Design Professional Catalogs in Adobe InDesign using XML Import and Data Merge

1. About this project: H. Designing catalogs in Adobe InDesign can be one of the most challenging and repetitive editorial workflows, making it crucial to learn how to use automation. In this project, we will dive into the most useful automation techniques InDesign has to offer, Data Merge and XML Import. To get started, we will warm up by working on a real travel catalog, where I will guide you through some advanced typographic features that can drastically reduce the time it takes to update content. After that, we will explore some real world catalog examples and discuss the key considerations that every catalog designer must keep in mind. Then we will start our project from scratch, building three different layouts step by step. First, we will design a layout with a single entry, followed by a spread featuring four entries, and finally, a spread listing over eight entries. For this course, I created a fictional catalog called Cosmic Canopies, showcasing the best and quirkiest treehouses from around the world. And even from alien planets. Using Midjourney and Magnific, I generated over 50 stunning tree house images with descriptions generated by ChatGPT, ensuring that this project will keep you engaged. By the end, you will have a deep understanding of both Data Merge and XML import, along with other advanced in design features. Let's get started. 2. Travel Catalog - Analysis: For our main catalog project that I prepared for this course, I thought it would be a good little exercise and warm up to look at one of the catalogs that I worked on in the past, where I was mainly asked to help improve the way they use in design, to make it more efficient, to work with their copy, and to be able to get their catalogs updated faster. And if you want to follow along what I'm going to do here, you will find an extract of the main catalog. So I'm not sharing the original complete catalog, just some pages of it, but you will be able to go through all the changes that I'm going to do in this exercise. Now normally when I'm asked to improve the workflow of a team, the first thing I do when I open up their in design file is to check the Paragraph Style panel. That's one of the first things that I do, and a great way to identify how deeply they understand and utilize the features in in design is to check their body copy. Because that's supposed to have a lot of smart formatting solutions. And if we check it in this case, I can see it's not based on anything, that's fine. But then this style setting section is very thin. There's not much things here. It's just simply defining the font, the style of the font, the size, the color, and then a brownie point goes for using the baseline. So apart from that, there's not much else there. Let's just check maybe the chapter title. Again, I'm not expecting much after seeing the body copy paragraph style. Yeah, again, pretty much the same. It just has alignment center and all caps additionally to the previous one. And essentially, this is the complexity for all of the paragraph styles, and this is one thing that we are going to improve and fix. And the next thing I normally check is the margins. It's good to know whether they are using column guides. And yes, indeed, they are using six columns. And of course, they have their custom margin setup, which is great. And I can have a quick look at these columns. So although they have three columns on most of the pages, there are actually pages where they would be utilizing those additional columns like here, the first column is skipped and columns two, three, four, and five are used to hold the text that we can see here in the middle. As we can see column guides they are actually utilizing, which is great. And we can just double check that the baseline grid is indeed in use. So we can see the baseline grid right there and the text is aligned to it. This is obviously something that we are using also in our projects. And then next thing I normally check is the text flow. So how many frames are used on a page? And if I just go to this page, for instance, we can just check that there is a frame here, no tax flow, another frame, no tax flow. These are individual icons floating around, nothing connected. That line is also just floating around. Then this is in a single frame. That's great. And there is a text full finally, which, by the way, is easier to track if we have the view extras show text threads option turned on. So when I'm in a normal view, I can see that this text is threaded between the three text frames. So one, two, three, and then it ends there. So it doesn't actually continue to the next page, which is fine. However, it is questionable whether this is the best way of doing things, having three completely independent frames, and even the alignment of the frames we can see already here is not perfect. However, they are using baseline grid, so that's actually going to fix that alignment issue there. But still, these should be set up as a single text frame. Actually, all of this that I have here, even including that box at the bottom, could have been handled in a single text frame, divided into three columns, and then all of these things should have been set up as inline objects. So this group, for instance, if I cut that out and I create a new paragraph here, drag this down. I can just paste that in there. Now that it's pasted in, we can just highlight and use the space before option to set it up exactly where it's supposed to go. So see already, we eliminated one unnecessary text frame that they had. But with the right usage of all the features I'm going to show you here, this, like I said, could have been done with a single tax frame. So instead of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, they originally had separate tax frames. And even this one actually was created with two frames. So more than ten frames could have been done with a single tax frame. 3. Travel Catalog - A single text frame with 3 Paragraph Styles: Let's take a look at the first example, which I have in the original catalog on page 76. So we can see if I show this in full screen that within these excursions, there's, like, smaller excursions or trips like this one, sailing to icebergs. Then we have this settlement cruise. Then there is another Ford that can be visited here on the right side, and then a city walk and so on and so forth, and notice how these blocks of text next to the images are always the same. So they always start with a heading or subheading. Then we have the copy. Then there is a rule or line, and then there is the prices section, which describes also the duration and a couple of other important information like when these trips are available. So these definitely are repeated elements throughout the catalog. And if we go to maybe another page that is a similar setup like this one here, again, we can see the same formatting. So once again, the excursions pages or spreads will always use the same format. It would definitely make sense to spend some time improving this because right now this is again, using multiple text frames instead of a single one. So we have one, two, three, four frames. So we can combine these all together into a single frame, first of all, and then we can also create a connection between the styles, which will help to automate things. One thing I notice for all of these excursions is that this text is always a single paragraph. So if we just check the story editor, there is no paragraph break there. We can also just double check with this one here on the left, yeah. There's no paragraph break, and that's actually something that we can double check with the team. I remember that they confirmed that there's never a paragraph break in there, which is very useful for us because that makes it easier to set this up as a chain of paragraph styles, which we start with this one, then goes into the next style and then goes into the next style. Within this paragraph, I would expect that this was set up as a character style, but it's actually not showing up here. If I select these arrows, they are using a character style, but I believe that's just simply to color this red. We can just double check this. If I go here, edit red, that is just simply a coloring style, but at least they use the style for it, which means that they already thought about perhaps updating that in the future, and that would make it easier to obviously update all instances at once. However, these could have been done as a nested style. So what I'm going to do here, again, just double check if we go into this one. Yeah, there are no net styles currently being used. So what we will do first of all, is I'm going to move this image to the left a bit or just crop it so we can then create a duplicate. So I'm going to duplicate this and keep the original version on the left, and I'm going to use this new version on the right, so I'm going to cut this text out of this frame. I'm going to drag this out and paste the text in here. Reason I keep that version on the left is because I want to make sure that I'm using the same spacing and same size. So then we can drag this down a bit, and I'm going to delete this line because we will recreate that with a paragraph rule. And instead, I'm just going to cut this text out and paste it in after this paragraph. Okay? So I made sure that I don't have any empty line breaks. So I only have one paragraph break here and another one there. That's all we need. And now I am going to set these up as new paragraph styles. For this, I'm going to create actually a new folder as well or group. We can just put this all the way at the bottom. I'm going to call this Fix. And then let's have that first one selected. Hold down Alter option, click on Create New Style. And I'm not going to base it on any existing styles because I just want to avoid any conflict. So I'm going to choose either basic paragraph or no paragraph style, and I'm going to call this one heading or subheading. Again, it depends on the base structure, what would make more sense. And I'm going to make sure that it's applied to the selection. So we can click Okay, and let's just drop this into our fix style category. Now, let's select this other paragraph right here, we can see this is using the body copy without any overrides on it. So I'm going to again, create a new style based on this. I will say base this on no paragraph style, so there won't be any connection. And I will call this excursion body. Al Style to selection. Click Okay. Let's drop it in here. And then finally, the prices section, I'm going to again, create a new style for. I will set it to be based on no paragraph style, and I will choose the name for this type in price section. Again, applies Style section is on, so that's all good. But because we've done that, notice that we actually remove some of the formatting here, like the capital stack is removed now, and also the arrows are looking a little bit thinner, but we will fix this soon. So I'm just going to make sure that this new style price section is also placed in here. Now, first of all, we should set up the chain or connection between these styles, and that is by using the nextile feature. So I will start with the subheading. And from the next tile drop down, I choose this excursion body, and then let's click Okay. And then I go into the body, and for that, I use NextylePrice section. So it's leading from one to the next and then click Okay. Now, what this means is that if I select this text here and I just change it to something completely different like hotel name, then if I then apply the subheading and all the next styles by right clicking on that style and choosing, apply the name of the paragraph style, then next style. Then it will be able to reformat it back exactly the way it should be. And even better if you create an object style. So for instance, in this case, this text frame can be selected, create a new object style and call it excursion text frame. As long as this option here under the paragraph styles is turned on, saying apply next style and obviously starting with the first one, then it could even be applied straightaway by using that object style. So I'm just going to undo this one step, and I'll show you once again if I change this to something completely different. Now having this one selected here, I can just click on that object style and see immediately the object style triggers the first paragraph style that we set up, which is the subheading, and that one triggers the other two paragraph styles, the excursion copy or body, and then the price section. So it's really like a chain of the styles that we set up. And in this case, we can consider these three paragraph styles all nested inside that object style that we just created. Now it's time to fix the rule that we are missing at the moment. I can do this now just simply by going back to the price section, paragraph style, and I can go into the options here, paragraph rules, and we want to use the rule above, which is great. Then we want to actually use the same color. I think it's already using the right color for us. Using text color, actually. That's not the one that we need. We need this one. It was text color because the red arrows were already there, but we shouldn't rely on that. I think the thickness might be slightly thinner, like 075. Actually, it seems like they are using one point. It's hard to see at the moment. But instead of column width, we want this to be set to text, and we want to use the right indent. I'm just going to increase that a bit until we can see it updating. So there we go probably around that much. Not sure how long this is, but of course we can refine this. Let me just set it up for 22 millimeters for now, that's close to it. So no matter how much text we have here, it will always be indented to make sure it looks similar in size to the one on the left. And then, of course, we also want to have spacing between this paragraph and the one before it. So I'm going to say space before and that should push it down. I'm going to use 2 millimeters for now. But then going back to that paragraph rule, we also want to have an offset. So I'm going to keep increasing it up until it seems like it's in the right place. Probably they use around this much space. And then going back to spacing, we can increase the space before further. And the reason why we have to go much higher is because of the baseline grid. So you don't see this updating straightaway because there is a baseline grid in use, which is right here. So align to grid all lines that's active. And now if I just click Okay, I feel like the main reason why we don't have the text in the same position as on the because our text frame is wider. We can easily check that by checking this text frames width here. So the width is this 47.7. So we can select this and just paste in the width to make sure it's the same and already, we can see the text flows exactly in the same way. And by the way, we can just double check how wide this is and we can align it to that other rule. So they are actually using 0.75 thickness. So I can come back to that paragraph style, price section and refine that rule that we use to 075 and then that right indent that we were using can be reduced a bit until we match the original distance. And if I want it to be even more accurate, matching it, I could set it up even more refined. But I'm going to go with 15 millimeters from now. I think that's close enough. Okay, so let's zoom back a bit and we can remove that extra line from there. And now all we have to fix is just this part here. So I'm going to first of all, remove this red character style. I will set it to none. So this paragraph should be completely as it's defined here. And it's not using any character styles. And what I'm going to do is to highlight the text here and create a paragraph style based on that. I will alter option click on create new character style. And what I'm going to do is to check the formatting of this text here. So it's defined in a paragraph style called bolt copy upper case. But we can see it is using or capitals, obviously, medium formatting, and it is using this BSS text color. And I believe that's all the settings that we need there. So I can just recreate this here quickly. I'm going to use medium all capitals, and the color is already the right one. Yeah, so that's all we need. This should be saved as a character style, so create new style. We can see that the only things recorded are the differences from the paragraph style, and I don't need the applied style selection in this case, because we will be nesting this. So I will call the prices from just makes sense to use it like that, and then let's click Okay. And I just create a separate group for these fix styles that I am proposing to the client and then I just need that additional style for the arrows. I'm just going to check that's also using exactly the same settings. But on top of that, it's also using that red color. So I'm just going to use this word here again, change it to red and save a new paragraph style based on this. So now it says medium, all caps and that color, and I'm going to call it red arrows or maybe price section arrows and then save it and drop it in here. And then having this paragraph selected, I can just clear all over with this icon. So it goes back to how it should be. And now I can right click and choose Edit price section, and then I can go into Drop Caps and Nested Styles category, where we can start with a new nested style. And first, I will start with the price section arrows. And if I click away, that will already be applied because it considers these as a single word because there's no space between the two arrows. So that's already good. Then we add another as this style, this time is the prices from, and then notice how it automatically continues after the arrows are applied. So the second word in this case, is becoming our second character style. But instead of through here, I'm going to say up to, and what I want to see is not a word, but a column instead. So I'm putting that character in there, and it basically is going to stop the character style whenever the column first appears. And that's exactly what we need. So it's already working perfectly. I can click Okay. And we can see that instead of having these four separate elements, now we have a single text frame, and the whole thing is also automated. So just to demonstrate this to you, if I mess this up completely by setting it back to basic paragraph, you can see if I just extend the frame. That's how it looks at the moment. And then if I clear the overrides on my object style, Boom, it's all done with a single click. And I can even just to make it even smarter, I can right click on this object style, and I can go into the text frame auto size option, choose height only anchoring the top edge of the frame, and click Okay. And you see even that extra space that I included in there is now removed. So once again, just to demonstrate this, I remove the object style from this, set it back to basic paragraph style. I increase the frame just so we can see what is in here. Again, let's just completely set back everything to the original basic paragraph style. So now I select the text frame, and I'm going to click on excursion text frame, and it's all done. Even the height of the frame snaps onto the text. 4. Travel Catalog - Inline icons: Second little exercise I wanted to show you is on this page. But on this page, there's actually a lot more we could fix. So similarly, what we've learned in the previous one, if you wanted to, you could automate a lot of additional things here. But what I wanted to focus on is this section here with the icons. Now, I notice that these icons are actually not placed in a table, so the spacing between them is random. I don't think they used any special way of measuring the space between them. It's probably just eyeball. So yeah, that's something that can be fixed already in the way that we are going to do. But the biggest problem here is that they are not in line, so they are not part of a tax frame. Now, because here they are using, again, independent tax frames, what I'm just going to do is to have them placed into this tax frame here. And just like before, just so I can compare the before and after, I'm going to make some space, drag this tax frame down a bit. Like that, and then I'm going to duplicate all of these to the right. Let's bring them here. And instead of just using these three icons, I'm going to jump back to the first spread where there is a key for all of the icons. So these are all the available icons that might appear in that section. So I'm going to copy all of these. Of course, we don't need their description, and let's just select them all, copy. Then go back to the page where we were. And I'm going to paste these here on the pasteboard. Now, when I have them here on the pasteboard, we can actually see that there are some differences between them. Some of these icons are grouped, some of them are not grouped, but I'm not going to waste time on fixing that. For now, let's just accept that these are the finalized icons that they want to work with. And first of all, what I'm going to do is to create a tax frame for them. And then cut the first one and paste it in here, then cut the next one, paste it next to the other one, and then just continue doing the same quickly. Cut and paste, cut and paste, cut and paste. I'll speed this part up. So here we have all of the icons in the same text frame. And because they are inline objects, I can already use the text frame to wrap these around, and it's working perfectly as expected. I can have them all in a single line or like this. And what I would actually do is to have them in a single line. Listed like this. This is actually something that we could keep here on the pasteboard for all the pages if we wanted to. We could have it placed somewhere convenient, like here on the top, from where we could easily select them. And what I'm going to do is to double click inside, copy all of them. Or if you know exactly which ones you want, you can even just highlight them and paste them into the text. But for now, I'm