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• • June 9, 2010 at 7:40 am #55974
    Roland

    Member

    I'm currently having too much work to do during my work-day, so I've decided to do some 50% of one particular job's work (copying & pasting data from Excel into InDesign) at home at night, and then do the rest (placing the correct images next to the tables) during the day.

    This works great, but my INDD file has quickly grown thanks to all the images and content and I'm an impatient guy, so I went to look for a way to keep the file size down a bit more so I can save to/open from my USB drive faster.
    It turns out IDML files are much much smaller (54.9MB INDD file = 1.4MB IDML file) which makes them far more interesting for sharing or, in my case, taking home and back to work every day for a week or two.

    But before I start doing this, I have to ask: are there any risks or draw-backs when using IDML like this?

  • June 9, 2010 at 8:14 am #55975
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Great question, Roland. One of the main reasons that IDML is so small is that the (non-embedded) images aren't included… if your colleague opens the file and doesn't have the images available, he or she will just see gray boxes. That might be fine, though; the images will pop back when you relink.

    However, I don't think anyone should rely on IDML to be seamless and perfect. There is always a chance that text may reflow a little bit or something might get messed up.

    If they use CS4 to edit your CS5 doc, things may get even more wonky. Any CS5 features you've used will of course get stripped out when it's opened in an earlier version.

  • June 9, 2010 at 8:17 am #55976
    Roland

    Member

    It's just me and I'm using CS5 both at home and at work (thankfully the license still allows this) with the same settings, so things shouldn't go haywire, right?

  • June 9, 2010 at 1:00 pm #55982
    Adam Jury

    Member

    This is a job for Dropbox, not USB drives! ;)

    I think that any time saved by the smaller file transfers is probably lost with the additional time to export to IDML, wait for InDesign to rebuild the doc, etc?

  • June 9, 2010 at 11:43 pm #55989
    Roland

    Member

    I prefer to use my USB drive as my internet connection at work is slow as heck (only .5Mbps up and 3Mbps down).

    Maybe once the file gets really large it'll be more worth it. For now I'll stick with the INDD file. At least I found out that opting for “Save As…”, overwriting the file rather than just saving, generally also shaves off quite a bit of the file size.

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