Lesson 16: Working With Long Documents

Longer publications, such as books and magazines, generally consist of _______________________.

InDesign’s book features allow you to combine the documents so you can track page numbers across chapters; create tables of contents, indexes, cross-references, and footnotes; globally update styles; and output the book as one file.

The Book panel displays the documents you add to the book and provides quick access to most book-related functions.

Before starting a book, it’s a good idea to collect all of the InDesign documents for the book into a single folder for the project. This folder is also a good place to store all the fonts, graphic files, libraries and other files required for completing the publication. 

The Book panel displays a link to each document in the book. It does not literally contain the documents. 

If you start with a few documents and add more documents later, you can always change the order of the documents and update the page numbering. styles, table of contents, and more as necessary. 

The ability to add and reorganise chapters makes the book feature ideal for compiling documents from multiple users into a single publication.

How to reorder documents listed in the panel? 

A challenging aspect of working with multi-document publications is tracking page numbers across individual files. InDesign’s book feature can automate this for you, numbering pages in a book from start to finish across multiple documents. Though you cannot override the page numbering and you have to create a new section within a document. 

When you select Document Numbering Options from the panel menu, the selected document opens automatically. You can also open documents by double-clicking them in the panel. 

A running header or footer is text that repeats on chapter pages – such as the chapter number (in the header) and the chapter title (in the footer). InDesign can automatically fill in the text for a running footer according to a chapter’s title. 

A text variable behaves as a single character when it is populated with the source text. This means that even if the source text is long, it will remain on a single line. 

With InDesign, you can create footnotes or import them from text imported as a Microsoft Word document or as a Rich Text Format (RTF) file. With imported text, InDesign automatically creates and places the footnotes, which you can then fine-tune in the Document Footnote Options dialog box.