just going to copy all of them come back down here and I'm going to delete this tree, extend that text frame and then add a line break and paste these icons in. Now, we can see that the size of the icons is actually different here, and that's something that we can fix and align to our placeholder icons. So if I bring it down here, we can try to align it to this other one. So let's just make it a little bit bigger. And I just noticed that they are missing this icon. This wasn't in the first spread. Let's just see again, Did I miss no, it wasn't there. So that's actually not defined here in the beginning. Maybe it's defined further in the catalog, but I'm going to just fix that as well. So I'm going to copy this and paste it in here. And I'm going to try to align the size of these other ones to this. I'm using command and shift keys or control shift to drag them and make them similar in size. I believe this can be slightly taller than the other ones. We can keep them the same size. Again, I'm not sure what's the best size for them, but for now, I'm just going to keep them roughly the same height. Okay, this should be the same height as well. This one to be much smaller, to align it. This one and finally, this one. Alright, so now one additional thing definitely worth mentioning is when you are resizing these icons that are using lines only, there will be inconsistency in the line strength. That's again, something that you want to definitely fix. And that's why it's important to set things up already in Illustrator to make sure that they are the correct size before you bring them into in design. But like I said, I'm not going to waste too much time talking about this here. So I will just select this paragraph, delete those icons, just delete them, and then now copy these placeholders in, and I'm just going to drop it in there. And then we can just drop this frame out of the page onto the pasteboard. All right. So we have our icons ready, but we only wanted to use a few of these icons here. So we want to have the camera, the little cabin, and the mountains, and I want the order of them to be different. So I just highlight the mountains and paste it there and see how easy it is to move them around once they are part of the copy. Now for these icons, we actually don't want to use baseline grid, so that's something that we are going to change. But first of all, I will set up a paragraph style for them, new style. Shouldn't be based on anything. And it actually doesn't need any of these settings, so I will reset this two base and I'm going to call it icons or large icons and apply style to selection. Let's click Okay. So we will improve that style soon. And while we are here in the dialogue box, we can already fix a couple of things like the indense spacing. So we want to have more space before it's actually already says align to grid none because we reset the style to base. So we removed that feature already, which is useful in this case, because we want to position it exactly how it was there on the left side. Feel like that's closer. Then to have the spacing between the icons, we want to use the tracking feature, so we can hold down Shift key, increase this a bit faster. And we can just try to find a good spacing. I feel like 500 is close to what they used, and it's a nice even number, so let's just go with that. And then let's not forget about the rule that we have below. So we just put that in quickly. Rule below on. We want to use the same red color that was used before. And I remember that it was 075. And this time, I'm going to keep the width on column because the text will really vary depending on the amount of icons we will have here. And they actually prefer to keep this line consistent, so it doesn't relate to the icon. So it has to be set to column width, but the right indent, we can control, and with that, we can define how much space we want for this. So I would just set it to 30 millimeters from now, and then we can change the offset as well. So we want to have this spaced out probably around there. Okay. So let's just click Okay. And the best thing to do is to already assign this paragraph style to that placeholder that we have here on the top. So if I just select this whole text frame, I can click on large icons and see immediately, we get the spacing between them. And if I ever need to adjust the size of things like this camera, for instance, I can easily do that. And then just to see how it would work, if I copy all of these icons onto another page, this instance, where we need the car and the mountains, I can just delete the unnecessary elements, create some space here, and then paste these icons in. C just highlight the things that we don't need. So we needed the car and the mountains. We don't need these and we just have to move the car before the mountain. And it's done. Now, this is already an elegant solution. However, what I advised the client for this project is to turn these icons into a font. And that way, they would be able to use characters on the keyboard to type with these icons. So when you create a font from the icons, you could have, for instance, the car on C, the mountains, on M, and then literally, you can just type them in, and they would appear in the right formatting because of the paragraph style, but it would be so much easier to handle them as glyphs instead of inline objects. And these two improvements that we've done here, I remember the client told me already saved them days of work. And that is just for this particular catalog, but they actually have dozens of catalogs. So once the same features are implemented throughout all the catalogs, it ends up saving weeks of work. And the main takeaway I want you to get from this is that although you can do everything in a raw format, by raw, I mean having everything just set up the most simplest Everything is in separate text frames, and although there are styles, they are not connected to each other and so on and so forth, when it comes to having these long documents, like a catalog, it's definitely crucial to utilize as much as possible of in design's smart features. Otherwise, you will waste so much time having to manually update everything, and not to mention the fact that you will be more likely to make mistakes if you are not relying on these smart connected styles that we created here. When you utilize these more advanced features in in design, it takes longer to set up in the first place, but it will save you a lot of time in the long run, and it will also assure that you won't make mistakes. I hope you found this warm up exercises useful and feel free to play around with these extracts from the original catalog and see how much more improvements you can introduce. And when you are ready, you can either move on to the next video where I'm going to show some additional examples of existing real catalogs. Or if you're eager to get started and learn about the smart ways of handling catalogs in in design, you can jump straight to our project. 5. Inspiration - Catalogs: I collected lots of references when it comes to product catalogs throughout the years since I've been working as a graphic designer, out of which I chose a few very good examples that you can also find in the reference folder for this project. And in this video, I would like to show you some of these and talk about certain aspects of catalog design that will be useful when we start working on our own project. First, I would like to start with an interesting antique example, product catalog from Ericson from 18 86. That's a very old publication. And yeah, it just shows really well that a catalog has been in use for a very long time. And essentially catalogs worked already in a similar way that they work in present day. So we have illustrations to show the products. We have the description, the prices. And then we have also maybe some additional graphics here, and that's actually the last page. So that's 24 pages, this catalog. Now, already from this, we can see one of the most important aspects of a product catalog, and that is consistency throughout the catalog itself. So consistency is key because users would browse through the catalog and they expect to find the same information in the same places. So in this case, we can see the prices would be always formatted the same way. If we move between pages, we can see, again, the information is displayed the same way. Let me jump back and see a little bit more up to date or more modern example. Like, this one is great by John Deer. We have these replicas or toys of their tractors. And after the cover page, we can see a nice table of contents here on the left side, and then we already see some of the products on the right. And if we zoom closer to these, we can already see that there will be information that will be repeated throughout all of the products. So we have a code, another SKU code as well. Then we have the scale or ratio to the original size of the product one to 16, the name, and then we can also see the age grade, when is it becoming available, and then we have some additional information below it here. And just to see the consistency that I mentioned at the beginning, we have the same exact information, same exact formatting as above. So that is helping viewers to be able to find what they are looking for and to compare products with each other because that's also obviously a very important part of a catalog. It's not just to find the information, but to be able to make an informed decision of which product is best suited for the customer. We can go through these spreads. Here, we have a lot more products, but still very easy to find what we are looking for. All the information, again, is repeated in the exact same way. We can see again eight products shown on this spread, and I notice how we have information about the section here on the left and on the right. So in this case, this is the prestige collection. These running headers on the left and the right are indicating that. And so if I go to the next spread, we are still in the same one, but then the scale is changing here. So it's not only telling us the name of the collection, but it also tells us the scale of these products, which, of course, for replicas is very important, and then we can go through. I like also the way they are mixing up the layout slightly. So for instance, here we have a large image on the right. Then we have this featured image on the left on this spread. There's also a combination and variety in the type of images they are using. So some of the images would show the product in the actual environment, someone using them, while others would just focus on the product with a blank background. But even the background is changing between gray, white or yellow. And sometimes we would also see the packaging in these boxes that are edited here. And let's just move on to additional pages. And from now, it's essentially just repeating everything we've seen before, maybe a couple of additional bubbles. Did we get these sticker like design elements to show what's new in 2024, which is also quite nice. It grabs the attention. And then we get to pages where we have a lot more products with a little bit less information. So here we have ten products on the left side, and we have six products on the right side. So it has a good variety of how many products they are showing amongst these preads. After this, it essentially just continues in a similar fashion. We have more like collection replicas here, which are displayed together. It just continues on like that. The actual catalog is 80 pages long. Now here's another similar catalog. This is by Lego. We have the table of contents on the left side, and then we have a hero image that introduces this product category called dreams. So we can go and see that on the next page. Beautifully designed catalog, by the way. I love how they display their toys. Obviously, they are really good at it and it's an amazing brand. I'm sure whoever is designing this catalog is having a lot of fun. Or they might be bored of seeing all of these toys all the time. Who knows? We can see that even the style of the formatting changes slightly between the different age groups. So the demographics will define slightly how the layout is looking. Here, it's a much cleaner and more simpler layout compared to the previous. Which is for older kids. This is for the youngest audience, the Lego Duplo. We can see these products. Then we have PAPA Pig, which is a brand that recently joined the Lego family, and then we can move on and we will reach the four plus age group. And this is really nicely displayed again as a running head here on the right side, and that is just something consistent throughout the whole catalog. So we will always know where we are if we take a quick look on the right edge of the spread. It's also worth mentioning that the main Lego logo is consistent throughout the catalog. It's always there on the top left. So as I go through the catalog, we can see the sub brands like Ninjago or City, Marvel. They keep changing, but they are still in that consistent location. So it makes it easier to find it. Now it's Star Wars the classic. Disney and so on and so forth. Beautiful catalog, really nicely designed. Amazing imagery, great use of typography, highly recommend to spend more time analyzing it. And now as a harsh contrast, here is a catalog for personal protective equipment. This obviously has a completely different tone. It's more mature and more professional, especially because it's about safety and protective gear. So we have the information about the different icons that they are using here at the beginning. Which will be used throughout the catalog. That is a key for the viewers to be able to identify what they are looking at. And then the table of contents is also great here on the right, again, reinforcing the icons that are used for these. So there's a lot of pages. It's over 500 pages for this catalog, and then we can see the actual contents. Then we reach the first category, eye protection, which has its own mini table of contents. And then we can see some main information here or introduction and then comes some additional guide on what to look out for when you are choosing the products here and a lot of information here at the bottom in this table. Now, that's again, very common amongst catalogs that you would have these extremely complex tables. In our project, we will also have a table, but it will be much simpler than this. But essentially the same techniques will be used for more complex tables like these that we will be covering like using cell styles and table styles and the various formatting options to change the orientation of the text within the table. Finally, here's another beautifully designed product catalog by Purdy, professional painting tools. We have a nice cover. We have the table of contents on the right. Already, there is a color key here to be able to find the type of bristles and materials, and then we can move on to the actual pages. An additional guide again, highlighting the various brushes from stiff to soft the color codes that they are using for it just zoom a little bit closer to this. So a nice little infographic here and some explanation on the different handles and the terms used for it. Notice how they are using the bold formatting for the first words. That's actually something very easy to set up in in design, and we will be also using it in this project. By using a nested character style within a paragraph style. And then here on this page, we have another example of a nice table, very sophisticated, very simple. I like how there is no outer boundary. So it's just floating in space, but it has just that very thin headline to divide the columns and the rows and, of course, also the header row that we have here on the top. As I skim through this catalog, again, you can see how important it is to be consistent. They are using the same style. It's very easy to compare the products and really find what you're looking for quickly and easily. It's 68 pages. So there's a lot of products to go through, and they are using their color coding here on the top. So in the footer area, it's again, very easy to find the category that you are after. And each of the larger sections or chapters of the catalog are broken up by having these large image and some introduction copy at the bottom. These type of high impact interruptions are very important to break the flow and the repetitiveness of the catalog, and of course, it again, helps for navigation, so the customers can quickly find what they are looking for. And again, we have another infographic, but then the general style is going to be very similar to what we've seen before. But of course, these are rollers, so they look slightly different. Then we have the prep and cleanup section, again, very similar style but different tools. And it just continues on and on. It's pretty much the same layout after this. But what we can tell already is that it definitely would make sense to have a page like the one on the right setup as a parent page, which would allow consistency, and it would serve as a template for all of these category starter pages. But it would also definitely make sense to have the table styles and sales style setup and potentially to link these tables with the product images and description because you definitely want to keep these groups together. So most likely this is anchored to the table, and again, this is anchored to the table, and that would be the same format throughout the whole catalog. So unlike the other projects in this course, for this catalog project, I actually have this big library of references that I highly recommend to spend some time going through, again, to find inspiration, to learn about catalog formatting. And then when you are ready, you can start the next lesson where we will be setting up the document for our catalog project. 6. The assets we will work with: Alright, so first of all, I want to show you what we will be creating in this project. And just a final warning, things will get technical in this project. And I'm going to try to show everything in the simplest way possible, but there's a lot to cover. It's really not for the fainthearted. So if you don't like complicated things, this might not be the best project to start with. Maybe work on the other ones first before you do this one. However, if you like challenges and if you love automation and see things happening automatically once you set things up, then you will actually love this project. So here's one of the examples that we will be using. You can see I have a couple of elements here if I zoom a little bit closer, we have a table here, some parent page elements on the top, left and right, and then we have another text frame here at the bottom. And in the background, which might not be visible properly, we have an image frame as well. Now, in this particular example, we will be using Data Merge, and I'm just going to preview the first page, how it will populate all this information. And I can actually switch between these pages already right here in the Data Merge panel, and we can see how all of this is going to be populated from a CSE file. And I can zoom closer. You can see how all the information is pulled in from that file. So it adds the required numbers in the table, and then of course, it adds the copy right here, and also everything is already coming in in a formatted way. So this is looking great, and by the way, this document would probably be close to 100 pages long once it's actually generated. But let me just jump over to another example, once again, same Data Merge feature, but this time used for four records on a single spread. And we can see this in full screen, really nice way of displaying these next to each other. So whoever is going through this catalog, will be able to take a better look at this. And once again, if we are using the Data Merge panel, we can go through the spreads and see exactly how everything is going to look like. And then finally, we have another example, again, using the same images. But this time, instead of using Data Merge, we will be using the XML import feature and tags. You can already see the XML structure here on the left side. Currently, we only have one entry here. Now, if I go to the file menu and choose Import XML and choose the file from the exercise file folder, it's going to ask me a couple of questions. We will deal with these later. I'm just going to say, Okay, but what will happen now is that it's going to populate my document with all of this, and it's going to generate the necessary amount of pages. This time, it's more of a list format where we have, once again, the left side and the right side, but in a little bit more compact weight, so we can display even more than four records. So on some pages, this might end up being eight records like here, we have four on the left and four on the right, depending on the length of them. And then here we actually ended up having nine, again, because there's some shorter descriptions there at the bottom. We will compare Data Merge and XML Import and learn exactly when to use each of them, what are the pros and cons for each of these workflows. And in the end, we will even see examples of combining these two features together. But we will take everything step by step without overwhelming you. First of all, I just wanted to explain where the idea of this catalog came always loved tree houses. I actually built one myself when I was younger. But my friend, we went up into a mountain, decided that we would build a treehouse there, and we spent months building it, kept going back, took so much building materials with us, and eventually turned into something more like a shelter that was built into the mountain than on top of a tree. Because it was in the forest, we can consider it still a tree house. And the inspiration for this project came from looking at Airbnb. I saw some incredible tree houses here. So there's actually a category to look for tree houses, and you can see some beautiful ones. And, of course, for a site like AirbnB, you have a lot of information for each of these out of which the most important ones are listed straightaway, the