Batch conversion of indd to pdf

[Pablo1]

Hi,

Please excuse my lack of InDesign knowledge but i'm very new to this.

I have a system which we use InDesign to
generate many (a few hundred) PDF files with differing content depending on a data source.

I have an indesign template from which I have generated a tagged text file. Using a piece of code the text in the tagged text file is programmatically being regenerated and the data changed according to the information that is to go into the next PDF file.

My question is, does anybody know if it is possible to do the conversion/relink of an InDesign document/template plus linked files (eg tagged text file, embedded images etcc) and produce a PDF WITHOUT having to fireup the full blown InDesign application?

I'm doing all of the above programatically and don't really want to start full indesign (eg with full edit capabilities) every time as now that the design is done, i just want to create the pdfs. I suppose a command something along the lines of
$ innd_conv template=x.indd output=y.pdf relink=y

which would produce y.pdf based upon x.indd and relinking anything embedded (which would have been changed by the program).

I'm sorry if i've not made this clear.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. The reason behind this is speed and not having to load up the full product during the conversion process.

Thanks.

[Dave Saunders]

Why not preload the application and leave it running? You make it sound as though the overhead would apply to each PDF, but it wouldn't if the application was simply left running.

There's no other way to do what you're talking about short of commissioning a team of programmers to reverse engineer all the various things you need to create a custom application.

Dave

[Pablo1]

Dave, thanks for the comment. Yes, pre-loading the application is what I do already however when contemplating options for improving performance I thought that a conversion utility of some sort (if it existed) may be more efficient and require less resources on the machine and therefore 'possibly' be faster. I may have a large number of these to produce and thefore reducing the conversion time by a few seconds per pdf would have a dramatic affect on performance.

Cheers,
Paul.