Indesign : the new desktop publishing generation Indesign is the new page layout program of Adobe, the largest publishing software company. You already use some of their programs, perhaps without knowing it. After all they invented Postscript and PDF. The last version of Indesign is now bundled in the "Creative Suite" that contains other must have programs like Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat. There is a tight integration between those programs. If you like to work with one of those, there is good chance you'll feel at home with Indesign. Indesign is the challenger of Quark Xpress. Recent reviews and market surveys conclude that there are plenty of good reasons to switch over to Indesign now. When time has come, the good news is: Leaflet is ready!

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Indesign document is an exact copy of the Leaflet document

Leaflet is very accurate in layout. Using dynamic templates, graphical objects are fitted to content and overflow automatically to the next page when needed. The resulting page layout is copied "AS IS" to Indesign in a few seconds. You start with an exact copy of the Leaflet page.

	Steps when using Leaflet together with Indesign Draw dynamic templates fetching any data from any structure of ODBC compatible database. Tag any frames you want to be updatable after first output to Indesign. Fill automatically or semi-automatically a Leaflet document according to your blueprint Export pages of this document to Indesign Make any layout changes to the Indesign document and update the XML contents at will. Output to Acrobat from Indesign. Your document is ready! Step 1 happens only once and can be done without programming. Steps 2, 3 and 5 take only a few seconds a page. This leaves you plenty of time to customize each Indesign page.
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Leaflet is Indesign compatible

Every single color, paragraph style or font style defined in Leaflet and used throughout the document is automatically carbon copied to Indesign.

Leaflet object groups are preserved in Indesign. This allows for quick and efficient moves of logical entities.

Text flows exactly the same way as in Indesign. This way a frame filled with text will occupy exactly the same space in both applications. Word wrap will happen the same way.

Effects on pictures are translated to Indesign.

Pagenumbers remain dynamic.

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Use Leaflet to generate roughs and Indesign to finish it up.

When designing B2C or less structured documents, the manual finishing touch makes the difference.

Use Leaflet to generate a draft fetching all data from the database following the blueprint of the document. This rough document contains all live data formatted according to advanced dynamic templates.

Leaflet has placed objects and frames on the pages according to a space saving algorithm.
At this stage exporting to Indesign allows to further optimize space utilization by allowing overlaps, rearranging freely blocks of objects and moving and resizing pictures in order to get an artistic layout that fits in the boundaries of the page.

Generating the Leaflet draft only takes a few seconds a page and further layout modifications in Indesign can be consequently speeded up because Leaflet already generated and formatted the building blocks of the page.

The designer can concentrate on the artistic part of the job instead of struggling with formatting manually all necessary data elements.

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Interface now, update later with XML

XML (eXtended Markup Language) is the most versatile and up to date method of interfacing data today. XML support is built into Indesign. That means that it is the best way to import and export data from Indesign documents. Any graphic object can be tagged in a Leaflet template. When exporting to Indesign, a set of unique tags will be generated and included in the XML structure of the Indesign file.

Moving or resizing of objects in Indesign or Leaflet will keep the XML structure intact.

Updating the tagged data in the Indesign document is straigthforward and uses standard functions of Indesign :

1. In Indesign export the XML structure to a file.
2. From Leaflet update this XML file.
3. In Indesign import the updated file, all tagged data are instantly updated.

The tagging and update process have been enhanced in order to be sure that data are updated a consistent way whatever happens to the Indesign layout between updates.

Updates can be used for taking changes into account between the initial export and publish time, but they can be also very efficient for effcient switching between several languages (knowing that both Indesign and Leaflet are Unicode compliant and hence can be used for publishing worldwide)

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Summary of features and benefits of the Leaflet Indesign option
Features	Benefits
WYSIWYG!	What you see in Leaflet is what you get in Indesign. Get the same document in Indesign as in Leaflet. No time consuming editing. Every graphical object on the page will have exactly the same size because objects like text take exactly the same space in Leaflet as in Indesign
Do the job only once	Styles and colors defined in Leaflet are copied exactly in Indesign in order to get identical rendering
Leaflet & Indesign : Best of both worlds	In Leaflet prepare roughs that are very close to the final copy capitalizing on dynamic templates and live database links. Edit the layout in Indesign making full use of the functionality of the most advanced DTP program of Adobe. Update seamlessly the data through the smart XML link
Smart XML updates	In the Leaflet templates, tag once the data elements that you want to update later. Leaflet will be able to trace every single data to be updated whatever changes occured to the layout in the meantime. Update is fast and XML import/export is a native Indesign functionality.
Multiple languages : one single design	Use the smart XML update feature to switch easily between several languages
State of the art DTP	Leaflet and Indesign share some advanced features not found in other DTP applications like easy drop shadows and sophisticated transparencies compatible with PDF 1.4 (Acrobat 5 and later) workflows

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