Waah! I miss my PageMaker Pasteboard!
Q: Why isn’t the InDesign pasteboard like the old PageMaker “perma-pasteboard,” available in every page?
–signed, Recovering PageMaker User
A: Dear RPMU,
It could be argued that the old PM pasteboard was more like a “real world” drawing board, with a plethora of persistent pieces perched in the periphery of your project. InDesign’s pasteboard is attached to one spread. But you can sort of recapture the persistent pasteboard by taking advantage of InDesign’s “new window” trick.
Store all your bits of artwork on a “donor” page (or in its pasteboard), then choose Window > Arrange > New Window. At first, it seems that nothing has happened. Choose Window > Arrange > Tile (CS3 gives you the choice of Tile Horizontally and Tile Vertically). Now you’ll see two instances of the document simultaneously. Click on one title bar, and scroll to the donor page. Click on the other title bar, and scroll to the “target” page.
Now you can select an object on the donor page, and drag-&-drop it to the target page. Leave the donor page displayed in one window while you work on the document in the other window. It’s cheesy, but it works.
Suggestion: because this eats up so much screen real estate, you might consider using an InDesign library instead. Libraries offer the same drag-&-drop functionality, in a petite phloating palette (yeah, yeah, I know: in CS3, they’re panels).
Alarm! Alliteration Attack!!
Interesting idea…
I found the script Dave Saunders once wrote for those pagemaker pasteboard piners…
http://jsid.blogspot.com/2007/01/universal-pasteboard.html
What an interesting idea, Claudia! You know, I don’t think I ever thought of dragging objects to a New Window before. Unfortunately, InDesign seems to always copy the object when it moves from one window to the next (instead of just moving it). Wish there were a way around that.
The beautiful thing about this is that you can have two different zooms, so you zoom right on on one and see the overall effect it has on the layout, for sizing tables etc. And it does consume a lot of screen space, but I solved the problem by getting a 24 inch monitor. Well worth the money.
Seems like the bridge is a good option also. Drag any object from InDesign into bridge and bridge will create a snippet. And you can drag and drop snippets anywhere in a InDesign document.
SNIPPETS! Sorry to shout but, this is far more useful and manageable than leaving all your bits and pieces strewn around your pages, plus you don’t have to reposition every time you need that bit there.
And like Joe says using Bridge to manage them rules.
I totally agree–I love Snippets! But I was just trying to comfort someone who longed for the old PageMaker days. They’ll get over that
Snippets are not appropriate in all circumstances. I’ve just done a job where I made considerable use of my “AggregatePasteboard” script (Gerald linked to it above).
In this case, my client had provided a Word document with (in the one case) content that had to be merged with existing content and (in the other case) corrections to content. I placed the Word document on the pasteboard and then worked through the document page by page either merging content or making corrections.
Each time I moved on to the next page, I ran the script to bring the place Word document along with me. Granted, I could have cut/paste, but it was much easier to run the script (which was but a couple of keystrokes away — Cmd-A to fire up my script that presents a list of recently run scripts: the one I wanted was almost always at top of the list, so all I then had to do was hit Return and there were the corrections for this page, right where I needed them.
I migrated from Quark to InDesign about a year ago. In Quark, I kept a large page with many text boxes and logos I used daily so I could keep pasting out of it all day long. When I finally discovered Snippets for InDesign, I was very pleased with how organized my “messy space” could become. I wish something similar to Snippets was available for Illustrator.