Setting up a large project – Document or Book

[doc_creator]

Hello everyone,

I was hoping to draw on the knowledge and experience of the community on here.

I have some experience with designing posters and flyers and small documents with InDesign and so I’ve been given a job at work to format a series of three large (approx. 100 pages) (currently Word) documents into InDesign. The documents will be completed in word before being handed over to me and I’ll then have a couple weeks to format them in InDesign before send them off to the printer.

The structure will be approximately as follows.

Document 1

Chapters 1-8

Document 2

Chapters 1-13

Document 3

Mostly images

So I would like to be as prepared as possible with some kind of template set up ready so that I can get the job done in time. So I have a few questions with regards to setting up my document before getting started.

My main question at the moment is what type of document would be best t

o go for Book or Document? Each document will be made up of chapters which will each have some specific formatting. Each chapter will be themed by a colour so heading titles/page numbers/first letter of paragraph will all be the same colour depending on what chapter they are in. But this will be the only difference with character and paragraph styles remaining the same between chapters.

As a newbie to InDesign I’m looking to do this with as few additional levels of complication as possible. Also, if I have a new file for each chapter there’s going to be 20 plus files which might get a bit unwieldly. I am therefore (intuitively) leaning towards just having one file for each of the documents.

Thanks. Any help, tips, advice and guidance will we gratefully received!

[Barb Binder]

I'm a fan of working with books in InDesign, and they are a regular part of my day-to-day workflow, but if you are new to books and your files are that short (100 pages each is short, IMO), you can certainly get away with single documents.

It's a tight deadline for three projects, and you'd have to get up to speed on the book features. If you have time to do that while you are waiting for the files—great! You can learn the new workflow, play with it, and hit the ground running. Otherwise, you'll be fine with three standalone InDesign docs. You can still generate a TOC in the front, and number the front matter with roman numerals. And mostly importantly meet your deadline without too much stress.

[Derek Cross]

In addition to Barb's excellent suggestions (and I agree separate documents rather than the book feature may be easier to cope with). I suggest you use some of the time before you get the MS, in creating some specimen pages so you can get the margins, text fonts, sizes, leading, colours and so on sorted and agreed before you start. If you can get the people creating the Word document to use styles, you can save a lot of time.

Other points: confirm the trimmed page size, when setting up the document select Print for the intent, select facing pages, add 3mm bleed, use primary text frame, work in RGB color mode, use paragraph and character styles, check the Effective PPI of your images is around 300PPI. Ask your printer if they have any specs and if not select PDF/X-4 for the PDFs you supply the printer, with Use Document Bleed Settings selected, and supply single pages (not spreads).

Make incremental back-up copies of your documents as you proceed and keep additional copies off-site.

[doc_creator]

Many thanks Barb and Derek. That is all extremely useful. Just to clarify something though.

Intent – The document will be made available online as a PDF as well as in print. How radical are the differences between the two? My plan (provisionally) is to design the project for print (use CMYK) and just use this version to go online. In actual fact will I have to make two completely different documents; one with print intent and one with web intent?

All the best.

[Barb Binder]

Is this a colors question, or do you want the file to look entirely different for the print version vs the online version?

[Derek Cross]

You can use the same basic documents but for the version for downloading from a website you can choose a PDF version that produces a smaller size PDF. Or maybe you can experiment with Publish Online.

[Jeff Witchel, ACI]

You may want to check out a video tutorial about the Book feature before getting started:

http://www.jeffwitchel.net/2015/07/using-the-power-of-the-book-feature-in-indesign/

Here's a video about the Table of Contents feature:

http://www.jeffwitchel.net/2015/08/setting-up-an-indesign-table-of-contents-automatically/

[Design Stream]

The basic InDesign features that I've found to be most useful in creating long documents is master pages using automatic page numbering and style sheets. I find it's best to thoroughly work out the design on a few pages and get that approved before moving ahead. Using those features makes styling so much easier to change when the client decides that the font should be a point size larger. Lynda.com is a great resource for learning these things.