PDF. Started with Fusion Pro but found a simpler and faster solution with JetLetter PSL which not only got the job done in minutes instead of hours but also could handle a lookup table in ASCII code which means I didn't have to import tons of data into Mail Manager that wasn't relevant to mailing!

Perhaps even more relevant to your example would be a casino application where the records represent customers who based on worth get different offers with different values for different dates. A table contains all the variables (dates, offers, dollar amounts for various locations), the data is the mailing address with a code for location and worth, the vdp program looks in the table for the offer variables based on location and worth code. Coupons produced are different size and shapes with varying offers, disclaimers, etc. I think the PSL run time is 20,000 records in less than 3 minutes then the file is sent to Xerox Nuvera or DC5000 for printing.

I just sat thru an afternoon demo of HP Extreme and didn't see anything that JetLetter PSL couldn't do (except for GUI interface which I heard is underdevelopment) for a lot less money....
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He's got a solution but I was hoping for something that costs less.

 

[DCurry]

Having the coupon names in the .csv is exactly what I was talking about in my second suggestion. So, if your rules specifically refer to a coupon file by name that you are typing in or changing each month, can you change the rules to look at the data field to get this name instead? Knowing that FusionPro uses JavaScript, I'm sure it would be possible (even though I am not a JavaScript expert by any means!)

If you can't make that work, then going back to my first point about standardizing the coupon names, would it be a possible solution to change the data to match your standardized coupon names? Using something like TextWrangler (it's free!) this would be a breeze. So, you might make all your rules refer to Coupon1, Coupon2, etc. Then, when the customer sends new coupons each month, you figure out which one is going to be Coupon1, Coupon2, etc and rename the coupon files accordingly. Then, open the .csv in TextWrangler and do a "find/change all" on whatever name the customer has given each coupon to match Coupon1, Coupon2, Coupon3...

Just in case you haven't done so already, I would do some research over at Printable's forums. Lots of really sharp FusionPro and JavaScript folks over there. I don't use FusionPro much these days, so I can't be much technical help other than helping you think through the theory.

 

[Alith7]

Have you thought about looking into XMpie? if it is this large of a project, the time savings would give you an ROI in a very short amount of time.

 

[DCurry]

I've not used XMPie, so I can't offer any advice there, but FusionPro is perfectly capable of doing this job quite well, with the caveat being the OP needs to get the right JavaScript in place. I wish I knew more about JavaScript to be able to offer more concrete advice - I can't tell you how to do it, just that it is possible to streamline.

 

[tommrz]

Since you already have your rules built could you map out the names in the rules to the names in the csv and "find and replace" the names in the csv to match your rules? May take a little up front planning but...

 

[Craig]

Post the question on Printable Forum, Dan is the master of JavaScript there!

 

[mewarren]

Thank you for all the responses. We use Text Wrangler as well, so using the Find/Replace function may be a great idea. It just worries me that there are about 33,000 recipients and I would have no way of catching a mistake. I will give this a try. Thank you.

 

[DCurry]

True, but you would have no way of catching a mistake made while editing 35 different rules, either, which seems more dangerous and mistake-prone to me. Good luck!

 

[tommrz]

I agree with both previous statements. The only reason I brought it up was because I have run in to very similar challenges. In the end, it made more sense to me to keep my rules (in InDesign using Smart Stream) the same and duplicate my csv and do literal find/replace on the copy. I used this technique on a monthly mailer for a large rental car company ranging from 60,000 to 100,000 individual records. Eventually I ended up using an applescript to change the names in text wrangler so i didnt have to do it all myself. Worked very well in my case. The key is to make sure you know what is mapping to what.