EasyCatalog 2026 Release Notes

Bug Fixes

The following bugs have been fixed in this release of EasyCatalog. For clarity, the bug reports listed below show the original problem as reported. It is often not possible to detail the fix for each issue as they involve internal changes to EasyCatalog. Note that some bugs listed here refer to issues that were encountered with new features in the beta version by our beta testers and are included here for completeness.

EasyCatalog 21.0.0

Enhancements

The following enhancements have been made to EasyCatalog and are available in the latest release on our website. Maintenance customers can receive a version of EasyCatalog containing these modifications for an earlier version of InDesign by contacting us via the website. Please be aware, though, that it’s not always possible to include all new features in previous versions.

EasyCatalog

• Added a new menu “Replace Record”

  This replaces the links belonging to one record with another and updates them.

• Generating Document, Panel and Data Source reports should now be quicker

  Generating Document, Panel and Data Source reports should now be quicker especially when generating large reports. In previous versions, the XML > HTML transformation via XSLT was slow.

• Added Copy & Paste Field Options to the right click ‘Edit’ menu in the data panel

  Field options can be copied to the clipboard and pasted onto other fields. You can also externally edit the field options in a text editor and then paste them back in.

• Added Export and Import Field Options onto the Record Viewer Panel
• Added keyboard modifier when double clicking on a field in the Record Viewer panel to insert a Field Specifier

  On Mac, Command+Double Click on a field to insert a Field Specifier; on Windows Ctrl+Double Click.

• Improvements to Advanced Preferences dialog

  – Tick/Cross Icons to represent boolean preferences rather than ‘true’ and ‘false’
  – Right-aligned labels; centred category headers
  – Modified some of the preference names to be more meaningful
  – Hid preferences that are no longer used
  – Preview of colour for preferences that specify a colour in the format #RRGGBB

• Added ability to specify defaults for some of the tickable menu options

  In the Advanced Preferences dialog the user can now specify defaults for:
  – Update Formatting Rules
  – Always download latest images
  – Deleted unused images on Synchronize
  – Prevent Images being downloaded
  – Update Containers

• Added the Cell Finder keyboard shortcut to EasyCatalog Lite
• Added ‘Convert to Field Specifiers’ to keyboard shortcut editor
• Double clicking an Enhanced tabular field in the data panel header now resizes it to the minimum
• Modifications to include additional data in the manifest.xml package file

  Manifest file now includes additional data, such as

  – Details of other data sources that are also open, including the number of panels open for them
  – Approximate memory usage for the data source being packaged and any other data sources
  – Total physical memory available on the machine
  – Used physical memory

• Added confirmation message that is displayed when the data source package has been exported
• Performance improvement when finding field definitions

  This is an internal change that should yield some performance improvements.

• The enhanced HTML parser now supports basic CSS style text formatting style properties  Learn More

  For example:

  <span style="font-family: Minion Pro; font-variant: Bold;">This is Minion Pro Bold,</span><br><span style="font-family: Minion Pro; font-variant: Italic;"> this is Minion Pro Italic,</span><br><span style="font-family: Minion Pro; font-variant: Bold Italic;"> and this is Minion Pro Bold Italic.</span>

  1

  <span style="font-family: Minion Pro; font-variant: Bold;">This is Minion Pro Bold,</span><br><span style="font-family: Minion Pro; font-variant: Italic;"> this is Minion Pro Italic,</span><br><span style="font-family: Minion Pro; font-variant: Bold Italic;"> and this is Minion Pro Bold Italic.</span>

  Also supported are:
  “font-family”
  “font-variant”
  “font-size”
  “font-style” – A character stylesheet name
  “color” – Color name, CMYK or RGB value

  The ‘style’ attribute now applies a paragraph style to the entire range of the tag

• Improved performance of Edge Relationship internal storage and usage
• Barcodes can now have a specific swatch applied, or a swatch specified by the contents of a field
• JSON Enhanced table fields now automatically case for a table of tables with the same number of elements

  This is treated as the tabular field content.

