Database Publishing

What is “Database Publishing”?

With Database Publishing, you can automatically create simple (static) as well as highly complex (dynamic) designs based on a data source and a set of rules.

Automate any design

Database Publishing goes far beyond the fully automated creation of print-ready business stationery such as business cards or letterheads. With dynamic database publishing designs/templates, you can also automate entire catalogs, price lists, brochures, flyers, posters, packaging, financial reports, resumes, logos, or ads for print and social media channels.
On your desktop or on the web.

Automate any element

Create static or highly dynamic designs/templates with Database Publishing. Automate the use of Alias Pages and styles, and dynamically create graphics, text, pictures, tables, QR codes, barcodes, charts, graphs or Viva XML objects from any data source or script.

Work with any data source like CSV, SQLite, MySQL or databases with an ODBC interface (i.e “Microsoft Access”).
Work with any data encryption like Western-1252, Latin1, UTF8, Shift-JIS or the BIG5 format.
Use the interactive rule editor to create rules for objects, content, Alias Pages (Parent pages), styles and records.
Use PHP or JavaScript to filter, reconstruct, combine, format or dynamically apply style sheets to your content and use the built-in debugger to test your scripts.
Define page break rules for objects in dynamic forms and dynamically wrap objects around text.
Manage any static or dynamic text in fields or in external files and work with preformatted text formats like RTF, HTML or VivaXML.
Automatically balance multi-column text objects.
Apply any paragraph or character style to your text and create highly dynamic text objects or fit text into a static text object.
Use any styles, typographic options, languages and writing directions that are supported by VivaDesigner.
Automatically enlarge, shrink, fit, crop and align images according to rules or script events.
Find images in predefined search folders without knowing the image type and extension (e.g. “.pdf” or “.tiff”).
Create highly dynamic and nested tables with text, pictures, codes or charts. Dynamically merge or expand cells and rows. Define rules and styles for cells, rows, columns, and dividers.

Static and dynamic designs

To be honest, many programs can create static designs/templates with variables.
With Database Publishing, you can create not only static designs/templates, but also highly dynamic designs/templates where content and objects are automatically oriented to other content and objects.

A schematic example of a dynamic design/template with different sizes of microsites (we call them “forms”) from which a complete page is composed. Within the different sizes, the elements can adapt to each other. For example, images can adapt to the amount of text, the size of tables or other images (black text objects) or the texts can overlay the images (white transparent text objects). This technique goes far beyond the possibilities you know from layout programs like VivaDesigner or InDesign.

Create static designs/templates from VivaDesigner or InDesign in minutes

Create stunning, static database publishing designs/templates in a minute, directly from InDesign or VivaDesigner. No programming required. Simply create or open an existing document, replace text with variables, upload the document to the VIVA Database Publishing Server and specify the formula interface with simple parameters.

Step 1

Create or open a document in InDesign or directly in VivaDesigner.

Step 2

Simply replace the text with the name of a variable enclosed in curly brackets.

Step 3

Upload the document to the Database Publishing Server and enter your data.