Context
A customer that we will call AllGazPro 1, a world leader in the gas industry, creates product sheets in PDF format to make them available to the sales representatives of each European entity and to their customers.
The objective is to automate the generation of multi-page PDF documents using the InDesign Server for 13 technical product families in 11 languages using the PIM 2 Akeneo, a product information management solution.
Challenges
AllGazPro wanted to implement an easy-to-use solution to produce more selling product sheets in connection with its PIM based on Akeneo. Simple Workspace connects via API 3 to Akeneo which remains the single source of truth for text and image data.
The challenge is indeed to allow each solution to follow its own roadmap without any impact on the other. Akeneo can now be upgraded without waiting for the specific code of the old generation engine to be modified. This has also made it possible to shift the burden of creating and maintaining graphic templates from IT to the graphic studio.
Generation of PDF files
From the Akeneo software, Simple Workspace generates the product sheets directly in PDF format, in batches when the volume of sheets is important, or in a unitary way at the user’s 4 request. The result is archived in Simple Workspace and sent to a directory accessible from Akeneo. After a few weeks of use, nearly 15,000 product records have been created.
Concerning the layout, the challenge was important: we started by formalizing, together with the business, the numerous rules to be applied for a successful layout, whatever the product concerned and the target language. Indeed, the generation carried out by Simple Workspace must take into account the linguistic aspects (for example, the German version generally occupies more space on a page than the English one) as well as the multidimensional aspect of the technical data related to the great variety of the products. AllGazPro has paid particular attention to the management of ” blanks “; at the heart of our generation engine based on InDesign Server, J2S LayoutToolbox and its modules must reduce as much as possible the blank spaces between the elements present on each page of the product sheets.
Modifications in Web2Print mode
Product managers will soon be able to make changes to the layout without having InDesign on their workstations. The objective is to give users the possibility to personalize the result in Web2Print mode by adding a comment, a visual, etc. before sending it to the recipient.
Richard Loubéjac
Cofounder of J2S
