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October 04, 2005
Long Document Features in InDesign
In our recent Auckland, Sydney and Melbourne InDesign presentations we were able to spend more time focusing on some of the excellent long document features of InDesign. Of course it is always hard to take in all the information presented.
The following links are to tutorials for some of the long document features such as creating a book, automatic Table of Contents generation, Index generation, using Layout Adjustment as well as search and replace to format text.
Regards
Steve
Comments
Picked up several useful tips. Thanks a lot!
Regards
Mike
Those long document features are nice, but ID still has a way to go to catch up with FrameMaker circa 1995. Specifically:
1. FM's ability to specify that a paragraph of text (typically a header) spans columns and sidebars, a feature that makes it deliciously easy to turn single-column text into a multi-column one. In ID, we have to break a text flow, adjust frames sizes, insert a separate text flow for the heading, and readjust everything any time the text flow changes.
2. Running heads that automatically grab the content of the first or last heading text on a spread. Books, magazines and catalogs need this feature. I've got a complex book I can't move to ID because it requires this feature, as well as a more viable scheme for sidebar text. I have about 1200 sidebars. I don't want to be tweaking the size of each.
3. ID needs named frames to auto-link frames in a specific text flow. Allow us to create named frame flows. Any frame given that name would become part of the flow, flowing with the usual and predictable rules for flowing text. A frame on p. 12 would automatically link up after one on page 3. One at the bottom of the page would follow one at the top, etc. It'd be marvelous for magazine designers. No clicking here, scrolling ahead pages and clicking again, hoping you didn't get anything wrong. The name would tell you in an instant where the text came from. And "continued on" texts would be much easier to automate.
4. Except for special situations, footnotes were replaced by endnotes in the 1960s. ID needs endnotes that can be placed at the end of a document (chapter) or end of the book like an index. And it needs a quick way to flip footnotes into endnotes and vice-versa.
***
In short, long document designers need ways to automate decisions, reduce the complexities of text flows, and the assurance that changing one thing won't create a hidden problem forty pages later. You can't klutz around with a 600-page book, fussing over every detail, like you can with a 60-page magazine.
Incorporate these changes into CS3 and it'll sell like hotcakes among those of us who work with longer documents.
--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
These are all excellent points Mike and certainly differentiate InDesign from FrameMaker. Much of what you want is only available to InDesign via scripting.
Steve
AMEN to Mike Perry's comments. Here I am flowing another book in InDesign and am at the point where I need to pick up continued lines and running heads MANUALLY. argh. Every time I do this I search to see if someone has come up with a plug-in to fix this time-consuming task...anyone know of anything??
No time to create a script...
--Kate Basart, UPW, Seattle
"Running heads that automatically grab the content"
This feature exists in other softs, but for indesign, you have to deal with scripting... :/
I am actually working on a automatic running headers script, and i confirm that it is quite complex!
Why adobe did not include such a fonctionnality?
So how do you script in Endnotes into indesign?? Footnotes just won't work in a 2 column format and look right.