29 Jul
Daiteo is now a partner of EasyCatalog, the catalogue automation module for Adobe InDesign published by 65bit Software. In practice, your design teams and your agencies can now work straight from the data held in your product repository, with no intermediate export in between.
Where the chain usually breaks
Most of our clients have done the groundwork: normalised attributes, images in order, documentation current, translations under control. The repository is clean.
Then comes the main catalogue, and the chain breaks. Someone exports a spreadsheet, the studio reworks it, the layout is built from that file, and from that point on the catalogue lives a life of its own. Six weeks later, when a price moves or a reference is corrected, you have to find the page, fix it by hand, and hope nobody forgot the German edition. Updating becomes expensive enough that you end up waiting for next year’s edition instead.
It is this link between the repository and the page layout that the partnership addresses.
What Daiteo already covered: the PDF module
What the EasyCatalog connector adds
A main catalogue, a range catalogue or a full price list follow a different logic. Across several hundred pages, layout is genuine design work: visual hierarchy, brand consistency, overset handling, coherence from one spread to the next. That is InDesign territory, and industrialising it is exactly what EasyCatalog does.
With the connector, EasyCatalog queries your Daiteo repository directly. The designer picks a scope: a range, a classification, a channel, a language, pulls the data into InDesign, builds the layout, then resynchronises whenever the repository changes. The intermediate file disappears from the equation.
What it changes day to day
The printed catalogue, the website, the distributor feeds and the datasheets all read the same data, so they all say the same thing. When an attribute is corrected in Daiteo, the correction flows through to the layout rather than being reapplied page by page.
Multilingual work follows the same logic: one layout, several language versions fed from the repository, without duplicating the design effort.
Working with agencies becomes simpler too. You open a defined scope of data to your provider, without emailing files back and forth or handing over access to the whole repository.
The net effect is that studio time goes into design rather than into checking data.
Who it is for
This partnership will be of most interest to manufacturers and distributors who publish high-volume catalogues and whose design teams, in-house or external, already work in InDesign. If gathering and checking data takes up a significant share of your catalogue project each year, there is ground to gain.
Going further
The EasyCatalog connector complements the distribution capabilities Daiteo already covers: distributor feeds, industry standard formats, web exports and PDF generation.
If you would like to assess it on your next catalogue, get in touch and we will run a demonstration using your own data.
