Publisher - assembling a book question

[CJW]

Each chapter in my book has a dozen or so pages. They share the same original template file and use the same layout and paragraph/character styles.  The master page in each chapter afpub file has page number and chapter name along the top.

I'm pulling these AFPUB files into a single Publisher file for the entire book and I would like to know how I can import the pages from these different files without losing the master page content in my document pages on the one hand, or creating an almost duplicate set of master pages for the 40-odd chapters

Any suggestions?

[sfriedberg]

One option would be to make each chapter a Publisher section.  In section manager, give each section the chapter name. Then in a common master page, insert the <SectionName> field where you want the chapter name to appear.  (See the menu Text > Insert > Fields)  For each section, the appropriate value (chapter name) will be interpolated, using the one common master page.

You can also control page numbering in the section manager.  The simplest thing is to just number consecutively from the beginning of the combined document.  But if you want every chapter to start renumbering from 1 (or whatever), you can do that, too.

You should review the Publisher documentation for "migrate content" (there's a useful video as well as the help pages) when assigning a new master page before beginning this process, and probably should double-check all your individual chapter masters to make sure text frames are named consistently to allow the migration feature to work reliably.  If all your chapter master pages are copies/clones of one, you're probably OK unless you have multiple text frames with the same name.

I would probably just copy and paste all the pages from the chapter documents to the combined document, define sections, create a common master, then assign (replace/migrate) the common master to all the pages, and delete the unwanted old chapter masters.  There may be a more elegant way of doing it.

[CJW]

Dear Sfriedberg -  that is brilliant, many thanks.  I was already aware of and using sections with page numbering but had not noticed the section field.      

I also am working to understand text frames better. At present, my masters have no text frames in them, just column guides.  Is the best practice to put blank text frames into the master pages?  

[Old Bruce]

4 hours ago, CJW said:

At present, my masters have no text frames in them, just column guides.  Is the best practice to put blank text frames into the master pages?  

No, not if you have text flowing from page to page.

Make a master page with linked text frames from the left page to the right page.

[CJW]

Well - things are not going that smoothly and some of the unexpected behavior looks suspiciously like a bug.  I have triple column, double column and chapter start master pages, with a title block. When I was trying to append files by importing pages, it was inserting a blank page and ignoring the text in the title block. With the continual ambiguity about modified master pages and text styles, I decided to make a simple experiment.

I took a multipage document and duplicated it. I then added it to itself. This avoids conflict between any of the masters or styles.

I still had the same issue - a blank page inserted where the title page should be, and the other pages following, with wrong masters applied and, again, missing the title block.

This behavior is not consistent, however, some of my afpub files, created from the same templates, append to themselves without issue.

Overall - I think there is room for improvement here. There is a 50/50 chance that RHS/LHS spread formatting needs flipping (inner spread margins are larger). One could make InDesign chapters and the book assembly feature was intelligent enough to align the pages to the margins, without any user interaction. 

I suspect I am going to have to create blank pages and manually copy paste all the content over from one document to the other.