Synchronize Multiple InDesign Documents
MT wrote:
I have a document set up and need to create a 2nd doc with the same information. Is there anyway to link the two docs so that if I make any changes in the first document they will get picked up in the second?
It all depends on what kind of “changes” you want to make. For example, if you want to synchronize text across multiple documents, check out this post (and be sure to read the comments that follow). If you want to synchronize the document size (so that if one file changes size, the other will, too), you’re out of luck — I can’t think of any good way to do that, though I suppose someone will come up with a script to do it sooner or later.
But there are lots of other things you might change about a document. For example, the definition of color swatches; or definitions of paragraph, character, or object styles; or of text variables; or of the layout on a master page. All these things can be shared across multiple documents… if you put those documents in a book panel.
Watch Out for Page Numbering
Most people use book panels for books (or other multi-file documents that have chapters or sections or whatever). But you can use a book panel for any set of documents that share some attribute. For example, you could use a book panel for all the documents you’ve made for one of your clients — even if the files have nothing in common with each other. In that case, you’re using the panel as a simple project manager that gives you double-click access to any of the files quickly.
However, when you use a book panel in this way, be sure to turn off automatic pagination, or else InDesign will spend forever trying to update the page numbers in your documents. (Which, at best, just wastes time, and at worst will screw up any page numbering you did need there.) To disable pagination, choose Book Page Numbering Options from the book panel flyout menu, and deselect Automatically Update Page & Section Numbers. Do this before you start adding documents to the panel!
Synchronize Across the Book
Once you’ve turned off pagination and added documents to the book panel, you can synchronize various attributes of the document throughout. Which attributes? Choose Synchronize Options from the book panel menu to see (and choose):
Once you’ve made your choices and clicked OK, you need to set which document in your book panel will be the “master” file — the file that InDesign will refer to when it’s synchronizing. By default, it’s the first file in the book panel. To set it to a different document, just click in the left column next to the file in the book panel.
Next, choose which documents you want to synchronize. If you want all the files to be in sync, then either choose them all, or deselect them all by clicking in the blank area at the bottom of the panel. (If none are selected, InDesign assumes you want to sync them all.) To choose some, but not others, use the Shift key (for contiguous selections) or the Command/Ctrl key (for discontiguous selections).
Now click the Sychronize button in the book panel (or choose from the panel menu). InDesign pushes all the selected attributes from the master file to the other files:
- A style, color swatch, variable, numbered list, or master page that is defined in the master file but not in another document gets added to that other document.
- If a setting is named the same in both the master file and another document, the definition for that setting in the master file overrides the one in the non-master document.
- If a setting is not defined in the master file but exists in some other document, it’s left alone. (This means you can have ‘local’ settings that exist in one document that don’t have to be copied into all the others.)
If your sync is just a one-time deal, you could remove the documents from the book panel. But most folks will likely want to keep these files in sync. InDesign doesn’t “auto sync,” so each time you make a change in once place, you’ll need to open the Book panel and click the Synchronize button again.
I wish there were more ways to make documents “sync” to each other. For example, I think it’d be cool if you could link an InDesign document to an external “style sheet” file — perhaps just a text file written almost like a CSS file. Then you could change that style sheet file and the next time you open a document, it looks different! Who knows… perhaps in CS8?
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Nothing to do with the post; just wanted to vent. Recently I designed a PDF presentation on InDesign. It had good reviews, and now it’s become the standard presentation we use. Now one of our clients asked for it, but they specifically determined it has to be a PPT document. No PDFs, no anything, just Power Point. Can anyone imagine the hell I’ve been through since?
David wrote: “at worst will screw up any page numbering you did need there”.
InDesign can also completely screw up your documents by forcing them to start on an even page — and turning all the left pages into right pages and vice versa. Watch your step…
@Alexandre: I’m sorry to hear about that. Did you see this article by Anne-Marie at CreativePro.com? It might help (though it’s focused on Word).
well copying a document, [when document closed] will copy the document size too… duh, well that’s what I do.
Thanks, David. I tried some stuff very similar to that, but unfortunately Power Point is even worse than Word (yes, something is worse than Word!) in dealing with many design elements I have been working with, not to mention the default fonts I have to work with and converting at least the titles to images (I usually am wary of unnecessarily converting fonts to outlines, but this is even worse!). Most of my layout can’t be converted to images, so I have to design with the primitive Office tools again. And some of the elements I just had to leave aside. Other highlights: three clicks for aligning, Ctrl instead of Alt for duplicating elements, no pathfinder panel and no pen tool. At least I can safely say I’m going where no “InDesigner” has gone before!
