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A comment on Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?.

Re:Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your ... by danraftis on Friday January 06, 2017 @01:07PM (#13338579)
Our company pumps out tons of long-document PDFs that are fairly complex in terms of text, charts, tables and whatnot. We then take the docs, excel files, and charts into InDesign to create a nicely designed PDF to upload online.

I need to find a way to automate this workflow. Anyone out there experience this in their organization and want to work together on something?

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Re:Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your ... by p_ronto on Friday January 06, 2017 @02:06PM (#13339187)
Check out pandoc. With it you could convert your documents into Markdown. Then use common *nix text-utils to merge the parts you want into a single file and then load it to InDesign. Check out this article (http://rhythmus.be/md2indd/) that inspired me to automate protocol specs extraction from Word documents (bluurgh).
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Re:Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your ... by fgcbs on Saturday January 07, 2017 @06:30AM (#13343552)
Hi danraftis, I'm interested in a generic solution solution to automate (instead of manually cut+paste) assembly of PDF files. Contact me at [email protected] if you are interested in working together as pilot user.
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Re:Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your ... by feep on Saturday January 07, 2017 @12:10PM (#13345164)
It’s not entirely clear what kind of PDFs you are building, but I’d like to hear more.

I’ve done this for 13 years (Mostly Quark instead of InDesign, but the same tools and tricks).

Let me know if you want to work together.

rusty

[you can email, feepish @ google’s free email]

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Re:Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your ... by evadne on Friday January 06, 2017 @01:35PM (#13338874)
InDesign itself is scriptable, but you may also want to look into automating it on the server using iText, which is available in Java and .NET flavours.
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