How to publish data in individual boxes or frames

It's easy to produce pages full of "mini-display" ads or product information boxes with CatBase and Adobe InDesign. For example:

Take a look at this video for a quick overview:

The Layout Manager

Each product or advertisement box is a text frame filled with whatever content you need. The creation and sizing of the individual boxes is managed via the Layout Manager in a Publishing Stylesheet.

Let's take a quick look:

Select a data table from the top row of tabs
Expand the Publishing Stylesheets topic on the left of the window
Select an existing Publishing Stylesheet, or click New Publishing Stylesheet to create a new one
Go to the Layout Manager sub-tab:

Put each record into a Text Box

This tells CatBase that when we publish data using this Publishing Stylesheet, each record will be published into its own text box.

Decision based on Choice List field:

This option specifies that the formatting of each text box (size, object style, etc.) will be determined by the option selected for each record in the specified Choice List.

In our example, the Choice List is "Ad Size".

Option

Once a Choice List has been selected, all the options on that list are shown in the Option box.

You set up the text box for each option by double-clicking the option name. For example, the text box settings for the Small option in our example look like this:

There are lots of options here, but the most important ones are:

Width and Height

These specify the exact size to draw the text frame.

Object Style

Here you can enter the name of an Object Style that has been created in your InDesign document template; that style will be applied to each box that's created.

Click the Close button to close the Text Box window and save it.

For more detailed information about the Layout Manager, see the Layout Manager Tutorial.

So that manages the FORMATTING of the boxes. The CONTENT is managed by the Paragraphs that you set up in the Publishing Stylesheet.

What's next?

Learn more about the Layout Manager and see a demonstration video on the Layout Manager Tutorial page.
Got a question? Contact us!