rating, the location, the host, and when it is available next and the price, of course. So I thought this would be a really good material to use as a catalog. So create a tree house catalog. But to make things more interesting and unique, I thought, why not use generative AI for creating the images. And that way, I can even create tree houses that feel like they are out of this world. So this fictional catalog that we are creating could offer not only locations on our planet, but even on other distant planets. And you can see I used Magnific to generate these images. Now Magnific has mystic version two, currently, that is a new feature where you can actually prompt right here. And if I select one of these, we can see my prompt is right here on the top, ultra realistic photo of a modern treehouse on top of a rocky mountain in Yosemite, built into the side of a vertical wall of El Capitan showing the entire building and surroundings in autumn. Very specific. And I feel like the prompt adherence is brilliant here in Magnific. That's one of the reasons why I like to use it. But also, in general, it just creates really exceptional detail in these images. Now, for most of these images, these are the additional features that are used. So creative detailing, I set to 100%. I had realism on, and I used the Illusio engine. Other great thing about Magnific is that by default, it generates two K images. So the resolution is already looking really good. As you can see, I can zoom in and see these details. But if I need it even more resolution, all I have to do is to upscale this. So what I can do is click here, say, Rue final image. But first, we have to switch to magnificUscaler, and do that again. It puts the input image in there, and then we can choose the scale factor. We can go extremely high resolution if we wanted to. I'm just going to double the resolution, and it tells us here at the bottom that the final size will now be twice as much as what it is currently. Of course, Magnific is not free, so it's costing these credits here, but that's fine. I'm just going to keep everything the way it is. Maybe I'm just going to copy the prompt and put it back here. And yeah, let's just see if I upscale this. And after around a minute of waiting time, we get the result. I'm just going to zoom in now. Get closer to this part here in the image, the building, and let's compare before and after. So that's before and that's after. You can see how much extra detail it can generate. And of course, there will be strange parts like this one here. Doesn't look good. Also that part there looks a little bit strange, but it actually fixed some of those details in the magnified or upscale version. But generally, all the textures and even details inside the building just get so much more interest. And we can see this also up here on the tree Again, before and after, it just does an amazing job. And we can even have a look at the mountain in the background. Once again, a lot more detail is added with the magnified version. So, yeah, Magnific is definitely my favorite tool to use when it comes to AI images. And then to actually create a database from these images, which includes all the necessary information like description, location, price per night, and host and so on and so forth. For this, I actually use ChatGPT. So I fed ChatGPT a table template, which had these columns prepared, and then I attach the images, and I asked ChatGPT to generate content based on these images. And that's how I got the database. Of course, there was a lot of refinement and tweaking on this. But without ChatGPT and Magnific, I don't think I would have been able to put together such an exciting and complex database from scratch. I am planning to create multiple template databases like this one, so you will be able to practice the techniques that we learn in this project and apply it to other type of service or product based catalogs. 7. Database terminology: While we are here in Excel, I wanted to also make sure we spent some time on some of the important terms that we will be using throughout this project. First of all, the database itself is what we can see here. So we have all the information stored in one location. And for instance, if this was a database for a supermarket, they would have all their food products here listed, and they would have all the necessary information in each of the columns. The great thing about having a database, of course, is that you can feed a website from it. You can also feed print projects like this one from the same database. And whenever something is updated, as long as there's automation in place, it should immediately and automatically update everywhere else. Now, each row within the database, we refer to as a record. So this is a record of a particular product or service or location in this case, while each of the cells or contents of the cell we refer to as entry. So within a record, we have several entries. And the columns themselves can be referred to in different ways depending on which workflow you are using. When we use CSV files for data merge, we normally refer to the columns as fields. While in an XML workflow, we would more likely refer to it as elements or attributes. I'm just going to show you quickly a text file example which can also be used for data merge, where we have the original columns from our database defined here in the first line. So each of these fields for which the corresponding entries are in the same order listed below. So this is one record here. Then here's the next record and so on and so forth. Of course, I can also just triple click to quickly find them because they are separated by line breaks. And between the entries, these commas as you can see, between each entry, we have commas. Those are called delimiters. They act as the separators between the entries. And depending again on the data source that you're using, it could be either a comma or a tab or some other special character. And because commas are also used within entries, for instance, in this text here, you can see, we have a couple of sentences, and there's definitely a couple of commas inside. There's also a need for something that we call text qualifier, and that's actually these double quotation marks right here and also where this entry starts right there. So these double quotation marks at the beginning and the end of an entry groups the text together, making sure that it doesn't get separated by the commerce inside it. Now, jumping back into in design, the data Merge panel is definitely going to be a key area where we will be working, and I'm going to give you a proper tour later. But for now, what's important is that you always have to choose a data source, and that is going to be displayed here on the top. So that's either a CSV or a text file. In this case, that's a CSE file, which has a table structure compared to the free flow tax structure of a text file. And the list that we see below the data source, we refer to as data fields. And these are the ones that have to be placed inside these placeholders like frames. So for instance, that data field location is placed here. This one is another data field, the description. And notice how I have some static text here, hosted by, which repeats for every record, and that's what we call static content. So something that doesn't change between the entries. And there's actually more of this static content right here. Again, like the bedrooms, rating, and even these icons, they don't change. They are static content right next to the placeholders of our data fields. But instead of boring you any longer with the technical terms, let's get started with our first example where we will be building from scratch the exact same layout that you can see here on my screen, where we will have a single record from our database on an entire spread within our product catalog and in design. 8. Single record layout - Setting up the image placeholder: For our first example, I would like you to start a new document, and we will be working with the default A four size portray format. It's important to have the facing pages turned on, and I like to start with page number two, and we can start with two pages as well. We should also set up three millimeter bleed for all edges. Because we will have the image completely filling the spread. And in these cases, we have to make sure that if this goes for print, we are covered, so the edges will turn out fine in the final print. And I think that's all we need to do for now. Of course, we can have the preview on, just so we can see this in the background. And yeah, that is looking good. We can hit Create. Now, as a first step, we can already get our data merge panel open. You can find this in the Window menu under utilities, data Merge. And by the end of this project, you will be familiar with most of these things here and also some additional things that you may have never seen in design. So I'm excited to show you all of these, but this is the data Merge panel, and it actually gives you already a little bit of a tutorial. So if you just read this, it explains that first, you need to select a data source, then you drag your data fields from this panel onto the frames. Which are your placeholders, and then you create the merge document at the end. So it's actually a very simple three step workflow. But of course, we will go much deeper than that. First of all, let's click on the panel menu and choose Select Data Source. And the one that you will need for this one is the TreeHouses CSV file. So we will click Open, and it immediately brings in our data fields, and it even shows that the image is actually an image while all the rest is text. Now, this is actually important to mention that if you ever have images in a database, you should always use the tsign at the beginning of your column name. So the field that we have here on the top should have that at sign at the beginning. And then you will need to include the location or path to that file in relation to where the CSE file will be stored. So in my case, if I look at my file structure, you can see that the CSF file is right here, and sitting right next to it is the images folder with all of these images that I have prepared for my database. So when you look at this in the background, it basically means that compared to the data source file, the SCV, we need to go first into the images subfolder, and within that, this is what we are looking for. It's very important to be accurate with the file naming. I always suggest the most simple file naming format possible with numbering at the end and also make sure to use always the same image format. So even mistakes like not including an E in the JPAG depending on how the files were named can cause a problem once you are using data Mage so just like for every type of automation, you have to always pay attention to the smallest details. But since I use the at sign properly, it automatically recognizes that that field is going to be an image type field instead of text. And let's not waste any more time. Let's test this out. So I'm going to use the frame tool. And I'm just going to draw a frame, and then I click on image here in the Data merge panel. Notice how immediately it updated the frame. So if I just go back, that's an empty frame, and now it became a placeholder for a data field. If I zoom closer, we can see the description of the data field showing up there, and that is looking really good. Now, if I want, I can already preview how this is going to look like. And that is looking great. However, I wanted this image to be completely filling the spread. So what I will do is to drag this all the way to the top left corner of the bleed, and also we go all the way on the other side. And now I can just test this out. If I use fill frame proportionally, this is how it's going to look. Now I can check the next page, and what you will notice is that the fitting of the images is not perfect. So if I go back to the first page, even that is now not filling the page proportionally, it's fitting the image proportionally. So it will have a little bit of gap on the right and the left. Now, this is something you can actually fix easily. You just have to go into the panel menu from data Merge and choose content placement options. And there you can change these features. So instead of fit images proportionally, we want them to fill frames proportionally. You can also choose to center within the frame. And of course, link images is always a good idea to have on, and then we can just click Okay. And then once we turn off the preview and turn it back on again, see automatically updated, and now it does a brilliant job already filling in the images. Now if I wanted to only include the images without any text, I could already generate a document based on this. By clicking on this, icon here in the data Merge panel called Create Merge Document. So let's test this out. If I click on this, it's going to ask me which records do I want, whether I want all of them or just a single record, and I can even specify which one if I wanted to, or I can also choose a range. So it gives me the option of all of them, which is 55 records. So out of that, I can type in maybe one, two, five. Comma and then maybe 20 to 55, for instance, just like specifying pages when you are exporting a PDF, this works exactly the same way. But I'm going to stick to all records. And because we are using a facing page format, it actually doesn't allow us to change this feature, the records per document page, but we will come back to this later for now. I just want to see a quick result. So I'm going to click Okay, and then keep an eye on the pages panel. Which is going to be populated with all the records. So in design is just telling me, by the way, that there was no overset text generated while merging the records. And that's quite obvious because we haven't actually imported any text. But yeah, we can see all of these spreads created. We have over 100 pages, and I can just zoom out and see all of these spreads created here. Beautiful. So the important thing here that we can learn is that every time you create a merge document using data merge, it's going to create a separate new untitled document. It's not going to affect your original source file, which is great. That almost serves like a template which won't be affected. So this is a completely independent file, and we can decide to save this or not, in this case, because this is not a final version. I just used it as a test. I'm going to close it, and I come back to my actual source document because we still have to populate our other data fields. 9. Single record layout - Text placeholders: Now, let's just go in order and let's set up the location for which I will need a text frame. Now, as soon as I start to have overlapping elements within a design, I like to also start using layers. So in this case, I'm going to call the original layer where we have our image, image or images, and I'm going to create a new layer now, and I'm going to call it text. Now, on this new layer, I'm going to create a new frame, and by the way, while we are working, we can also lock our image layer, so I don't accidentally move that frame around. So I'm going to use the type tool on this new layer and I'm going to create a text frame. It doesn't matter what size it is for now, I'm just going to create it like that. And within this one, we will be storing a couple of things. First of all, we will have the location and once again, I'm just going to zoom a little bit closer just so you can see better what's happening here. So having the text frame selected, I double click inside it, and then I just click on location in Data Merge panel. That adds already that first placeholder within the layout. Then I'm going to press Enter. That's a line break to separate this. From the next element, which is going to be description. So another data field is added. And by the way, notice how these little numbers are appearing here. Immediately as soon as we have a placeholder for a data field, it tells us on which page they appear. So the image is associated with page number two because it overlaps the spread, while these two I have on the right side at the moment. That's why it's saying three there. And after description, I'm going to press Enter again, create another line break, and then I'm going to drop in the host as well in here. So that is looking quite good. So far, I'm not going to format it at all now. I'm just going to keep it like this. Maybe one thing that I'm going to do is to assign a fill color for the container or frame itself. I go up to the swatches, choose this fill option, make sure that the container is selected, and then I choose paper. Now, we won't really see any difference right now, but this is just filling in the frame with white. So if I move it here, you can see how it looked before and how it looks after when we assign that. So it fills it in with white. That's going to help us to be able to read the copy even when the image is behind it. So now that is ready, we can hit preview in Data merge panel. And look at that. We already have the image in the background and we have the location on the top. Then as a new paragraph, we have the description, and once again, as a new paragraph, we have the host's name. And we can probably already start formatting this a little bit. So one thing that I wanted to have is some corner radius on this frame. So the way you can do this is by clicking on the little yellow square and then start dragging it. And I'm just going to set it up for 3 millimeters, and by default, it's using round corners. But this is actually something you can also access from the Options bar. In case you don't see the options bar, just go to the Window menu and choose Control. It's actually called Control bar. It used to be called Options bar. But yeah, so we have this also available there. You can decrease the amount, and you can also change the corner radius style. I'm going to keep it rounded, and one additional important thing to do is to have some inset spacing so to keep the text away from the edges of the frame. If you press Commando Control B, that's for the text frame options. And here you want to make sure preview is on so you can see what you're doing, and I'm going to increase this to maybe 5 millimeters. That's going to create a nice offset from the edge of the frame, and that works nicely. We can click Okay. So if we zoom back, we can see everything in context. And once again, we can just use these arrows to toggle through all of the records and we can see how it looks. It's looking great. But I noticed an issue, and I wanted to make sure I mentioned this because it can be very annoying when it happens that some of the characters don't render properly here in design. So Winter's edge, the little apostrophe. Turns into this strange code, and that would appear actually many times throughout the catalog. So what you need to do to fix this is to make sure whenever you save a CSU file that you use the right formatting for it. And that is actually something that you can do in even the most simplest text editor applications. I'm using a little bit more advanced one called Es CSU Editor. I just to show you, when I save this, what I need to make sure is that I use the UTF 16 nIicode text encoding. So instead of eight, this is what you want to use. So once I do that, I can save this. By the way, we can see here, we can even customize what the field separators should be and also what the field escape rules are. So remember when we talked about delimiters and text qualifiers, these are exactly those features. So I'm just going to save this and overwrite the original file. Then let's just close this. And jumping back into in design, I'm going to zoom closer to our text. All I have to do now is to go to the data Merge panel menu and notice that there is an option here to update the data source. Now, this is extremely useful. So if you make any changes to your CSV or text file, you can just update it, and then it should automatically fix itself. We just have to click Preview again, and then the text now renders perfectly. So we have the apostrophe sign there, and also within the text, it looks perfectly fine. One thing that I'm going to fix already here, and that's going to be saved into our paragraph styles, once we set them up, is to have no hyphenation. I'm going to select all the text, and I'm going to go to the paragraph formatting controls and turn off hyphenation. So that's just something I like to do at the very beginning because sometimes I forget, and then I only notice it later on in the workflow. So now I can just double check text is looking good, and now we have roughly half of the data fields already in our layout. So that is a good progress. I will come back to formatting these later. For now, I would like to add the additional information, which actually will go into a table. So let's create a table now. I'm going to go to the table menu and choose Create Table. And for this particular layout, I would like to have four rows and one column. Now you can already assign a table style to this right here in this menu, which is always a good idea. So I'm just going to choose that new table style. And I will just call it table style one for now. And I'll click Okay. And then we have to click Okay again. And then the table is loaded into a cursor. If I just click somewhere, it's going to generate it and fill the available space within the margins. But if you want to be more specific, of course, you have to click and drag instead. Unfortunately, if you undo the last step, you have to go through the settings again. I'm just going to choose that style once more. Click Okay. And then I am going to do a click and drag and roughly define the area that I need. We can obviously refine this later, just like all the other information. But this is going to be our table. And then in the first draw, we can probably put the price probably the most important one people want to see. Then the second one can be the rating. I think that's also very important. And then can come the bedrooms and then can come the bathrooms. So these will show the number of each of these. And if I zoom closer