Search the Community

In resource manager I can't easily distinguish between linked, integrated and collected resources. I think that it can be really useful to highlight what resources are neither integrated nor collected, in order to avoid accidental deletion of linked files.

I did a first-time test of the make-collection feature and got quite the surprise. I made a temporary directory of the hard drive. With a small Publisher document open, I selected Document > Resource Manager, selected all image files shown there, and clicked Collect. For the destination I selected the temporary directory and then the collection was made. After checking to ensure that all files appeared in the temporary Collect directory, I removed it. At that moment Publisher announced a loss of linkage to all of the image files in the document. It appears the program had just re-linked all images to the versions that were copied to the Collect subdirectory. (Had I missed an option that specifies: only copy them — don't re-link them?) Then I had to re-link all of them manually to their original location. I'm glad it's a small document. If I had to do that in the document once it's finished, I'd be at it all day as there does not appear to be a way of doing it in a batch (which would make sense if the missing image files were all in the same directory—which, in this case, they were). Restoring the links seems to be a one-file-at-a-time operation. As far as I can tell, Publisher's online help file (the topic on making a collection from the Resource Manager) does not mention the change of linkage in this situation. Is the feature working as designed? The "gotcha" of suddenly changed linkages could be a nasty surprise indeed for the unwary with a large document containing image files residing, originally, in multiple locations.