One might guess that people were actually objecting to the CS3 and CS4 behavior: if you lock a frame to prevent it from changing and do a global replace on the “remaining” text, text in the locked frames was also changed. That could be called a bug.

In this case, CS5's behavior is more consistent: if you lock something, you cannot change it until you unlock it.

A “run book” as in a short-hand op manual? Kudos for making one with InDesign! System engineers yet to come will hopefully appreciate it from the usual crappy Word jobs.

I don't think you need an actual template, as technically they don't seem to be very demanding. I think I'd go for wide, wide, wide margins to accommodate occasional hand-written scribbles and notes, clear and big chapter titles, perhaps even starting each separate sub-section on a new page (it depends on the length of the text per section). Go for an easy readable font, use lots of spacing. For a “classic” look, use a sans serif font for the headings (Helvetica is “the” classic; but you can go wild and use Myriad Pro, since it comes free with InDesign) and a serif font for the plain text (Minion Pro; or perhaps — if you have it — Century Schoolbook). Be consistent in your design: use the sans font for all headings, for tables, and for figure legends, and the serif font for plain text only.

Basic InDesign skills requirements:

1. Master Pages. They Rule. Define your margins on them, allowing for some space at the bottom for a page number, and, optionally, at the top for a repeating header. (Check the Help on how to automatically generate chapter headers!)

2. Styles, styles, styles. Define Paragraph styles for your chapter titles, subheadings, plain text, figure and table captions, and table contents. Define Character styles for regular text attributes (bold, italic) as well as for frequent stuff like

. If you suddenly decide you don't like Courier for your sample code, change the Character style to use another (non-proportional) font and you are done. Don't forget to define Table styles as well, so all of your tables look the same, and you are able to change all of them in one go.

3. Lynda.com. Lots of tutorial videos, showing how to actually do the stuff in my points 1 and 2!

4. … Erm. Especially check out point 3.

As for InDesign templates: well, there are lots of them out there but I never found one I could use right away. I prefer to design “in parts”, that is, I take some page format, import lots of text into it, then go fiddling with page size, margins, styles, fonts, and whatnot until I'm largely satisfied. Then I continue with the lay-out of the entire document, but I'm always improving little things here and there. That's why using 'styles, styles, styles' is so important.

Ah, I thought you were wondering if the page numbers get updated correctly.

No: you cannot have automatic renumbering without having InDesign open and update each document. The only way you could do that is by doing the exact opposite: set the page number manually (but then you cannot move individual documents around anymore).

The “starting page number” does not 'live' in the Book document, they are stored inside each separate doc, as you can see if you open one of them without opening the Book file first: the starting page number will still be correct in relation to the entire book. The only function of the Book file in this is changing it when necessary.

That said: if you changed one document but did nothing that ought to affect the other documents, you only have to update that one. The other files may get 'touched' by InDesign (if only to check if the page numbers are still correct) but if your page count did not change, they won't actually be changed.

Ouch — good one, Anne-Marie! Yup, that's another one — small columns in combination with long words and no hyphenation.

Greg, if possible, avoid manual line breaks. Those can be irritating little buggers; one of their more nasty side-effects is that they will forcibly justify the 'current' line, if you are using full justification. (I do hope you don't, though; narrow columns w/o hyphenation ought to be ragged right).

You can better use “Optional Line Breaks” — hold on while I check what they are actually called … “Discretionary Line Break”, in the popup menu under “Insert Break Character”. These behave like Discretionary Hyphens, in that they can break any word at any place, but they don't show the hyphen.

You can insert them manually where you think they are needed (if doing that a lot, assign a hotkey to the command), but you can also insert them using regular Find/Change. For your PriceWaterHouseCooperUnlimitedCorporation, search for that, and put this in the “Change To” field:

Price^kWater^kHouse^kCooper^kUnlimited^kCorporation

— each ^k will be inserted as a Discretionary Line Break, and ID will use whichever fits best with its current paragraph/line/spacing composer. Inserting multiple ones is no problem at all, ID will pick one and ignore the rest. If your text reflows, it'll simply use another one, whereas with manually inserted line breaks it cannot change the breaking point.

A-ha.

Check — with Invisible Characters switched on — for a hard Page break (it looks something like a blue bullet). You can also search-and-replace this code: “^P” with this one “^p” — replacing any Page Break with a simple paragraph return.

It's also possible ID imported wrong Keep With Next settings. Select all of the text, then call up the Keep With Next dialog. If the “Keep With” field or “Start on” fields are empty, there are mixed settings in the text that may try to keep everything together, or force a new page per paragraph. Enter “0″ for “Keep with next”, and “Anywhere” for the “Start on”.

And place your cursor somewhere inside the overset text in the Story Editor and check if all of the text has “No Break” applied to it. If ID cannot break a paragraph somewhere, it refuses to fill any further pages.

(Ed.)

And another one: if the text imports with a *huge* left or right indent value, ID cannot compose its lines either. You'll only have to check the first overset paragraph for this.

Now if I could just index by GREP…

(?i)^Now there is a (good|great) idea for Adobe! Perhaps as an option on the ~{Add All~} button — ~{Add Using GREP~}

It would make it possible to have “dog” as entry, and use the expression “dog(s)?” to add all occurrences of both “dog” and “dogs”. Or even “(?!dogfight)dog*”, to add all words starting with “dog” — excluding “dogfight”. Oh the possibilities …

Now if I could just index by GREP…

(?i)^Now there is a (good|great) idea for Adobe! Perhaps as an option on the ~{Add All~} button — ~{Add Using GREP~}

It would make it possible to have “dog” as entry, and use the expression “dog(s)?” to add all occurrences of both “dog” and “dogs”. Or even “(?!dogfight)dog*”, to add all words starting with “dog” — excluding “dogfight”. Oh the possibilities …