Recently a partner approached us with an interesting request from a DocMaker customer. They had noticed that you can download InDesign documents as PDF files in DocMaker Studio and wondered if it would be possible to do something similar when ordering InDesign documents in AssetStudio. Ideally, the customer would also like to use different PDF export settings depending on the application (e.g. screen resolution vs. print resolution).

It turns out that it is quite easy to do this once you put all pieces of the puzzle together. It also turns out that this makes an excellent topic for a blog post, so here we go.

Defining PDF export presets

The first thing we need to do is decide which PDF export presets we want to make available for use on the server. You can always use the predefined presets but you can also define custom presets using Adobe InDesign:

When defining new presets, you can specify detailed options for compression, color conversion and much more. For instance, here we specify that the exported PDF should include color bars and bottom bleed.

All presets are stored in the common Adobe PDF Settings folder, so they can be used by both InDesign and InDesign Server if running on the same system. If you want to use your custom presets on a different server, you can copy them manually to the settings folder. On Windows Server 2008, the location of this folder is C:\Users\[User]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe PDF\Settings. You will need to restart InDesign Server before using the new presets.

Creating the custom order target action

To be able to export InDesign documents to PDF when ordering files in AssetStudio, we need to create a custom order target action. How to do this in general is explained in the ADAM Developer Guide. Here we will focus on how we can use the DocMaker API to accomplish our goal in a simple way.

DocMaker 3.0 includes an InDesignServerMediaEngine that communicates with InDesign Server through the DocMaker Queuing Service. This media engine supports several media actions that are used when indexing or downloading InDesign documents. Of course all of this fits right into the generic ADAM provider framework, so you are not limited to using it in a Web2Print context.

The media action needed for our purpose is the CreatePdfMediaAction. When running this action, you can specify the original InDesign document, the path for the exported PDF, and the name of the PDF export preset that should be used. The preset name can be made a property of our custom order target action. Full source code is included below, but the interesting part is how a MediaManager is used to run a CreatePdfMediaAction against an InDesignServerMediaEngine when executing the order:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21

protected override void OnExecute()
{
 string originalPath = Target.Path;
 string newFileName = Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(originalPath) + ".pdf";
 string newPath = Path.Combine(App.GetEmptyFolder(), newFileName);

 InDesignServerMediaEngine mediaEngine = new InDesignServerMediaEngine(App);

 CreatePdfMediaAction mediaAction = string.IsNullOrEmpty(PresetName) 
  ? new CreatePdfMediaAction(true, originalPath, newPath) 
  : new CreatePdfMediaAction(true, originalPath, newPath, PresetName);

 MediaManager mediaManager = new MediaManager(App);
 mediaManager.Run(new MediaEngine[] { mediaEngine }, new MediaAction[] { mediaAction });

 if (mediaAction.IsSuccess)
 {
  Target.Path = newPath;
  Target.OrderedName = newFileName;
 }
}

Putting it all together

The final step is to register our new class library either in the GAC or in the ADAM database (as explained in the ADAM Developer Guide). We also need to add our custom provider (consisting of an order target action and a web control) to the "Order target action providers" setting in ADAM:

1
2
3

<engines>
  <add name="ExportToPdfAction" type="ExportToPdfLibrary.ExportToPdfAction,ExportToPdfLibrary" webControl="ExportToPdfLibrary.PresetNameUI,ExportToPdfLibrary" />
</engines>

The result is that we no longer order the original InDesign file, but a PDF version instead. This is what the exported PDF file looks like, including the color bars and bottom bleed specified in our custom preset:

This is the behavior the customer was looking for, and thanks to the DocMaker API, it only took us a few lines of code to implement. Of course, for all of this to work, InDesign Server and the DocMaker Queuing Service need to be up and running.

As promised, the full source code is included for all of you to try out, but the usual warning applies that the code has been kept as simple as possible for illustrative purposes and that you should at least add more robust exception handling etc. before taking it into production.