When you choose New from the File menu in Adobe InDesign, you may have noticed the option to create a new book without ever knowing exactly what a book is. Well, in fact, books are a fairly nifty feature: they allow you to take a series of related InDesign document and treat them as a single entity; a book. All documents in the book can then share resources such as paragraph and character styles, colour swatches, master pages, sections and page numbering.
Once you have created a book, by choosing File-New-Book, the Book panel is displayed. It features a panel menu with all the necessary Book options. Your first task is to add documents to the book: from the Book panel menu, choose “Add Document” and select the documents you want to be treated as part of the book. The book panel can now be used as a launch pad for each of the documents it contains: simply double-click a document to open it.
The book file can now be saved. The book is a separate entity to the documents it contains and the documents in a book do not have to reside in the same location as the book or as each other. To save the book, choose Save Book in the Book panel menu.
Next specify which of the documents in the book will be treated as the style source. The document elected as the style source will be used as the master document in the process known as synchronization whereby InDesign replaces the colour swatches and styles of all documents in the book with those in the style source document.
To manage page numbering across the whole book, choose Book Page Numbering Options in the Book panel menu. The default is “Automatically Update Page & Section Numbers”: this will number pages in the documents within the book according to the order in which they are listed in the Book panel.
Books are a wonderful tool for division of labour since the fact that a document is part of a book does not stop it from being a regular InDesign document. If a book contains six documents, six different people can work on each of those documents and then, at the end, the whole book can be preflighted, printed and output as PDF as a single unit.
Both tables of contents and indexes can also be generated for an entire book as well as for a single document. Simply create the table of contents or index in the normal way but activate the option “Include Book Documents”.
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