*** From the Archives ***
This article is from February 15, 2013, and is no longer current.
Free Video on the Useful but Slightly Mysterious Content Collector Tools
Some call it a “Clipboard on Steroids.” Adobe’s John Nack called it “the kind of thing we were trying to enable many years ago with the mini/floating mode of Bridge.” I kind of think of it as “Power Place Command.” However you envision it, the Content Collector toolset in InDesign CS6 is a convenient way to share content (images, text boxes, etc) across multiple pages or even multiple documents.
In a recent episode from Anne-Marie and David’s InDesign Secrets course at lynda.com, Anne-Marie revealed how the Content Collector tools could be particularly useful with regard to creating sets.
As you can discern from Anne-Marie’s video, the Content Collector tools are really three parts in one; here are my pithy nicknames for keeping things straight:
The Content Collector (aka “The Sucker-Upper”) allows you to grab any object in your layout by simply clicking on it.
The Content Collector allows you to grab items in your layout and put them in the Conveyor for transport.
The Content Conveyor (aka “The Serving Platter”) is that gray rectangular receptacle that appears when you’re in Content Collector mode, in which you can see all the things you’ve gathered for moving to another document or page.
The Content Placer (aka “The Spewer Outer”) is the form the toolset takes when you want to place the items you’ve collected.
The Content Placer allows you to place your collected items from the Conveyor into your layout.
After watching Anne-Marie’s video, and playing with the toolset, I came up with the following observations:
- You’ll do yourself a favor by remembering that when you are in Content Collector mode (which you achieve by pressing the B key or selecting the tool from the toolbox), you are in another mode. Things like drag-and-drop and selections aren’t going to work the same way as they do in InDesign Proper.
- Despite the slight disorientation caused by the interface, when I showed the feature to my partner in crime (Deke McClelland—with whom I have suffered through the writing, editing, and layout of many books) he just kind of stared at it and said, “Wow, we could really use this.”
- It seems to me this feature could be very useful for making design-conscious changes to layouts of different sizes (as opposed to giving over completely to the robots.)
- Anne-Marie’s video is really helpful in understanding the navigation of sets vs. groups. Sets are sub-collections of content that you can later place en masse, even with all the relative positioning intact. (If there are other new features for CS6 that you haven’t caught up with you can see more in InDesign CS6 New Features at lynda.com.)
- For members of lynda.com, David’s video on “Collecting, Conveying, and Placing Content” from Chapter 11 of InDesign CS6 Essential Training has another perspective and some great tips for placement of collected items.
(If you’re not a member of lynda.com, you can sign up for a free week trial at https://lynda.com/trial/indesignsecrets. If you plan your week correctly, you can absorb all the InDesign Secrets course and more.)
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Thank you Ann-Marie. I have this Content Collector on my list of things to learn. Checked it off.
I do have a question: What does Letter V mean when selecting pages?
I wonder if there’s a way to use the Content Collector for a full page. It would be great for manual imposition say when there’s a document with 30 business cards, to load each card into the Conveyor and then drop into a new Template page with Containers waiting.
“Letter V” is a CS6 thing for Alternate Layouts. It means “Letter Vertical” … and if you created an Alternate Layout in the same doc, InDesign assumes its name should be “Letter H” (for Letter Horizontal) thinking you’re creating a DPS article for a tablet publication.
Both layouts would be available in the Pages panel, each one with its own name at the top: Letter V and Letter H. (And you can change these default names.)
If you choose “Digital Publishing” as the Intent when creating a new document in ID CS6, it gives a name to the first layout, even if you don’t create any alternate ones.
Rob, I think in the video I show how if you click the Load Conveyor button at the far right of the Conveyor interface, you get a dialog box with some options, one of which is to load everything from a given page, or even all the pages.
We talked about the Load Conveyor feature and how it can load entire pages’ worth of objects in Podcast 185 just a few weeks ago. “Load Conveyor” was the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week-eek-eek. :D
https://creativepro.com/indesignsecrets-podcast-185.php
I’m impressed, I’m still new to the adobe in design, I’ve played around with the program a few times and still don’t know what all the tool are yet. That’s why I’ve joined here. The video really has me interested in the content collector tool. Seems easier than copying each item one by one. Being able to select everything at one time and to seeing everything you have selected in the content conveyer, lets you know what you have and haven’t selected is cool. I wouldn’t like it without this feature, knowing me I would select one thing multiple times.
I have been using this feature a bit today, I like it but is there any way to make the items to snap into the same place as their original place? In the same way I can with snippets?
Pretty late to the game here, trying the conveyor on CS6. Not impressed… The idea is great. But ‘clipboard on steroids’? That could be the case if it allowed cutting from a document and storing ala libraries. But it’s simply aliasing original items, which is an important distinction: any changes made to the originals will be reflected in the conveyor. And if you delete one of the items, it will be removed from the conveyor. I’m curious how people are using this in the real world; judging from the few comments on here, not too many are!
A followup (if anyone’s reading this):
I now see the tool could be useful in its ‘aliasing’ capacity, since it allows you to create links to the original via the ‘Create link’ checkbox. Then any changes to original are reflected in the links.