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We are currently looking for a way to automate part of our design/development process. Our product is an asp.net mvc multi-tenant website and we have a need to create marketing materials (such as banners and leaflets) and letters for each of our clients, dynamically replacing content like client names, urls, logos, etc. where necessary.

We have a third party designer working in illustrator, and then porting the designs over to a work document. This is so we can do our content replacement using word automation from our Windows service. We then export these files to PDF, PNG or JPEG and allow users to download them.

As we are growing, we've realised that it's no longer viable to using the word automation on the server to produce these documents and we are looking for alternatives.

I've currently investigated a few different avenues, such as replacing the need for word with just using illustrator on the server and making our content replacements there but this appears to have the same issue, as well as not running headless. Another route that we've considered is looking at indesign server, however I think this is overly complicated for our scenario and definitely over priced.

A lot of places seem to suggest doing ai files to html and then performing our content replacement there. However, one of our needs is the ability to be "print ready" from these PDFs, so I'm not sure if that's possible.

I think I might have reached the end of my research path, so I'm looking to see if anyone else has created a similar system for custom content replacement?

James Waudby
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  • Why is your current implementation not viable? – mxmissile Oct 11 '18 at 14:38
  • @mxmissile there are long build times on these due to having to open word documents and save these each time (effectively opening a word process for up to 3000 clients). We would also like to remove the need to install windows on our servers. I believe Microsoft does not actively support word automation on a server either. – James Waudby Oct 11 '18 at 14:40
  • If you have the files in the `docx` format, why not use one of the `docx` libraries to open the document and modify it (like [DocX](https://github.com/xceedsoftware/DocX). These do not require Word automation. I cannot speak for the speed of them, but it seems like you might be able to use a toolkit like that to basically preserve your current workflow and just replace the Word automation part. – pstrjds Oct 11 '18 at 18:48
  • @pstrjds so we're using the OpenXML power tools for all of our content replacement needs. However as we require the files to be exported out to PDF that's where the need for Word on the server comes from (and the use of interop etc.). Ideally I was looking for a free toolkit to do use but it's looking less likely, maybe the paid version of DocX would suffice. – James Waudby Oct 12 '18 at 07:54
  • Indesign Server is probably the best solution, but you can look at JasperReports, although this requires Java, not C# – Nicolai Kant Oct 12 '18 at 09:59
  • Built a couple very powerful artwork automation engines ([example](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-X4kVdvXtR7ydKHnRg8m8Q)). The first was a master-slave system that ran AI on Xserve VMs, but the current one runs directly on the artworker's desktop. 100% automation is often not cost-effective for complex/variable artworks, and desktop-based is better for autonomation. Plus AI's a huge pain for headless use: aside from being a GUI app, which requires a bunch of extra work to cope with unexpected dialogs, crashes, etc, the standard EULA doesn't permit it to be run as a customer-facing service. – foo Oct 24 '18 at 09:26
  • If your needs are straightforward (and letterheads, leaflets, etc. shouldn't be rocket science/packaging) you might look into Chili Publish. It's a hosted service that runs IDS on the backend and supports a variety of inputs. As far as building your own, that is a rabbit hole and will cost. IDS will really cost. Templating HTML and rendering to PDF would be simplest—you'll have to speak to printers to ensure your PDFs meet their requirements, but at least you should only need to target Digital printing. – foo Oct 24 '18 at 09:47

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