Working As A Team On Publications With Adobe InDesign’s Book Command

Whenever you choose New from the File menu in Adobe InDesign, you may have noticed the option to create a new book without ever knowing exactly what a book is. Well, it turns out that books are a pretty cool feature: they allow you to take a bunch of related InDesign document and treat them as a single entity; a book. All documents in the book can then share the same resources such as paragraph and character styles, colour swatches, master pages, sections and page numbering.

Once you’ve created a book, by choosing File-New-Book, the Book panel is displayed. It contains a panel menu with all the options necessary for managing a book. The first task is to add some documents to the book: from the Book panel menu, choose “Add Document” and select the documents you want to be treated as part of the book.

When the book file is saved, the book becomes a separate entity to the documents it contains and the documents in a book do not have to reside in the same location as the book or as each other. To save a book, choose Save Book in the Book panel menu.

Next, you need to specify which of the documents in the book will be treated as the style source. The document elected as the style source will be used as the master document in the process known as synchronisation whereby InDesign replaces the styles and colour swatches of all documents in the book with those in the style source document.

To set page numbering across the whole book, choose Book Page Numbering Options in the Book panel menu. The default is “Automatically Update Page & Section Numbers”: this will cause InDesign to number pages in the documents within the book according to the order in which they are listed in the Book panel.

The Book panel offers useful feedback about the status of each chapter in the book by displaying an icon next to the name of each chapter. The “Available” icon indicates that the book may be opened by one member of the team of people using the book. The “Open” icon indicates that you have the book open and that no one will be able to use it until they have finished with it. The “In Use” icon will appear when someone else has that chapter open; this means that you have to wait until they have finished with it before you can use it. The “Modified” icon shows that changes have been made to the book since last time you opened it. And, finally, the dreaded “Missing” icon indicates that the InDesign document associated with that chapter has been moved from its original location.

Books are a terrific tool for division of labour since the fact that a document is part of a book does not stop it from being a regular InDesign document. If a book contains ten documents, ten different people can work on each of those documents and then, at the end, the whole book can be preflighted, printed and output as PDF as a single unit.

Both tables of contents and indexes can also be generated for the entire book as well as for a single document. Simply create the table of contents or index in the usual way but activate the option “Include Book Documents”.

Author is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent computer training company offering Adobe InDesign training courses at their central London training centre.