Indesign snippet

[john booth]

Can I use an indesign snippet as an asset and switch it out with my data like any other graphic?

[west-digital.fr]

For my understanding, could you elaborate, what is an "InDesign snippet"?

How do you create it?

If it is a file, what extension does it come with?

Thanks!

west-digital.fr

[john booth]

You can export a portion of your indesign document as an .idms file. First select your elements then export as “indesign snippet’. Instead of importing an entire .indd, you can just import the piece you need.  

I have several business cards that are similar except for the logo and some variable text. As of now, I’m using layers but my layer count is growing pretty fast. If I could save the layer content to a snippet, I would swap the snippets out as needed and reduce my layer count to a minimum and constant amount.

[west-digital.fr]

Thanks for the clarification.

In my knowledge, the XMPie composition engines do not support IDMS files as Assets.

At least, could we not find any explicit reference in the XMPie documentation.

However, I noticed a quite weird behavior with CC-2025 / 25.3: should you define a Graphic Content Object that explicitely refers to an existing IDMS file (with the ".idms" extension, specified in the QLingo rule), then... surprisingly enough, the XMPie engine injects the contents of your IDMS file into your VDP InDesign document.

It's certainly a non supported behavior which, as such, comes with several unwanted results, such as:

• in the WYSIWYG UI, the previous injections are not "cleared", so multiple IDMS renderings appear atop eachothers
• in the output file... only the first injection appears

But maybe XMPie would welcome a Feature Request?

Meanwhile, may you consider exporting to PDF? (instead of to InDesign Snippet)

west-digital.fr

[john booth]

PDF was a thought but I can’t see as an improvement over using layers (6 in one hand. Half dozen in the other.).  In this case, layers may be the way to go.

[west-digital.fr]

I do not know the details of your document and workflow, but my guess is that the XMPie composition engine would be way more performant with one Graphic Content Object driving thousands (or 6 or half a dozen) of Assets, against a document with many layers (regardless it's 6 or half a dozen).

[Scott B]

I agree with west-digital.fr’s assessment: referencing PDFs via Data Sources and Asset Sources is generally less demanding on the composition engine than using Visibility Layers. From what I understand, Graphic ADORs or PDFTables tend to render faster than Visibility Layers. That said, while exploring XMPie documentation for .idms file types, I came across XNIP—a supported method for embedding images with text. It uses XMPie’s proprietary XML-based XLIM format and offers a flexible way to import formatted content. Here's the relevant link from XMPie’s Campus site:  https://help.xmpie.com/uCreatePrint/Latest/Help/en/Work_Dynamic_Doc/Importing_Formatted_Text_into_a_Design.htm?Highlight=file%20types#Importformattedtextusingcontentobjects