🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi,

I'm only a beginner but wanted to add my two cents...

I don't know what the best way to start out is if you are new to this. But I do quite a bit of work making dynamic pages from data files by using Excel (Windows). Previously we would print our pages as PDF's from Excel. Now we just pull our data into Excel via ODBC and then organize it in Excel for transfer to our other layout applications. (Images are inserted via path's in the database.) (Well all dynamic charts are still done as PDF's from Excel, we have not moved onto the charts in Illustrator.)

The advantage to us is we are non-programmers bumbling around programming scripts and at least on the Windows side we can set up lots of the data portions of our scripts via recorded macros in Excel (then we edit them to fit our needs). If you are on a Mac and can record Apple Script actions in Excel this might be help your initial coding.

Being able to see a recorded macro is VERY helpful, its making the transition to becoming a script programmer much easier.

But then if you can do it in ASP or PHP then you can probably hard code it using XML.

Make sure you download and print the scripting guide to have on hand, the Illustrator guide has better examples (for me) then the InDesign guide.
 <http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/scripting/main.html>
Good luck,
iolaire