again, I can show in the preview how these look like. Now, we can't really see them yet because there is no backdrop for our table, but that's actually something we can fix very quickly. So I'm just going to move this here just so you can see it. We need a sale style to define that. And this is actually something I have already opened here on the right. So we need sale styles, and the table style is already there. If you don't know where these panels are, it's from the window menu and you will find them on the styles. So there's sale styles and table styles. And don't get confused, although there is a type and tables category. This is not where you will find the styles relevant for tables. It's all grouped together within the styles category. So once you have these open, within the cell styles, you can define a new style. So that's what I'm going to do here. I'm going to create a new style, and we can, I guess, just call it sale style one. I'm going to, let's just call it sale style one without any spacing in it, and then I can double click on the table style one. And then for the body rows, I would like to assign Sal style one. Right? Let's click Okay. So now the two things are connected, I can go back to the cell style itself. And here I want to have a fill color. So I go to strokes and fills. And for the cell fill, I choose paper. Now, as long as you have the preview option on here, you will already see this appearing in the background, and for now that's all I wanted to do. So I'm just going to click Okay. It's a basic thing that we already started defining the styles for this document. It's going to help us later on. But now we can see the result that if I preview this, we can actually see these numbers much better. So we have the price on the top, the rating, bedrooms and bathrooms below. And we can see the next page, and we can see how these numbers keep updating. So that is nice. It's working perfectly. And the good news is that if we look at the Data Merge panel, now all of our data fields are in the layout. So everything has a placeholder. Now it's time to stylize them. 10. Single record layout - Setting up Paragraph Styles: First of all, you will need the Paragraph Styles panel for this part of the workflow. So make sure you open it up from Windows styles, paragraph styles. I'm going to keep it here on the right side. And this is definitely a panel. You should keep an eye out for throughout the work that you're doing in design no matter what kind of projects you do. And to make things easier for now, I'm going to even just drag it out here to display it better. So we can see right next to what we are doing. One of the first things I would like to do is to turn off the preview just so we go back into seeing things just as a structure. And first, I would like to format the location. So I have that selected, and then the font that I'm going to use here is called Monsera. I'm going to use the normal version of this. So I'm just going to go down here and actually will use the bold version of Monsera and I will use ten points on this. And then for the description and the host, actually, we can both select these and already choose Monsera. I'm just going to choose regular, and then I will change the size of these as well down to eight points. But the host, I will actually set back to medium. Oh, maybe it could be even bold, but I think medium is going to work quite nicely. Alright, so that is looking good. Now let's give it a try and see how this looks. Yeah, that looks good in terms of hierarchy. It looks nice. The medium might need a little bit more strength, so I might just use semibld that's very subtle difference, but definitely helps to separate it. And then, of course, we will have to save these as paragraph styles. But one thing that I'm going to change first is the leading. So for the description, I'm going to use 11 points leading. And then I'm going to use also space before and after. So for the description, we can increase the space before to 3 millimeters, and space after again can be maybe 3 millimeters. I think that's looking good. I like the way that looks. So now we can save these as paragraph styles. So when you select tags, you can either use the Paragraph Styles panel and hold down Alter option key and click on the plus sign when you create the style, or on the next one, I'm going to show you the other way. I'm going to call this according to the data merge data fields. So this is called location. Let's just be consistent naming our styles exactly the same way as the data fields are named. It's less likely you will make mistakes if you do I'm going to select the description part. I will now instead of going through the panel menu, go up to the paragraph formatting controls and click on this little drop down and choose new paragraph style. So there's another way to access the same feature. So this should be called description. Again, the same way as before. It's not based on anything, so my styles won't be connected to each other. Here, I'm not going to do based on styles just to reduce the complexity of an already quite complex project. I'm going to click Okay. That's done, and then let's do the last one right there. I'm going to go through again, creating a new style for this, and I will call this one host. Okay. Now you just have to double check that whenever you select these, they should show up both here in the paragraph size panel and also in the data merge panel. So they should have no plus sign on them. They are defined exactly the way they are shown in the layout. So that is looking very good. Now what we need is some static content. And if I turn off the preview, it's probably easier to do it there. So in front of the host placeholder, I'm going to type in hosted by space. Then the data field comes in to fill this in, and then after that, we want the full stop. So this turns into a sentence. If I turn on the preview again from data Merge, now it looks much better. So instead of just a name, now it says hosted by Vsper in this case. But we can check the next page. That one is hosted by Sienna and Luca. If we take a look at this from a distance, it looks already much nicer than before. Our formatting is working very nicely. Our static content, that little text that we it as well, blends perfectly in with all the dynamic text that is coming from the data source, and our styles are working as expected. Now we have to do the same for the table. So let's go closer to the table. And the first thing that I would like to do here is to highlight the whole table. Now, you can do this by double clicking in either of the cells. And then when you see your cursor flashing, you can hover over the column in this case. And then just click that will select everything. And while it's selected, you can change the vertical alignment of the text. We can set this up to be center that's going to help. But then I also want the text to be horizontally centered. That's just a normal alignment, which we can do with Command or Control Shift C. That's great. Now it's perfectly in the center. And for formatting the text here, we will be using a style again. But first, I also want to put some static elements in here. So I'm going to turn off the preview just so we can see everything properly. Now, for the price per night, I'm going to press Enter, and before my placeholder, I will type in price. It actually would make sense to type in per night, as well. That's quite important information. And this one we can already format and save as a new paragraph style. So again, I am going to use Monser just like before. But this time, I'm going to use light, and I will reduce the size down to probably ten points, or it can go down even to eight points. Yeah, I think that looks good, and it's time to now save it. I'm going to call it table header text. I think that makes sense, and we can make sure applied situs selection is on. You can click Okay, now we can just copy this text, go to the next cell, and before the actual placeholder for rating, I just copy this text in and change the text on it to rating. And again, copy this here and then place it in front and say number of beds bedrooms. Let's just write the whole thing. Copy this and then put it down there, number of bathrooms. Okay. So that should already work if we check with the preview. That's page one, page two, and so on and so forth, looking already better. But of course, we can refine this further. The placeholders themselves have to be style as well. We can start off by using the table header text style, but then I'm going to make some changes to that. Maybe we can set these to be bold. And also bigger, maybe they can be ten points in size. And we can also have some space between the header text that we specified earlier and the placeholders. So I'm going to use the paragraph formatting controls space before maybe 2 millimeters. I think that will be enough. Now, there is a plus sign next to the paragraph style, meaning that there are overrides, and I'm going to create a new style based on this selection, and I'm just going to call it table text. Now, this can be based on table header text if you want, but I'm going to just choose no paragraph style. That way, it's again, completely independent, so it shows all of the formatting options here. Yeah, that is looking good. Let's click Okay. And now we can just apply the same thing here as well. So that's table text, table text, and table text. And there's actually one additional static element that we need to place in, which is very simple. So right before the price per night placeholder, I'm going to put Shift four, which is the sign, US dollar sign. You can, of course, change this to any currencies that you want, but I'm going to use US Dollars, and we can check the preview now. It's looking so much nicer already. And the formatting is great, and of course, everything is nicely hooked up, so it's working perfectly. So let's turn off the preview. Now one additional thing that I would like to do is to get rid of the strokes around this table. We just want to keep it completely blank. So no separation between these elements. And the way we can do that is by going back to our cell style you might recall setting that up earlier. So there's a sale style which is connected to the table style, which is connected to this table. So if we go to see style strokes and fills, we can set the weight to zero point Walla that's gone. Sell fill is still there. Of course, we will keep that intact, so we can click Okay. And just like before, we can test this how it looks with the preview looking very nice. I feel like this is going to be great. One thing maybe that I'm going to change here is to change the static text. Instead of number of bedrooms, I'm just going to say bedrooms and bathrooms. I think it's very obvious what these represent here. So we're just reducing the copy that makes it easier to read everything. I think that is looking quite good. And there's one additional thing I wanted to include here, and that's to add some anchored or inline icons. So for the rating, I would like to see a star sign for bedrooms, a bed and bathrooms a bath. We already have these prepared in the exercise fis folder. But before we do that, I would highly recommend to save your work if you haven't already 11. Single record layout - Inline icons and refinements: Now that it's saved, we can bring in those icons. So what I will do is use Commando Control D on the keyboard, and then from the images folder from your exercise files, you can find these three SVG files. They are vector files, both BD and star. Let's open them, and then you can click and drag to paste them in one by one, or if you use the right you can place them in together, just press the right arrow twice, and then when you let go, it should populate this. It's called the greedy five feature in in design. Don't worry about their size because we will specify that. Now we can set these. It's set the first one. And I'm going to make sure that the width and the height is connected, and I'm going to change the width to 5 millimeters, and then I will choose field frame proportionally. See how that looks. We zoom a little bit closer. Actually, we need fit content proportionally, or what we can also do. Going to check how big this is. If we come closer here in the text, bathrooms. It's probably still a little bit too big, so I'm going to reduce the width to 4 millimeters. And then what we want to use actually, is the fit content proportionally, making sure that the icon is completely showing up. Yeah, that is looking much better already. And now we can do this is to cut this. That's Command X or Control X, double click inside the text just after where the number is, and then paste with Command V or Control V. There we go. We have our first inline icon. Now I can just press space between these two. I can even use older option left and right arrows to add more kerning between them if we wanted to. And then if you highlight your icon, you can highlight it just like text. You can use baseline shift to adjust it vertically. That's Alt Shift up and down arrow on PC or option shift up and down arrow on Mac. I just needed to drag it down just ever so slightly like that. Now, what I like to do is to copy this together with its space to the other places where I want to see my icons. So first, we just put in the same icon everywhere. The rating can go in there as well. And then we will be updating these with these other icons. Now, you can either select them from here by clicking on their CenterPoint and then copy. And then we go to bedrooms, and then we can choose edit paste into, which is Command, Option V on Mac or Control Alt V on PC. And that's going to update the icon, and you will just have to choose fit content proportionally again to fix it. Or you can also just select the frame and press command or Control D on the keyboard and bring in the same image once again. And that way the fitting won't be affected. So that is looking quite nice. We can actually delete these to here. We won't need them anymore. Yeah, I feel like this is working well. Let's zoom out a bit. So we have now all of the relevant information here. So let's just test the other pages, lovely stars and bedrooms, bathrooms. And notice how they obviously update and move left and right, depending on the numbers that are displayed next to them. That's the amazing thing about inline images or graphics in design. That is looking lovely. The left part is looking good as well. But there is one additional thing here on this description part or this main text frame that I wanted to change. And there's another feature which I would like to introduce here. It's called auto size for text frames. You can access this from the text frame options, that's Control or Command B. And within the text frame options, it's called auto size, and you just want to make sure that the height only option is turned on. In this case, you probably want the bottom edge of the frame being anchored. That means that, for instance, if I position the text frame here, if there's more text, it's just going to continue growing upwards. So the height will change, but the bottom edge is fixed. If I want to do it the other way, I can fix the top edge of it, as well. So it's completely up to you, but in this case, I feel like that makes more sense. And we can click Okay. Now, if you want, of course, you can save this as an object style to make sure that it's easy to apply on other frames in case you have them. So this is something you can do from the control bar here on the top. You can click on this icon and choose new object style, and I'm just going to call it textFrame and applies style to selection already, so it's connected, and we can see it up here. So that is looking good. And once again, if we test this with the additional pages, if there is more text, let's just go to spread where there's more text. You can see already slightly adjusting up and down there you go. So between these three pages, there will definitely change between the height of the frame, and each time it's nicely adjusting without the bottom edge of the frame moving around. That's auto size for you. There's a longer text example here. We can take a look at this in context of the whole page. Let's just drop the paragraph styles in here. Again, let's test this out between the pages looking really nice. Now, what I would actually do is to keep the table also on the left side. I think it just makes more sense to keep it there. Somewhere there, we can also make sure that it's put all the way on the bleed like this. But when you do this, notice that it doesn't feel scented anymore, and that is because don't forget we have the bleed, so we just sacrifice 3 millimeters of this table, and that makes it not balanced anymore when we look at it. So what you can do is to compensate for that is to put an space before each of these lines. That's command Shift M on the keyboard, and we can here as well, and by the way, you can find this in the type menu insert whitespace space. Space is wider than space, so you can decide which one you prefer to use. I feel like space is quite good. And in case you forgot where you use them, you can either go to the type menu and choose show hidden characters. There you go. There's our space, or you can also use Command or Control Y to see the story editor, where, again, you can see all the inline elements. Can see where the rows are separated, and we can also see our space special character here. I'm just going to come back to the layout editor and copy these in there and there and there and there and to more and now it's looking good. So if we look at it from a distance, it definitely feels more balanced now. But we also made sure that the bleed is correctly set up with this table element. And in terms of the full spread, I feel like the positioning of everything is looking good. These two elements that we have here are not taking up too much space. They are quite close to each other. So whoever is looking at this catalog can get a quick glimpse at all the necessary information all in one space, and then they can still enjoy a wide close up view of the image itself. And the good news is that we are almost ready. Now we just need to set up some other additional static elements like the header information and page numbers in the footer, which we normally call folio in magazines. And the best way to set these up is to use the parent page. 12. Single record layout - Parent page setup: First of all, I'm going to turn off the preview just so we can see what we have so far. And I'm going to go to the parent page because we originally chose a facing page layout is also a facing page setup. So we have the Verso and rectal sides or left and right sides. And I'm going to start with the folio, the page number. Now for this, I'm going to use the type tool, come down here on the bottom left, and I'm going to place a text frame right there on the margin. I will use the type menu, choose Insert special character, markers current page number. And then we can stylize this. We can probably use one of the existing styles. Let's see, maybe the table text. Yeah, table text is looking good or even the location. I think that's even better. Yeah, that's great. Location is going to work well. However, I'm just thinking about this now because we will have a full spread image in the background. We probably want this to be white. So I'm going to change this color of the text. I go to the field color, choose text formatting, and set it to paper. But then to help legibility, I will also introduce the effect on this. I'm going to add the drop shadow. And if you alter option, click on the drop shadow icon in the control bar, you can adjust the settings. So I'm going to go down to zero distance. Size of the shadow can be 1 millimeter, and the opacity can probably stay on 75%. Now, if you want this to be stronger, you can increase the spread. As you can see, that really makes it thicker. Maybe something like that, and maybe we can tone down the opacity a bit down to 20% somewhere around there. All right. Let's click Okay. I feel like that looks good, and of course, we can test this on our actual page. If you turn on the preview, we can see the image behind. Now, in this case, because the image is dark, it doesn't really matter. But if we find an image that's brighter, maybe another image where there's a brighter detail. Yeah, like here, we can see that it's still legible, sort of. Yeah, I think it's still legible. It gets a little bit lost, but it's not too bad. So we can jump back to our parent page, just double click there, and then we can move this element on the right side. So we can duplicate this, place it on the right, and I'm going to just write align it. That's Command or Control Shift R. Same formatting, just write align. By the way, you can also save these as paragraph styles if you want to. I'm just going to keep them as is for now. I'm not going to overcomplicate my styles. And let's just use the same setting up here. So I duplicate this once again, actually. Yeah, I duplicate it and place it there on the top. And we can maybe align this to the margin like that just outside the margin, and then we can maybe have a little bit more space here. And for the text, I already have it prepared, what I want it to paste here. It's called TreeHouse Adventures across planets. There we go. Yeah, that's looking good. Once again, we can test this out on an actual page. On text, it looks actually really nice. And perhaps here we can change the formatting slightly. I think the bold looks a little bit too thick. So we can change that to medium, and perhaps we can have a bit more tracking. That's option right arrow once I think is enough. So just to spread the letters out a bit, let's just check how that looks. Yeah, it's looking very nice, subtle, but still legible. And then we can go back to the parent page, and let's just duplicate this, move it on the left side, right there, and then we can align it to the left. In this case, that's command or control shift. L. And for the actual name of the brand that we are building, I wanted to use cosmic canopies. I think it's quite a clever name for these cosmic treehouses. So, yeah, I think