13 Replies Latest reply: May 19, 2009 7:48 PM by Quite CJ RSS

    The lack of spirit in Book

        • 1. Re: The lack of spirit in Book
          Community Member
          Talk me out of combining a book file into one document. What are the disadvantages? Here's is some background.

          I've been using Book now for several weeks, combining 49 chapters into one book, and I must say, because of the limitations, I'm not convinced of Book's advantages over just using one big document. But I haven't yet tried the one big document, so I may be speaking too soon.

          The big advantage in separate documents is the reduced time in opening and saving, and if a catastrophic error is encountered only that chapter is affected. Also, having separate chapters allows you to find them easily amongst lots of others. In my case, my chapters have names not numbers, and I find it quite easy to search for them in Finder rather than search through a large document.

          Comes a time when an author thinks of Book. For me, like women in the 50s becoming jobless after marriage, it wasn't a choice -- opening a Book file just happened. It's what you do, isn't it? You arrive at a certain stage and you open a Book file. I'm not so sure now.

          Let me summarize. Correct me if I'm wrong. Going through the Book options in order:

          ADD, REPLACE, REMOVE DOCUMENT
          At the document level, use MOVE, but not quite as easy.

          SAVE, CLOSE
          Book doesn't save or close the separate chapters, so Book offers no advantages. And Book can't open all chapter at once. If you select all chapters and try to open them, it kicks you to a new window which asks which documents you want to open. If you click on a chapter and press Command-A, the Macintosh-wide shortcut to select all, it doesn't work. Conclusion: Book is an actual hindrance to opening and closing chapters.

          PREFLIGHT BOOK
          No advantage over preflighting a single large document.

          PACKAGE SELECTED DOCUMENTS FOR PRINT
          No advantage over a single large document.

          EXPORT SELECTED DOCUMENTS TO PDF
          Book is less flexible here because it can't export a range of pages.

          PRINT SELECTED DOCUMENTS
          Again, Book is less flexible because it can't print a range of pages.

          DOCUMENT INFORMATION
          Book offers no advantage.

          SYNCHRONIZE...
          Book has a definite advantage here, and can accomplish in short measure what cannot be done any other way -- overwriting swatches for instance.

          UPDATE CROSS REFERENCES
          I consider Book to be at a disadvantage for this one. In my case, even though no chapter is opened, Book takes about 30 seconds to do whatever it does when it first opens ("Processing book documents"), about the same time that I guess a large document would take to open. Then when you do want to synchronise, Book has to open all the documents individually anyway, whereas the single large document would be ready to update immediately.

          NUMBERING
          I am not aware of any advantage of using Book to do this.
          • 2. Re: The lack of spirit in Book
            Community Member
            The only advantage of Book that I can see is in synchronising. Before I tried Book I thought one advantage would be in using Find. I wrongly assumed Book would have a specialist Find function; but no, the only way to Find in a Book is to do it the normal way. Book really should have a specialist Find ability. i.e buried inside Book should be a simple text file of everything in the Book, allowing very quick searches. TextEdit can find items in a text file 5 times the size of my 800 page book, significantly faster than InDesign can.

            Book has one serious, irreducible disadvantage that compels me to combine all the chapters into one large document -- Book cannot impose. Yeah, OK, you can pay through the nose for Quite Imposing, but for a simple two-up book -- once off in my case -- that's not a sensible option. And according to one poster in a previous thread of mine, using QI you have to manually enter the page imposition anyway. I don't relish doing that across 800 pages.

            There is another -- what I thought might have been serious -- issue regarding moving from Book to one large document: cross-references. I thought: "What's going to happen to my several hundred cross-references when I merge 49 chapters?" I was doubtful about the result. But a quick test of merging two documents, seems to indicate that InDesign handles the moved Text Anchors appropriately.

            So why use Book, unless you want to synchronise? I can see the advantage in retaining separate chapters while a book is in progress (shorter opening, save, and moving-about times, and more disaster proof); but come the time of combining the chapters into book form, what are the advantages? I can't see any --other than synchronising.

            I don't think Adobe has entered into the proper spirit of Book. Where is the Find, the imposition across chapter boundaries, the automatic page insertion across multiple chapters, the multiple open, the Convert to Single Document function? I'm looking forward to the time (CS7?) when InDesign moves beyond being a page layout program, a glorified text and object processor at page level, and becomes a book layout program -- a chapter processor.

            If InDesign was a forestry worker it's a man with a chainsaw. It needs a few bulldozers for the heavy work.
            • 3. Re: The lack of spirit in Book
              Community Member
              >and if a catastrophic error is encountered only that chapter is affected.

              If ID crashes your document opens to its last state the next time ID is openedyou won't lose any work. The book feature doesn't have anything to do with backing up, there are plenty of inexpensive, automated backup solutions available.

              >Book cannot impose

              Neither can InDesign.
              • 4. Re: The lack of spirit in Book
                Community Member
                >Conclusion: Book is an actual hindrance to opening and closing chapters.

                I'm on Windows, so maybe it's different in a Mac, but I can open all files in the Book file by select them and double clicking.

                >Book is less flexible here because it can't export a range of pages.

                You export and print ranges of pages by doing it through individual files.

                >So why use Book, unless you want to synchronise?

                For the reasons you've alread identified: synchronising, shorter opening, save, and moving-about times, and more disaster proof. Those are all good reasons for me to use a Book file.

                >but come the time of combining the chapters into book form, what are the advantages?

                But why would you want to combine the files once the publication is finished? You haven't offered any good reasons to combine them and that just seems like a waste of time and effort to me. You also lose the Book file advantages if you or someone else later needs to work on that publication again.
                • 5. Re: The lack of spirit in Book
                  Scott Falkner Community Member
                  I had a catalogue to design that listed upcoming agricultural auctions. There were about 100 auctions, and ten people to lay out all the sales. I made templates based on where the auction was and whether it was a one-page or multi-page listing.

