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General Category => Tips & Tricks => Topic started by: AaronH on May 21, 2019, 10:09:56 AM

Title: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: AaronH on May 21, 2019, 10:09:56 AM
Hey guys, is there a way to split up a 10up BC template from Word into separate 3.5x2 business cards? I have a lady that has 630 separate cards, they're inspirational phrases or something, and they're two sided...see the attachment. Is that possible? I don't want to have to place them and manually adjust in indesign for that many cards if I don't have to.

Your help is greatly appreciated!
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: DigiCorn on May 21, 2019, 10:45:55 AM
What is the page size in Word? You *might* be able to adjust the page sized in Word to 3.5 x 2 and then save as a .docx and upload to Zamzar for .pdf conversion (or save as a .pdf from Word). If not, you might have to save as a pdf, and then place and adjust 10 times in ID, and then relink the additional pages to save time.
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: scottrsimons on May 21, 2019, 11:14:14 AM
This thread made me think of this.  :popcorn:
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: AaronH on May 21, 2019, 11:18:44 AM
Quote from: DigiCorn on May 21, 2019, 10:45:55 AM
What is the page size in Word? You *might* be able to adjust the page sized in Word to 3.5 x 2 and then save as a .docx and upload to Zamzar for .pdf conversion (or save as a .pdf from Word). If not, you might have to save as a pdf, and then place and adjust 10 times in ID, and then relink the additional pages to save time.

That's what I was afraid of.
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: abc on May 21, 2019, 11:31:51 AM
Interesting one. I can do that in PitStop 2019 for you. Be an interesting one.
How do you want them, Front, Back, Front, Back, Front, Back...
or something else?
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: AaronH on May 21, 2019, 01:27:26 PM
Front, back, front, back... The backs are numbered to match up with the front on the other side. I've got the newest Pitstop if it works, I should be able to import an action right?

Thanks ABC!
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: abc on May 21, 2019, 04:33:15 PM
Will give it a try, probably won't be till tomorrow though
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: AaronH on May 21, 2019, 04:34:25 PM
Thanks ABC!
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: Slappy on May 21, 2019, 07:23:22 PM
Quote from: AaronH on May 21, 2019, 10:09:56 AMI don't want to have to place them and manually adjust in indesign for that many cards if I don't have to.
I wonder if the PDF Multipage Importer script could help. You can set it to offset by X & Y, but I guess you'd need 10 different offsets for each of those pages. Blech.

Curious to see what abc comes up with!
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: wonderings on May 22, 2019, 08:23:01 AM
Why is the one side numbered? Looks all common to me.

Would dread a file like this and wonder how much time the customer spent formatting and selecting fonts thinking they were helping you out?

Hopefully it all works in pitstop for you. Only way I could think of doing it would be if the quotes were separate and you could data merge it. Would lose all the formatting that the customer did though. I like challenges sometimes, this one just seems like a headache.
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: AaronH on May 22, 2019, 11:51:16 AM
I like challenges too. Sometimes I learn something on jobs like this that I can use to make other jobs even simpler. This though, I've hit a wall. Unless ABC comes up with a cool action, I'll be manually doing it. I let the customer know it will take a lot of time to break them apart, so we'll see what the finished art from them looks like but, bleh, I'm not looking forward to it.
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: delooch on May 22, 2019, 12:17:54 PM
i fooled with this and made an indesign template that will split the sheet into 10- 3.2.5 pages per original sheet, but you have to re-link the original pdf for all 63 sheets.. trying to figure out how to relink that automatically for each page in the original document
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: AaronH on May 22, 2019, 03:24:17 PM
Oh nice! How did you do that?
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: delooch on May 22, 2019, 05:05:46 PM
i dont know if this will help, like i said i have to manually specify which pdf page to import, but it does split it to 3.5x2..

I made 2 additional 10-up pages in the pdfinput file, just to see if the additional pages land correctly, they do.

also, position 4 of your sample is off-center, i left it that way in case the rest of the pages were correct.

I didnt mess with the back side as they were all the same.

I forgot to remove my guides off the master page, just ignore it
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: AaronH on May 22, 2019, 05:37:05 PM
Nice! Thank you! I'll take a look at it. Hopefully this will come in handy.
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: abc on May 23, 2019, 05:08:23 AM
Here you go. This seems to work on the 2 pages you sent.
How it works, basically duplicate the first page 9 times, so you have 10 pages. Then crop each page to each individual card.
Do the same for the backup.
Then re-order the pages so they are in the correct order.

I would suggest splitting the original large document into various 2page documents and then running the Action List on each.

You could of course modify the Action List to work with the complete document, but that would take a long time and be prone to error.

Let me know how you get on.
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: AaronH on May 23, 2019, 10:00:45 AM
Thanks ABC! I'll give this a shot!
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: AlanV on May 23, 2019, 01:50:10 PM
ABC,

When we run your action on different computers we get different results. The only difference we notice is that one has FusionPro installed on it.

Alan
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: abc on May 23, 2019, 02:46:28 PM
I forgot to mention this only works in PitStop 2019.
I can't think of any reason there could be a difference. What are the differences?
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: AlanV on May 24, 2019, 09:40:13 AM
On 1 computer I get the correct results 20 4.3" x 2.79" pages. On the other I get 20 pages the first is 4.3" x 2.79" the rest are 8.5" x 11", some are blank and some have the cards stepped out on it. We just upgraded all of our computers to Pitstop 2019.
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: abc on May 24, 2019, 10:18:21 AM
Can you check if they are both set to run on the complete document?
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: AlanV on May 24, 2019, 01:12:54 PM
Thank you.

That is exactly what the problem was!!!

I have another question though, is there a way to run it if you don't how many pages there are? Currently we use Switch with a similar action to split the file into single pages and then run each of those pages through the action and then recombine all of them back into one file. So I guess I am looking for a repeat.

Alan
Title: Re: Split 10up BC template from Word to Separate Pages
Post by: abc on May 24, 2019, 03:16:45 PM
I'm not a Switch expert, but this could be an approach
Switch will know the page count of the job via it's metadata, so you could split a file in multiple two pagers, then run the action on each and split the pages into single cards.

If you need to re-combine them back into one, Switch can calculate the total number of cards x 10 (per page), that total could be used in the hold job to wait for all the cards, then recombine them.

If it's not exactly 10 on the last page, you could use PitStop to identify the empty pages (in the trim box) and remove them.

Make sense?