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• • July 9, 2014 at 11:39 am #69413
    Frederick Choate

    Participant

    I have an InDesign book with 18 documents. For each document I created InCopy Assignments from InDesign. Some docs have more than one story, so there are several Assignments.

    I have indexed the whole book. When it comes to generating an index in ID, all Assignments must be checked out at once for all the documents in the book. Is there any easy way to check them all out at once? When I exit ID, btw, all assignments are checked in, although I have to accept that action for each one.

    What sometimes happens is that I’ve checked out the stories for 17 of the documents in the book; the index generator says: cannot generate index because one or more assignment is not checked out. But I have to go through each document, one at a time, to find the one assignment that was overlooked. This can be very time-consuming. Any ideas?

  • August 13, 2014 at 1:07 pm #70106
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    Sorry, I don’t know of any menu command that will do that, but it could be scripted, perhaps.

    Not sure if you’re really using assignments or if you mean InCopy stories. Both appear in the Assignments panel. You don’t check out an assignment, you check out the InCopy stories. (But if you select an assignment name in the panel, and choose Checkout, that’s a shortcut to check out all the stories you’ve grouped into that assignment. Maybe that’s where you’re getting the idea.)

    FWIW it’s usually not necessary to create assignments, just export all the stories to InCopy from the Edit > InCopy > Export All Stories command, and then all the InCopy stories appear in the Assignment panel in Unassigned Stories. Some people call those linked InCopy stories “assignments” too. Much confusion here because the name of the dang panel is Assignments. It’d be like calling the Paragraph Styles panel “Style Groups.” The Assignments panel should be called “InCopy Assets” or similar.

    okay, end of rant. ;-D

    Anyway, bottom line is you have InCopy stories in your Assignments panel. what might be a little bit faster would be to Shift-Click each assignment in the panel so they’re all selected, then click the Check Out icon at the bottom of the panel. That checks out all the stories. Do that for each file.

    You might try asking if anyone could script this for you in the Adobe Scripting Forum
    https://forums.adobe.com/community/indesign/indesign_scripting

    AM

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