Multi Page InDesign previews in Adobe Experience Manager DAM (CQ5)

Adobe Experience Manager DAM (CQ5) has had the ability to generate thumbnail previews of InDesign documents since CQ5.5. It creates thumbnails by communicating with Adobe InDesign Server. Unfortunately the out of the box setup only produces a thumbnail of the first page, however this is easily tweaked to created previews of every page in the InDesign file.

You’ll need to either grab the jsx file from GitHub and place it at /etc/dam/indesign/scripts, or if feeling lazy I’ve created a tiny package for you to install here: MultipageThumbnails-1.0.zip

All that is left to do now is add your new script to your DAM-Update-Asset workflow. Double click on the Media Extraction workflow step, switch to the arguments tab, then add a new entry pointing to the MultipagePreview.jsx file you imported. (see the screenshot of how your dialogue should look)

Don’t forget to hit save, close the workflow and try importing a new InDesign Document to DAM. Assuming InDesign Server is set up correctly, you should now see additional page previews!

I’ve tested this out on CQ5.5, CQ5.6 and 5.6.1. If you get stuck, check out the video to see what you might have missed.

InDesign JSX on Github – MultipagePreview.jsx
AEM/CQ Package (including the JSX) MultipageThumbnails-1.0.zip

Big thanks to Sameer Charles for his work on this.