Adobe Illustrator Variable Data

Zenify

I need a bit of help with Adobe Illustrator Variable Data. I am a beginner when it comes to Illustrator skills.

I print a lot off stuff using Mail Merge on Word and it works great. Every so often I need to do the same on Illustrator. It's a basic artboard with mostly words and a small graphic. One of the words is a name that needs to change. I could have up to 150 different names so 150 variations. I import all the variables so that's automatic and no issues there.

When it comes to printing the variables I have to do it one by one. I have created an action so that it automatically pops up the print box for each Variable but it still takes too much time. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I have created an action which automatically saves each one as a pdf and then I can combine all the pdfs into one and print all together but I'm thinking there has to be a better way?

I could be missing something very simple here because I am not that skilled at Illustrator, so all suggestions welcome.

Thanks in advance

Flinty997

You can script illustrator or PDFs with VBA. You could write a VBA macro in MS Word to do this. You would need some scripting/coding skills though.

It may also be possible to do this from the pdf using acrobat.

There seems to be bunch of third party add-ons that can do this to avoid scripting it yourself.

Be interesting to try it using VBA. PDFs seem to have replaced forms in world for this kinda stuff. But no one seems to know how to create or work with PDFs.