What are the best practices to work with multiple chapters documents?

[Seweryn]

Hi,

 

I am working on some leaflet, where separate chapters/sections comes from different authors (text files).

What are best practices to work in such a case?

As I have to glue the document, whenever I got new text from any author I have to recreate his or hers chapter from scratch (text flows, fonts styles, ...).

Are there any options, not to do this all over and over again?

 

Remark: The main reason for my question is that for images, the workflow is pretty clear in that case. One shall use linked images and operate on resource manager.

 

Best regards,

Seweryn.

[thomaso]

6 hours ago, Seweryn said:

Are there any options, not to do this all over and over again?

Hardly, or limited.

If the author provides unformatted text that you are to update in your .afpub, there is no way to automate the re-formatting process. Depending on the changes in the text, it may even be more efficient not to place the whole text again, but to manually edit the text in the layout. That would require to get a document from the author with makes the changes from the last version obvious. Of course, this way of manual editing is more risky for the text content.

If the author provides formatted text: When you import a text document with menu File > Place, the text styles saved and applied in this document are imported into your .afpub. There you can change them or use them for Find & Replace to exchange them with other saved styles in your .afpub. So, for an efficient workflow, the author would use styles according to the designer's needs. Unfortunately, authors often ignore even the styles prepared in a text file template, so it is a question of their discipline and the hierarchical relationship between author and designer.

For a very complex text structure / layout it can be efficient to use the Data Merge feature. This is the only way in APub to keep a text document linked. Although you can update the linked file in APub it requires to generate the data merge again, once it's merged it's not linked any more. Data merge requires a lot more layout preparation than simple copy paste, place or import of the text.

[Old Bruce]

1 hour ago, Seweryn said:

I am working on some leaflet, where separate chapters/sections comes from different authors (text files).

What are best practices to work in such a case?

One of the best practises is to give the different authors deadlines. After that no changes other than spelling corrections will be allowed.

[Wosven]

4 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

After that no changes other than spelling corrections will be allowed.

Or such added fee for redoing the work again and again that the main editor would manage to get the last draft of those texts before the first proofreading for corrections*... if not in this edition, in the next book

Best practice would be to have the proofreading done first.

In your case, there'll be many proofreading for the texts, and many reflowing of the texts... a really bad situation with wasted time.