New to XmPIE - UCreate

[Scott Lee]

Hello,

I am new to using XmPIE.  We only have the UCreate package at my office.  I went through the tutorial and everything went fine.  I've also used it on a few projects that exchange graphics per doctor or lawyer depending on the data.  Is that pretty much the extent of what UCreate can do?  What I mean by that is, basically all Ucreate can do is have graphic changes depending on the data or is there a lot more it can do I just don't know how to yet?

Any help would be great.

[Iain Dwyer]

You can also manipulate text and layers in InDesign based on data. I usually call it a document composing tool. Apparently some people have even managed to get it to call to web services for data although I don't know how that was done.

[eko...@gmail.com]

Scott,

There are countless InDesign features that you can tap into with uCreate. In the past 16+ years the uCreate plugin for InDesign had become quite powerful.

To name a few features: dynamic text, graphics, text files, text files with nested variable text, pages that show/hide, layers which show/hide, dynamic tables, dynamic styles, if you're clever you can move image position, resizing of variable images, copy resizing based on content area, dynamic object styles (shapes, color, position, etc), numerous barcodes out of the box, business logic on top of data, sliding text content if photos are present, variable length documents, format/transform data for printing, mathematical functions, direct connect to a uProduce server for templates or Port data, ... the list goes on and on. An important key is that you can do all of that while never leaving InDesign The software gets really interesting when you add a server for on demand interaction for Web2Print or PDF on demand.

You might want to browse the XMPie website for Case Studies to see some of the real applications that folks build/maintain with uCreate and XMPie.

[David Baldaro]

Well said Scott!