Creating InDesign Templates

Prerequisites

• Any site-specific fonts should be sent to the Naviga Ad hosting team, so the fonts are loaded on the InDesign Server.

• Your site must be configured to use the InDesign Server for your region. Contact support or your implementation specialist to set that up for you

Metadata Setup

The InDesign templates are built with the Metadata set up in Naviga Ad so it is important that this is setup prior to building the template so the designer knows what tags to use.

Advertising Module -> Setup -> Classified Order Setup -> Classified Category Tree Setup

Merge Tags should follow these rules:

• All Caps

• Use an underscore for a space in the name. Ex: Contact Name could be CONTACT_NAME

Building a Template

• Launch InDesign – must be created on InDesign 2020 or EARLIER. Our InDesign Server is 2020, so newer will not work.

• Create a new document

• Create Text boxes as needed for each desired text area.

• Create Image boxes for any photos.

• Merge tags should be entered as hashtag with caps, Ex: #HEADLINE#

• Any forced text can be entered, Ex: Salary:

NOTE: The width that you set in the document itself isn’t super important, since Naviga Ad is going to pass the width parameters into the InDesign server based on the width of the column for the product that you are booking into. It is certainly helpful when creating it to have the width somewhat accurate so that you can see how it is going to come out, but it's not something that has to be 100% accurate.

Important Points

Things to notice starting from the top of the image above

• The Box with the #HEADLINE# tag is a regular text box. This means it will grow based on how much text is in the ad. It is styled according to the background, alignment, font size and font that is set up on this template (standard InDesign rules)

• The next box down will NOT grow because the edge of it is outside the margins.

By putting the edge outside the margin, it has created a blank space to prevent the text or whatever is next from being squished up against the item above it. It doesn’t matter if it is the left margin, right, or both…it just has to be outside at least one margin.

• The next box down is an image box. (See the “X” in the box.) User still needs to assign the merge tag (example #LOGO# or #IMAGE#) that was assigned in the Category Metadata so the image(s) get assigned to the correct box. Use script label field from Window -> Utilities.

• Next box down is another space box (the right edge is over the margin here.)

• And then the next two boxes (separated again by a spacer) are the main text of the ad. In this case I have “Salary: $” hard coded as regular text followed by the salary and salary type tags.

Linking the InDesign Template to Naviga Ad

Advertising Module -> Setup -> Classified Order Setup -> Classified Category Template Setup

Important parts to note below are the Template Type is "Indesign" and the file that you just created in InDesign needs to be uploaded using the select below. Once added the InDesign File Name will be displayed in the gray box.

Fill in sample metadata as above and then click onto the Sample Image tab to generate a sample image

Tag Names and Sample File

On the Naviga Ad template setup and look at your sample image tab, there is a very handy button here…Download sample data. This will give you a .json file that looks like this:

Text Description automatically generated

The tags in here are the tags that are set up for this category. This is helpful when you are creating the template to know which tags are part of that category.