Creating a Design-Led Catalogue with CatBase
Many catalogues, directories, etc. are formatted in a standardised way - in other words, the information for all items in the publication is presented in much the same way. for example, for each product there's the product name, followed by the picture, followed by the description, followed by the pricing etc. And CatBase is perfect for this kind of publication; you simply publish the data from CatBase, import it into your page layout template, and most of the job is done.
But sometimes you need a more design-led approach: you need to organise the layout of each product's information according to the type of information, the size of the picture, or the other items on the page. In that case you can take a slightly different approach with CatBase. Take a look at this movie, which demonstrates how it works:
Use Adobe InDesign or QarkXPress
This approach works with both Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress. You'll also need to have a plugin called Xtags for either Quark or InDesign, as both of those page layout applications can't automatically create text or picture boxes from an imported file.