InDesign Books and fixed paths to associated documents.

Great point, Justin! Yes, there are many clunky things about books and book panels. Here’s another thing that always bugs me: I like saving versions of my documents. So I’ll open, say, “Chapter 3.indd” from the book panel and then do a Save As, naming it “Chapter 3_v2.indd”. But of course, the new version is no longer part of the book and it needs to be relinked!

This issue that the indb file has fixed paths and there is no one-step re-link feature hits me several times a year. Do you know if anyone has written a script that does the job of re-linking the indb to the new document location?

And David, I agree with your issue re: saving versions of book documents. I also like to keep versions of the documents and of the indb file. The “replace document” function handles this situation, but seems clunky. It would be handy if renaming a document while the indb is also open would replace the document in the indb.

Cheers!

Agreed . . . still, in 2018. I’d like to right-click document in book file, rename it to a new version number, and have InDesign keep the old file (not really change, per se) and have InDesign be smart enough to reestablish links to the new file. So while the book lists “Chapter03-v03.indd”, the v01.indd and v02.indd are still there as files not attached to the book. I can drag them to an archive folder with zero damage to the book or links within it.

A Finder rename and reattach to the book isn’t a great option because links from other chapters tend to retain their links to the pre-renamed file.

I also don’t need versions of the .indb file. While not a “100% perfect” version control system, I have no need for the old .indb files.

It’s been a while since I used FrameMaker, but I *think* that if the book were open, I could go to Finder, copy the old chapter off somewhere and rename the original, and Frame’s book does all the changes for me. I think…

Is there a workaround for this issue, without generating a nightmare of extra work?

I’ve got a travel guidebook I ‘inherited’ that we’re going to update for 2019, it wasn’t in book form yet, just 17 individual .indd files with associated folders for linked images. In a hurry to make it a book file and clean up, so we could export 2018 ebooks, none of the file names were changed at that time due to a lot of image links that we didn’t want to break. All of the original document/chapter names are variations of 2018 or some other name. Now that we’ve had time to catch our breath and regroup for 2019, I’d like to change the .indd names for future use and relink to the book, but I’m afraid all of the Index links that have been added since making it a .indb, will be lost too.

Yes there is a workaround. After copying the book and related files to their new location, change the name of the older folder and then run a book-wide sync of some sort. Then change the folder name back. I wrote about it here: https://documentgeek.blogspot.com/2011/01/indesign-absolute-vs-relative-links.html

Maybe I mis-understood, but this is not working for me.

I have a folder, cleverly named books, that contains several book files, that is, indb files. There is another folder called proceduresplus that has all the indd file in the books. It got moved, so now the indb files cannot see their indd files.

Is there a way to re-connect them other that manually, one at a time? I have several books, each with 20-30 chapters, so I’d prefer a manual method.

Users rejoice, I’ve written the script: https://github.com/raphaelmatto/indesign