Reply To: Single (large/long) versus Multiple Text Boxes – Best Practice?

Hi Gilley

I’m very much a fan of using as few text files to flow out as long as possible – perhaps my Ventura history has taught me to do it that way.

I’ve just completed two books in InDesign CC 2014, both were in the 100’s of pages (e.g., 4-500), and one of them had over 2,700 anchored images. Granted, both books were broken into individual ‘chunks’ – not because I didn’t think InDesign could handle it all at once, but, because it didn’t NEED to handle it all at once. So, I went with what makes practical sense and chose to work on smaller files and then glued them together in Acrobat when I was done.

Some of the files are well over 100 pages long.

All, with using a single text frame (story) flowing from page to page to page. One book was 2-columns per page, the other book was 3-columns per page.

Had NO problems! Anchoring was BEAUTIFUL and behaved really, really well.

My NEXT project I’m looking at taking 3 magazines (Buy & Sell magazines) which also contain hundreds of anchored images, intermixed with MANY adverts in frames, flowing through 4-columns per page … and running anywhere between 100 to 190 pages per magazine. In THESE cases it will be a SINGLE INDD file. And … I am quite confident with the testing that I’ve done so far that it’s going to be ‘no sweat’.

So . . . I’d say, Stick with a single (or few) stories and feel free to flow out as many pages as you feel comfortable with.

Hope this helps. :)

Allan