Long Docs Posts

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 [...]

MH wrote:

I know just what you mean: My son is steeped in the mysteries of how letters form words right now and word spacing is crucial! I wrote about word spacing last year, but I focused on using InDesign’s secret keyboard shortcut. When you’re doing a whole book, you certainly can’t rely on the shortcut; you need to define the word spacing as part of the paragraph style. Fortunately, this isn’t hard to do…

One of the most common requests we see from InDesign users is “How do I do cross-references in InDesign?” Everyone assumes that x-refs must be really easy in a program as powerful as this, but unfortunately Adobe has not yet implemented this feature into the program. So here are a few options you should check [...]

Most people, I think, can figure out the basics of InDesign’s Numbered Lists feature; it works the same as Microsoft Word’s. Select a range of paragraphs and click the Numbered Lists icon in the Control panel, and the paragraphs are numbered sequentially. If you have CS2, that’s about 90% of what you can do with [...]

One of the things I like most about InDesign’s table of contents feature is that it’s document-wide rather than simply story-wide. That means that any text in any text frame can be included in a table of contents — even text in a nonprinting text frame. With this in mind, you can add “tags” to [...]

I love being able to add footnotes in CS2 — I just click where I want a footnote and choose Type > Insert Footnote. The footnote text appears at the bottom of the text. I know that I’ll get 10 comments about how
the footnote feature is limited and doesn’t do everything it should (such as [...]

Ron wrote:
I am developing an InDesign template for [this book series] so that we can improve on its process. The TOC for this series is complex but I have been able to successfully make it fully automated except for one issue: One of the tags being brought into the TOC is the chapter intro, which is a 1-paragraph block of text. The full paragraph is also used in the TOC to give readers a decent description of the chapter in addition to the contents. There seems to be a 255 character maximum that the auto-generated TOC will actually bring in per tagged paragraph. I need it to pull in the whole paragraph regardless of character length. Do you know of any way to change the maximum number of characters allowed?

Ron, while I know of no way to change the number of characters the Table of Contents feature will capture, I’m sure someone could write a script to grab all those paragraphs for you. But until someone does, here’s an alternate solution you might consider: Make the first paragraph of the chapter an anchored text frame in its own paragraph. [...]