One of the pitfalls of converting print publications to EBooks, is that designers often use forced line breaks (Shift+Return/Enter) in print-layouts to control where headings and even paragraph lines are broken. Doing so can cause problems when the same document is also converted to EPUB later on. Problems can occur when we leave the line breaks in the document, but also when we simply opt to remove them. Let’s have a look at what issues we encounter… and how we can fix things in InDesign without altering our layout prior to EPUB export.

The EPUB Export dialog provides us with an option to Remove these Forced Line Breaks on the fly if preferred.

Forced line breaks in InDesign document (Colour code explained later on).

Let’s assume we are working with a publication that has been originally prepared for Print and must now be converted for EBook publishing (be it for EPUB or Kindle)… what happens to the forced line breaks that were inserted?

1. if we opt to leave the forced line breaks in the InDesign document
2. if we opt to remove them from the InDesign document

1. Retain Forced Line Breaks during EPUB export

What happens when we export the EPUB and retain the forced line breaks? Well in a nutshell, the resulting HTML will include  <br /> characters. And with altering font-size these characters might generate some very unpredictable (read: unwanted) line breaks in our text.

Break characters inserted in EPUB HTML.

 Some unwanted line breaks appearing in the EBook.

 2. Remove Forced Line Breaks during EPUB export

Looking at the example above, it seems clear that you’d want to remove the forced line breaks during export right? So let’s see what else can happen.

 Possible result in EBook after line break removal (some ok, some not ok).

Yup, you’re not seeing things… (image above). Removing the forced line breaks can result in words being ‘fused’ together. Why does this happen in some cases and not others? Well, it’s all to do with the way the designer originally inserted the forced line breaks in InDesign:

• Recommended is to place the cursor in front of the character that needs to be moved to the next line, then press Shift+Return/Enter (GREEN). This retains the preceding space.
• Unfortunately this doesn’t always happen and in quite a few jobs I’ve worked on I encounter ‘missing’ spaces. In this case the space character between two words might have been highlighted when Shift+Return/Enter was pressed or the cursor was inserted at the end of a word when Shift+Return/Enter was pressed and then the leading space on the next line was removed manually. (RED)

No matter what happened, the removal of the space character as part of the forced line break insertion is causing a problem. So it’s important that we check our document for missing preceding spaces and fix things before we export our InDesign file to EPUB.

GREP Find/Change to the rescue

My preferred export way is to have the remove forced line break option enabled… it means less work in EPUB editing… IF we apply one essential step first before we export our InDesign document.

Basically we want to look for any forced line breaks in our document that are NOT preceded by a space character, and then we’d like to insert a space character in front of this break.

Tip: If you find yourself performing a ton of these Find/Changes prior as part of the EBook clean-up… consider purchasing Multi-Find Change plug-in for InDesign and you’ll be able to store all your EBook clean-up Find/Changes in a single set and apply them all in one hit see: www.automatication.com

Here we go…

Find what?

• Any character that is NOT a space: “\S”
• But we need to put it in a marking sub-expression, so we can put the character we found back in the text later on : “(\S)”
• Next we go look for the forced line break: “\n”

So our Find what string ends up looking like: “(\S)\n”

Change to?

We now need to change things to:

• The non-space character we found earlier with the first sub-expression, so we don’t end up losing that character from the text : “$1” (Found > Found  1)
• Followed by a space-character followed again by the Forced Line Break: “ \n”

So our Change to string ends up looking like: “$1 \n”

Next click the Change All button in the Find/Change dialog and…

You can now safely Remove all Forced Line Breaks when exporting your InDesign document to EPUB. Best bit about this: There  is no need to fiddle  with <br /> tags in the HTML afterwards

Postscript – Removing Selected Forced Line Breaks only

Doug (comments below) mentions that there are indeed cases where you’d like to retain the Forced Line Breaks. Poetry for example. In that case you’d probably be more likely to remove the forced line breaks all together in InDesign for those paragraphs that are NOT  poetry , and opt not to remove them during the EPUB export. Once again I’m a big fan of trying to get the export as clean as possible from InDesign so there’s less to do with HTML/CSS later on. The one side-note here is that removing those forced line breaks would result in text reflow in the InDesign document. So if you’re looking at a single InDesign file for Print and EBook export, you’ll need to refrain yourself from using forced line breaks as a designer As Keith mentions in his comment below. You could  apply a ‘no break’ as an alternative.

