InDesign CS3: Mastering Design Collaboration

One Document, Many Designers

Dividing a mul­ti­page doc­u­ment into mul­ti­ple doc­u­ments of one or more pages each and then col­lect­ing the pieces under a book file is a com­mon col­lab­o­ra­tion work­flow. So com­mon is it that I’ve giv­en it a name–the Book File Collaboration Workflow (I hope no one has already coined this). Under this method, mem­bers of the design team work on pieces of the whole, and each piece is at least one full page. If the team mem­bers work from a sin­gle net­work file repos­i­to­ry, each piece of the pub­li­ca­tion stays in synch with all oth­er pieces with regard to sec­tion and page num­ber­ing, style con­sis­ten­cy, and oth­er shared doc­u­ment attrib­ut­es. If they don’t work off the net­work, shared attrib­ut­es are updat­ed when their pages are deliv­ered to the per­son in charge of assem­bling and man­ag­ing the parts into a whole pub­li­ca­tion (the paginator).

Setting Up the Book File Collaboration Workflow

To set up book file col­lab­o­ra­tion, begin by ana­lyz­ing the doc­u­ment to be cre­at­ed or edit­ed. How many cre­atives will work on it? Does it have inher­ent break points for appor­tion­ment? For instance, if the pub­li­ca­tion is a mag­a­zine, could the “Letter from the Editor” col­umn page be bro­ken out into its own doc­u­ment for one design­er to work on while the “New Bites” spread and sub­se­quent depart­ment and fea­tures pages are giv­en their own doc­u­ments and hand­ed to oth­er design­ers? If log­i­cal con­tent sep­a­ra­tors aren’t as obvi­ous, look for more sub­tle sep­a­ra­tions where the doc­u­ment could be divided.

Once you’ve iden­ti­fied where the pub­li­ca­tion can be sep­a­rat­ed, make the pieces.

1. Begin with the com­plete pub­li­ca­tion in a sin­gle doc­u­ment. Set on the mas­ter page(s) folios, page head­ers and foot­ers, and any oth­er com­mon ele­ments that will appear on all or at least the major­i­ty of the document’s pages. Although you’re unlike­ly to need the full pub­li­ca­tion doc­u­ment again, save it for safe­ty anyway.

2. On the Pages pan­el (Window > Pages), select all the pages that will not be in the first con­stituent part and delete them. You should then have a doc­u­ment con­tain­ing only the page(s) that will be assigned to the first design­er. The pages must be con­tigu­ous; if you want to give pages 2–5 and 10–15 to the same team mem­ber, make one doc­u­ment for pages 2–5 and anoth­er for 10–15.

If the doc­u­ment con­tains the Current Page Number spe­cial char­ac­ter, the doc­u­ment pages will renum­ber after the oth­er pages are delet­ed. Ignore the page num­bers. They’ll be fixed auto­mat­i­cal­ly in a few steps.

If you man­u­al­ly insert page num­bers, stop doing that! InDesign has robust sec­tion and page num­ber­ing options that can han­dle near­ly any page enu­mer­a­tion sce­nario with far less work than the unnec­es­sar­i­ly masochis­tic prac­tice of man­u­al­ly insert­ing and chang­ing page num­bers. Read about page num­bers, sec­tion num­ber­ing, and text vari­ables in this book before you say, Oh, InDesign won’t do auto­mat­i­cal­ly what I need for page num­ber­ing and identification.

3. Because you’re still work­ing in the one and only full pub­li­ca­tion doc­u­ment and you’ve prob­a­bly just delet­ed the major­i­ty of the pub­li­ca­tion, don’t save. Instead, choose File > Save a Copy. When prompt­ed, name the doc­u­ment some­thing both you and the design­er who will work on it will under­stand. If the sec­tion you’re cre­at­ing is the first of 10 parts of the May issue, a name like May-p2‑5.indd would be ide­al. Click OK when ready. Save a Copy saves a copy of the doc­u­ment with­out sav­ing or clos­ing the orig­i­nal document.

4. Press Cmd+Z/Ctrl+Z to undo the dele­tion of pages and return to the full document.

5. Repeat steps 1 through 4 for each sub­se­quent sec­tion of the doc­u­ment, sav­ing a copy of each part, until all the pieces are saved out to their own documents.

