Produce AIs and Catalogues the easy way

The production of AIs and catalogues can be easily automated through the use of XML and InDesign or Quark.

Step 1

Click the Export button in APM for the titles of interest and generate an XML data file with all of your title information

Step 2

Launch Adobe InDesign or Quark and get creative and design the look for your new AI or catalogue in a template.

Step 3

From within Indesign/Quark link your new template to the XML data you generated from APM.

Once linked, a Structure pane displays all of the XML data fields which you can simply drag into your design and format them.

Step 4

Once you are happy with the layout you can go ahead and generate an entire catalogue or batch of AIs

Well OK we may have jumped over a few bits but with the power of APM and XML it is possible to automate what has traditionally been a very labour intensive endeavour. Not only will you save hundreds of man hours of copying and pasting you will reduce typos and keying errors to virtually nil as you will always be using a single source of data.

Whilst other solutions will suggest you can export ONIX to drive your catalogue production you will find you are quickly enmeshed in a lot of technical details and may have to resort to using XSL stylesheets to format the data before you can use it. Its technical, complicated and not what you should be doing!

At Anko we believe in keeping things simple so we created a simpler title export XML format that takes all of the technical headaches away. With a couple of clicks of a mouse you can generate a simpler "human readable" XML structure which will allow you to simply get on with creating rich marketing materials, harnessing the full power of your design packages, without the technical nonsense.