Assuming you find yourself working with a document that has its text formatted with paragraph styles, you can selectively replace the forced line breaks in the text and replace them by a single space. We’ll cover both the scenario where we don’t have a preceding space and do have a preceding space in a single Find/Change action.

Find/Change replace All forced line breaks with a single space

Once again we look for

• any non-space character ‘ \S’ followed by a forced line break ‘\n’  OR ‘|’
• any space character ‘\s’ followed by a line break ‘\n’

If we turn the non-space character and space character into a Marking subexpression ‘()’, we can then set our Change to to just ‘$1′

The only thing we still need to do is set the Find Format. If you don’t see this option in the Find/Change dialog, click the More Options button.

• Click the Specify Attributes to Find button
• In the Find Format Settings dialog choose the Paragraph Style for which you want to apply this Find/Change.
• And once again click Change All.

You’d need to repeat this Find/Change query for each relevant paragraph style.

Note: Tina Hender (@tinahender) tweets, that forced line breaks are also used for URL breaks. My guess would be that in this case you’re likely to see the forced line break at a ‘/’. I’d opt to perform a Find/Change that fixes these first of all. Again… Multi-Find Change for pre-EPUB clean-up will become a handy tool, as you can build this massive Find/Change Query Set in which a multitude of queries are run in one hit

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

I’d received client-supplied print artwork in InDesign, and the Links used in the document contained all sorts of naming conventions. Including the use of special characters. So I decided to perform the big clean-up. I could have used Adobe Bridge’s Batch Rename to convert special characters to underscores etc., but that would have left InDesign displaying a ton of missing links afterwards… What Marijan’s script allowed me to do is rename the images to my liking AND retain the Links in InDesign in one hit. Nice!

Script download / install

Download link: tomaxxiLINKrename.jsx

• Download the .jsx file from the above link.

To install the script:

• Show the Scripts panel (Window menu > Utilities)
• Right click the Application folder
• From the Script panel menu choose Reveal in Finder

• Double click the Scripts folder
• Double click the Scripts Panel folder

If you wish to, create a new folder in which you want to organise your scripts (it will appear as such in the Scripts panel).

• Place the script inside the Scripts Panel folder (or a sub-folder within this folder).

The installed script will now appear in the Scripts Panel.

Using the script

Marijan’s instructions for using the script come down to:

• Select the image with the Selection tool
• Run the script
• Rename image in dialog that appears
• Click Rename

Run Script: You run the script by double clicking it in the scripts panel, or selecting Run Script from the Scripts panel menu, or applying an assigned keyboard shortcut.

Be aware: Clicking a link to an image in the Links panel, will select the Content. Unfortunately, running the [1.0] version of the script when the content is selected throws an error. You must have the Container selected. The easiest way to do that is to press the Esc-key on the keyboard.

Using the Links panel to select images

I found myself working on a document that contained quite a few images that I wanted to rename. So to ensure I didn’t miss any, I used the Links panel to navigate from image to image before executing the script.

So I first of all assigned a keyboard shortcut to the script (Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts… Product Area > Scripts ). Then used the links in the Links panel to select the images in the InDesign document on by one and ran the script to rename.

Process I used:

1. Click image link (and press ESC after that to select the Container)
2. Run script
3. Type new name and click Rename
4. tadaaaa… new name…

If you happen to enter a name that’s already used and click Rename, you’ll receive a warning telling you that a file with the intended new name already exists.

In this case you have an option to a) Relink the selected image to that particular file (Click Yes), or b) Cancel the rename action, by clicking No .

If you change your mind… and want to Cancel out of the Rename placed file dialog, press Esc.

Some small improvements I’d suggest:

• Script to work when either Container or Content is selected.
• Rename placed file dialog to have ‘Rename’ and ‘Cancel’ buttons.
• File exists dialog: change text to ‘File already exists! Relink image to existing file instead?

Batch renaming: John H. in the 4th comments below points out that there are also batch image rename scripts available for InDesign as well. The last script in the InDesign forum posts he mentions, renames all image links in InDesign based on a ‘base-name’ you enter and adds a counter suffix to that name that numbers each image. E.g. you’d end-up with artwork001.jpg, artwork002.jpg etc.

