VeeDeePee: get up close and personal with variable-data publishing (vdp)

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DesignMerge Evaluation

It's been a few years since I've seen DesignMerge in action and haven't had an opportunity, or reason, to use it myself, so I thought it was time I took a closer look.

Before you read on, I would like to throw in the following disclaimer; my evaluation is intended to be an independent, subjective analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of this software. It is not intended to be an exhaustive analysis, but identifies the key functional areas of the software and assesses them against similar VDP products. If you are looking at making a purchasing decision for VDP software, then I would encourage you to try this software for yourself, rather than basing your decision on my evaluation.

DesignMerge is a variable-data plug-in for Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress, and as I understand, it functions in the same manner across both products. There are several important functions and concepts to understand before you can create personalised documents using DesignMerge and I've attempted to explain these in my evaluation, through assigning each function it's own section.

Database Connectivity
Unlike other VDP software products, DesignMerge only supports delimited text files. So, if your data is in Excel, Access or another data format, you need to convert it to delimited text. DesignMerge uses the concept of a Database Definition, or DDF. The DDF describes the data attributes (delimiters, file, columns, etc) of your data file. You can create multiple DDF settings for commonly used data files, and import them as required. The DDF dialog is scattered with a cluster of different buttons, but they use fairly intuitive descriptions.

Variable Links
A Variable Link in DesignMerge refers to linking a variable tag in a document with a field in the data file. There are five different types of variable links; Text, Picture, Article, Box and Pick List. A 'Text Link', as its name implies, inserts variable text from the data file. A 'Picture Link', inserts a variable image, based on a file name in the data field or a defined business rule. An 'Article Link' refers to a static text file (RTF, Word, tagged text, or text). Similar to XMPie software, static text files can contain nested variable links. A 'Box Link' is a text frame whose entire content will be replaced—if a Text Link is assigned to a frame tagged with a Box Link, all of the content in the frame will be replaced by variable content. If an Article Link is assigned to the frame, all of the content will be replaced by the contents of a text file. Lastly, a 'Pick List' link behaves just like a Text Link, but is used for creating DesignMerge Web documents.

Business Rules
DesignMerge includes a graphical-based rule editor for creating business rules. It uses the familiar 'if/else/and' logic approach to apply a conditional rule based on the field value. The rule editor is relatively straightforward to use, but involves a multitude of mouse-clicks to set up each business rule. There are two components in a business rule; criteria and actions. A 'criteria' is the conditional rule that you want to define, and the 'action' is what to do if the criteria is true/false. An action for a text variable could be applying a prefix or suffix to the text, or even applying an InDesign Character or Paragraph Style. An action for a picture variable could set a defined InDesign Swatch Colour to the frame. The number of possible actions is fairly comprehensive and even includes an option to display a defined alert message, where a pop-up dialog appears when you merge the document—although I'm not exactly sure why you would want to do this.

Inserting Variables
Once you've defined your Database Definition, set your Variable Links, and created your rules, you're ready to tag your InDesign document with variable links and rules using the DesignMerge palette. This is straightforward and functions similar to other VDP products; just select an existing object, then select the corresponding variable link or rule from your DesignMerge palette and click 'Insert'.

Sequence Numbers
Before we move along, it's important to mention the Sequence Number feature. DesignMerge uses a concept of record numbers and sequence numbers. A record number is exactly that; it's the record 'line' from the data file. A sequence number, however, is relative, not absolute to the record number. It assigns which record to merge, relative to the record number that is currently being merged. Simplistically, if a document contains a 'name' variable with a sequence number 1, and a 'gender' variable with a sequence number 2, then when record 5 is merged, it will merge the 'name' field from record 5 and the 'gender' field from record 6. Why would you want to do this? Good question. You may have a unique application, where you need to display the next number in sequence. Sequence Numbers are also required for Cut and Stack layouts, which covered later in this evaluation.

Merge
Once you've tagged your document with variable links and assigned business rules as required, you're ready to create a print-ready file. This is a 'merge' process, where you can either merge the variable records to create a print file (PPML, PostScript, etc), or separate InDesign pages for each record (similar to InDesign Data Merge), or select a number of 'test' options. These test options include previewing records and field values, pre-flighting, and other sanity-check features. One little annoying thing I found with the Merge feature is that you're required to re-select your data source every time you apply a merge action. However, this can be disabled via a preference option.

Cut and Stack
DesignMerge offers a cut-and-stack feature for laying out smaller documents on a large sheet size, but before you get too excited, you need to understand that this feature doesn't work the way you would expect it to. Rather than imposing the merged records on a large page, you need to define your InDesign document page size as the size you want to print, then step and repeat the design (a postcard, for example) across and/or down the page using the InDesign/QuarkXPress Step and Repeat feature. Even though you have identical variable 'documents' on the same page, DesignMerge can merge the records in each postcard as cut and stack. The downside to this approach is that if you want to update your design, you then have to go and amend each object that is stepped up on your page. Ouch. I prefer the approach of other VDP products (uDirect, Darwin, PrintShop Mail, others) that step and repeat pages across a defined sheet size.

Summary
There's no doubt that DesignMerge is a useful VDP tool. However, it's main shortcoming is in its usability. Before you can start using the software, you really need to step through a set of tutorials, as it's not very intuitive to use. Other solutions such as InDesign Data Merge or XMPie uDirect, for example, are much easier to start using, and even include a step-by-step guide on their palette. Once you've got your head around DesignMerge's quirky terminology and array of interface buttons and options, it's quite a functional tool to use.

In closing, I award DesignMerge with a subjective 3.5 out of 5 rating. However, I invite you to download the software, try it, and draw your own conclusions.

Posted on Wednesday, 6 February 2008 at 7:41 PM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/85