EasyCatalog for Mac Download

EasyCatalogOverview

EasyCatalog lets you take data directly from a file or database straight into Adobe InDesign CS3 or later. Ideal for time-critical publications, EasyCatalog can dramatically speed up page make-up time and ensure your documents remain error free. Trusted by thousands of users in over thirty countries across six continents, EasyCatalog has quickly established itself as one of the most powerful and flexible database-publishing solutions for Adobe InDesign.

NEW

Note: Version 11.x is a paid upgrade from previous versions. Single-version upgrades begin at $324.75. Additional pricing info can be found here.

Enhancements

EasyCatalog

Added support for InDesign CC 2015.
New field type: "Formatting Rule" - This new field type will import and populate a named Formatting Rule and use that instead of the contents of the field. An example of its use can be found in the videos on the following Knowledge Base article: Computed Fields and Complex Tables
Added ‘Computed Field’ panel - This panel allows you to define a custom field function on the page rather than in the panel. For example, if an instance of a field should appear in lower case in the document, the user would previously need to configure a new custom field in the panel to perform the conversion. Now, the custom field function can be applied to a Field Specifier in the document. This should drastically reduce the number of custom fields that need to be configured in the panel which should in turn speed up the opening of data sources. Note that not all custom field commands can be used in the panel (for example, the GROUP custom field commands). A list of available commands is shown in the pop-up on the Computed Field panel, which can be found on the Window menu.
- Added TAGINSTANCE custom field command. This command can only be used in the Computed Field panel and returns the index number (starting from 1) of the field within the text flow. For example, if this command is applied to the ‘Stock Code’ Field Specifier, this function will return ‘1’ for the first instance of the ‘Stock Code’ in the text flow; ‘2’ for the second, etc.
Custom Fields
- Modification to DOESIMAGEEXIST to return ‘false’ value when an empty field name is passed in.
- Added ‘RANDOM’ custom field that will return an integer between the minimum (first parameter) and maximum (last parameter) values
- Added ‘HTMLROWCOUNT’ and ‘HTMLCOLUMNCOUNT’ custom field commands that will return the number of rows/columns in the specified HTML table content.
- The following custom field commands can be specified in the image path within field options. They will be stripped from the path but will adjust the PDF image import settings:
  - Added ‘PDFSETIMPORTPAGE’ to specify the page number of the next PDF that is imported.
  - Added ‘PDFTRANSPARENTBACKGROUND’ to specify whether the new PDF imported will have a transparent background.
  - Added ‘PDFCROPTO’ to specify the PDF import crop settings. Can be one of: ‘CONTENTVISIBLEONLY’, ‘ART’, ‘PAGE’, ‘TRIM’, ‘BLEED’, ‘MEDIA’, ‘CONTENTALLLAYERS’.
- Base64 support added
  - Added ‘BASE64ENCODE’ custom field command to encode the given string.
  - Added ‘BASE64DECODE’ custom field command to decode the given string.
New picture import option ‘Frame Specified’, which will use the fitting and cropping options applied to the picture frame.
If present, ‘PreImageImport.jsx’ will be called before importing an image. This script should be placed in the Scripts folder for the datasource, or a ‘Scripts’ folder can be created in the root level of the workspace folder
Added ‘Computed Field’ panel
Modification to ‘Auto Pickup’ keyboard shortcut:
- Can now work when the key field(s) are not placed in the document. Prefix the name of the field with ‘SF:’ to specify this field should be used to search for the record in the panel.
- Added the ability to search for Character Style sheets as part of the regular expression. Character style sheet names are injected into the textual content inside of < brackets >. Prefix the regular expression with REGEX.
Table column resizing has been optimized to improve performance.
Holding down Shift + Alt whilst selecting ‘Update Data Source’ will now output a UTF-8 encoded file containing the data source content.
Added new right-click option 'Mark As Updated' that will flag all non-key fields as updated in the panel. These fields can then be updated in the data source using the ‘Update Data Source’ option.
Dragging and dropping an image from the panel now supports snippets.
IMG tag now supports downloading images from a URL.
Added support for InDesign CC 2015 graphic cells in tables.

Excel Data Provider

A named range (specified in the Excel sheet) can now be specified when importing data to only import a portion of the spreadsheet.

Pagination Module

Added call to ‘PrePaginateDocument.jsx’ and ‘PostPaginateDocument.jsx’ to Guide-based, Into Text Flow and Position-based paginations. These scripts can either be in the ‘Scripts’ folder for the data source or in a ‘Scripts’ folder at the root of the workspace folder.
Custom field commands can now be specified in the Position Index pagination attribute.

Scripting Module

paginateUsingDefaults not has an optional last parameter that specifies the page number to start paginating at. This currently only works with Position based pagination.
paginateIntoTextFlow now accepts a Rule Set name as well as a path to the pagination library.
Added ‘markedasupdatedbysynchronize’ property to the record object to determine if the record was updated, inserted or deleted during the last ‘Synchronize with Data Source’ operation. This property will return ‘true’ if any of the fields are marked as inserted/updated/deleted. Inspect each field’s ‘synchronizestate’ property to determine the affected fields.
Added ‘synchronizestate’ property to the field object to determine it’s synchronize state. This property will be one of ‘updated’,’inserted’,’deleted’,’unchanged’.
Added optional last parameter to ‘updateDocument’ to specify whether Formatting Rules should be updated. Pass ‘true’ to update them; ‘false’ to only update the fields in the document.

