Books > Synchronize suggestions

[MikeTO]

If your book has 35 chapters and you want to sync a text style change you must select all the chapters before choosing Synchronize. I can do that quickly (Shift+click or give the panel focus and use Cmd+A) but many users won't know that and they'll worry that they have to leave the Style Source Chapter unselected before using the command (tip: it's okay to leave it selected). Perhaps the command should be named Synchronize Selected Chapters and there should be a second command, Synchronize All Chapters?

The Synchronize Settings dialog has a Synchronize Now button which is helpful if you want to change the settings temporarily, sync, and then change the settings back. But the dialog is modal so you must select the target chapters before opening the dialog, and inevitably, you won't have done that. If the dialog has to be modal, perhaps a Synchronize All Chapters button would be more helpful here?

The dialog should probably be titled Synchronize Settings to match the menu command.

[MikeTO]

I just realized that if you don't select one or more chapters and choose Synchronize, it will synchronize to all of them. This isn't documented in Help.

[BR22]

I would like to suggest a few other changes to Synchronize as well:

1. There doesn't currently seem to be a way to make a global change to a book for the Document Setup for things like page size, margins, color, or bleed. For example, if you want to change your book margins you need to go to each chapter and make the change and then either edit each master page to use the new margins or remap pages to master pages if you add a new master in the Style Source chapter.
2.  I would guess that the current behavior for synching master pages is not what most people would need. It would be great to at least have the option to overwrite the master page in a chapter if it has the same name as a master in the Style Source.

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, BR22 said:

There doesn't currently seem to be a way to make a global change to a book for the Document Setup for things like page size, margins, color, or bleed. For example, if you want to change your book margins you need to go to each chapter and make the change and then either edit each master page to use the new margins or remap pages to master pages if you add a new master in the Style Source chapter.

That's correct, you can't sync changes to things like page size, margins, and bleed. I understand why it works the way it does but your suggestion is a good one. It would also be nice if you could rename masters and text styles and have the name changes synced without new masters and text styles being created in the other chapters.

I highly recommend getting your chapter template and styles perfect before building additional chapters.

[PaoloT]

Am I wrong, or you can't change the style names globally? This is one of the most irritating things in InDesign.

Paolo

 

[MikeTO]

3 hours ago, PaoloT said:

Am I wrong, or you can't change the style names globally? This is one of the most irritating things in InDesign.

If you're working with a single document, you can change a text stye name and all text formatted with it will have the new name.

If you do the same thing in the Style Source Document for a Book and then sync the other chapters, they will have a new text style created for the new name. The text in those chapters will still be formatted with the old style name. I was pointing out that renaming a text style doesn't work for books because the unique identifier for a text style is its name so there's no way for Publisher to sync a name change. It's the same for master page names and presumably table format names.

[PaoloT]

7 hours ago, MikeTO said:

If you do the same thing in the Style Source Document for a Book and then sync the other chapters, they will have a new text style created for the new name. The text in those chapters will still be formatted with the old style name.

Really awful. This is one of the worse aspects of InDesign that passed into Publisher unchanged. Now, let's see what happens when one has to rename the styles (and any other style or master page) in all the chapters of a long book…

Paolo

 

[MikeTO]

3 hours ago, PaoloT said:

Really awful. This is one of the worse aspects of InDesign that passed into Publisher unchanged. Now, let's see what happens when one has to rename the styles (and any other style or master page) in all the chapters of a long book…

Well, you don't really need to rename the text styles or masters, you can live with what you have since the name isn't that important. Changing this would require adding a unique identifier to each style or master instead of relying on the name.

The bigger issue is if you decide to tweak the master in other ways, such as editing the margins as you pointed out. Page size isn't a huge deal, most people finalize the page size before creating subsequent chapters but sometimes might change the margins or realize they forgot to set the bleed properly. If you need to do this, I recommend doing it manually in each chapter and deselecting sync master pages in Synchronize Settings.

Edited July 7, 2023 by MikeTO
fixed typo

[PaoloT]

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

Well, you don't really need to rename the text styles or masters, you can live with what you have since the name isn't that important.

It can happen more often than one can expect. For example, you may want to reuse text, where the structure's hierarchy levels are globally promoted or demoted (think to a chapter of a book becoming a single article). Or having to switch from a traditional Volume-Chapter-SubChapter naming to an H1-H2-H3 one.

Publisher is a closed program, at the moment. When it starts being able to export data and be included in a wider workflow, styles will change name often.

Paolo

 

[Lothyende]

Great suggestions. Especially BR22's!

It would be perfect if Document Setup could optionally apply to a Book instead of just one Chapter.
After all, in most cases, one would want all chapters to have the same margins, bleed, format, colour model and whatnot.

Of course, as MikeTO mentions, ideally you'd have templates and styles 100% done before starting to lay out chapters. But I guess it even happens to experienced users that something in the layout needs to be changed afterwards. Right now, that comes down to a discouragingly tedious errant of having to change document settings and syncing Master pages across all chapters in a book; and then, for every chapter individually, manually re-assigning the newly copied master pages to all pages in the chapter - while making sure you don't pick the wrong one because the copied master pages' names are identical to the old ones.

I also found that when re-assigning a master page to a page containing an image, the image's scale and location relative to the image frame are reset to default.
I can see the rationale for all these behaviours, but it sure would make things a lot easier if we could optionally have Book-level Document Setup, Guides, and Master pages.
Oh, and book-level search & replace would be brilliant  !