Also If anyone out there has spotted a Batch Rename script for InDesign that a) retains original names, but turns them into web-friendly names (no spaces, special chars), for instance by replacing those chars with ‘underscores’. Let me know. I’d be happy to add some extra info about that script to my blog.

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

InDesign CS5.5 introduced significant new features for EPUB/HTML and PDF export. Building Accessible PDFs is now much, MUCH easier… It’s not yet perfect and we’ll still need to do some extra work in Adobe Acrobat X, but overall the delivery of an Accessible PDF is a lot less time-consuming than it would have been in working in InDesign CS5.

So I spend a few minutes testing what happens with figures created in InDesign CS5.5 (7.5.2) when we are building Accessible PDFs. In all cases Object Export Options was set to Apply Tag Based On Object, and Alt Text Source set to Custom (in Alt Text and Tagged PDF tab), and ensured ‘Create Tagged PDF‘ option was selected during PDF Export.

Below are this morning’s findings.

Test 1 – Original InDesign Artwork

Building a chart in InDesign, and Grouping the artwork together.

• Grouped InDesign charts that are NOT inline or anchored do not turn into Figures on PDF export.
• Inline/Anchored grouped InDesign charts do turn into figures, but loose the Alt Text allocated to them through the Object Export Options dialog.

Test 2 – Placed InDesign Artwork

So then I thought I’d be clever and build the InDesign chart in a separate InDesign document, and place this into the InDesign file that’s turned into an Accessible PDF:

Test 3 – Placed Illustrator Artwork

I then rebuild the InDesign chart in Illustrator and ran same three scenarios (independently placed, inline and anchored).

• Placed Illustrator artwork does convert to a Figure in the resulting PDF and retains its Alt Text
• Inline/Anchored Illustrator artwork also turns into Figures and retains the Alt Text.

In Summary, using InDesign artwork for diagrams/charts presently means extra work in Acrobat X to ensure the PDFs generated from the InDesign file are Accessible.

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

• An issue in the DOCTYPE of the EPUB, where InDesign would insert an extra space, which in turn caused iBooks to return an error and stop rendering the EPUB.
• The iBooks rendering issue when ;&shy;  (soft-hyphen) characters appear in a story.
• An issue caused by the InDesign document containing composite (CID) fonts , which resulted in InDesign unexpectedly quiting on File Export to EPUB.

Web references:

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Membership’s absolutely free, and you can even grab a cool drink and a slice of pizza before our meeting starts during our Pre-Meet-Gettogether.

The meeting’s held at Edith Cowan University campus (thanks to sponsorship) in Mt. Lawley.

Hope to see you there.

More info/registration:
http://www.indesignusergroup.com/chapters/perth/events/1914/

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

InDesign CS5.5 introduces a new feature called Linked Stories. I’ve just posted a contributor blog-post on InDesign Secrets that gives one example of how you could use this new feature.

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

One of the new InDesign CS5.5′s EPUB Export Option features is the ability to control whether images are exported with Fixed width or Relative to Page Size setting. In this blog-post I’m running through a few findings.

I’m only looking at the Fixed / Relative to Page Size settings in this blog-post, I realise there are many more settings and options available for images and object export, but will leave those for future blog-posts.

The example I’m using throughout this blog-post uses the following settings:

• Image width relative to the page width is 41%
• Image width relative to the text frame width is 50%.

Fixed

Selecting Fixed from the Image Size menu in the EPUB Export Options dialog seems to apply the following image resampling and resizing logic:

• First it looks at the actual pixel dimensions of the placed image.
  My source image in InDesign starts at 700px x 883px at 218ppi.
• The image is resampled to the set resolution. I used 150ppi which is an average ppi setting for eReading devices. Which changes the image settings to 481px * 607px at 150ppi.
• Before exporting the image-file into the EPUB package, the placement percentage at which the image is placed in InDesign is also considered, and this percentage (77% in my sample) is applied to the image settings. Resulting an image size of about 370px x 467px at 150ppi.

The resulting HTML, applies a few more calculations it seems. As the width and height attributes display the following:

Looking at those figures, I’m wondering where these settings originate from. It seems to be about 50% of the pixel dimensions in step 3 above. When I reduce the image size to be 25% of the text frame width, the HTML result again approximates this 25%, but is not exact.

