P-hall wrote:
“Whenever I save a file as a Template and place it on a server for clients to use, they find that double-clicking on it just produces a copy of the file.”
You have discovered an unseemly truth about InDesign’s templates: They’re one of the few truly poorly implemented features in the program. On the Macintosh, InDesign relies on the Mac OS X concept of a “Stationery Pad” file, and Stationery Pads work the way you describe: As soon as you double-click on one in the Finder, the Mac duplicates the file and opens it. It’s terrible, because you can quickly get many copies of that template littering your folders. Even worse, you can just choose “Save” and the file saves with the template “copy” name. Grrr.
If you open the template from within InDesign or Bridge, it works fine: you get an Untitled document. So it’s not totally broken… just mostly. Here’s one solution: In the Mac OS X Finder, click on the template file and choose File > Get Info. Now turn off the Stationery Pad checkbox and turn on the Locked checkbox. The file will open with its given name in InDesign (not Untitled) but it will be locked so it’ll show up as “[Read Only]”. That means you can’t accidentally write over it, which is probably what you were aiming for in the first place.
In Windows, InDesign’s templates work just fine. You can save any file with an .indt extension and they act like a template: Open them from Windows explorer or Bridge or from within InDesign and they open as Untitled.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on December 19, 2006
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