Requirements

• The placeholder text can be located in any text frame, along any other text
• You can choose any text you like (a-z, 0-9, _-)

Make sure that even the longest text from your datasource will have enough room in the text frame provided, or overset text will be produced.

A text placeholder will inject text from various sources into your layout in the merge process.

These sources can be one or a combination of:

• Datasource content (Changes for each record)
• Static text (Always the same)
• Sequence (Different types of counting numbers)
• Automator workflow (for editing outside of MyDataMerge – learn more here)
• Custom (java-)script (learn more here)

To add an element, open the placeholder by double clicking it (or click the pen icon), then add an element by clicking the plus icon:

Add the element and the appropriate editor will open (e.g. datasource element):

Once you selected or entered the required data, the element becomes valid (green check)

Once every placeholder is valid, you are able to export.

Notes:

• You can combine different elements here by adding them (plus icon above the eye icon) and drag & drop them up or down. The result will always be shown in the preview on the right.
• Additionally every element has some settings (gear icon) which will provide a wide range of tools to transform your data (e.g. strip whitespaces, add space before or after and so on)

To advice MyDataMerge to download images please follow these instructions

1. Make sure your image placeholder has the right type “Replace with image” [1]
2. Add static text element with the base URL to your images, e.g. “https://www.myserver/path/to/” [2]
3. Add a datasource element and select the column with the image names [3], this will add the image name to the above URL “https://www.myserver/path/to/myimage.jpg”
4. Open the settings (gear icon), and activate “Download image” [4]. You may additionally select a folder where to download the images to

Issues that may arise

• By default, MyDataMerge checks for file name extensions of images. e.g. “https://www.myserver/path/to/myimage.jpg” -> .jpg – If it doesn’t find any, an error will be thrown. You can disable this behaviour in the preferences > editor > Disable file extension check for downloaded images
• If images change online, MyDataMerge doesn’t know that. At the first time an image is downloaded, it will be cached and not re-downloaded by default (for a better performance). You can force a download everytime by activating “Force download on each export” in the image settings (check the image above).

If you want to export to JPEG files go to export > filetype and select the preferred filetype from the dropdown.

To configure dynamic file names go to Export > Filetype and make sure “One document per record” [1] is activated. Then a button “Filenames setup” [2] appears. Click it to configure your filenames.

If you click the “Filenames setup” button you can then select the filetype to setup custom naming. If you e. g. export to PDF files and keep a copy of your InDesign files you can define both the names for the PDF files and the InDesign files. Double click a row and enable it. Then you can configure it like a placeholder.