• The Advanced Preferences search text field now only searches the options themselves, not the headings

  Typing ‘log’ previously would return all options for “EasyCatalog”, which isn’t useful behaviour.

• Applying an XSLT stylesheet now logs errors to “Easycatalog Log.txt” if logging is enabled
• URL(Live) is now only available via an Advanced Preference

  We are removing support for URL(Live), since it relied on InDesign’s URL import mechanism which could be unreliable when connecting to some servers. Existing data sources that use URL(Live) fields will continue to work, but the option will be unavailable for new data sources or fields that are not currently configured to use URL(Live).

  Users should now investigate using ImageLink via the URL(ImageLink) option as it offer much more robust linking and status updating.

• Added additional field option: ‘Frame Options’  Learn More

  These allow specification of an object export value and a script that is run on frames tagged with the field.

• Added icon that will show when an image preview is not available

  If an image fails to download, or a preview is not available for the image, a ‘broken link’ icon will be displayed as the image preview in the panel.

• Now allows a field set to Location “URL” to show a preview even if the path to content is empty
• Added ‘Alpha Channel’ as a new Clipping Path Option for images, which applies the default Alpha Channel if available
• Added support for ‘class’ attribute for HTML tables

  EasyCatalog will apply a table style named in the “class” attribute on the table node.

• PostImageImport now passes the number of alphaChannels on the image imported or zero

  The PostImageImport.jsx can now access a new scriptArgs property – “alphaChannels” that contains the number of alpha channels available in the image that was imported – e.g.

  var alphaChannels = Number(app.scriptArgs.getValue("alphaChannels"));<br>if (alphaChannels > 0) { myImage.clippingPath.clippingType = ClippingPathType.ALPHA_CHANNEL; }

  1 2 3

  var alphaChannels = Number(app.scriptArgs.getValue("alphaChannels"));<br>if (alphaChannels > 0) {    myImage.clippingPath.clippingType = ClippingPathType.ALPHA_CHANNEL; }

• Packages will now export the contents of the Snippet folder (if used for pagination)
• EasyCatalog Lite keyboard shortcuts for ‘Update Document’ and ‘Update Selection’

  Added support for ‘Update Document’ and ‘Update Selection’ keyboard shortcuts in EasyCatalog Lite.

• [Windows] Add support for using environment variables in paths

  For example, in the Picture Location field you can now use:

  %USERPROFILE%/EasyCatalog/Images

  1	%USERPROFILE%/EasyCatalog/Images

• Saved Configurations can now be colour coded
• Edge Relationship Hit Testing has been improved
• Added information to “Export Configuration” dialog box to explain why the field options is disabled
• Generates an error if the table population settings used are invalid for an Enhanced Tabular field
• New Advanced Preference to re-enabled exporting Field Options as part of configuration

  Added new advanced option preference ‘Enable Configuration Field Options’ to enable the ‘Field Options’ check box on export Configuration.

EasyCatalog – Pagination Module > Guide-based

• Added ability to start pagination from top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right

  The Direction pop-up now shows clearer pagination directions (for example, Right, Down or Left, Up). The old Across, Down (Aligned) option has been replaced with a simpler Aligned checkbox, found in the Collision Detection section. This checkbox is only available when Collision Detection is turned on and the pagination direction goes sideways first.

EasyCatalog – Pagination Module

• Added a new Position Index ‘First Record’ that targets the first record in a nested group hierarchy
• Refactoring of Pagination Rule Display

  Legacy Pagination Rules removed by default.
  Added a new Advanced preference to show them ‘Show Legacy Pagination Rules’
  Re-ordered Pagination to have a more logical grouping

• Added a new Pagination Option  Learn More

  A new Pagination Option “Paginate When Anchored” will Duplicate and populate a item based on its Pagination Rule settings, similar to other forms of pagination.

• New Pagination Option Added

  Added a new pagination option – Text Separator.
  When an inline frame is paginated, this will be used to separate each item. It can be any text and can include meta character sequences.

