InDesign UXP panel
A native panel inside InDesign (Pro & Scale). Pick a template, point at the sheet, hit run — and the document builds in front of you, ready to tweak. Built on Adobe's UXP plug-in system, so there's nothing fragile bolted on.
How it works
One spreadsheet. One template. A whole catalog, on demand.
Spec Forge is a layout engine, not a merge hack. You wire your spreadsheet to a branded template once, and from then on the engine builds the entire catalog — validated, paginated and print-ready — every time you run it.
The pipeline
Five stages from cells to print.
Stage01
Map the sheet to a template
We connect your spreadsheet (Excel, Google Sheets or a PIM export) to a Spec Forge template — title, SKU, price, spec fields and image references. Columns are matched by meaning, so the mapping survives a renamed or reordered field. This happens once, during the build.
Stage02
Validate every record
Before a single page is laid out, the engine checks all rows: missing prices, broken image links, empty required fields, malformed units. You get a clear list of exactly which rows need attention — instead of Data Merge silently dropping products and shipping a catalog with holes.
Stage03
Run the layout engine
The engine paginates the whole catalog from the validated data — product cards or table rows, section dividers, running headers, automatic page numbers and a back-of-book index. Run it from the InDesign UXP panel for in-app control, or from the web engine for a hands-off batch.
Stage04
Ship print-ready output
Out comes a print-ready PDF (with bleed and crop marks where you need them) plus an editable InDesign file, so a designer can fine-tune a hero spread without touching the other 380 pages. Send the PDF straight to the printer.
Stage↻
Re-run whenever data changes
A price moves, a line is discontinued, a new season lands — update the spreadsheet and run again. The catalog rebuilds in one pass. No agency re-script, no week of hand-fixing, no waiting on the one person who knew the old process.
Two ways to run
The UXP panel for designers. The web engine for everyone else.
Web engine
No InDesign on the marketer's machine? Upload the sheet to the web engine and get the print-ready PDF back. Same template, same validation, same output — without anyone learning a design tool.
What you can build
Three document types, one spreadsheet source.
Product catalogs
Full catalogs with imagery, sections, running heads and an index — from 80 SKUs to 50,000. The flagship use case.
Price lists
Dense, table-driven price lists that stay readable across hundreds of rows — re-run the moment pricing changes, per region if needed.
Spec sheets
One-page-per-product spec sheets with a consistent layout — perfect for sales decks, RFPs and distributor packs, generated in bulk.