that looks good. Maybe this one can be in all capitals just to signify that a little bit. Yeah. Cosmic canopies. Yeah, that looks nice. Let's just check it on the page. Beautiful, nicely aligned, everything to the margins, outside the margins, both the header and the footer, and everything else looks good. Now, of course, these are static elements, so they won't change when we are using data merge. So if I just come back here and change the pages, we can see how these look across the whole catalog consistent. They are always in the same place. So that's great. The good news is that we are ready to produce the final version of this. So stop previewing it and actually turn it into a merged document. So like I showed earlier, that's the icon that we will have to use for this. Create merged document. We want all records to be included. I don't need any alerts normally for missing stuff, but for now, I'm going to keep it on. And yeah, that's all we need to do. Just double checking under options, make sure you have the field frames proportionally on, and both of these options on, and then you can click Okay. Remember, this is going to be generated as a separate document, a brand new document, which you will need to save. There's text, so there's no overset text generated, which is great. There's no errors. I can see it in pre flight as well. And we have all of our lovely spreads here. I can jump to any of them, and they all look beautiful. Some of these generated images are crazy. I love them. They look really cool. Right. So we are done with our first example. That's all we had to do here. So once again, just to review what we've created, we have a template, this original in design file that we can use. So in case we have more entries that we need to generate, we can just come back to this and then regenerate the whole thing again from scratch because everything is now set up, the styles are saved. Everything is in the right place. The data source is set up. In case there's more data coming in, we just have to update the data source as long as that file has been updated already and then create the new merge document, which will result in the updated version. So even though it takes time to get to this point, from now on, anytime we have to work with the same database and we have to produce the same layout, it's literally going to take only a minute or two to get things ready and then just hit publish and we are done. So that's the biggest gain by using automation like data Merge and XML input. That takes longer to set up, but then in the long term, it's going to really save a ton of time. So you can give yourself a tap on the back because you already completed the first example in this project. Now it's time to move on to a slightly more complex layout and see how we can build that with the things that we've learned so far. 13. Four record layout - Adapting the record layout: Good news is that for this example, we will be able to use pretty much all of the things that we already set up. And I would actually advise to save the existing template that we created as a new version. So it already has everything included. So we can just go to File Save As, and I'm going to call it number two, and I will call it four dash records layout. And then save it. Now for this, first of all, I'm going to go back to my pages panel, unlock the image layer because we will have to resize the image frame. I will make it smaller. Probably somewhere around this size, we can tweak it later, and we will have to move things around a bit like the table will move here, and the text frame will move here as well. We can zoom a little bit closer. And there's actually one thing that I would like to do also is to separate the host from this text frame. I'm going to cut this out, Commando Control X and then move this text frame. Here and then just create another text frame and paste in that placeholder text with the static content as well. So hosted by, we can align it there. The image can come down maybe somewhere around here. The table can move on the right side, and then the location can go somewhere here. And if we zoom back a bit, most importantly, we want to make sure that there will be enough space two of these on the same page, and don't forget that this text is going to increase in height. So once again, we specify the bottom edge to be staying in place and it's going to grow upwards. So most likely this can come up around here, and I think that's going to work fine. So without changing our data source, I'm just going to double check how this looks. And yeah, it's looking quite good. Maybe one thing I'm going to do is to reduce the distance between these entries here, so the height of the cells can be updated in this example. So I'm just going to do that by double clicking in the table. Then click here on the top. To highlight all the cells. And then from the control bar, you should be able to find the height option, which is this one. So if I start reducing this, notice how it works like an accordion and it's collapsing it down, maybe up to there, something like that should work. So I want to make sure there's still enough space between them. And then for this text frame not to have too much space at the bottom, I'm just going to select it and double click. So it snaps onto the table nicely. Yeah, that's looking good. Maybe this can come up a little bit. I like this subtle overlap. There. So it connects the image and the text together. That's just a very subtle indication that they belong together. And by the way, this image can probably be a little bit bigger, maybe come out all the way here, and then that text frame can go down to there, maybe a little bit further down. Yeah, that is looking good. This is the cool thing is that once you have your formatting and style setup and also your data source connected, you can preview these changes very quickly without having to do much work. So we adjusted our layout very quickly in this case, and I like the way this looks, and we can even test this out with different versions of it. So yeah, it's looking good. I like it. That's looking good, too. And, yeah, we can turn off the preview now. Because what we are going to do next is to change the data source. Now, why is this important and why is it necessary? So far, we've been using this CSV file, which looks very similar to the original table. So we have the columns corresponding to each of these data fields that we are using in in design. But the main problem with this is that if we want to use multiple entries on the same page or same spread, In Design is going to keep loading the same record until it moves on to the next spread. So let me show you this just so you are aware of it. So if I select all of this and duplicate it down here below, so let's just say we want it to be aligned maybe somewhere around there, right? So now we have two instances on the same page. If I turn on preview, you will see straightaway that it is exactly the same content on the top and on the bottom. Now, if I move these on the right side, so on the other side of the spread, I can even keep the preview on. If I duplicate this, it's going to be the same issue. So it's just going to populate each of these placeholder instances with the same exact record. And that is one of the annoying limitations of data match that I can't specify that I want these to be alternating or changing or moving through the CSV file, so to change between the records. And I don't understand why there is no simple checkbox within data merge, which would allow us to automatically move to the next record once it's been utilized in one part of the spread or page. But unfortunately, like I said, that's just a limitation, and it doesn't matter even if you group things together. Let's just say I group these together. You see, it's still not updating here. So if I group these ones as well together, unfortunately, that's not fixing anything. I'm going to go back to having these two or maybe even just one, and I'm going to update first the data source. So I come up here and choose Select Data Source. I design is going to warn me that this might mess up my data fields and the placeholders. You will have to insert them again, but that's fine. I'll click Okay. And the one I would like you to use this time is called TreeHousesF record groups. So this is actually a text file format because I just found it easier to format a text file this way, and I'll show you how this looks. First, I will just bring it in. And straightaway, what you will see here is that we have four times as many data fields. So instead of just one set, we have now image one, location one, and then here's the next set, third set, and the fourth set. So each of them are named accordingly. And if I open up the text file, this is how it looks. So in the first row, I specified four instances of all of the fields. So all fields are specified four times of course, including the numbering, so it's consistent and the order of them is consistent as well. And then of course, these paragraphs will be much thicker because they will hold four records. So there's only a line break after four records of information. And that essentially is all the information that goes into a single spread. So there is only commerce between these because that's how it's specified here on the and then there is a line break, and then we move on to the next set of records, again, four, and then another four and so on and so forth. So that's the way this is set up. Now, of course, this is again, something you can do with a CSV file if you wanted to. I just wanted to show a text file this time that you can work with the text file just as well. In some cases, this might be easier to create depending on the formatting automations that you are using when you are exporting your database. But right now, I have that text file in place, but the connections need to be updated. So my placeholders are not going to work unless I update them. So first, let's start with the image. Instead of image, this should be image one. Then price per night should be price one. Then rating should be rating one. Number of bedrooms should be bedrooms one, number of bathrooms, bathrooms one, and then we have location one, description, one, and host one. Now I can see the numbers here, which means that this record placeholder group is ready. I am just going to test this out by pressing preview. Let's see how that looks. It looks good. One thing that I want to make sure is that this text frame goes behind the table. So in the layer s panel, that should be at the bottom. That's correct. And this one is on top of that, and the host is all the way on the top. That's fine. That's not going to overlap the other elements. I just wanted to do this because some of these text frames might be quite tall and I don't want this text to overlap the table, while there will always be a little bit space here. So we should be able to display the text in a good way. I think the first one is the longest text, and then the rest is going to be slightly shorter. So as long as the first one fits, the rest should fit as well. Yeah. So this is looking really good. 14. Four record layout - Setting up placeholders for the additional records: Now it's time to duplicate this. So use the same format that we have here, and I will actually have exactly the same setup here on the bottom right corner. Now, I'm not grouping these together because I like to keep them in separate layers. Normally, I would group stuff together, but because I want to keep the separate structure of image and text, that way, you can't really group them together. But yeah, now we have two of them. And before I'm going to change the placeholders, I'm going to create another version of this here on the left side as well. But this one, just to give some visual interest, I'm going to swap around. So this way, the table moves to the left. The image moves to the right, and the host can also move to the right. I change the alignment to right, command, control, shift. R and then move the text here to the left. Yes, that's looking good. By the way, you can preview this because now the placeholders are working, even though they are only utilizing the first record from this data source, but we can already see how this is looking. Yeah, I like how this feels. So it's more dynamic having some change between the top and the bottom of the page, and we can then do the same thing here on the top right corner. So for that, we can just copy this and paste it up there. So align it. And once again, let's just test this. I'm just going to go into full preview mode. And yeah, this is looking really good. I think everything is nicely placed. It has some dynamic interest to it, and it's easy to read and find the relevant information, especially because we will have them always consistently in the same place. So I am happy with this. I am going to now update the placeholders. So that's something that we can do by zooming a little bit closer. At this point, you can decide whether you want the order of the records to go one, two, so top and bottom, and then go to three and four on the next page. Or you could go one, two, three, four. It's completely up to you. And that's the good thing about data merge that is very easy to set it up the way you prefer. And I'm going to keep the preview on just so you can see things updating already. So I'm going to go to the one here at the bottom. I will actually use this as the second record. So that's going to be the order. This is going to be image two. Then I want this one at the bottom, the host to be host two. Then I want this to be price two, this one to be rating two, and that's actually exactly the same. It didn't update. That was just strange. This one should be bedroom two, then this one should be bathrooms two. Again, those didn't change, but I think we will see the change here with location too, and then this should be description two. It is looking good. Now, the only issue here is that the way we set things up is that this table is in front of the text frame. And while on the top, there was space for them to clash in a way or overlap each other. Here, the text or the location text is in the way of these elements. So they are overlapping each other and that's not going to work well. So we have to make more space. So for this bottom part, we probably will have to go back into editing the table again and we just have to reduce it further. So we have to squeeze them a little bit higher like that. And if you want consistency between your tables, I advise you to do the same for all of them. So here I set 20 millimeters for the height, and that's actually something I'm going to do here as well. So let's just be consistent 20 millimeters and also here. For this table 20. And then let's be consistent with our bottom right one as well, select it and choose 20. All right. Nice little accordions are working perfectly. Yeah, that's looking good now. So if I turn off the preview, I can actually double check that I see number two everywhere here. So it should be two, two, two, two, two, two, two, and two. So all of them are number two. That's perfect. I'm going to just speed things up here because I'm going to do exactly the same thing on the right side. So I will just select the image and choose Image three and move on doing this. I actually usually prefer to do it this way, updating the placeholders while not previewing the entries. But you can choose whichever way you want to do this. Just make sure you update everything before moving on. Alright, so I am done with both of the number four elements and number three elements. I'm just double checking. Everything seems to be updated. And the best way to test this, of course, is to turn on preview. And if you've done everything correctly, you shouldn't get any errors or warning, and you can test this out. This one, the fourth one should say Winter's edge frostold and this one should be called mossy Glade dor, and this one is skyinacle Tiberius, and that one should be the coral ridge. Now let's just look at this from a distance, full screen. Yeah, I am happy with everything, how this looks. One thing I spotted here that I want to fix is to have the run of the text frame corrected. So that single word there at the end, I would consider a run and also this one here. This is something that we can easily fix with a grab style. So we can do this right now before moving any further. So this is going to be for our description, paragraph style, which we can bring up. It's right here. But we will also need a character style for this to work. So we need to open up that panel and choose new character style. And then I normally just call this no break, double click on it, and then choose basic character formats, turn on no break. That's all you need to do there. And then from the description paragraph style, we need to go into grab style, create a new grab style, and choose no break. So apply the no break character style. And then what you want to type in is a full stop. Then in curly brackets, 15, and then $1 sign at the end. And if you click away, this should already work. There you go. Now we have at least 15 characters in the last line, and that's the number that you can change here. If you want more than that, you can type in, let's say, 20 and so on and so forth. But that's a quick fix, and now it should work on all of these text frames. So if I go to the other ones, yeah, they all look good. So yeah, that was a quick little fix there for the text. And once again, let's just take a look at the whole spread. Looking really good, I'm happy with this. So I think we can generate our next document. Maybe just one final fix the parent page elements. They don't need drop shadows on them. They should be just set to black. So what I'm going to do is to go to the parent page, select everything on this page, and then go to the text colors and choose black. And then what we can do here in the top, left and right, we can take off the drop shadow and also on the bottom, left and right. Of the drop shadow. So that should look better now. If we go back again, see this in full screen. Yeah, that's looking much better already. So yeah, like I said, now we have everything ready. We can save this file the way it is. Once again, without the preview, this is the template that we created, and I can just close maybe my layers and these so we have a little bit more space here just to review what we created. So we have placeholder groups for all four of the records that are grouped together in this data source version, and that allows us to populate the spread with four different records. Then on the next spread, obviously, it's going to move on the next four, and we can test this out if we click on Create Merge document. We will be using the same settings. Feel frame proportionally still there because we duplicated the original document. We want still all records to be used. And once we click Okay, it's going to create a new document, keep an eye on the pages panel as it's going to appear there. So we should have less spreads this time because we obviously are using four records on each of the spreads. So we have almost 30 pages here, and the last placeholder is actually empty because we have 55 records, and I intentionally did it that way, just so you can see what happens if there's not enough records to populate a more complex spread like this. So, of course, in these cases, you just have to manually come in here and delete whatever is not necessary. So that way, we have a nice layout and we can, of course, go through the whole document and see how this looks. We can also see it in full screen. And of course, while you are using data merge preview, it might take longer to see the generated spreads. While here, once you have a document that is ready, it's much faster to go through everything and take a proper look at everything that you created. So once again, you deserve a tap on your back. You're done with the second example of this project. Time to move on the third one now, where we will try to fit even more records on a spread. 