Long Docs Posts

How to make two or more documents share the same styles, master pages, and more.

Bob shares an amazing trick that shouldn’t work… but does!

Klaus (yes, that Klaus, a frequent commenter here) wrote us:

You can do this, albeit somewhat tediously, by taking advantage of what most people consider to be a bug in InDesign:

Daniel wrote: Recently I had to export a document with lists (numbered questions with a, b, c… answers) to RTF, so it could be printed in Braile, but InDesign striped the numbers from the lists when I exported it (no numbers on the questions, no letters on the answers). Do you know any workaroundaround this strange behavior?

I’m going to have to agree with you that this does seem like strange behavior; after all, numbering or bullets are just paragraph formatting, such as indents and so on, and that should export in RTF just fine. However, you’re right that bullets and numbers get stripped away upon export. The good news is that you can convert those lists…

Most of us are at The InDesign Conference in Miami right now, so it’s hard to get away to post tips. However, I was sitting at the AskMOGO desk yesterday and an attendee asked an interesting question: She has a lot of index markers in a document, often one right next to the other, and she wanted to know how to figure out what each index marker refers to.

The problem is that after you place an index marker, it’s just not obvious how to open the Page Reference dialog box to see how it was indexed (how it shows up in the index, what range it has, and so on)…

KRB wrote:

That is frustrating! Fortunately, Find/Change comes to the rescue…

MY wrote:
I am working on a project that has 15 documents in a book. After I do a global change, I have to activate each document window and save it. Is there a way to tell indesign to save all opened documents? Shouldn’t it be a option in the book’s panel to do this?
I completely [...]

Tim Cole has posted a fabulous new tutorial on how to be productive when creating anchored frames frequently. It makes use of the anchored frames feature in InDesign CS2 and CS3, the InDesign Secrets/DTP Tools Keyboard Shortcuts palette, the Story Editor, and drag-and-drop text.

Here’s how it begins:
InDesign’s anchored frames feature is a life-saver for certain [...]

Tom wrote: I have been trying to find a way to do an alphabetical sort to produce a glossary of definitions. The project is a manual that has many procedures. We would like to place definitions from all of the procedures and place them in their own section. We have looked for a sorting feature but cannot find one.

While InDesign doesn’t have a sort feature built-in, it does come with a script called SortParagraphs.jsx. In CS2, you have to find this on your install disks or on the Web, but in CS3, it’s installed automatically. When you select some text and run the script, InDesign sorts each paragraph alphabetically.

But I think what you want goes even further than this. It sounds like you want…

This is one of those really esoteric solutions that makes sense for the two or three people who need this specific feature, but I’m writing it out hoping that others will take the concept behind the feature and apply it elsewhere.

First, here’s the problem.

I generate a TOC from the Chapter Names and the A Heads [...]