Is there a way to have in-page "master elements" ? (symbols)

[davidesieb]

I've been using InDesign for years and this wasn't possible at the time, but I'm hopeful that maybe it has changed since: is there a way to "instance" elements that I'll be using on multiple pages; elements that are not in a specific position on the screen (⍯ Master pages) and that are composed of several elements; say events infos groups with title, subtitle, text, background, date etc... that will be used on many pages of my doc but that I wish graphic changes done in one place could impact all other instances (without overwriting text/color values), the way "symbols" worked in Flash (rip) or Sketch? I wouldn't understand that this couldn't be possible in 2018... ; )

Thank you for your help

[Chad Chelius]

Well there are no symbols in InDesign but from what you describe, I feel like you just need to make use of paragraph/character styles and Object styles. You say you want to change the graphic attributes in one place and then have them update in other locations without affecting the text/color values. So is each instance different text or is it the same text with different formatting? The Place and Link feature allows you to create multiple children of parent elements that will update their content if the parent element is modified but each can have it's own appearance.

[davidesieb]

Thank you Chad. But my idea was going further than Text and Paragraph styles; I haven't used Object styles; they may be a way of doing what I want, but say I have got an "info box" with a background on many pages and I want to change the size of the background, and the positions of the different elements (texts and other) in the so-called box; would I be able to do that with Object styles? Anyway, thanks a lot for the hint; I'll try to know if I can get around what I want with it.

[Laubender · Accepted solution]

Hi davidesieb ,

a not very flexible solution would be a single page InDesign document where you set up your so-called "box".

Then you'd place the page from that document to various spots in your other documents. If you want to change the contents or the appearance of the "box" you'll do this in your single page document and update the links in all other documents.

You can do this also with a PDF/X-4 exported from your single page design. In case you need the box in various versions of InDesign.

Your question about object styles:

You can define an object style that sets the size of an object.

Position is a bit difficult, if you mean position relative to other objects with e.g. a group.

If you aim for that you may explore anchored objects where object styles are applied individually that control size and distance (position) from the anchor point. Also an object style for the text frame where all the other objects are anchored to.

You could synchronize object styles by using InDesign's book feature.

Regards,
Uwe

[davidesieb]

Hi Uwe, thanks a lot for your solution; I'll look into it and that may be what I'm looking for (in sort of a skewed way) ; )

Best,

David