The difference could be caused by rounding errors, but in all honesty I’m not sure if my theory is correct.  But let’s leave this be, as the main reason for this post is to look at what InDesign does with images in various positions when the Image Size setting is set to Relative to Page Size setting.

So what happens when we use the Relative to Page Size setting?

Relative to Page Size

Non-inline/anchored Images

Once again taking the same document I’ve tested with in the prior example and only changing the Image Size setting in the EPUB Export Options to Relative to Page Size.

The physical image size that appears inside the EPUB package is identical to that of the previous example, which I reckon makes sense, as it’s consistent. As the image is about 41% of the page-width, the HTML outcome is no surprise:

Note: InDesign nests images within a paragraph (p) element in resulting HTML. As there is no setting that allows us to define the paragraph style for this presently, the class values are automatically assigned during EPUB export. Resulting in the display of ‘para-style-override-n’ class values.

Inline/Anchored Images

So I wondered if Inline/Anchored images would provide a similar result when using the Relative to Page Size setting and ran a few more tests to try and understand what’s actually going on.

First of all I turned the previous ‘floating’ image into an anchored object, and ran the EPUB Export again. Ensuring that this time I also selected the Settings Apply to Anchored Objects checkbox.

The Settings Apply to Anchored Objects checkbox applies the Image Alignment and Spacing settings to anchored objects.  In the example above, it means that although the image is anchored to the start of the paragraph, the image will actually appear above the “Chapter Title” paragraph in the EPUB output instead of inline at the start of the paragraph.

Alright, so considering I’m using the Relative to Page Size Image Size setting, I would expect the resulting HTML to set the width attribute to 41%. However, upon checking the HTML I discovered that for anchored or inline images, InDesign sets the width percentage to the relative text frame width. Which in my example is 50%.

So it seemed at this stage that the relative image width setting is based on the width of the parent object within which it resides.

Text Frames with Text Inset

That begged the question: what happens when a text frame has a text inset AND contains an inline/anchored image. Would InDesign look at the parent text frame and regard the text inset values when calculating the width percentage?

A quick design change, and new EPUB export answered that question. And wow… was I surprised to see the result!!!!

The width percentage changed to 59%! That is seriously cool! And provides tons of potential in other areas – about which I will write a blog-post later on… I’m trying to stay focussed on the Relative to Page Size setting here… which as you can see now, shouldn’t be taken as ‘relative to the InDesign page size’, but relative to the parent text frame size.

Ok, so I sneaked in another tiny test… narrowing the previous text frame, and pasting that PLUS its inline image, into a new text frame set to the original width and inserting some text in this frame as well… to see if InDesign was looking at the parent of the inline graphic or the top-level parent… and it seems it looks at the parent of the inline graphic itself when setting the width percentage.

So that left the question: Would this work for inline images in tables? Let’s take a look.

Tables with Inline Images

Alright, so I created a simple 2 column table and inserted the inline graphic. The graphic filling 100% of the cell width to check if this relativity to parent object (table cell in this case) would work as well.

Unfortunately a sad face here the visual EPUB results quickly reveals what’s happening:

Only the parent text frame is considered when calculating the relative image width, the parent cell width is ignored. This means that the image width will be set to 50% in my example, resulting in the image displaying at half its size inside the table cell.

Take away the following: For the time being be aware that when using inline images inside tables, you’ll need to jump into the HTML and alter the width values for those images.

In the meantime I’ve filled out the feature/bug form, so hopefully in the future the relative width behaviour of images will be further enhanced. Also: If anyone’s figured out an alternate work-around or setting that changes this particular behaviour let me know and I’ll update this post or add a reference to your blog-post on the topic.

A feature enhancement for Adobe would be to remove the confusion that might be caused by the “Relative to Page Size” setting, I would propose changing the Image Size drop-down menu options to read:  ’Fixed’ | ‘Relative’. Additionally ‘Relative’ width settings should be calculated based on the width of the parent element. Thirdly, to eliminate the issue of automatic para-style-override class value assignments, it might be an idea to allow the user to define this ‘external’ paragraph style, either during EPUB Export or as part of the Object Export Options…

A word about iBooks: Just wanted to point out that presently there is still a bug in iBooks (eReader for iPad), that ignores the width attributed set for images. Liz Castro has written an excellent blog-post about this some time ago, that also provides a work-around for this issue. Reference: Controlling Image Size in iBooks.

