Hello all, i’m new here and almost new in InDesign. I have used it in the past for small projects like leaflets, but i just got a new job in a newspaper and i will be working in the editorial office so if someone could please answer me a few questions would be much appreciated. Of course i’m already reading and practising, but there are many practical things i can’t figure out.
The newspaper is an ads paper, has listings of jobs, houses, etc, it’s a 64-pages paper, half of these b/w and the other half colour. Ads are listed on 6 columns, so i have set the pages’ columns likewise. Also there are category rectagles, commercial banners and a few .tif images here and there. Here are a few things i need help with:
1) Ads come and go all the time – fresh ones need to be inserted and old ones must be removed. When i remove an ad, everything else following must somehow move up to cover the gap. We are talking about dozens of pages and thousands of ads, so i can’t just click and drag every single frame. If i choose to put all the ads in a single frame, i can get the text to move up and down while i append/remove stuff, but in this case things get messy because advertisments/banners/promotions are also among the text. Pff…
2) How do i tell InDesign which pages to convert to black and white and which to keep colour during export? (i want all of them to be colour in the indesign file because in a future edition some portions might move to a colour page and vise versa)
3) Is there a way to automate the whole process, in a way that InDesign creates the proper column, text frame, category tags and listings, fishing the data from an excel sheet and morphing it the right way?
I apologize for the size of my post – i’m kinda nervous with this and time is pressuring me. The former guy who used to do this quit and i really want to do this job as excellent as possible. Thank you!!
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