How CatBase and Your Page Layout Program Work Together

How CatBase and the page layout program link together

First let's have a quick review of the publishing process:

1. Get your data into CatBase's database, either by entering it manually or importing it
2. Create one or more Publishing Style Sheets and (optionally) one or more Publishing Projects
3. Publish the data: this creates a specially tagged text file
4. Import that text file into a text box in your page layout template

It's the Publishing Style Sheets that create the link between the data and the page layout program: they tell CatBase what data you want to include in your publication, how you want it sorted, and how you want it styled.

Setting up CatBase

The styling of the text is handled using Character Style Sheets and Paragraph Style Sheets. Character Style Sheets determine the styling of the text (the font, size, weight, etc.) and Paragraph Style Sheets determine the characteristics of the paragraph (space before and after, indents, leading, etc.). In Adobe InDesign, the basic character styles for a paragraph style are specified in the Paragraph Style; you only need to create Character Styles if you want to have mixed formatting within a paragraph. You create Character and Paragraph Style Sheets in both CatBase and your page layout template; their names must match exactly. When you publish the data and import it into your page layout template, it will try to match the character and paragraph styles in the data to the ones in the template; if it doesn't find a match, it will create a new one with the CatBase settings.

For example, in a typical catalogue, you might set up a Paragraph Style Sheet called "Product heading" in your page template, and choose a font, style, colour, space before, and indent for that style. In CatBase you'll also create a Paragraph Style Sheet called "Product heading ". In your Publishing Style Sheet you would choose the "Product heading" style as the Paragraph Style for the paragraph that publishes the product names - for example:

Suppose you want to have mixed formatting within a paragraph - for example:

Chocolate Soldiers pack of 10

To accomplish this, you select a Paragraph Style for the paragraph and then select a Character Style for the element that you want to style differently. The Paragraph for our example would look like this:

Open the Pack size element and go to the Preferences tab, and select a Character Style for the Pack size:

Setting up your Page Layout Template

Remember that the page layout template controls the FORMATTING of your publication.

Basic Page Elements: Master Pages

The first thing you need to do is set up the basic page elements for your publication: these include things like the page number, headers and footers, and probably, a text box to contain your data. These things go on the Master Pages. You modify the Master Pages by double-clicking on them in the Page Layout or Pages palette:

Quark	InDesign

Add your basic page elements to the Master Pages: they will then appear on every page you create. You can add additional Master Pages with different designs; for example, you might have some of your document pages set with a three-column text box, and others with one large single-column text box. Or no text box at all.

Important note! When you publish your CatBase data, you import the published file into a text box in your page layout document. So you must have at least one Master Page with at least one text box on it.

Here's an example of a Master Page spread in Adobe InDesign:

Note the following elements:

• The logo in the header area
• There is a two-column text box on each page
• The footer contains the date that the document was last modified, and an automatic page number
• We've used InDesign in this example, but the principles are very similar in QuarkXPress

An actual page in this document would look something like this:

Linking Text Boxes

Not all layouts are quite that simple, of course. You might, for example, want to have various parts of the data arranged in a particular way on the pages - perhaps To achieve this a product picture on the left, the description in the middle, and pricing details on the right - something like this:

To achieve this, we created a group of four text boxes for each product and linked them together. This is how it looks on the Master Page:

QuarkXpress	InDesign
The arrows show the order in which the text boxes are linked.	The "out ports" indicate that there is a link FROM a text box; the "in ports" indicate that there is a link TO a text box.

Note that the box which will contain the picture is a text box, not a picture box. When the data is imported into the layout using the Xtags plugin, it will create the required picture boxes and place the pictures into them.

How to create links between text boxes

QuarkXpress		InDesign
In the Tool palette, select the Text Linking Tool		In the toolbar, select the selection tool
Select the first text box that you want to link		Select the first text box that you want to link, then click in the boxes out port
Then click in the next text box that you want to link to. An arrow is drawn to show the linking order.		Click in the next text box that you want to link to. The in port will now show an arrow pointing into the box.

 

We hope you found this little Tutorial helpful! If you have any further questions please don't hesitate to get in touch with us.

What to do next ...

• Find out more about publishing your data with CatBase
• Get a free, fully functional Trial Version of CatBase
• Find out more about Publishing Style Sheets
• Order your copy of CatBase now!
• Ask us a question