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

InDesign CS5.5 now recognises character styles that are applied through nested styles and GREP styles during EPUB export.  That’s very cool!  It adds a span tag with class references to the style names by default, when leaving the Export Tagging, Tag setting set to [automatic] and Class field left empty.

FWIW I’m not promoting using the [automatic] setting with class field left empty as a ‘best practice’…  :)

There is however one exception: Drop Caps. When using a drop cap that’s formatted through the Drop Caps and Nested Style feature, no <span> tag is added to the resulting html inside the EPUB. The Drop Cap is basically totally ignored…

So I applied the Drop Cap character style over the top of the already formatted Drop Cap, and left the Tag set to [automatic], but added a Class name “dropcap”

After Exporting the EPUB and taking a look at the HTML that was generated I saw this:

Hmmm…. so I removed the Drop Cap reference within the Paragraph Style…

And exported the same document again, leaving the character style applied to the initial cap and with Export Tagging defined as before and ended up with the same result as earlier. As a last step, I forced the Tag option to span and exported once more…

Same result once again.

Wanted to share this finding. It’s not a major issue, as the matching style declaration is also added to the template.css, but it just makes a bit harder to develop a reusable template.css file for publications, when this char-style-override occurs. (Note, that I had the Include Style Overrides option in EPUB Export dialog deselected during all of this).

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Martinho da Gloria (www.automatication.com), this week released the 1.02 update for the Mulit-Find/Change plug-in he developed for InDesign.

About this plug-in

Whether it’s to fix common formatting issues in manuscripts you import in InDesign for book and EBook publishing, such as removal of double tabs, spaces, paragraph returns, conversion of hyphens to en or em-dashes. Or to apply paragraph/character styles etc. to text that’s imported with multiple style overrides, such as a Word document import containing half a dozen style overrides for the paragraph style style ‘Normal’.  If you find yourself performing the same series of InDesign Find/Change search and replacement actions over and over again, this is a super handy plug-in to have.

The idea behind the plug-in is that you can combine saved Find/Change Queries into Find/Change sets and apply multiple Find/Change commands with a single click. You can build Query Sets for the different groups of Find/Change commands you use for various jobs and Query Sets can be shared between plug-in users.

New features

The 1.02 maintenance release is a free upgrade for current Multi-Find/Change licensees and provides a series of cool new features:

• The release adds support for InDesign CS5.5 and continues to support InDesign CS4 and CS5.
• You can now import Find/Change queries when first launching the plug-in after install.
• You can import and export InDesign’s Find/Change queries to/from any location.
• And in my opinion the coolest new feature is the ability to use this plug-in to perform a Change Case command as part of a query that’s executed from Multi-Find/Change.

The plug-in in action…

After install the plug-in is triggered from the Window menu.

For each Query that’s added to a Query Sets you can also set Query Options to apply to the result by double clicking the Query name in the Style Set. For those headings that were typed with the Caps Lock on or Shift-key held down, you could for instance use this new Multi-Find/Change feature to fix captilisation issues in the text.

In the example above I added 2 saved GREP Queries to a Query Set. Each looks for all text set with a particular paragraph style (Heading 1 or Heading 2 in this case) and the found text is returned, then converted to lowercase through the added Query Option setting  (see screenshot below for InDesign Find/Change settings used).

Note: Although I used the ‘lowercase’ option to change the headings back to lowercase, I applied a GREP style within the paragraph styles that applies an All Caps character style to the first Word character of each sentence.

The result is an automatic fix for the Capitalisation issue on the headings.

For an earlier recording I made about Multi-Find/Change please check-out the video below.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHWMw3qH-s8

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Publishers quite often generate multiple paragraph styles for bulleted and numbered lists behaviour. For instance the first or last bullet point in a list might have slightly different space before and after settings applied to it.

I’ve been working on demo materials for the upcoming Print and ePublishing conference and was using the following style names:

• Bullet-1
• Bullet 2
• Bullet-1-last
• Bullet-2-last

The styles were part of a style group named “Lists”.

For each of the paragraph styles I left the Tag option set to [Automatic]. This ensures that InDesign automatically generates <ul> and <li> tags in the resulting html correctly, based on the selected EPUB export options.