15. List layout - Adapting the record layout: So far, we completed two layouts. The first one, had a single large record covering the whole spread. Then the second time, we created four records on a spread, four different records, important to say. But what if we need to fit more records on a spread? So maybe we need to fit around eight of them. That's probably the limit what we can do with the amount of information we need to display. So for this, we need to come up with a different strategy. But I think the best thing to do for this is to start off with a new document. But this document can be based on our second example. So this document right here, I'm going to save it as a new file. I will call it number three, and I am going to call this list. I think that name describes it really well what it's going to be. So I'm going to save it and I just click Okay. And turn off the preview, and we can already delete most of the things from here because we won't need them. We will only need the first section, and we can also update our data source. Again, select data source to be the CSV file that we used in the first example. So we updated that, but don't forget that these placeholders are called slightly differently. So these will have to be changed. And by the way, if you are doing multiple versions of your layouts, it might be worth thinking ahead already if you wanted to use image one, image two, image three, so on and so forth, to also call those accordingly in any other format or version of your database or exported database files. But what I'm going to do is to just quickly update these right here. So I'm going to have this image updated and the price, just like before, then the rating, bedrooms, bathrooms, location, description, and host. It doesn't take long to fix this. I am happy with that. Now the next important thing we have to do is to adjust the size of the frame. I'm just going to resize this. If you hold down command, the control shift and drag, you can keep the aspec ratio, or you can just change it randomly because we are using field frame proportionally with data merge that's going to fill these frames no matter what aspect ratio they are I'm just going to resize it for now roughly like that, keep it here on the left side, and then the text box that we use for the location and description can come here in the middle. Now, I will change the or size option that's Commando Control B from the bottom edge to be fixed to the top edge to be fixed this time. And I will click Okay, maybe an additional thing. I won't need inset right now because it won't overlap the image. It will be sitting next to so zero in set and the or size is anchored to the top. Still height only is the feature we are using there. No corner ID is needed. We can remove that as well. Set it to none. We can place this and align it with the other frame right there. We can select them, align them to their top edge. That's looking good. And then this time, I would like the host to be included in the text frame. So it doesn't need to be a separate text frame. So I just move that right in there, and we can already preview this how it looks now, straightaway, what I notice is that if I were to use this format, our table is going to be still too tall, even though we already squashed it and tried to fold our accordion, it's still not going to work, so we have to tweak it slightly. Most likely, what we will need to do is to set up a two column layout instead of a single column layout. And this is actually something fairly easy to do. So all you have to do is first of all, increase the text frame just so there is more space for your cells. Then double click inside the table. Go to the table menu and choose Insert column. And then, in this case, I will use right, so one column on the right of the existing column. That's looking good. And now we can just copy the contents of this cell up here on the right. So a price rating, and then comes the bedroom, those in there and the bathrooms. I'm just copy or cut and pasting in. And then I can select these, right click and delete row and that should leave us with only two rows. And if I double click on a corner point of my text frame, it will adjust itself to the new table format, and that is looking good, but it's too wide at the moment. So what we need to do is to highlight the whole table, double click inside of the cells and then click on the top left corner that highlights the whole table. And while this option we use for the height of the cells, there's also an option for the width of the cells. So I'm just going to reduce this down, keep reducing it down until we can't go any further without the text being affected. But even that, having the text in two lines is not a big deal. Ideally, I would want to keep it like this. But I feel like it's okay to go a little bit even further. Let's just squash it in until it's an issue. And I actually just noticed that we have these spaces in this text frame, which was placed there because we had to adjust for the bleed. This is actually something you can easily fix. If you highlight all the texts here, just press Commando Control F. That's for finding and changing things. So here, if you look for spaces, you want to look for spaces, and you want to change them to nothing that will remove them. If you say change all, you should find eight of them, click Okay, done. That's a quick and easy way of eliminating the spaces. And yeah, that is looking already much better. Now, in this case, we don't want these to overlap. So let's just drag this out here on the left. That's why it's good to have this in one frame so everything updates nicely. This one can be aligned in a way that the price will be close to this line. We can use the rulers, that's Commando Control R, drag this down, just place a guide here, and then we can align the price to be close to that. That's the topmost element within this table that can be aligned with the top edge of the location and the image. Yeah, this is looking very good. This can be maybe dragged out a bit more towards the right. This. And yes, I feel like this is looking good. If we wanted to, we could still adjust the width of these even more. So we can squeeze them in now that we have no space in there, I can go up to this point without being too squashed, in my opinion. So now we can just adjust the text frame again and drag this to the right, holding down shift key, so it's not moving up and down just to the right. So we have even more space here for our text frame. And we can maybe even go all the way up to here, so it looks to each other because there's still some spacing in between them. Yeah, this is looking quite nice. Now, to be honest, the spacing of this probably can come down a bit. Now I'm thinking about it a bit more. I think it might look better that way, but for now, let's just keep it there on the top. We'll see which one works better. All right. So the good thing is that we have this setup and it's already hooked up and working with our data source. So whenever I do this, it's going to keep updating. Now one thing that I see straightaway is that I would want this image to be a little bit smaller, so it's not so close to the text. And also, I want to bring back the corner radius on the image. So let's put the same three millimeter corners right there. That is looking nice. Once again, let's just see this on a couple of instances. Lovely. Looking really good. All right, I'm happy with this. I turn off the preview, zoom back a bit, and I just noticed that this needs to be updated a bit there. Let's just preview this again. Yeah, it's looking good. It's a good idea to keep a bit more space vertically for your table. So the text frame allows for a bit of movement if necessary. That's obviously a non printing detail, so you don't actually see that in the final design, but allows a little bit more space there for overset text. That is looking really good. Once again, turn off the preview, see the structure of everything up here. I can see that the price might be moving up and down when it's populated. So yeah, that's just changing because of the text being much longer for this placeholder for that data field. But that should be okay, yeah. That's looking good. Alright. 16. List layout - Data Merge with Multiple Records: So now that we have all of this ready, we actually don't have to change anything else for now, but that will be a big important thing that we will have to change, and you will see why. So if I now say, I want to turn this into a merged document, so create merge document, notice how it still doesn't allow me to change this feature called single record. And that's a big problem because if I say all records using this layout, I'll just show you, what will happen is that it's just going to create these big spreads completely empty or almost completely empty, just with that single entry on each page on the top left corner. And that's obviously not what we had in mind. So this is obviously going in the bin. That's not going to work. And the reason for this, and this is something again, another quite annoying limitation of data merge, is that it doesn't allow multiple records feature to be used on spreads. Again, I don't know why that's the case. There must be a technical explanation for that. But what you need to do, and this is the workaround to fix this is to go to your document setup and take off the facing pages feature. You also want to set everything back to one and one page numbers. Bleed can stay on. That doesn't affect anything, and then you can click Okay. And since our pages will be generated with the single page format, we also have to update our parent page, which is still a facing page layout. That's just something you have to do manually. I'm just going to move that header across. This text frame can be deleted and we can just delete that right side of the parent page spread. So let's just choose Delete parent page and click Okay. So now we just have a single format and you can decide where you want the page number to be on the left on the right. It doesn't matter in this case. I will just go back here. But more importantly, now we are ready to use data Merge, so we can use the merge document option. And alla, the multiple records option became available. So so far we've been using the single record option, but now we can choose multiple records. And these little icons here try to represent and explain what's happening, but it's so small, it's hard to see essentially, instead of having the same exact record repeated on the page a couple of times, which sometimes can be useful, in this case, we want to have different records generated using the same placeholder. And under the multiple record layout section, you can decide whether you want to create rules or columns. In this case, obviously, we want rows, so it's a vertical listing format. If you preview these settings, you can actually see how this is going to look. And it is looking quite good. However, we want to have a little bit more space between the entries, right? So that's something you can do with the space between rows option. I'm going to hold down the Shift key and increase this value maybe 10 millimeters. That looks fine here. But the second and third entry probably still a little bit too close to each other. So maybe let's go to 20 millimeters. But this way we end up having only three entries on the first page. That's not ideal. So let's just go back to 19, 18. Let's keep going down. Maybe all the way down to 15, we can go and is still comfortable. I mean, like the entries or the records are still separating from each other quite nicely. And we can just double check this on the next page, looking good, looking good. Yeah, I think they are all going to work quite nicely. So let's just double check the options before we click Okay. Feel frames proportional on Link and centers on that looks all good and maybe just worth mentioning that you can actually limit the pages per document if you wanted to, and you could even divide documents. So if you have lots of entries, can generate multiple documents with data merge, which is quite useful, but I'm just going to turn that off. And also, remember, in the last example, we created some blank elements. Those can be automatically be removed with this feature if you wanted to. But now I'm just going to click Okay, and let's see how this turns out. No overset is being created, which is great. And we can just preview this. Yeah, looking good. I like the formatting of the table on the right, nicely aligned, everything, and some details might maybe overlap the margins at the bottom sometimes. But generally, we will have four entries or four records per page. And then on this last page, if you take a look at this, notice how it didn't generate an additional anti element there. That's just simply because it ran out of records. So this is how it looks, and this is where we reach the limitations of what can be done effectively with data merge. So the main issue I'm having here is the rigid spacing between the records. So we had to specify exactly how much space we want between the records, but it doesn't feel equal. And that is because these text frames vary in height. So if I go to here, for instance, it feels like there's a lot of negative space here compared to the space between these two records. So if I was doing this manually, I obviously would select these elements and move them up a bit just to balance things out. Maybe this one can move up a little bit as well. So you can even group these things together again and then have the groups distributed equally on the page. So if we select these, we can use distribute vertical centers, and there you go that feels already much more balanced. And of course, this can be done manually, but if you are talking about 1,000 pages long document or catalog, that would be very annoying, especially if you have to keep generating new ones every day or week. So that's definitely not ideal. The other issue is that the components of each of these records are not connected. So there is no connection between them. If I move this text frame, the others won't follow it. That's also not ideal. Again, you can manually group them together if you wanted to or maybe group them before you run the merge feature, which might cause issues, but again, it's not ideal the way they are connected or not connected to each other at this stage. But most importantly, each of the records are in individual text frames. So there's a lot of text frames. If you think about it, there are 55 text frames. So there's a text frame for each of these entries, and they are not connected. So it would be very hard to make changes for all of them, especially if you don't have the style set up in the first place, but there's just no flow between these frames. Just to show you a workaround for this, it's not going to fix the main problem, but it's just interesting to know about it. There is actually a script which is included in the exercise files that you can add to your in design scripts. So what I'm just going to do is to close this document, go back to the original template that we prepared, and before running the data merge here, I will open up this panel from the utilities called Scripts. When you have that selected, you can see that under my user group, I have this inline merge script. Now, the way you can install the script for yourself for it to work in in design, all you have to do is to come to this folder here and choose reveal in finder or explorer by right clicking on it that will open up that folder on your computer and just copy this file from the exercise files folder and place it in here. As soon as you do that, it's going to show up here. And then once you do that, all you have to do is to select that text frame, one in the middle, and then double click on this script. It's going to ask you for a separator between the records, which you can just use the line break, the original one that is going to be there. And then if you click on Run, what will happen is that it's actually going to generate all of these records, but they will come in in a single frame. As you can see, it's been set up like that. Now, there's an overset text at the bottom, but you don't have to worry about that at this point. Just wanted to show you that once you start using scripts, you can overcome some of the weaknesses of certain workflows like data Merge. And improve on it. And of course, if you are good at coding, you can create your own scripts, and you can make in design even more powerful than what it is by default. But I'm not going to go into scripting. Don't worry, because this course is more for designers and not developers. So if you are a developer, that's great. You probably will be able to make use of scripting in design, and it's good to know where you can find it. But what I would like to do is to actually have a better workflow. Where we will be able to create a list, but without the weaknesses that we identified here. So I'm actually going to undo this last step because I will be using this layout, but we will be updating it and adapting it for the XML Import workflow. So to summarize what we've done here is that we pushed the data merge workflow to its limits. We tried to squeeze in more entries on the same page. And although it is working, it has its weaknesses as we discussed. So to be able to do this properly, we have to learn about XML Import. Before we do that, I have a couple of additional things that I would like to show you. 17. GREP Style for treehouse descriptions: Before we jump into the XML workflow, I wanted to take a break and why not take a grab break? Grab is one of the other features that's quite complicated in design, and I thought we could look at a really cool thing that you can do. And that's again, favoring designers like myself. Who is not into coding, and I don't really like to wrap my head around complex expressions and languages. And grab is a language, a coding language. And there's two things we can use it for. First, we can use it for find and change. So there is a grab option here. You can find specific things within documents, but you have to know these special characters and definitions. That you have to place in here. And based on what you are searching for, you can change that to something specific. Again, that can be a grab code, but you can also use this for whatever you find with that grab expression to change the format and apply either character style or paragraph style. So this is very useful. However, the way I prefer to use grab, and we've already seen an example for this in the description, paragraph style, is to apply certain logics, like to make sure that the last line of a paragraph is not too short. That's the run. We already eliminated that earlier, but we will be creating a new style here. I'm going to click on New crap style for the same part of text. And I'm going to choose apply a new character style once more. And this I normally just call highlight. Now, it shouldn't be based on anything, so I say none. And the only thing I want this to be is to turn the text into maybe bold italic and nothing else needs to change. Let's click Okay, so that's good. However, at the moment, it's not applied to anything. And the easiest way to understand how grab works is if I just type in a capital H here, see how immediately the first capital H in this text is updated. Or if I put a lower KC, then all the lower KC text is going to update. Going to zoom a little bit closer just so we can see it right there. We can see it, and then here as well, we can see it. But of course, that's not what I wanted to achieve. So I go back to the description, grab styles, and we will have to change this to something more useful. Now, what I had in mind here to use this highlight for is to highlight wherever the location is mentioned within the description. In this case, that's Winter's edge, right? But of course, there's other examples. If you just move to the left side, I'm sure there will be something there as well. So yeah, Tiberius would be here, or Sky Pinnacle is another one. So there's two instances already here that should be recognized. And now the question is, how can we specify that the style that we created should be applied to these? Now, the obvious choice is that we are looking for capital letters, right? But we want to avoid capital letters at the beginning of sentences. Unless they are also locations. So it's starting to get a little bit complex to define this. So for now, let's just concentrate on any sentence case words that appear not at the beginning of sentences or paragraphs. So how do we define this? So, this can be quite tricky. The good news is, I already have this prepared. I'm just going to drop it right here. And that's that simple code that you can see there. If I click away, there you go, it's already working. So with a bit of knowledge of grab or a lot of knowledge of grap, you would be able to understand what this Gibberish is. I'm not going to waste time on it because like I said, this is not a coding or a developing course. It's about design. Instead, I'm going to show you a very cool way of utilizing chat GPT. To be able to come up with these grab expressions. So here we are in Chat GPT, and I'm just going to paste the text in here that I wanted to ask as a prompt. So can you create an in design grab definition for finding any sentence case word not at the beginning of a sentence? And probably it's worth mentioning, I want to use this within a paragraph style. That's important because there can be differences between how the fine change graph works in in design compared to nested grab in paragraph styles. So once you do that, Chet GPT is going to be able to explain this really well to you. So it's going to give you the code straightaway, but it also gives an explanation of what each of these elements within the code do. So it's a brilliant way to understand how these things are built. And then it even tells you how you can apply this. It gives you pretty much like a very neat, short tutorial on how to do this. And then you can just copy this code and paste it into in design and see if it works or not. Now, to be honest, it doesn't always work, so it's not like a completely magical solution. Will still have to go back and forth a couple of times until Chet GPT refines the code, make sure it works with in design, because in design is very picky about the expressions that are created, which might work in other applications, but in in design, it has to tweak it and refine it slightly until it's going to work. So yeah, just don't get your hops up that is going to be immediate straightaway. And even now, this looks slightly different to the code that I was using. So let's just jump back to in design. My one is slightly longer, but as you can see, it works perfectly. I can just close this dialogue box and move to another instance to see how it looks, yeah. Even when there are three words next to each other, it still works fine thanks to the sentence case words. However, we can reach examples where the first word in the paragraph or sentence is also part of the location name. So in this case, Highland Rock. Only having rock highlighted is not going to look good. So this has to also be highlighted. So remember, in our current grab expression, we are avoiding the first words in every sentence, but we can add that additional logic to the same grab code by adding this vertical line character and then pasting in some additional code which I prepared using Chen G PT, and now it's fixed. So it got even longer now the grab code, but the most important thing is that it works. We don't have to understand why it works. Spent time analyzing this to understand it, and I actually had to tweak the code myself manually to make this work. But in the end, you can get to this much faster by using an AI tool like Chet GPT or maybe other tools that you prefer like Cloude. But most importantly, AI is really good at coding, understanding expressions and code. So if you're not familiar with it, it's going to help you a lot, both in understanding and coming up with the right expressions. And using graph expressions can open up a lot of automation for your text, and I highly recommend testing it out and using it for things like this. This code, I will be including it in the exercise file, so you will be able to just copy