Add additional boxes with content in the layout geometry variant.

Prerequisites

Adobe InDesign CS6 or higher and the censhare XMLCommand version 2.8.19 or higher are required.

Introduction

Layout geometry variants can contain variant-specific boxes and you can use custom content with a custom layout geometry in the variant.

How it works

You can create additional boxes on their own layer in the layout geometry variant.

What happens during a geometry update when the original and its geometry variant differ?

The geometry update icon appears when there is a new version of the master layout. During the execution of the command, either manually or via the censhare Render Client, the existing previous version of the layout is renamed internally, so that in the the next step the original layout can be copied into the layout variants. What follows is a calibration of placements with different content. Then the system has to ensure that individually created boxes are transferred from all pages of the existing layout variant into the new layout variant. You do not notice those internal changes, even not until finally the existing layout variant gets replaced by the new one. 

The new boxes require a separate layer in InDesign. If the additional content is not present on a separate InDesign layer in the variant this may lead to Plugin-errors. The additional boxes must not be on the same layer with the boxes of the original layout. If so, the conversion does not work. Besides that, the separate InDesign layer also needs to exists in the master layout. Otherwise, you may receive Plugin-errors. In case of errors, first examine whether they are caused by a user error in the layout.

Configuration

If required by the customer scenario, it is possible to modify the variants with InDesign scripts to display and hide content. As triggering events for the InDesign scripting these four settings have been added on the server side.

  • After updating geometry

  • After updating a layout geometry variant

  • Before updating geometry

  • Before updating a layout geometry variant

Four new triggering events for the InDesign Scripting part

The following schema illustrations and screencast will give you some insight about the new layout geometry concept in censhare 4.10.1.

Original layout with Variant 1 and Variant 2

See a video that introduces the functionality:

See also the InDesign-Scripting manual or ask our Solution Specialists, if the scripts are not executable or not recognized by the censhare system or by InDesign.