PDF catalogues and exports that read from the same inventory

What "exports" actually means in a gallery context

A working gallery generates a small number of recurring documents: PDF catalogues for fairs and exhibitions, lender certificates for institutional loans, customs paperwork (commercial invoice, ATA Carnet packet) for international shipping, condition reports, sale invoices, and CSV exports for accountants and partner aggregators. Every one of these reads from the same canonical work record, or it should.

When they read from the same record, a dimension correction made once on the Inventory propagates to every regenerated document. When they do not, the gallery has six versions of the truth and the lender catches the disagreement.

The five documents every gallery generates often, and how to template them

Five documents make up about 90% of what a gallery exports. Templating them well saves hours per fair.

1. Fair / exhibition catalogue PDF. A 12-to-40-page PDF with hero image, work-by-work entries, full credit lines, dimensions in two units, and the gallery's contact block. Generated from the exhibition record; one click per regeneration.
2. Lender certificate / loan agreement. A signed-off PDF for institutional loans, with the work, lender, period, insurance value, and conditions. Generated from the loan record; the institution's name and credit line populate from the contact.
3. Customs commercial invoice + ATA Carnet packet. Required for international shipping (especially fair logistics). Dimensions, declared value, country of origin, and HS code per work, all generated from the inventory.
4. Condition report. Baseline and return reports as PDFs with photos, signed off by the registrar. Used by the insurer and the lender; matches the data already in the system.
5. CSV export for accountants or partners. A structured file with stable internal IDs, work attributes, sale data, and any custom fields the recipient requires. Stable IDs let the recipient round-trip changes back without breaking the join.

Where InDesign and Word + a folder of JPGs break

The classic gallery catalogue is built in InDesign by a designer who copies dimensions from the gallery's spreadsheet, drops in JPGs from a Dropbox folder, and exports a PDF. It looks beautiful and is wrong somewhere by the second revision: a dimension changed in the spreadsheet after the InDesign was started, the wrong JPG version is in Dropbox, the credit line was edited in Word and never made it back to InDesign.

The fix is not to fire the designer. It is to make the designer's starting point a structured export from the Inventory (CSV + named image folder) so the designer is composing layouts on top of correct data, not transcribing the data themselves. Better still: for routine exports (lender packets, customs paperwork), skip InDesign entirely and use a templated PDF generated from the system.

How Art.industries handles exports

PDF templates are built per gallery to match the brand: typography, colour, layout discipline, credit-line format. The data fills in. Templates exist for the common documents (exhibition catalogue, fair PDF, lender certificate, loan packet, condition report, customs commercial invoice) and can be customised for gallery-specific formats (e.g. a museum that requires a particular credit-line structure).

CSV exports support stable internal work IDs, so the partner aggregator that ingests the export can round-trip corrections back without breaking the join. Field selection is per export profile; an export to the customs broker contains a different column set from an export to the accountant, both saved as named profiles the gallery uses again next time.

For one-off PDFs (a custom press kit, a single-collector proposal), the private viewing room is often the right tool instead of a PDF, because the room updates when the inventory does. PDFs are the right tool when the recipient (lender, customs broker, accountant) needs an immutable artefact for their files.

Watermarking, consignor permissions, and what not to leak

Some works can be freely shared in PDFs (gallery-owned primary work the gallery is publishing publicly). Some cannot (consignor-restricted works, estate-managed works, secondary-market works under NDA). The export system enforces this: works flagged as consignor-restricted require an explicit permission grant before the PDF generator includes them.

Watermarking is per-document, not per-system. The lender certificate does not need a watermark; the secondary-market proposal sent to a single advisor probably does. The default per work or per consignment sets the policy; the user can override per export with a logged reason.

Versioning: which PDF did the lender actually receive?

A common dispute is "the dimensions on your PDF disagree with the wall label". Resolving it requires knowing exactly which version of the PDF the recipient has. Art.industries records every PDF generation as a dated event on the work or the exhibition, with the user who generated it, the recipient (when sent through the system), and a regenerable copy.

When the lender complains six months later, the gallery can pull up the exact PDF the lender received, compare it to the current state, and have a real conversation about what changed and why. No more "I think we sent the right one".

Aggregators, third-party sites, and structured feeds

Galleries often submit work to third-party aggregators (Artsy, Artnet, fair organiser portals). Each aggregator has its own field requirements; pasting the gallery's catalogue into each one by hand is the most boring job in the gallery and the most prone to mistakes.

Art.industries supports structured CSV and JSON feeds for these submissions, with per-aggregator field maps and image-size profiles. The submission becomes "select the works, choose the feed profile, send" rather than "open the aggregator portal and retype". Updates to the works in the inventory regenerate the feed; the aggregator stays in sync without the gallery noticing.