And I assigned the same class-names to Bullet-1 and Bullet-1-last (bullet-1, sticking to the recommendation for xhtml to use lowercase characters).

Then exported the Lists sample file I had ensuring Bullets are Mapped to Unordered Lists (which will generate <ul> and <li> tags in the resulting HTML:

You can imagine I was quite surpised to see InDesign generate the following in my HTML and template.css:

What InDesign’s doing here is recognising for the “Bullet-1-last” paragraph style that it needs to set the Class name to “bullet-1″. However, for this particular paragraph style (and “Bullet-2-Last”) it adds the Style Group name as a prefix.

It puzzled me… and I couldn’t let it go until I finally figured out how to fix this (I’m not one to give up easily ). After trying a number of things:

Changing the paragraph style naming convention to not include the first hyphen seems to fix the issue. Turning “Bullet-1″ into “Bullet1″ and “Bullet-1-last” into “Bullet1-Last” etc.

As soon as I reran the EPUB export using the new style naming convention, the problem corrected itself, and InDesign correctly ignored the Style Group name when generating HTML and CSS.

Bob Levine (see comments below, thanks Bob!), points out you can also enter your own Tag as part of export settings. In running a quick test this morning (10-May), it seems that setting the Tag to <li> tag also resolves the issue. So solution number 2 (and definitely the easier one) would be:

To retain original style naming and enter your own tags instead.

That leaves an interesting issue with [automatic] setting … to say the least (maybe it is a feature? I’m not yet sure… will have to spend a little more time testing when I’ve got some more time on my hands later today).

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Have just posted a new blog-post on the InDesign Secrets blog. If you’re curious about pink, green and blue smart guides, then go and have a look and discover where and when smart guides pop-up in InDesign CS5.

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Happy to announce the launch of a new brain-child I’ve been working on in my limited spare time the past weeks. A new digital magazine published with Adobe tools… Adobe InDesign & Overlay creator plug-in for the layout, Digital Content Bundler for folio testing and Viewer Builder to generate the .ipa files (to test on my iPad) and .zip files for delivery to Apple.

You can download it from the App Store today.

It’s been a fun project to work on! What better way to learn how to use the new tools Adobe’s providing us for mobile and tablet publishing, than to actively produce a product with it?  The first edition is a short teaser of 10-pages, that will hopefully give you an idea of what is to come in the future. I’ve aimed to keep the design simple and hopefully effective. All feedback welcome. Hope to make the next one bigger and better of course

I’ve launched a separate web-site for this magazine as well www.latitude3195.com

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

• I name the Paragraph Style Group based on where the style is applied. For instance styles that are used within body cells of a table would appear in a Style Group named ‘td‘.
• Within the Style Group, the paragraph styles names themselves also have short names. E.g. text-blue

When applying the paragraph style “text-blue” to some text in a table cell, the resulting stylesheet in the CSS will become:
p.td-text-blue {
}

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Every now and again I encounter something in InDesign that I really like and that surprises me… I just had one of those “OMG… this is soooo cooool” moments… It’s probably something that’s been working in InDesign for a while… it might have even been announced as a new feature at some point… what ever it was… I hadn’t noticed it until about 20mins ago

Let me sketch the scenario… The project I’m working on consists of a series of InDesign documents. I’ve added all of the InDesign documents to an InDesign Book. As I’m working away on the production job, I encounter styles I still need to add… and I add them to the document I’m working on. In the Book panel I set the Style Source to this document and apply the Synchronise Book command from the panel menu, to push the newly created styles to the other documents.

Originally I hadn’t used Style Groups on this job, as I didn’t think I’d be generating too many different styles… However, as time progressed today, I thought…  ”Should have set-up Style Groups from the start, things are getting a bit messy here” … “now you’re going to have to create them in hind-sight and you might end up with duplicate styles when you synchronise the book…”

I was wrong and what followed was my little “wow”-moment

When you push styles into style groups and then Synchronise the Book… not only are the style groups added to the other documents… InDesign also moves the styles from their listing into those style groups.

Clever engineering Adobe! Love it!

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Balancing columns in InDesign CS5 is a breeze in the park… no more stress, no more loss of sanity. Want to learn more?

Read my new blog-post on InDesign Secrets: Keeping our (Vertical) Balance.

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker