How To Work On Publications As A Team Using InDesign’s Book Command
Whenever you choose File - New in InDesign CS4 by Adobe, you may have noticed the option to create a new book without ever knowing exactly what a book is. Well, in fact, books are a fairly nifty feature: they allow you to take a series of related Adobe InDesign CS4 document and treat them as a single entity; a book. All documents in the book can then share resources such as paragraph and character styles, colour swatches, master pages, sections and page numbering.
Once you have created a book, by choosing File-New-Book, the Book panel is displayed. It features a panel menu with all the necessary Book options. Your first task is to add documents to the book: from the Book panel menu, choose “Add Document” and select the documents you want to be treated as part of the book.
The Book panel offers useful feedback about the status of each chapter in the book by displaying an icon next to the name of each chapter. The “Available” icon indicates that the book may be opened by one member of the team of people using the book. The “Open” icon indicates that you have the book open and that no one will be able to use it until they have finished with it. The “In Use” icon will appear when someone else has that chapter open; this means that you have to wait until they have finished with it before you can use it. The “Modified” icon shows that changes have been made to the book since last time you opened it. And, finally, the dreaded “Missing” icon indicates that the InDesign document associated with that chapter has been moved from its original location.
Once the book file is saved, the book becomes a separate entity to the documents it contains and the documents in a book do not have to reside in the same location as the book or as each other. To save a book, choose Save Book in the Book panel menu.
It is possible to replace an existing chapter of a book with another InDesign document by simply selecting an existing book chapte and choosing Replace Document from the panel menu. Next, navigate to the replacement document and double-click to select it. InDesign will then replace the selected chapter with the new document. Deleting chapters from a book is equally straightforward. Just highlight the chapter(s) and choose Remove Document from the panel menu, or click the Remove Document icon at the bottom of the Book panel.
You must also choose which of the documents in the book will be treated as the style source. The document elected as the style source will be used as the master document in the process known as synchronization whereby InDesign replaces the colour swatches and styles of all documents in the book with those in the style source document.
To customize page numbering across the whole book, choose Book Page Numbering Options in the Book panel menu. The default is “Automatically Update Page & Section Numbers”: this will cause InDesign to number pages in the documents within the book according to the order in which they are listed in the Book panel.
It is also possible to use the Book panel as a navigation aid or launch pad from which you can open any InDesign document which has been specified as a chapter of the book. To work on any chapter of a book, simply double-click the name of the chapter in the Book panel. The chapter will open like any regular InDesign document and can be closed when you have finished editing without it being removed from the book.
InDesign books are a terrific tool teams working on the same publication since the fact that a document is part of a book does not stop it from being a regular InDesign document. If a book contains five documents, five different people can work on each of those documents and then, at the end, the whole book can be preflighted, printed and output as PDF as a single unit.
Indexes and tables of contents can also be generated for an entire book as well as for a single document. Simply design and create the table of contents or index in the normal way but activate the option “Include Book Documents”.
The writer is trainer and consultant with a computer training company who carry out Adobe InDesign training courses all over the UK.