Using the Book Panel in InDesign
This article appeared in Issue 12 of CreativePro Magazine.An InDesign Book is just a bunch of separate InDesign INDD files that are collected in the Book panel. Associating separate files this way gives you the benefits of breaking up one large file into smaller pieces while still allowing you to number the pages continuously between files, create a single PDF from all the files, and perform other crucial tasks.
The typical way designers use the Book feature is to create a multi-chapter book, with one chapter per InDesign file. But Book files can be useful for any long document that contains logical sections that can be laid out as separate files.
What Is a “Book?”
When you choose File > New > Book, an INDB (InDesign Book) file is created and the Book panel appears on the screen. Then, you can add InDesign files from anywhere in your local file system, including a network server, to the Book panel, either by clicking the + icon at the bottom and selecting one or more InDesign files or by dragging files into the panel from the macOS Finder or Windows File Explorer.
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What a fantastic overview of the Book panel! Great stuff. I’ll be keeping this handy as a reference when I need to jog my memory on those scripts.
There is a quick way to open all the documents in a book. It’s weird, and it’s clunky, but if you select all the documents in the book panel, then double click on any of them, they all open. With a fast machine and lots of memory, this can really speed up Find/Change, spell check, updating cross-references, and updating the book TOC.
Save All (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S, Cmd+Opt+Shift+S) and Close All (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+W, Cmd+Opt+Shift+W) keyboard-only, not-on-the-menu commands become very useful once you’re done!
Thanks for these great additions, Alan!
Peter Kahrel also has a very useful script for endnotes which InDesign plonks at the end of a book chapter. If you need to break the links between the endnote ref number and the endnote text in order to place the endnotes in a separate .indd file for a book, the script to use is end_to_static_CC2018.jsx. I set books all the time and this is such a useful script – I daresay it has been updated for the latest versions of InDesign.
Anne-Marie Concepcion just alerted me to the fact that, with a little bit of work, you CAN use the “Import PDF comments” workflow with PDF’s generated from a book file, at least with InDesign 2022 and newer. If you use the book panel, you’ve got to watch her recent video at https://www.linkedin.com/learning/indesign-tips-for-design-geeks/import-pdf-comments-into-multiple-indesign-files?u=2125562 to see how to do this. This is really slick.