Recently I laid out the first of a series of books. The idea, said the publisher, is for me to lay out the book in InD (CS5.5), send the files to South Africa (where the books are also going to be published), for them to enter all the author's changes and amends and return the files to me so that I can check the house style is right etc. etc. In SA they use CS4.
No problem I thought. All I do is export each files as IDML and send them and the book file. After a flurry of emails it transpired that the people in SA never use the Book function; nor do they use visible grids, margins and stuff like paragraph returns. Fine, I thought. Just change and amend and return the files to me.
So on return of the files I hit W to see all the hidden stuff again and found that the 2 varieties of master page (chapter start and main pages) were now exactly the same which was pretty boring. What was that about?
But the worst thing was when I rebuilt the book and exported it to PDF, each chapter had the same page number on every page. I tried everything (I think: IDML, redo master file page numbers, stare at Numbering and Section options, shout at my Mac, drink coffee and tear my hair out) I've ever heard of, but it would NOT obey!! In the end I set up new files and copied/pasted the text over, rebuilt the book, exported to PDF and all was well.
But honestly, am I to do this with every book? Please not …
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