• Added a new “Fill Method:” option for Data Threaded Containers

  When set to ‘incremental’, data will be added to the container until it goes overset; when set to ‘decremental’ all data will be added to the container and removed until it is no longer overset. Depending on how the container is configured, this may lead to performance improvements.

• Enhancements to Enhanced tabular field usage  Learn More

  When a Pagination Rule “Once Per..” is set and the Group Name is the name of a tabular field, anchored items are repeated once for all records in the tabular field or once per record in the tabular field.

• Optimised pagination, added a new advanced preference to lower the level of Composition during pagination.

EasyCatalog – Lua Commands

• Added a new optional parameter to the lua TABLE sortrows function to specify ascending or descending sort
• The lua command removeemptycols now takes an optional parameter to exlude the top ‘n’ number of rows
• duplicaterecord in the RECORDSET object now takes either a record index or a RECORD object
• choosefolder now takes an optional default second parameter for the default path location

EasyCatalog – Scripting Module

• Added a new ‘getPaginationOption’ on the EasyCatalog object to get a named Pagination Rule
• Added a new optional parameter to groupDataView and subgroupDataView which is the field to display instead of the group field content.

  e.g.

  myDV.subgroupDataView("Sub Section", true, "Sub Section Order","Sub Section Title");

  1	myDV.subgroupDataView("Sub Section", true, "Sub Section Order","Sub Section Title");

• Template Document pagination will now obey the “Update Furniture After Pagination” option if it is disabled by a script
• documentReport on the DSO object now take an optional ‘open’ parameter to open in the default viewer

  e.g.

  myDS.documentReport(myDoc, "Macintosh HD:report.xml", true);

  1	myDS.documentReport(myDoc,  "Macintosh HD:report.xml", true);

EasyCatalog – Enterprise

• Modification to Enterprise Data Providers so that ‘config’ is now a global

  Modification to Enterprise Data Providers so that ‘config’ is now a global – its properties can now be set/get from any callback function in the lua code

• LUA-based Enterprise Data Providers can override the built-in Enterprise Providers

  If a LUA-based Enterprise Data Provider reports the same name as a built-in Enterprise Data Provider, the LUA provider will be given precedence on the menu and the built-in provider will be hidden.

• The GetAsset Enterprise data provider call can now modify the options table by returning it

EasyCatalog – XML Module

• Increased label width in ‘Field Configuration’ to support multilingual text.
• Removed dependancy on the XML data provider in the Lua XML class

EasyCatalog > Custom Field Commands

• New Command Parser for Improved Performance

  Currently, the default Custom Field parser is the version from previous versions of EasyCatalog. To enable the newer parser, go to Preferences > EasyCatalog > Advanced… and change the “Custom Field Parser” version to be “v2”.

• Modification to XREFFIELD to improve performance when referencing external data sources
• Modifications to DeepL translation to accommodate changes to the API
• Language translations are now cached
• Added “GROUPMODALVALUE” to find the value that appears in a given field the most number of times

  Added “GROUPMODALVALUE” to find the value that appears in a given field the most number of times

  GROUPMODALVALUE('group1:group2','mySortField','my field')

  1	GROUPMODALVALUE('group1:group2','mySortField','my field')

  The parameters are:
  1. The group path
  2. Field(s) to sort the records in the group by
  3. The field to return the modal value from

  The sort field is used in the event of multiple values appearing the same number of times (the first value encountered will be used).

EasyCatalog – Pagination Module > Flow-based

• Improvements to flow based pagination

  When undo support is turned off, pagination performance improves by breaking the process into small, time-based segments. An advanced field option, **Flow Pagination Commit Period**, lets you control the duration of these segments. The default is 15 seconds

EasyCatalog – Pagination Module > Formatting Rules

• Added a “Search and Replace Formatting Rules” menu to the Formatting Rule Panel.

EasyCatalog > Combined Data Sources

• Columns appearing and disappearing when viewing a Combined Data Source

  When viewing a combined data source, the number of columns shown in the panel can sometimes change if the panel is grouped and different groups are opened and closed.

