Meadows Publishing Solutions (MPS) today announced the release their AutoPrice™ plug-in module for Adobe InDesign CS3. AutoPrice is a powerful yet easy to use tool for linking text and graphics in any type of database to Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress documents, vastly streamlining production. Proven over 12 years by many of the largest catalog and financial publishers throughout the world, AutoPrice has set the standard for plug-in based data connectivity software.

As the name implies, AutoPrice is engineered to automate the process of inserting, updating and versioning prices for catalogs, retail flyers and similar publications. It is also ideal for updating timetables, phone lists or any other type of information that can be referenced from a database or spreadsheet file.

“After adding the AutoPrice plug-in to our InDesign CS3 workflow, our catalog production time fell considerably,” notes Joseph Allen, Senior Graphic Designer, American 3B Scientific. “Using AutoPrice, we can now customize our product item numbers, and update all prices with the click of a mouse. It has been very helpful!”

Jodi Phillips, Creative Supervisor at Swanson Health Products adds, “Our company has been using AutoPrice for nearly 6 years now, utilizing both the QuarkXPress and InDesign versions of the product. It is a critical part of our everyday production, enabling us to produce and update multiple mail-order catalogs each month. We rely upon AutoPrice to update important information such as pill counts, sizes, as well as retail and sales prices. Not only does this save us hours of production time and data entry, but it has substantially increased our efficiency levels and lowered our error rates!”

How It Works

AutoPrice extracts and updates prices (or other data) via “placeholders” within InDesign (or QuarkXPress) documents that are linked to records in any type of database or spreadsheet. Placeholders can be positioned anywhere on the page, even within running text, and can be styled without restriction for maximum design possibilities. Raw database prices can also be styled in virtually any fashion as they are extracted.