Dynamic, Variable Information Document Design Comes to InDesign, Courtesy of Creo

As desire and demand for InDesign-based work­flows ris­es, so does the need for InDesign-based work­flow exten­sions. Critics of InDesign often cite as rea­son to avoid it the pro­lif­er­a­tion of QuarkXPress add-ons, called Xtensions, the absense of whose equiv­o­lents for InDesign keep the Adobe new­com­er from break­ing into high-end, com­plex pro­duc­tion work­flows. Creo’s Darwin Variable Information tool for Quark, which is wide­ly used by design­ers, adver­tis­ing agen­cies, and mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als for auto­mat­ed cre­ation of an unlim­it­ed num­ber of pages with indi­vid­u­al­ly per­son­al­ized text, data, images, and graphs, is one such add-on often mentioned.

Today at Graph Expo 2004 in Chicago Creo unveiled Darwin VI for InDesign CS.

Click thumb­nail for full-sized screenshot. 

nDesign CS and Adobe Creative Suite we com­bined pow­er­house pro­duc­tion capa­bil­i­ties with unmatched tools for our cus­tomers to express their cre­ativ­i­ty,” said Don Walker, gen­er­al man­ag­er of pub­lish­ing tech­nolo­gies and ser­vices at Adobe Systems. “Variable Data Publishing is a key area of growth for the print­ing indus­try and Adobe cus­tomers. Now InDesign users can use Darwin to pro­duce per­son­al­ized multi-channel cam­paigns quick­ly and effi­cient­ly, and out­put them reliably.”

Running native­ly on Mac OS X, the Darwin VI author­ing tool turns Adobe InDesign doc­u­ments into vari­able data doc­u­ments where every ele­ment is dynamic-text, graph­ics, charts, col­ors, lay­outs, back­grounds and even entire pages. The soft­ware effi­cient­ly han­dles large data­bas­es which is ide­al for tar­get­ed mar­ket­ing and pro­mo­tion­al cam­paigns. Intuitive and easy-to-learn, the Darwin VI author­ing tool offers a new Apple Aqua-based user inter­face and improved work­flow, includ­ing a robust, stand­alone data­base engine that improves per­for­mance and flexibility.

As a plug-in to Adobe InDesign CS, Darwin enables users to work in the famil­iar InDesign envi­ron­ment and take advan­tage of InDesign func­tion­al­i­ties. VI users can design their mas­ter lay­out with InDesign and eas­i­ly embed the vari­able infor­ma­tion with drag-and-drop oper­a­tions using Darwin to cre­ate per­son­al­ized documents–without leav­ing the program.

Using sim­ple rule-based log­ic, func­tions can be auto­mat­ed with­out script­ing or pro­gram­ming. Output for­mats include Creo Variable Print Specifications for opti­mal speed and per­for­mance with a Spire col­or serv­er, PostScript, and Optimized PostScript.

The Darwin VI author­ing tool for InDesign is expect­ed to be avail­able in ear­ly 2005.