@Alexandre:
If you have converted titles to images, the clients cannot edit the text, can they?
Perhaps you could just convert every page to an image and place these in the PPT. ;)
There are a few PDF to PPT converters, but i never tried one of these.
Another way: Use an OCR tool to convert PDF to PPT.
I have problems with Powerpoint the other way: I sometimes get PPT and I have to print them. If transperency is used the fun starts. Usually I open these PPT in OpenOffice Impress, which can export PDF including transperency. Most of the time this works quiet good.
A much worse problem: If the client chooses A4 as papersize, then the actual size of the document is SMALLER (at least in Powerpoint 2003). And you even can’t resize it proportionally, because the aspect ratio is changed, too. GRRR.
OK, enough venting, back to syncing.
Florian, crazy as it sounds, I really considered the possibility of exporting the whole pages as images. The only thing that deterred me was the size of the presentation. As for the titles, fortunately the client doesn’t need to edit anything, but some colleague might have to, so I have to be there to prepare eventual new titles if the presentation changes. Maybe a converter would be a good idea, but I don’t really trust them, even though I never tested them. Not to blame who built them, of course: MS Office structure is too messed up for me to think some sort of automatic conversion is possible.
:)
Oh, and as soon as you mentioned your first problem, the first solution that popped on my mind was the exact one you cited. As for the second, I can’t really think of a solution.
Great post! I’ve been wondering about something like this for a while and I never would have worked it out on my own. Thanks!
Alexandre, if someone insits on using PPT, (s)he has to be punished. A least with some really big files.
I really would try to use a converter. Perhaps the current beta of OpenOffice will do the job. It includes PDF-Import.
Thanks for this post! Very helpful once again, of course. also, I like the re-design of the comment boxes!
does anyone know how to save paragraph styles for use in other documents? i have 5 books i want to all be alike. don’t want to risk the odd-even mess mentioned by sander. thanks.
@Patricia: Sander’s problem is easily fixed by choosing the correct setting in the Book Page Numbering Options dialog box (see image in the post above). InDesign doesn’t randomly add pages; it just does it when it’s repaginating, based on those options.
For example, if chapter 1 ends on page 29 and you have “start on next odd page” selected, then ID has to add a new blank page 30.
However, if you have “Continue from Previous Document” selected (which is the default), then InDesign makes the first page of chapter 2 start on page 30 — a left-hand page! Suddenly, chapter 2’s pages are all flipped (what was a left-page turns into a right page). But only because “you asked for it.”
If you disable Automatically Update Page Numbers, then this will not happen.
Of course, another alternative is to simply use the Load Styles feature in the Paragraph Styles panel menu.
How do I convert 4 process inks into 1 process ink (black) in indesign CS3?
@M: There is no way to make that conversion inside the InDesign document. You can simply print to grayscale (that’s an option in the Print dialog box). Or use Adobe Acrobat Pro to convert color pdf files to grayscale.
David, there actually IS a way to convert a full-color InDesign file, with placed color images, to black-only inside ID and output a fairly decent black-only PDF. So . . . what am I offered for giving up this little trade secret? ;-)
Klaus, if you’re talking about printing to PDF, we covered that in this post. But I think Acrobat is probably the better/easier way to go.
Ah, everything’s “better/easier” with the old, tried, boring techniques. I’m not talking about them, but a Radical Crazy Approach — which works nicely, and isn’t old and boring.
I have 10 docs in a book. However, My book is not numbering the pages in sequence. Every doc is continuing numbering from the preceding doc, only, but I’m not able to get the numbering continues all over the 10 docs. How can I sort that?
@Bader: It’s hard to say what could be going wrong in your document, but my guess is that if you open the numbering & section dialog box in each document, you’ll find that some are set to Automatic Page Numbering, and some are set to “Start on Page…”.
Someone else just emailed me with a sample document with this same problem (pages not renumbering properly). The solution: Just choose Update Numbering > Update Page & Section Numbers from the book panel menu. That seems to make it work. Perhaps InDesign just got confused and forgot to update the numbers.
I have 6 chapters in my book and 3 Appendices (A-C). The numbering style requires that the prefix section number appear on each page with the page number (e.g. 3-18 or A-4) on the top of each page. I have inserted the variable on the master for each chapter and the numbers appear properly by selecting Use prefis,etc. I add the chapters to the book panel and then attempt to create a TOC- BUT when I create the table of contents only the page number appears, not the section number prefix!