                  As one document it would have needed twenty different master pages. Easier to work with only a few masters. Also, each sale's text could be formatted independently by editing the Styles without buggering up other sales using the same styles. Text was generated from a database in tagged text format.

                  So while syncing styles is a nice feature of a Book, the ability to not sync styles was the real winner here.

                  Making a book was the ideal solution. The only problem was the stupid and unnecessary limit of 100 documents to a book. I needed to make two books.
                  • 6. Re: The lack of spirit in Book
                    Community Member
                    I can't fathom why anybody would want to arm wrestle with 800 pages in one file. Our projects average 200 pages, and as revisions to text, graphics and tables come in, Book allows me to: Zero in on the targeted section; add or delete pages as needed without worrying about page numbering; add or delete graphics and automatically maintain Figure XX (using numbered lists + running headers); tweak styles and synchronize; easy open, easy print, easy orgnization.

                    I wouldn't go near a large project without Book.
                    • 7. Re: The lack of spirit in Book
                      RodneyA Community Member
                      I assemble an academic journal, and each article is its own document. Easy to create PDF files of single articles for proofing by the authors (if I used a single document for the whole issue I'd constantly be paging through to find start and end page numbers), and when I get an error about a missing linked graphic, I know it'll be on the article I'm working on, not somewhere else in the book. I also can run my script on a newly imported word file without having to worry about whether it's going to make subtle changes to other word files I've already formatted.
                      • 8. Re: The lack of spirit in Book
                        Community Member
                        Other benefits of using the book feature include the ability to have multiple users working on a project concurrently, and the ability to different page sizes in a project.
                        • 9. Re: The lack of spirit in Book
                          Community Member
                          Thanks for all the hints. I'm taking it all on board before I merge my chapters. Some observations:

                          i You export and print ranges of pages by doing it through individual files.

                          I may want to export to PDF across chapter boundaries. A merged document will allow that.

                          i I'm on Windows, so maybe it's different in a Mac, but I can open all files in the Book file by select them and double clicking.

                          I just checked on my Mac. Double-clicking opens all selected chapters, but Command-O (my usual approach) doesn't.

                          i ...synchronising, shorter opening, save, and moving-about times, and more disaster proof. Those are all good reasons for me to use a Book file.

                          I'll let you know about the shorter opening times when I compare the two methods. I'm particularly interested in comparing Find times for one large document vs separate documents. It was a major effort to go through the entire book checking as single passes: 'bought' vs 'brought'; 'practice' vs 'practise'; 'past' vs 'passed' and about 30 other word pairs that can be confused. Searching through one large document may be several times faster. But I don't know yet.

                          i But why would you want to combine the files once the publication is finished?

                          So I can impose Perfect bound, 2-up, across chapter boundaries. My book is being printed on a Xerox iGen and I'm going to use the full flexibility that digital printing allows. Each book will be individualised for the person it is printed for. But further: some people won't want to buy the entire book (about $150), so I'm offering them their own version - which chapters do you want? Some people may be interested in just a dozen chapters which they can have for, say, $30.

                          For example, if I have one large document I can impose certain page ranges: "62-65, 82-85" with signature size of 4 pages (just as an example) and do it within InDesign. Quite a powerful flexibility. Book can't do that.

                          I'm not saying Book is not useful, just that it is not as useful as it could be. And in my circumstance, I may be better off with one large file.
                          • 10. Re: The lack of spirit in Book
                            Tony Morse Community Member
                            Bear in mind the imposition can be done at the iGen RIP.
                            • 11. Re: The lack of spirit in Book
                              Community Member
                              I haven't checked with the operator yet, about imposition. It's something I must do when I next contact the printer. But leaving it up to the printer removes the flexibility of variable-length signatures, which I may require. Some of my images which cross the middle of the page, I may want to appear on a centre page of a signature so the image is whole. It's just an idea I might try to implement.
                              • 12. Re: The lack of spirit in Book
                                Community Member
                                >It was a major effort to go through the entire book checking as single passes ... Searching through one large document may be several times faster.

                                Why would you think it would be faster to search through one file than to search through all book files at once?

                                As far as all this exporting across chapters and imposition goes, just export the whole book to PDF and impose that or delete unwanted pages from the PDF.
                                • 13. Re: The lack of spirit in Book
                                  Quite CJ Community Member

                                  Guy,

                                  You don't have to enter all the pages in Quite If it's a simple booklet you just use Create booklet. (really easy) If it's a little more complicated lets say a 4up you just have to have a group of 4 and a Rule of 4 1 2 3 or 4* 1* 2 3 if you want them head to head again pretty easy. You do not have to enter all the numbers in.

                                   

                                  If you'd like to take a test drive download Quite Imposing or Quite Imposing Plus Mac or Windows.

                                  Hers is a temporary number to test drive without X's before you ever purchase.


                                  Quite Imposing Plus V1/V2
                                    Expires end 6/2009  Serial 7116-2660-5540-8766  Code 6696
                                  
                                  
                                  Also, once loaded: Check out Getting Started tech sheet. Go to our Imposition Control Panel and click on the
                                  ? button.....then click the Getting Started button. Lots of good information on signature setups Step-by-step
                                  Instructions and New features.

                                  You've already looked at www.quite.com/imposing/techsheet .



                                  cheers,
                                  Charles


                                  Charles James
                                  Technical/Marketing Director
                                  Quite Software
                                  1527 Law Street
                                  San Diego, CA 92109
                                  USA

                                  858.581.9143
                                  charles@quite.com
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