CreativePro Forum

Return to Member Forum

• Author
  Posts
• • July 18, 2013 at 1:35 pm #34326
    Justin Sligh

    Member

    InDesign books (.indb) contain fixed paths to their associated InDesign documents. If you copy a book and its associated documents to a new location and then open the book in that new location, it still retains the original path to the associated files.

    Books should be aware that they have moved to a new path and that the associated files have moved. It should prompt the user whether it should point toward to original associated InDesign files or the copy in the new location.

    It is not often that this would occur but it did trip me up about a year ago. I was working on a booked document shared on a Dropbox folder. I needed to create a similar document with a few additions. I copied the booked document package from my Dropbox folder locally on my machine. As I added additional InDesign documents to the book and made revisions, I noticed Dropbox alerting me to the sync. It took a few minutes to straighten the situation out and ensure the original documents were restored.

    Any thoughts?

  • July 18, 2013 at 2:37 pm #34327
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Great point, Justin! Yes, there are many clunky things about books and book panels. Here’s another thing that always bugs me: I like saving versions of my documents. So I’ll open, say, “Chapter 3.indd” from the book panel and then do a Save As, naming it “Chapter 3_v2.indd”. But of course, the new version is no longer part of the book and it needs to be relinked!

  • February 6, 2014 at 1:25 pm #66998
    Brad Grigor

    Member

    This issue that the indb file has fixed paths and there is no one-step re-link feature hits me several times a year. Do you know if anyone has written a script that does the job of re-linking the indb to the new document location?

    And David, I agree with your issue re: saving versions of book documents. I also like to keep versions of the documents and of the indb file. The “replace document” function handles this situation, but seems clunky. It would be handy if renaming a document while the indb is also open would replace the document in the indb.

    Cheers!

  • May 7, 2018 at 9:48 am #103582
    Tim Murray

    Member

    Agreed . . . still, in 2018. I’d like to right-click document in book file, rename it to a new version number, and have InDesign keep the old file (not really change, per se) and have InDesign be smart enough to reestablish links to the new file. So while the book lists “Chapter03-v03.indd”, the v01.indd and v02.indd are still there as files not attached to the book. I can drag them to an archive folder with zero damage to the book or links within it.

    A Finder rename and reattach to the book isn’t a great option because links from other chapters tend to retain their links to the pre-renamed file.

    I also don’t need versions of the .indb file. While not a “100% perfect” version control system, I have no need for the old .indb files.

    It’s been a while since I used FrameMaker, but I *think* that if the book were open, I could go to Finder, copy the old chapter off somewhere and rename the original, and Frame’s book does all the changes for me. I think…

    • May 7, 2018 at 10:07 am #103583
      Justin Sligh

      Member

      Tim,

      No improvements yet.

  • September 24, 2018 at 1:59 pm #110514
    Tony Locke

    Member

    Is there a workaround for this issue, without generating a nightmare of extra work?

    I’ve got a travel guidebook I ‘inherited’ that we’re going to update for 2019, it wasn’t in book form yet, just 17 individual .indd files with associated folders for linked images. In a hurry to make it a book file and clean up, so we could export 2018 ebooks, none of the file names were changed at that time due to a lot of image links that we didn’t want to break. All of the original document/chapter names are variations of 2018 or some other name. Now that we’ve had time to catch our breath and regroup for 2019, I’d like to change the .indd names for future use and relink to the book, but I’m afraid all of the Index links that have been added since making it a .indb, will be lost too.

  • September 27, 2018 at 11:06 am #110600
    Kelly Vaughn

    Participant

    Yes there is a workaround. After copying the book and related files to their new location, change the name of the older folder and then run a book-wide sync of some sort. Then change the folder name back. I wrote about it here: https://documentgeek.blogspot.com/2011/01/indesign-absolute-vs-relative-links.html

  • April 1, 2022 at 7:59 am #14362753
    George Grenley

    Participant

    Maybe I mis-understood, but this is not working for me.

    I have a folder, cleverly named books, that contains several book files, that is, indb files. There is another folder called proceduresplus that has all the indd file in the books. It got moved, so now the indb files cannot see their indd files.

    Is there a way to re-connect them other that manually, one at a time? I have several books, each with 20-30 chapters, so I’d prefer a manual method.

  • December 15, 2023 at 9:06 am #14398364
    Raphael

    Member

    Users rejoice, I’ve written the script: https://github.com/raphaelmatto/indesign

• Author
  Posts