HELP!
@Mary: If you’re going to use page number prefixes, but want them in the TOC, you should probably use the Section Prefix feature in the Numbering Options dialog box instead of typing them manually. I think that works…
A little off the topic of the post, but in addition to a book, I have a number of other docs in different sizes and shapes to go as one package to the printer. Is it best to put everything together into one book for packaging or to package each separately with duplication of fonts and massive numbers of file directories?
Is there an industry standard for this?
Thanks,
Jennifer
Re: Section Prefixes — I am also experiencing Mary’s problem (above post on 12/11/08) with section prefixes not appearing in the TOC. I am using the Include Section Prefix feature in the Numbering Options. The Chapter TOCs for each individual document work correctly with the section prefix appearing with the page number (e.g. 2-10). However when I try to make a master TOC including all documents in the book (using the same settings and paragraph styles), the section prefixes do not appear with the page numbers. Any way around this?
That was what I was looking for, but I didn’t learn how to unlink two documents in a book and stop syncing them
@David
Thanks for the post. This is really useful. I create 6 different newsletters every month to different clients, and this will save the time spent juggling between documents.
Thx.
Is there a way to sync paragraph styles across multiple documents without creating a book file? Kind of like how InCopy links text across multiple, separate INDD documents?
DesignerUS: Without using a book file, the closest you can get is to 1) Designate one of the files as the style source (maybe add “styles” to its filename) and then 2) use the Load All Text Styles command in each of the other docs to import the source’s styles. If there’s a conflict — the style already exists in the target doc — you can choose to have the incoming definition “win.”
The command is found in the Paragraph Styles panel menu.
When loading paragraph styles (PS) from one doc into another, the “organization” of the style names is lost. In other words, I have the styles arranged in my “good” file according to order of their usage. I want that order to remain intact, but it gets scrambled when loading to the new file. Is there any way to retain the organizational order of the paragraph styles when loading them? (This is also happening with other styles… particularly the character styles where I have colors defined.
If you put the files in a book and use the book panel to synchronise the styles, the order in the template will be preserved. You might also use folders in the style panels so, when the styles are disordered when you load them to a new document, at least they will be grouped roughly by usage.
hello
i am creating a new catalog that contains many documents.
is there a way to creat like folders in the book so i can put some documents that are relevant to the same category in, and in that case it would be more easy to navigate between the documents..
for example:
book:catalog> folder: door handle> documents
catalog> folder: building handle> documents
thank you!
Shira: No, book documents don’t offer folders at this time. It’s a good idea though!
Nice article. I have all my documents in a book, set up into chapters. There are headers on each page of each chapter with the chapter name. I need to use the same colours for all the headers. The problem is when I try synchronise colours in the headers throughout the book, the chapter title of the source document appears in the headers of all the other chapters, giving all the chapters in the entire book the same title. What am I doing wrong? Please help!
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I’m trying to sync style sheets in a book. Each chapter has the same style sheets, but one paragraph style has color type.
Since I needed a different color for each chapter, I created a color in each chapter called “New Color Swatch” and changed values as needed. I then unchecked swatches in the sync setting.
I have made unrelated changes to the paragraph style.
When I synced selected chapters, the paragraph style got updated correctly, but the color values of “New Color Swatch” also changed.
I hope I’ve made myself clear, and I’d really appreciate help on this.
I have a multi-language manual set up, with the style source being the Cover-page where i put all formatting styles.
in the style source, I also formatted page numbers in the master pages of both the style source, and in all the different language-chapters
My page numbering is centered at the bottom of each page both vertically (between margin and edge of page) and horizontally on the page.
i did this by creating a text frame the width of the page and the height of the space between bottom margin and bottom edge of the page and then using “align centre”
now, I turned off synchronization for Mater pages. but still, when I synchronize the book, all page numbers are aligned vertically in their text boxes. what am I not seeing?
My question would be how to resize a book and that is reflected in all the documents in Indesign CS6
Hi , this post is nice when u want to sync text, but what about images?
This conversation is kind of hard to follow, as people keep changing the subject.
At the end of it all, I found my question from 2017! Well, I still have the problem, and I’m hoping to get help this time.
Here it is:
I’m trying to sync all chapters in a catalog. I’m able to sync master pages, style sheets…
Each chapter has the same style sheets, but one paragraph style has color type.
Since I needed a different color for each chapter, I created a color in each chapter called “Chapter color” and changed values as needed. I then unchecked swatches in the sync setting.
When I synced the chapters, swatches also synced.