In the past I’ve had very little use for the package command in InDesign because for the most part all I ever sent anywhere was PDFs, but with Digital Publishing Suite, that’s changed…a lot. Why? Because now I’m working with clients that want and need the packaged InDesign files after all the work of adding interactivity is done.
The package command however has a major flaw…it doesn’t package anything on the pasteboard. This made sense back in the days when you’d routinely package a file for printing. The printer certainly didn’t need the objects on the pasteboard so there was no sense in packaging those objects but I ran across a situation where this came back to bite me the other day.
I created an article for DPS project that contained a scrolling frame that would be used as a custom navigation. I created thumbnails of all the pages, laid them out, grouped them and then pasted them into the frame that would be converted to a scrolling frame using the overlay creator. This worked great but when I packaged the file, the graphics that were located outside the bounds of the page were not packaged and so the client was left with missing links. As you can see in the following screenshots, even after being grouped and pasted into a frame, two of the graphics are still showing as being on the pasteboard.
Images placed and arranged prior to being grouped.
Images have been grouped and pasted into a scrolling frame.
After packaging the document you can clearly see that that only two of the links, those on the live page, are being packaged.
I wish I had a workaround for this and I certainly think Adobe is going to have to rethink this. In fact, I’m not sure this doesn’t qualify as a bug. After all, the two graphic are part of a group that is on the live page.
If you’re involved in DPS workflows, this is just something to be aware of and until the behavior is changed, you many have to manually copy those links to the packaged links folder.
This article was last modified on December 30, 2021
This article was first published on March 22, 2013
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