Using product information from Drupal in InDesign is a common practice for very good reasons.

The elements contained in this type of document are mostly product information, and Drupal is a technology with specific parts designed to handle this kind of data.

Compared to other business applications, Drupal is very suitable for use with:

• Grouping product codes into different categories
• Editing long sales and marketing product descriptions
• Managing multilingual content
• Associating products with pictures

In short, Drupal is a great platform for storing all the details you want to publish in a catalog.

Without a system like Drupal, firms run the risk of spreading critical data about their products across too many locations. Updating these data takes a long time, which may lead to falling behind and not updating all the needed product information on an ideal schedule.

When product details are stored in Drupal, it’s easy to update and to present them on the Web, but sometimes it needs to be presented in a well-formed and complete document, one intended for print or digital publishing. The reasons for this are many. The main thing is that, very often, a print document has a high conversion rate (there are many examples of this).

These documents help customers to buy more and more easily, and they enable sales teams to sell more.

Catalog and price lists help both sales and marketing teams by:

• Showing the products in their best order
• Bringing consistency to the company’s message (i.e., following the brand style guidelines)
• Conveying higher product values
• Facilitating customers’ product searches

That is exactly what the Web is not able to offer.

When a company wants to publish product information from the Web (such as that stored in data management software or on an e-commerce site) in a ready-to-print document or PDF file, some peculiarities arise, and a great deal of attention must be paid. This is because print-ready documents and PDF files have specific rules related to the long development of both the print design and typographic industries, such as the use of layouts, grids, fonts, bleeds and slugs, CMYK color spaces, and so on. Any slight imprecision in the final document could yield a less than perfect result. On paper, these are very eye-catching, and not in a good way.

For all of the reasons mentioned above, the expectations concerning a document that is going to be printed are higher than those for one destined for publication on the Web, but the fast pace of digital publishing is now dictating the cycles of the printing industry, too.

Technologies like Drupal have an “export to PDF engine,” but in most cases, the results are not perfect, and if a company aims to enhance and bend the logic of HTML to a PDF engine, the path is very hard. Sometimes, the desired results (those expected from the print medium) cannot be achieved.

The only way to guarantee the quality of a typographic document export action is for it to pass through InDesign. This is exactly the service we offer at Pagination.

With Pagination, it is easy to upload the data exported from Drupal and automatically create a perfect document in both the InDesign and PDF formats. Static and dynamic sections can be merged together to create ready-to-publish documents in minutes.

Customers from all around the world are using Pagination to create catalogs and pricelists from their Drupal files.

It’s simple to create a catalog from Drupal data because the information exported by this platform is already organized in a way suitable for use with Pagination.

Contact us for more information.