CreativePro Forum

Return to Member Forum

• Author
  Posts
• • May 4, 2017 at 10:50 am #94211
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    My day job is that of a freelance designer — but my real work has been on stage as an actor. The beauty of having a solid command of InDesign — thanks in large part to Lynda.com — is that the book I’m now writing (about thriving and surviving in community theater) isn’t something for which I’ll have to hire someone else to design for print and epub publication; I obviously can do that myself. But there’s a gap in my knowledge. I don’t know if I should just lay it out as one multi-page InDesign document or assemble individual documents into a book.

    It’s going to be a simple, text only book. A compilation of perhaps over 100 different “tips and techniques” topics, each with a simple header, subhead, body first and body style. Maybe a numbered list here and there.

    What I’m really looking for is the best way to easily identify chapters and move them around, the reason being: even though I’m going to organize all the chapters ahead of time on index cards in the order I want them, ultimately I know I’m going to want to move things around once the layout has begun in earnest. Point being, I’m gonna have a lot of chapters, and I’m sure I’m going to decide one chapter’s might to be better off going before (or after) another one, and “this” chapter needs to come before “that” one, etc. etc.

    So here’s the question: what would be the better work flow, specifically if I want to find the way that’s easiest to see and rearrange things? Single InDesign document with multiple pages or multiple documents in a book?

  • May 4, 2017 at 3:10 pm #94225
    Ariel W

    Participant

    Normally I try to avoid using the book feature — it just makes things more complicated and fiddly. In your particular case, perhaps it makes sense to use it, but the fact is that you could just as easily cut and paste the text from one chapter to another.

    However, I don’t think it’s a good idea to write a book in InDesign — however much you’re itching to put your knowledge to use. Save it for the layout stage. For the actual writing, it will probably slow you up — a wordprocessor is better for writing.

    Ariel

  • May 4, 2017 at 4:28 pm #94226
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Thanks. Pretty much what I was thinking. But others are welcome to pipe in, of course. For the record, I wasn’t planning on using InDesign to write it, or even InCopy; actually going to try out Mac’s Pages (mainly because of the iCloud). Don’t laugh. Writing is writing, plus finally…FINALLY.. Apple has added an export to .rtf choice.

  • May 5, 2017 at 4:47 am #94246
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I agree with Ariel: the Book panel feature is great in some situations but I suggest using it only when necessary.

    You can easily put each chapter in its own “story” in a single document. (A story can be multiple text frames threaded together across pages.) Then you can move those chapters around by selecting the pages in the Pages panel and dragging them to a new position. To do that more easily, you can make the Pages panel thumbnails bigger (use Panel Options in the panel menu) and you can even use color labels to identify different chapters.
    https://creativepro.com/keep-your-pages-in-order-with-color-labels.php

    That said, you definitely could put each chapter in its own InDesign document and then combine the docs into a book panel. There’s lots more on this subject at Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning.

    Break a leg! :-)

  • May 5, 2017 at 7:14 am #94252
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    We never use the book feature. All of our publishers want one InDesign document. In rare exceptions, two files.

  • May 5, 2017 at 9:27 am #94263
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Color labels… never even knew that existed. Great advice from everyone. Thank you. Now visualize Zelda Rubenstein from (the original) Poltergeist brushing a lick of hair from her brow and instead of declaring: “This house is clean!” she says, “This question is answered!”

    • May 5, 2017 at 12:37 pm #94278
      Dwayne Harris

      Member

      Glad you found your answer :)

• Author
  Posts