By Cyndie Shaffstall

Catalogue production may be the most time consuming of all publishing projects. A single catalogue can be a burden on everyone: IT managers, database creators, designers, photographers, production artists, and even the customer. There may be dozens of collaborators, thousands of pages, tens of thousands of images, and yet somehow you are expected to pull it all together into a beautiful, easy-to-navigate design with every last-minute pricing update, product description, and photo in place and perfect.

Xcatalog (Pro) for QuarkXPress	InCatalog (Pro) for InDesign

In the history of extensions technology, few available today date back to the beginning (mid-80s). Far fewer date back to the beginning and have been on the best-sellers list the entire time. Em Software has developed three that share the honor. Xtags, Xdata, and Xcatalog (including Xcatalog Pro) all automate the production of documents. In the case of Xtags, virtually any type of document can benefit from the turbo-charged auto formatting. With Xdata and now InData, too, think price lists, phone books, and the like. When considering Xcatalog or InCatalog, imagine documents such as the Sears® Wishbook® or The Home Depot® weekend-newspaper insert. Something along the lines of the StrappyArt spread shown below, perhaps.

Figure 1 In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a catalogue. It may or may not look anything like the StrappyArt catalogue shown here, but the point is that the extensions module offers you unlimited design flexibility. Click the image for a larger view.

Xcatalog (Pro) for QuarkXPress	InCatalog (Pro) for InDesign

In the pages of X-Ray Magazine, I've spent more than a little time extolling the many benefits of Xdata, but this is my first foray into the catalogue-publishing realm. It won't be my last. I'll walk you through Xcatalog and InCatalog today, but in a coming issue, we'll tackle this same sample catalogue using LinkUP! Pricing from MC Research.

Xcatalog for QuarkXPress and InCatalog for InDesign provide you complete design flexibility. Unlike Xdata and InData — that work with structured lists and directories — with Xcatalog and InCatalog your product names, descriptions, pricing, and images can be anywhere on the page. Take a look at the completed catalogue with which I will be working in this article shown in figure 1 above.

Good news! Xcatalog is available for QuarkXPress 5, 6, 7, and 8. InCatalog is available for both InDesign CS2 and CS3.

Getting started

I've structured this article to follow a particular workflow:

Extract the data from an existing catalogue;

 

Modify the data; and then

 

Update the document.

 

Working from a completed catalogue and extracting the text first may seem a bit backward, especially if you're referencing the user's guide as we go, but I've done this for a reason.

At ThePowerXChange, we've been selling Xcatalog since 1995 and InCatalog since its release a few years ago, and I can tell you with great confidence that the majority of designers and production staff looking for a catalogue-building solution already have a catalogue. It may be one that they've been updating for years, or they may have only generated it once, but they have one. It's almost as though they had to live the pain of a full production cycle to be driven to find an automated solution.

Keep this workflow in mind as you make it through the article. I think it will help you to understand more about what you're learning and how you can apply the skills to your actual project.

Am I a pro?

The first question for most is, "do I need the pro version?" To decide, ask yourself if you will be using ODBC (see sidebar). Will you be connecting to live data? If so, you should use Xcatalog Pro if you are a QuarkXPress user and InCatalog Pro if you are an InDesign user.

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