EasyCatalog

• Improved parsing of delimited tabluar field

  In edge cases, empty rows would not be recognised.

• Packages created from Combined Data Sources do not always import correctly

  Packages produced from a Combined Data Source that uses linked data sources stored in a sub-folder of the workspace folder will not import via File > New > EasyCatalog Panel > Import Data Source..

• Crash when using “Options…” button when creating a new data source

  If the user attempts to change field options using the “Options” button on the Data Source Configuration dialog, InDesign will crash.

• Delay showing right-click menu when right clicking on a field that contains a significant amount of URL-based images
• Fixed issue with Mustache JSON parsing

  Instead of a string value from the JSON, ‘true’ or ‘false’ would sometimes be output.

• Applying a configuration with field options does not import tabular fields
• Commands in the “Location” field are not evaluated when the field contains a full path to the image
• “Download Selected” on the Images menu is not always enabled when selecting a group
• Edge Relationships are drawn on when the layer is invisible
• Record Viewer not updating based on the selection of a newly created data source
• EAN14 barcodes not being output
• Incorrect clipping path being applied when using “Photoshop” clipping path

  If an image contains multiple paths, the first path will be used as the clipping path even though it may not be clipping path. This resulted in the first path being applied as the clipping path to the image, but the clipping path name being shown in the Object > Clipping Path > Options dialog.

• Small memory leak in the Lua XML parser
• Potential hang when using Key Finder keyboard shortcut
• tags such as <oll> or <ul> with a ‘style’ attribute not applied for the entire range of the tag
• Populate tables with Enhanced tabular fields now looks up the record hierarchy to find the field
• Removed “Output Barcodes As EPS” advanced preference

  This was a legacy option that has now been superseded by the new barcode code.

• Cells not being merged when they contain ‘deleted’ text (e.g. an InCopy tracked change)
• Configuration dialog is not resizing when “Name” and “Colour” pop-ups are hidden
• Barcodes are not inserted when picture options are set to “Insert As Inline”
• “Allow Empty Key Fields” not working when multiple fields are selected as the key fields
• Right click menu sometimes appears as “Update All ^1 Fields In The Document”

  This will occur when the user right-clicks in an area of the panel that contains no records.

• Importing a data source package where the data source name contains unicode characters can sometimes cause it to load incorrectly on Mac
• ‘Edit Field Content’ Keyboard Shortcut not working
• Cell merging does not merge cells that contain anchored group boxes

  EasyCatalog should compare the contents of the groups to ensure they match when determining whether to merge the cells

• Exception reported with Inserting a Formatting Rule for a tabular field row when no Pagination module is installed
• Intermittent crash when dragging an image preview from the panel to the document
• Fixes for ImageLink image import

  – Previews for ImageLink-type images not shown in the Record Viewer Panel
  – Images previews are sometimes updated with the preview for a different image

• [Windows] Some fields will appear empty when using date formats that output localised month names

  This will affect months that contain accented characters.

• Rotation specified by XMP metadata not being obeyed when importing from URL(Live) or ImageLink
• Incorrect results shown in panel when using the quick search text box in conjunction with a Subset that has the “Show Entire Group” option set
• Fixed instances where field names were not using consistent comparison logic
• Remove blank lines for empty fields not being obeyed on InDesign Server
• Inserting an enhanced tabular field into could case the field name on the tab to be the parent field name, leading to broken links
• Image previews not being shown when field type is set to “ImageLink” and there is nothing in the location field
• Added support for pre-caching images where the field type is set to “ImageLink”.

  This requires build 31356 of ImageLink

• Crash when applying some field options to multiple fields
• Formatting Rule Post Processing in Extendscript can now be used without the scripting module.

  Only one parameter is passed to the script in this case, which is the formatting rule frame.

