Reply To: Large InDesign Document

Hi Aldo

I’m not sure what would be the limiting factor here, because of course 600 pages of text will likely have very different handling than one which has a load of embedded and linked images/files, which will be different from one with a simple master frame vs one with complex layout.

I don’t really see a disadvantage in working with Indesign book files and breaking a document down into separate chapter files. (I don’t know anything about in5 though.) I never get any kind of machine slowdown working on indd files up to 70-80 pages (~10-50MB files depending on content), which might be one consideration of handling much larger documents, but Indesign does sometimes decide that it doesn’t like something and I get into a crash loop every time I try to do a particular edit. File recovery seems to be very good, so I rarely *lose* work, but it is incredibly annoying and wastes time while I try to figure out what is causing the crash (almost always it is an edit that causes some kind of content reflow that it can’t handle).

So, I guess personally I would say it’s useful to work with separate chapters simply so that the chance is reduced of any one particular part of the book having a problem that could corrupt the whole thing.

Nick