it from there if you want to try it out, and I will have it explaining exactly what each of the elements are. But for now, I just wanted to show you that we can add here, and obviously we can test this out and see it on all of them. Even here, once again, the starting text or words are part of the location or describing the location. And maybe the only thing here I can see is that river desert is not fully highlighted because this is not a capitalized word. Maybe that's something I can fix in the text, or again, there might be a way to come up with a grab expression for that. But I didn't want to waste too much time on this. This is just one of those refinements or small tweaks that's worth mentioning. Of course, we will be able to use the same grab expression in all of the different variations of this catalog layout. But now it's time to learn a little bit about the XML import feature and all the additional terms that we should familiarize ourselves with. 18. XML terminology: Before we jump into using the XML Import feature, I wanted to show this template that I prepared and that you can open up as well and check out where I will be able to explain the most important terms that we need to be familiar with. So first of all, what you will need to open up whenever you work with XML files in design is the structure pane. This is something you can find from the view menu. And once you open it, it will show up on the left side. You can assign a keyboard shortcat. I believe this is the default keyboard shortcat Command Option one, or control option one, so that will show or hide that pain. It's not a panel. It's called a pain, which XML can be a pain sometimes, so I think it makes sense. So if we look at this, first of all, we have the root element, which in this case, I called catalog. Once we click on the little arrow, it can twirl down. First, it shows this line in the XML file, which I'm going to talk about a bit later. But then we have another element, and this would be called a parent element, the story within which we have another child element, the BNB or tree house. And under that, we have additional child elements, the BNB image, the B&B table, and the B&B text. And within the text, we also have additional child elements, and also within the table, we have these additional child elements. So even a simple layout like this can already look quite complex when it's displayed as an XML structure, but it's key to have this setup correctly and to make sure that this corresponds with the actual XML file itself. Now, while in data Merge, we were using data fields and placeholder with X amount Import, we have to use another panel called tags. And this is again something you can find in the Window menu on the utilities, you can open up tags. And as you can see, in this file, I already have this amount of tags. And if I go to the panel menu or drop down and choose Select all unused tags, these are actually all used. So there is no unnecessary tags here or element names. So these are all in use, and we can actually see this highlighted in the text. So for instance, this one is the host. We can see the tag there. If I double click inside the text, it will also highlight the corresponding tag. If I click here, I can see that's the long description, location, is location. And then if I select the image, we can see that's the BNB image. And if I select the table, that's the BNB table. Within the table, this is the price tag. There's the bedrooms tag, bathrooms tag, rating tag, and so on and so forth. And I can even highlight the cell itself. Which is also tagged, this is C three, because everything is positioned within the XML file. So you can see in the structure within the table parent element, we have another element for the table itself. And then within the table, we have these elements for each cell, and then within the cells, we have the actual elements for the data that is coming in, the price, bedroom, so on and so forth. Now, I am going to zoom back a bit, and I can show you some additional options that you might come across while you are using the XML feature, and you might be wondering what it is. So, for instance, from the text panel menu, you can find Load DTD, which is going to open up a separate menu for looking for this file. Now, DTD is a set of rules that you can use to validate your XML information. And this is something that whoever is handling the database should be able to provide to you. So that's something that you can save as a template and reuse. In our case, we are not going to complicate things with that, but it's worth remembering that this is where you can find it, and then you would be able to validate your XML structure based on that, which you would be able to do from this structure pin drop down. So as long as there is a DTD loaded already, you will be able to choose validate from root element or just validate selected elements. And one final thing before we can actually get started is that when you use the import XML feature from the file menu, or this is something you can also access from this drop down. So whenever you do that and you select an actual XML file, there is an option here called apply XSLT. Now, this is for formatting your XML file. And again, this is something that's more complex. You need to know again another language to be able to do this. Someone who is into code can easily create this, and potentially you can use AI like Chet GPT to generate XSLT files for you for specific task to format your XML information in the way that is going to work well for the layout that you are creating in design. But I'm not going to go that deep because, again, this is even more advanced than just simply understanding how data merge and XML Import works. Now that we covered these essential things that we need to know for this new workflow, the XML workflow, in the next lesson, we will get started with a blank new document, and we will set up everything from scratch, just so you can see exactly how I built this template that you've seen here in this video. 19. Assigning tags and setting up the layout: The new document that I would like you to create will be again, facing pages format, portray, and A four signs like before. But I also would like you to set up the primary text frame option for this, and you will see why we need this. The pages can be set to two and the start page can also be set to two, and perhaps you can already set up the columns which we will be using in this case, so that you can just set to three, and I feel like the rest of the options can stay the same. Bleed, if you want to you can keep it on or off. For now, that's fine. Let's just click Create. So here's our new document. And notice that even though I said I want two pages, it actually only created one page. And the reason for that is because we are starting off on the left side of the spread. So if I add a new spread here, it's, of course, going to create it for us, but it started off with this single frame because we have that primary text frame option used when we created this new document. Essentially means that in the parent page or spread, we already have a text frame both on the left and the right side. And if we go to the view menu and choose extras, show text threads, we can actually see that these two frames are already connected to each other. So that's going to be very important as we go along. And, of course, that's the frame here as well, already prepared for us, where we will be able to paste in the content. Now, this text frame I actually going to reduce in size and make smaller. And if I just press Command or Control B, this actually doesn't need columns, so I will set it to one, click Okay, and just drag it in, so I keep it here in the middle, just like that. So right now, it's hard to see it, but this is what we wanted to create for our text. And we will have an image on the left for which I can already create the text frame. That's where we will have our image, and we will have a table on the right. But the table we can actually bring in from one of our previous compositions. And the best one would be that data merge example where we were attempting to create a list that's going to work. So this I'm just going to copy and bring into this new format. And then we can just place it here on the right side for now and we will deal with formatting it later. And, of course, we will also have to update the placeholders because XML works differently to data merge. Instead of data fields and placeholders, we have tags. For now, what I'm just going to do is to remove this and just simply have price here, can just have rating there. And then we can have bedrooms in here or beds even can just call the beds, and then we can have bods written on that side. For now, this should be okay. However, maybe we can just change the width of these cells a bit, just so it fits everything in nicely, and then we can just drag this right inside the margin. Alright. Like I said, this is useful because this brought in some useful information like the styles that we were using here. Whenever you copy text frames that are already using styles from one in design document to the next, they also travel together, which is very useful. But of course, notice that within our tax panel, we currently only have the root. And if I show the structure on the left side, once again, from view structure, show structure, it doesn't show anything else apart from the root element. Now within the text frame, I know I'm going to have the location, then the description. I can also write this in quickly, and the host is going to make sure it's spelled correctly, although it doesn't really matter because it's just a placeholder. But there we go. So those are in place. And I guess at this point, we can already import a simplified XML file. So we go into import XML from the structure pane, and I prepared one that just has a single record in it. And this is how it looks just so you can see so we have the structure here with the root element, which will be called catalog, then the first element called story, then a child element, B and B, and so on and so forth. One important thing to mention here is that I included this attribute right here in the root element, and this is a code that you can reuse every time that you are using XML important in design, because this will allow you to use these aid attributes to stylize things like the table right here, aid table, applying the cell style, or we have the eight paragraph style description, applying that and another one name, so on and so forth. So these can be very useful. But again, I'm not going to spend too much time explaining how an XMI file looks like. Instead, we will see how it works. So if I jump back into in design, we have this treehouse single dot XML, which I would like you to import. And for the import options, these are the ones I would like you to use. Maybe you can turn on do not import contents of white space on the elements. That's also useful. Besides that, the rest doesn't have to be turned on for now. So let's just click Okay. And what you will notice in your tag panel that all the tags for the elements will show and then also here on the left side, we have that structure that we've seen before with the child and parent elements nicely populated. So that is looking good. But what we need to do just like with Data Merge, is to actually assign the tags to the placeholder. So we have our image frame here on the left, that is supposed to be the B&B image. So I'm just going to assign it. Notice how immediately it's also colored yellow, just like the color of this tag to be able to see this, you will have to go to the view menu and choose show tagged frames and show tag markers are also useful to turn on. So this way, you will be able to keep track of where your tags are assigned. For the location, I'm going to just select that line. I will assign the location tag, and immediately, you see there's a green marker appears on the whole text frame because that's now assigned to the story element, which is one of the main parent elements in this database. For description, I want to use the long description tag. That's how I defined it in this XML file. Then for the host, I want to use the host tag, and then we can move on to the table. So first, I'm just going to select the whole table, and I say that this is actually the table. Then I'm going to select the whole frame, and the frame itself should be called BNB table. So the frame is the BNB table. Within that there's actual table, and then the cells individually can be named. So this one should be C one. This one should be C two. Then the next one should be C three. And it's important you highlight the whole cell when you assign these tags. And if you've done it correctly, you should be able to see this showing up here in the structure. Now notice that there is an empty shell of an element, this BNB that comes from the original XML import. This is something that we should use. But first, we have to delete these duplicates here, so I can select these three and just press backspace on the keyboard to delete it. And then I come back to my text frame and highlight all three of these elements that we created here. And these actually together should be considered the B and B text. And notice how that automatically groups them together here in the structure as well. And now we can select all three of these main components or elements, and we can drag them into the B and B. Element. Because if you recall, that was the original structure story, then BNB and then within that, we have the three main elements, B&B image, BNB table, and BNB text. So once again, that's exactly what we can see here. So now it's probably time to save this style the way we set it up. I will call it 04 list XML. And then if we zoom back, we can already test it out how it works by going into the import option. So import XML. And now instead of choosing the single record XML, choose the one called TreeHouse O. So this includes all 55 of the records. And let's open this. Again, I'm using the same settings as before, and I'm going to click Okay, and we can see that it managed to import most of the information. So we have the image, we have the price, the rating, the bets, and the bots. But the actual main element, the location, description, and host is not showing up yet. So there is some connection issue there. So we have to analyze what's different in the XML file and why it hasn't been linked up properly, even though we have already the text in place. 20. Fixing the XML structure: Now, whenever the XML import doesn't work out, it's always recommended to go back one step, so just undo that last import and double check that everything is set up correctly. Most importantly, you want to make sure the order of your elements mirror exactly the structure that you have in the XML file. And when you compare the file that we created and the XML structure from the single entry one, it's easy to see that the BNB image is lining up nicely. But then here, first, we have the BNB table and not the text. So that's something that we will have to change. And the order of things you can easily change in the structure here directly within InDesign, you just have to drag things up and down. And when you drag it up and down, just make sure you don't drag it directly over the name of an entry, but more towards the right. That's when the little line appears, and this way I can change the order. So now table is the second and text is the last. So we can test this out now. Let's just do the Import again. I actually have a keyboard short get assigned to Import XML, and I will choose all again. Let's click Okay and see what happens. We see immediately just simply by changing the order, that fixed one issue here. So this is looking good. It came in the right place where we wanted it to be. And the information goes there as well. However, we have to fix a couple of issues here in the table. But for now, it seems like the first record at least has been imported. And although all the other entries are also in here, they are just not showing up yet. That is because first we have to fix a couple of additional things. First and foremost, we have to turn the image and the table into an anchored object. And the way you can do this is by selecting the image frame, and click on this icon here. So if you click and then drag, you can place inside the text frame and place it right in front of the location. And then we can select the table and do the same thing. Again, there's that little icon, drag that and drop it in here. Now, to be able to see this properly, you can also turn on an additional extra here from the view menu. It's the show anchored object control. So notice how I have these two frames selected or this one, it tells me where things are going to. But what's more useful if you double click inside the text frame and press Commando Control Y, you can actually see these anchored object icons within there. And what you actually want for this to be at the front, before the location name. So all the way at the beginning, right there. So first is the anchored object, then the location. Then after a paragraph break, it's the long description, and then after another paragraph break, it's the host. You can actually see the hidden characters. If you go to the type menu, just choose show hidden characters. So you can also see this paragraph breaks here, and that's looking good. And what the anchoring means is that if I were to move the text up and down, both the image and the table is going to move together with that paragraph where the location is. So that's going to be a reference point anchor, that's where both of these elements are connected to. And this generally is a very good technique to learn whenever you working in design, even when it's not XML Import. Using the anchoring can be very useful in newspapers where you want images to move together with a specific part of the text, and of course, also in magazines. It's a great way to move certain elements that correspond to specific part of a flowing text that might be threaded throughout multiple pages, multiple spreads. So this way, you can always keep them tied to each other. In some cases, when you add too many elements or shift things around, like introducing anchors, it can happen that things get too complicated to make changes to. It actually turns out to be easier to remove all the elements from the structure. So select the main story element and just press backspace. Now, what you would want to do here is to untag all the elements. So you still have all the details here. You just have to re tag them. And first, I would start by selecting the text frame, which should be the story element. Within that, all the copy that we have here should be the BNB text. Then we have our image, which should be BNB image, and we have the BNB table. And then all of these three together should be grouped into a new parent element called B&B. So you just have to right click New element B and B is going to create that structure for you. And now this corresponds to the XML structure. So we can just go in and change the copy. First of all, this should be just simply saying location. Highlight that and assign that tag, which will go inside the B&B text. Then this one here, I'm just going to call it description. Again, highlight that, choose long description, and then these here are the hosts or host, and we can highlight that and assign host. Now, same way here in the table, I am just going to highlight the word price, which should be assigned to price. And this host cell, by the way, should be C one. So within C one, we will see price. Then within C two, this cell should be selected, highlight it, say C two, C three and C four. And then the rating should be just a placeholder for rating. Then the beds, again, shouldn't have the number in there already, simply the beds should be assigned to bedrooms. Baths shouldn't have the number in there, just simply the bathrooms tagged. And at this point, I'm just going to double check and my table is the right order, so the C one is the price, and C two is actually bedrooms. So I have price, and underneath, I have the rating, again, something that I have to fix. So I'm just going to copy the contents of this cell down here and then copy the bedrooms on the right or cut it out and paste it in here. So that should fix the order. So C one is the price C two bedrooms. Let's see, C one, price C two bedrooms. And then we can see the structure now C three should be rating, and C four should be bathrooms. Okay, so that's working now. So the whole structures being fixed. It should be all corresponding to the XML file, and now we can do another test. So I'm just going to zoom back out a bit and import the main XML file. So XML all and let's see what happens. It is going to take a while because we have 55 entries. But as you can see, we have populated a couple of pages. I didn't fill up all of them because there's actually quite a lot of overlap happening here. So there's still a lot of things that we will have to fix until this is going to work. But it's getting there. We at least now have everything populated the way I imagine all the images came in, all the relevant copy came in. So I'm just going to undo this last step and go back to before having all those entries. It's always good to clean it up. And of course, you can see how things were populate it if you want to analyze it and understand what is going wrong. But I'm going to show you this how to fix it. So first of all, if I select my anchored image and right click on it, there's an option for the anchored object right here. And what I like to do is to keep this within the top and bottom column boundaries. So it's not going to go beyond that, which is useful. Then we want to also make sure that the X is relative either to the anchor marker or the column edge. I'm just going to use column edge here, and I will set up the anchor objects reference point to be the top left corner. Now I can click Okay, and I can move it back here where I wanted it to be. And I will do the same thing with this one, right click and choose anchored object options. Again, I will use the top left corner. We can use the keep within top