Bug Fixes

EasyCatalog

Conditional logic errors are showing with ~1 instead of the actual error message.
Update Document > Selection not working when a group box is selected.
CALLSCRIPT custom field function not escaping some characters that are used in the field name and contents passed to the script.
CALLSCRIPT not setting the error state correctly if the script fails it’s not being displayed in red.
If ‘tracking’ is turned off, and an HTML table is inserted by a field, the table will be reduced to a single row.
Implied formatting tags (i.e. tags that refer to a style sheet) should support style sheets that are stored in a group.
Update Panel not updating numeric values correctly when an ‘Advanced’ numeric format has been used.
Cell Styles are not being applied if the table has been set to ‘No Expansion’.
Updating Formatting Rules will sometimes lose the paragraph style at the start of the Rule if ‘Frame Contents’ are being inserted into a text flow.
Rule Sets are always being updated during ‘Update Document’.
Update Document > Selection not working when images boxes are selected.
Crash when attempting to update an index for a book (using InDesign’s indexing functionality).
EasyCatalog Panels > Close All sometime leaves panels open.
‘Edit Field Content’ missing from contextual menu on the Record Viewer panel.
‘Show All Fields’ slow.
Scroll wheel not working on Formatting Rules panel.
Screen redraw issue when drawing Rule Set label (sometimes part of the label is left behind when dragging).
"Unhandled exception in ECFitBoxToText.cpp at line 601″.
Box fitting can sometimes get stuck in a loop, caused by multi-column boxes where one column is empty.
Clipping path is not always being applied when importing an image. The clipping path will show as selected in the ‘Clipping Path’ dialog, but won’t be applied until the user OKs that dialog.
(Windows) Edit Field Content is inserting carriage return and line feeds into the content.
Default SQL statements don’t have the correct quotes. It is assumed that table and field names should use double quotes; field content should use single quotes.
Empty table rows are not ignored when they contain our table column/cell/row attributes.
InDesign sometimes crashes on startup when attempting to load a data source.
Some images are being imported with incorrect orientation. Metadata stored in the image that specifies whether it is a landscape or portrait image is being ignored.
‘Search For Content’ not updating picture boxes that are also Formatting Rules.
‘Edit Field Content’ contextual menu allowing fields that shouldn’t be edited (such as key fields or fields whose content is calculated by a Custom Field) to be edited.
HTML table width attribute is not always being obeyed when one of the columns has a specified width.

EasyCatalog XML Data Provider

(Mac only) Large XML files are not being imported.

EasyCatalog Scripting Module

DSV.groupUp crashes when the DSV is already at the top-most level.

EasyCatalog Pagination Module

Paginate dialog failing validation when invalid Rule Set selected, even though the user is performing a Template-based pagination that does not use a Rule Set or Library.
Guide-based Pagination
- Grow and Flow ‘name’ attribute appearing for Frame Depth to Content depth fitting type it should only appear when Fitting = Grow and Flow.
- Guide-based pagination is stopping with an error ("The library item ‘xxx’ does not fit within the bounds of the page at the next guide intersection"). This occurs on guide-based pagination with collision detection on: pagination is inserting a dummy guide and then finding there’s not enough space.
- Guide-based pagination ‘Across/Down’ with collision detection on is not behaving the same as the previous version: items are filling in spaces (e.g on the right of the page) rather than moving to the next available vertical position on the left and then working across the page.
- Double-width items always being placed on a new left hand page, even if space is still available on a left-hand page to place the item.
- Guide-based pagination placing double width headers on right-hand pages.
- Grow and Flow not using ‘Grow and Flow’ continuation type.
Flow-based pagination can sometimes pick different Rules to paginate than dragging and dropping to a Rule Set. This is caused by pagination not taking into account ‘default’ Rules (i.e. Rules without criteria). Rules with criteria that have zero matches should be ignored; default Rules (i.e. Rules with no criteria) should be considered.
Renaming a Formatting Rule is slow on large documents. This seems to be caused by all frames being updated for every story in the document.
If the user anchors a Rule in a text flow, it will not change name if the user renames the Rule.
Flow-based pagination ‘autoapplyparaspacebefore’ sometimes inserts page break character when paginating a long library item. This causes EC to think that some of the anchored items later in the flow will go past the end of the frame and therefore insert a break character.
‘Frame Depth to Content Depth’ moves box when image has clipping path.

EasyCatalog ODBC Data Provider Module

ODBC Data Provider should ignore empty rows this is a problem that seems to affect importing Excel spreadsheets via ODBC.

EasyCatalog Excel Data Provider

When importing data from Excel, the decimal separator for the import should default to ‘.’ rather than ‘,’. This affects locales where comma is generally used as a decimal separator.
(Mac) ‘Update Data Source’ fails to write the file when there is an umlaut (or any unicode character) in the path.