6. Go to File > New > Book and cre­ate a new InDesign book INBK file with the same name as your pub­li­ca­tion. After you save, a blank Book pan­el will appear; its name will be that of your publication.

7. On the Book panel’s fly­out menu, choose Add Documents. In the Add Documents dia­log, choose all the pub­li­ca­tion part files you just cre­at­ed. Click on the first file in the list to select it, and then, hold­ing the Shift key (on both Mac and Windows), click on the last file in the list. All inter­ced­ing doc­u­ments will also be select­ed. Click the Open but­ton and the doc­u­ments will pop­u­late the Book panel.

8. If the doc­u­ments are not in their cor­rect order, drag them with­in the list until they are cor­rect. Automatic page num­bers will update across all the files, putting them back into place in the scheme of the over­all document.

9. Send the sec­tion doc­u­ments to the design­ers who will be respon­si­ble for them.

Using the Book pan­el, you, as the pub­li­ca­tion man­ag­er, will be in con­trol of the over­all pub­li­ca­tion cohe­sion. If your team is work­ing from a net­work file serv­er, place all the com­po­nent doc­u­ments, the INBK book file, and doc­u­ments’ linked assets in a fold­er on the serv­er, and have team mem­bers open from, and save to, the same doc­u­ments and fold­er. Your view of the pub­li­ca­tion through the Book pan­el will then always be in synch with the most recent­ly saved changes to any pages of the pub­li­ca­tion. If your team works remote­ly from one anoth­er or for anoth­er rea­son can­not open and save files in a cen­tral repos­i­to­ry, ensure that, as each piece comes back to you, you over­write orig­i­nals with new ver­sions, which will also keep your Book pan­el updated.

Rearranging the indi­vid­ual doc­u­ments in the pub­li­ca­tion is as easy as drag­ging them with­in the Book pan­el. If sec­tion A, for instance, must now come after C instead of before sec­tion B, sim­ply drag A down to the cor­rect place in the Book pan­el. Pages through­out the rest of the pub­li­ca­tion will instant­ly renum­ber to reflect the change. You don’t even need to involve the design­er work­ing on sec­tion A!

If you lat­er need to make changes to the seg­ments, to move pages between pub­li­ca­tion sec­tions for instance, that’s easy:

1. Open both the source and des­ti­na­tion doc­u­ments by double-clicking each in the Book panel.

2. In the source doc­u­ment, the one from which pages will be moved, choose Layout > Pages > Move Pages, which will open the Move Pages dia­log (see Figure 12.1).

Figure 12.1 The Move Pages dialog

3. In the Move Pages dia­log and the Move Pages field, enter the page number(s) of the page(s) to move from the source doc­u­ment to the tar­get doc­u­ment. Use hyphen-separated num­bers to spec­i­fy a range (e.g., 1–3) and comma-separated num­bers for non­se­quen­tial pages (e.g., 1,3). Change the Move To field from Current Document to the name of the des­ti­na­tion doc­u­ment, and then, using the two Destination fields, tell InDesign pre­cise­ly where to drop the page(s). Check Delete Pages After Moving so they will be removed from the source document.

When you click OK, the pages will imme­di­ate­ly move from the source to the tar­get doc­u­ment. Save both, and you’re done; the Book pan­el will update itself.

If you only want to copy pages between doc­u­ments, leav­ing the orig­i­nals in the source doc­u­ment but also adding them to the tar­get, don’t check Delete Pages After Moving. This is a handy trick for those sit­u­a­tions where­in some­one comes along and says, “Hey! Wouldn’t it be cool if every chap­ter sud­den­ly began with a splash page?” Folks who work on mag­a­zines, tele­phone direc­to­ries, and oth­er such advertising-supported peri­od­i­cals love that par­tic­u­lar trick because it makes it easy to insert new­ly sold full-page or full-spread ads into the mid­dle of a fea­ture arti­cle or oth­er pub­li­ca­tion sec­tion that can’t–or shouldn’t–be bro­ken into still more documents.

Speaking of periodicals…

Next: When Book File Collaboration Won’t Work