Creating Shared Layouts (Composition Zone) in InDesign

David Blatner

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P.S. wrote:

Is there a “Collaborations/Shared Content” feature in InDesign that is similar to the one that I use in Quark? It allows me to share one layout (in this case a feature story) with four different magazine layouts.

Well, it’s an interesting question. On the one hand, I don’t think there is any feature in InDesign that is quite as painfully designed and difficult to use as that QuarkXPress feature. But on the other hand (and being a lot less sarcastic), there are certainly ways to get the similar results with InDesign.

Probably the best method of sharing a part of a page, a full page, or a two-page spread across multiple documents is to create one document (such as an ad, or the feature story you mentioned) as a regular InDesign document, and then place that InDesign document into one or more other documents. That’s right, you can use File > Place to import one document into another. It’s a very powerful feature.

One of the best things about placing an InDesign file into another one is that it acts like a graphic in the target document. However, if you want to edit it, you can Option/Alt-double-click the “graphic” and it opens the original INDD file, ready for editing. You can also later use File > Package to gather up all the linked graphics — including the placed INDD files, and graphics that are placed into them.

Let’s say you have a 10 page document, and you want to place page 8 and 9 into some other file. Use File > Place, choose the INDD file, and turn on the Show Import Options checkbox in the Place dialog box. After you click OK, you’ll have a chance to choose which pages you want to place.

Layout Zone

Now, QuarkXPress does offer a way to create a “composition zone” — an area on a page that you “export” so that someone else can work on it. InDesign itself doesn’t have this, but Martinho da Gloria created a free add-on called Layout Zone (described here) that does all that, and more. Every InDesign user should check this tool out. Very cool.

There is one significant limitation in all these methods, however: They work only on a single page or spread at a time. That is, you cannot grab 4 pages from one document and merge all four of them into the middle of another… well, you sort of can, but you’d have to do it one page at a time, as I mentioned earlier.