and bottom column boundaries and relative to column Edge or anchor marker, again, whichever you prefer to use. I will just use column edge again, and I'm going to paste it here on the top right corner. Now I'm actually going to remove the column guides from my parent pages, so I will select those go to lay out margins and columns. I'll set this to one. I don't actually need to see them. And in this original text frame that we have the primary text frame, I will also set the columns to be one, and the other one should be also one. This is by the way, Command or Control B to set it to one. It's not necessary to be set to three, and this one actually can be wider. So I wanted this to have a little bit more space, or maybe later we can refine the composition to have the image taking up a little bit more space but just by refining the anchoring option, I feel like we will get a better result. And I'm just going to remove this number here. Again, that's not necessary. Just ended up from the original import, and I feel like everything else is looking good. 21. Additional corrections to the XML structure: At this point, it's probably worth saving your file and do another test. So we can import the XML, again, the one with all the records, and let's see what happens. And the main issue what I can still see happening is on the second page, instead of just using the middle column for the text frame, it actually takes up the entire spread. Of course, that is because within the parent page, I forgot to change the size of these text frames. So that's something that we will have to fix. We can go back and undo this last step, and let's just check the size of this text frame here that we ended up using. Maybe we can change the text frames here to something that's a little bit easier to remember, like 70 millimeters like that. And I'm just going to move the tax frame there. Also, let's just set the X 210. So 110 and 70, that's easy to remember. Going to adjust these two anchored objects, which obviously keeps updating whenever I mess with that tax frame, the main tax frame in the middle. Because these are anchored to it. So once again, 110 and 70. Let's do the same thing here. So select this text frame, and we want to change this to 110 and 70. The width is going to be 70. Now, the position of it is actually not 110, but it's 110 plus 210. That's 320 because remember this is on the right side. So the reference point is the top left corner of the spread. So this way, it should be in the same place on both sides. And the one on the left, we can change to 110 and 70, okay? So that's looking good. Now let's give this a try again. So we import the XML. It's very important that the parent page setup is, again, the way that you want the whole document to be populated. And by the way, this is the common workflow, and I wanted to record this. I intentionally make some mistakes on the way. Some of them are not intentional, but it's very common that you have to go back and forth until you refine your template, and you really want your template to be saved because you don't want to mess it up. Lose it by populating it and then actually not having a blank template that works with your data. So that's going to be a very important step. We will be saving a template. But as you can see, there's a lot of back and forth until you refine and get things working. Even though there is a good connection now between all of our elements, the layout is still not perfect. But with the parent page being fixed, things are looking much better already. So if I just press W or Shift W, we can see that the pages were generated actually really well. There are some overlaps between the images, which I expected. That's something that we will be fixing soon. But generally, everything is looking much healthier. Now we just have to get the styling right, which will include also the spacing between these paragraphs. And to be honest, we are pretty much almost there. So don't forget, I'm going to undo this last step to go back to our single record version, which is our template. I feel like now it's time to fix the styles of the text here. And to save time, we can actually import these from existing documents. So if you go to the Paragraph Styles panel and click on the drop down, you can choose load paragraph styles, and we can use one of our previous ones, maybe the one that we created for the other list version where we were trying to use data merge for this format. So let's just click Open. Then we can see that we have a couple of things here that will be imported. So we have the host, the description, the location, and the no break. Yeah, these can all come in. Let's click Okay. Now notice that I already had a host description and name here, and these were actually imported by the XML, because if you recall in the XML, I had these attributes written down. So we had the paragraph style called description, another one called name, and another one called host. So one thing that we can do is to undo this loading the paragraph styles. And when I do it again, so choose load paragraph styles from the previous file. So what I can actually do here is to select the host that's currently an empty style that was just imported by the XML file. Right click and choose delete it. And then it's going to ask me what to replace it with. And I want to use the other host and click Okay. And then we just have to make sure that this is a lowercase host, written exactly as it's referenced from the XML file. Now, the description style, again, this one is the one that's empty. So we can delete this, delete style. And assign the other description to it, and then we can just update it. So we can just have lowercase D. And then finally, the name can be deleted, and that should be using the location paragraph style, and then that should be just renamed to be name in this case. Again, it's slightly inconsistent between the data merge and the XML file, but that's just a quick fix here that we updated, and you can already see these looking much better. And unfortunately, with XML Import, we don't have that convenience of quickly previewing things like we've done with data merge. Here, we have to go through that step of actually importing the whole database to be able to see how things are going to turn out. But before we do that, I just wanted to make sure that the host paragraph style or the name paragraph style, whichever you want to use for this has some spacing applied to it. I think actually it would make sense to use it on the host, which is the last one. So if we go inside that style definition, in the indense spacing, we want to make sure that there is enough space after this. So maybe 3 millimeters to separate the records should be enough. And let's just click Okay. I think for now, that's enough refinement. It's also good not to make too much changes between attempts of importing the XML file. Otherwise, you won't really be able to tell what's improved the result and what's need still fixing. So I'm just going to do another import, again, not the single one, but the version. Let's click Okay. And after this, although things are looking better, there's still a couple of issues like the host and the name of the locations are merged together. So there's definitely something we have to separate with a line break. Then I notice that the corner radius is not applied on the images yet and we also don't have our grab style showing up, even though it's already in the description, I believe. Oh, no, in this one, we don't actually have it. So that's just something that we have to add manually again. That way we will have the highlights showing up here. But also, we have to make sure that character style is imported. So we will just have to do that after we undo this last step. Yeah, I feel like most of the other things are looking good. So again, I undo this last step, and hopefully this is going to be our final refinement. So after the host, that should be actually a line break. And it's actually important to check this. If I press Commando Control Y, we have to see this in the story editor as well that the B and B ending or closing element should be after this line break element. So I just put that here. So that's the ride structure that I wanted to see. So this way, the B&B element, which is holding one record from the database, also includes that last line break. That's important to be able to separate the two paragraph styles, the one we use for the location and the one that we use for the host. So notice how this little marker is now showing up here at the bottom, so that includes the line break as well. This was a very important step. We couldn't miss this. So now this is going to be fixed. Then let's try to remember what was the other things we wanted to fix. We wanted to have round corners here set to 3 millimeters. Let's just check that. Yeah, that's looking good. And then we can also bring in that character style, like we mentioned earlier. So let's just load character styles. We can load it from that file that we created earlier. I believe it was in the four records layout that we created that style. So there is the highlight. I'm just going to turn off no break. Only a highlight needs to be brought in from there. Let's click Okay. So now that is in place, and then we can make that connection for the description. We just have to go back and get that grab style. Let's just copy this massive code that we have here, and then let's just jump back here. Double click on description, grab style, new grab style, highlight and drop that in there. So that's nicely prepared for us. We don't actually see any results of that yet, but it's going to work once we update things. And let's save this and import our XML. Hopefully, the final test before the final template creation. So let's just do not the single, all of them open using the same things again. Click Okay. All right, so let's take a look at this. We just go back a bit. The page is looking nice. All the other spreads are generated accordingly. And if I just come back here, let's take a closer look. The styling is perfect now. There is a good spacing between the records, and already you can see that instead of having aesthetic spacing, like that rigid structure that we had with the data merge, here is just beautifully flowing exactly the same three millimeter spacing between the records, which looks much more professional. 22. Creating a template: However, I noticed one major problem, and that is the host, in some cases, might be separated from the record, the rest of the record. So we get these orphans or widows in some cases, and that's something that we should definitely connect to each other. Now, on this version, I can show you how this works, how to fix. So what you need to use is the keep option within the paragraph styles. So what you want to do is for the description to have the keep option turned on keep with previous. This is going to make sure that it connects and stay together and doesn't get separated from the location or name style in this case. But you also want all the lines to be kept together within that paragraph. So you don't want the description to be separated. And notice how straightaway, if I turn this feature off, there's one that has the text separated between two spreads. Once this option is turned on, that is fixed. So these two settings we will have to do for the description paragraph style, but we will also have to do this for the host paragraph style. Again, keep options and then keep with previous. And notice how immediately the top option or the top instance is fixed now. So that is never going to separate from the description. And this way, we get a perfect alignment on this spread. So just have to remember to fix this. Once again, I'm going to undo the last couple of steps until we get back to seeing the single record layout. So let's go back there. Alright, perfect. Now we can fix this once again, like we've done before. We just did the rehearsal for it. But now I'm going to do description, keep options, keep with previous, keep lines together, all lines in paragraph. Click Okay, and then the same for host, keep options and keep it previous. Now, you can also turn on the keep lines together, but all of these are only one line of text, so that doesn't really matter. So we can just click Okay, and that should be it. So now what we have here is something that we can save as a template, and you don't have to worry about the image being in here or that you have maybe additional information in here because that will be updated or replaced once the XML Import happens. So this is a perfect time to save this as a template. You go up to the file menu and choose Save as, and then you go into the options here on the format and choose template. So I'm going to save it like this. And then if I go to File Open and choose the template file, the main advantage of using it like this is that it automatically creates an empty untitled document, so there is no danger of overwriting your original template. So this is going to make things much easier, and we can just double check. There is one entry here. But if I go into the Import XML feature, again, choose all the full database. Then now one additional feature that I would include once you get to this stage that you are starting to use a template is to use the create Link option. So that is going to link to the images. So if the image is update, it will also update in your catalog. That's definitely a useful option there. And we can just click Okay and wait for our final version of this XML example. It's exciting and nerve wracking at the same time whenever I use the import feature because I always expect something to go wrong. But hopefully, we've done everything right and we fixed all the issues. We got through all those hurdles that it always just happens whenever we use this workflow. So you can definitely see that XML import takes even longer than setting up than data match, but it can be used for much more complex layouts and you can include more logic in them, depending on how you build your XML files, it can be even more advanced than what we see here. Things are looking good. Of course, I could further tweak this by maybe moving everything down a bit so they are not so close to the top edge. And, of course, we don't have any parent elements. So like the page numbers and the headers could be added. But because we've already on those, I don't have to repeat it. Instead, let's just take a look at this in full screen and see if we can spot any issues. I can see that the alignment here with the table is not perfect. It's just has to again be tweaked slightly. Maybe we can refine how the anchoring works there to make sure it doesn't get separated like that. But besides that, things are looking good. Here, I can also see a bit of an overlap between the images. We probably need to have a little bit more spacing between the entries. I feel like that's still something that needs to be fixed to avoid these overlaps and to generally make sure that each of these records stand out. So they don't feel so blended into each other because right now it's a little bit too dense the layout, so we can have definitely a bit more space there. Or maybe we could increase the leading on the text just to space things out a little bit more. But overall, I think we've done a really good job and don't forget that this is a template, so we can just easily switch back to the template. Make the changes here and then go to file open template separately as an untitled document to create your tests. So you don't have to now repeat those changes twice. You can just do it within the template. To make sure that you understand what I mean, I'm going to keep this untitled document open as a reference, just so I can remember what was going wrong. So one of the things I want to do is to have a little bit more spacing between these two elements or each of the records. So I come back here, go into the host style and then indense spacing and space after maybe we can increase it up to 6 millimeters, could be even more if we wanted to. For now, six, I think, should be enough, and we can just save the template file, so that updates the template itself, and then we can go to file open, or even open recent you can use and then choose the template, which will create another new untitled document where we can again just import all of the records as the XML file. The create link is definitely again, a useful option to turn and then after waiting a little bit, we should be able to see the results of these changes. But most importantly, having the template file created makes it much easier to do these changes and update things than the way we were doing it before. Okay, so here's the result. Now we have more space between the records. That's looking definitely better, a bit more spaced out in general. Now, this specific record is still a little bit too close to the other one, and that is because this is probably the shortest entry. So maybe the text needs to be a little bit longer for this to work well. Or we just have to make sure that the space after is maybe ten points to account for even instances like this one. But overall, I think all the other ones are looking good. There's another very short one here. Again, that is overlapping still. So yeah, we definitely have to go up a bit more. There's another overlap there. But, yeah, I feel like maybe with ten points, we would be in a safe zone already. And of course, this is something that you can again test in this generated version of the document. So we can go to a page like this one. And if I go to description, we can just test this out, go to intense spacing, and actually not the description, the hosts the one we want to update. We just go up to 10 millimeters, and it should update everything accordingly. Some images got lost in the process like that one. I'm not sure why that happened, but 10 millimeters seemed to have fixed this problem here. And I feel like that's the shortest paragraph. So most likely 10 millimeters would be enough for all of the other entries or records. Yeah. That's all I wanted to show you about XML Import. And I know it's complicated and time consuming, but believe me, it's a very useful skill to learn. It really is going to take your in design skills to the next level. And especially when you work on complex catalogs or publications, this can save you a lot of time, even if you just use it on certain parts of the document, maybe not to populate or generate the whole document. And that's actually something I'm going to talk about in the next video, which is briefly how we can combine the results of multiple generated documents. 23. Combining layouts: Now, before I show you how to combine multiple documents that we created in these examples, there's just one final thing that I forgot to mention, and that's how to map tags to style from within in design. So if you are not using the style definitions within your XML file, you can actually go to the text panel and go to the panel menu and choose map tags to styles or map styles to tags, whichever you prefer. So if I click there, you can see there's options here to choose from. Table can be assigned to table style one and so on and so forth, the cell can be assigned to the cell style one. You can do the same thing for everything. However, if you remember from within the XML file, you can use these attributes, the eight attribute to call on to a specific style. Like, in this case, I'm calling or assigning the cell style called cell, or in this case, there is a paragraph style name assigned to the location by default, or here for the description, I have the description style assigned, and for the host element, I have the host paragraph style assigned. So I didn't have to do these connections manually within in design, it automatically assigned the styles based on the definitions that I created in the document. It's just important to remember that you either do it from the XML, which obviously can save time for complex documents, or you can do it through the text panel and again, map the tags to styles or vice versa. Either of these techniques are good, so you can use whichever you prefer. Going back to the results of the merged documents with our data merge technique, we have the one, if you recall, which has all 55 of the records generated or populated onto these full spread layout. Then we have the four records per spread. Again, we have all of these created here, and then we have our list, which we created with the XML Import, which definitely works better than using data merge. And when you get to this point, you can start combining these documents. So for instance, maybe from this document, I would like to move the first three spreads into the other document. All I have to do is to right click and say move pages, and then I want to specify the destination let's put it in the large image version, and let's put it at the start of the document. So if I click Okay, we can just jump to that document. And obviously, this will show up nicely here. So if we look at this now next to each other, that's the first three spreads, and then we move into the full image view. So that's how quickly and easily you can start combining these results from the various automation examples that we went through. And as long as you are using consistent parent styling and paragraph styling between the different versions, and also importantly, you are using the same page size, then you should be able to fairly quickly merry these different results together to create something like a hybrid where you're utilizing all the different layers that you create. With this project, I can say that we really covered data merge quite in depth, and I feel like we already got to the limitations of what's possible with that feature. While with XML Import, we really just started to scratch the surface. There's so much more impressive and complex things you can do with this workflow if you master it. But all I wanted to show you through this project is how these two workflow, although similar, there's still quite a lot of differences between them. And I want you to be able to confidently choose one over another, depending on the type of layout that you require.