• Images imported via the “ImageLink” location option are not updated via Update Document
• Images imported via the “ImageLink” location option do not show the correct green/red error state in the panel
• “Unhandled exception in EVerticalTableMerge.cpp at line 177” when using graphic cells in a table
• Smart Synchronize does not correctly synchronize the data source when the order of the fields changes
• Enhanced tabular search and replace is case sensitive, so fields are not always found if the case has changed
• “Allow Empty Key Fields” should be ignored in EasyCatalog Lite

  Advanced preferences are not available in EasyCatalog Lite, so “Allow Empty Key Fields” should default to ‘true’ to enable users who are using an empty key field to load their data.

• Selected configuration not being shown when the configuration has a ‘hide empty columns’ column filter applied
• The content of tabular fields created using createcontent.lua are not always inserted into the document

EasyCatalog > Custom Field Commands

• Some commands are not specifying their dependencies

  Some commands, such as XREFFIELD and XREFFIELDLIST are not specifying the fields they’re dependent on. This can cause their values to not be recalculated when their dependent fields are changed. This will affect commands that reference specific cells within a tabular field, rather than the tabular field itself.

EasyCatalog – Scripting Module

• exchangeKeys method is relinking fields from other data sources

  The exchangeKeys method is on the datasource object, but is affecting fields in the document from other data sources.

• Calling ‘setOption’ to set a data source parameter on a LUA-based provider doesn’t work

  The setOption method can be used to set user data source parameters, but this is not functioning when using a LUA-based data provider.

• Errors are not being reported from the ‘packageToFolder’ method
• dv.selectedRecords can sometimes produce a panel with too many records

  This will occur when the panel/DSV is grouped and subgrouped, and a parent and child group are selected.

• paginateUsingDefaults is checking whether pagination library exists when using a ‘Container’ pagination

  This pagination type does not use libraries, so should not check that the specified library exists.

• Fixes an issue with myDS.updateDocumentField() that would update anchored formatting rules
• EasyCatalogObject updateTags wasn’t properly handing optional parameters
• ‘placeFormattingRule’ method is not downloading URL based images before placement

EasyCatalog – XML Module

• Scroll bar position is not reset when opening configuration dialog
• The XML data provider allows fields to be added that differed in case only

  Fields names are not case sensitive.

• “Import” button not highlighted unless there are fields already configured
• User is warned about changing key fields when importing a field configuration file on the data source configuration dialog when creating a new data source

  This results in the OK button being permanently disabled. The warning about changing key fields should only appear when editing an existing data source, not creating a new one.

EasyCatalog – Pagination Module

• Action conditions could contain line endings, which should not be allowed

  These are invisible to the user and should not be allowed

• Pagination dialog not displaying saved values for export to pdf and image
• When an anchored image is set to paginate once per record, it will be repeated for each image in the field, rather than just for the first
• Tabular fields not being updated in furniture
• Positional Pagination attributes missing from sample script copied to the clipboard
• “Update Furniture” sometimes deletes furniture boxes when very long fields — i.e. that span multiple pages — are placed

  This error occurs when a field is so big that it spans multiple pages and there are no field markers at all on the page

EasyCatalog – Pagination Module > Master

• Rule Sets are not being populated when overridden from Master Page
• “Unable to Paginate onto a Master Page” error is displayed for Master Pages pagination when a Page # field has been specified

  The error is bogus, as pagination will not be paginating onto a master page due to the Page # field being specified.

• “Unable to convert page number field to a number” error is being displayed when a named page cannot be found

  If the user has specified as page number field that contains the name of a page to paginate onto, they will receive a ‘can’t convert to number’ error instead of a ‘page cannot be found’ error.

• Crash in master page pagination when a page number field is used and the field is empty
• Page items are being overridden in the wrong order when using a hierarchy of master pages, resulting in boxes being shown in the wrong z-order
• Overriding furniture boxes incorrectly during Parent Pages pagination

EasyCatalog – Enterprise

• Crash when returning wrong values from Synchronize in custom data provider

EasyCatalog – Pagination Module > Formatting Rules

• Force Break > Paragraph is unnecessarily inserting a new paragraph when inserting into a Rule Set
• Fixed issue with Formatting Rule post population scripts
• Grouped Formatting Rules that are anchored in a text box are not being updated via the Update Document menu option