From the course: InDesign Secrets
176 Quickly empty out an InDesign document of text and images - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
176 Quickly empty out an InDesign document of text and images
- I often use one document that I've already finished as a starting point for a new document, but I usually need to get rid of all the text and graphics first. I want to keep the frames, though, that way I have something to put my new text and images into. So, I'm going to point out a few tips for getting rid of a bunch of stuff in your documents quickly. First, let's tackle the pictures. If you were good and put all your pictures on one layer, then you can select them all super quickly by opening the Layers panel and then holding down the option, or alt key, and clicking on that layer. That selects all the objects on that layer. If you didn't have all your images on one layer, then you'd have to click on one and then shift-click on each of the other ones. Once you have all these graphic frames selected, you want to select the images inside those frames. And you can do that really quickly by clicking on this little weird-looking button up here in the control panel. It looks kind of like an alien or an octopus with a down arrow. That's the Select Content button and it selects inside frames to select the image inside of them. There's another way you can do it with a keyboard shortcut, too. I'll use that; just press shift+esc. Again, that goes inside the frame and selects the image. Now to get rid of those, you simply have to click the delete key on your keyboard. Now of course, this only works one spread at a time. If you have a lot of pages of images and it's too annoying to do it one spread at a time, then head over to indesignsecrets.com/free and search for delete images. There it is down there: delete all images. If you click on that, you'll find a blog post from which you can download a script. It's a free script and it works really well. If you don't know how to install a script, then you can read this blog post up here. Or you can watch the movie on that topic here in the online training library. I've already downloaded and installed that script, so I'll switch back to InDesign, and let's go run it. I'll go to the Window menu, choose Utilities, and then Scripts. Inside my user folder, I find that script so all I have to do is double-click on it. It warns me, "Are you sure you want "to delete all the graphics?" Yes I am. Now all the graphics throughout my document are gone. I can see that by opening the Pages panel and just going to one of these other spreads. Graphics gone, but frames remain. Okay, now what about all this text? You can delete all the text in your document, from every text frame, really quickly. All you have to do is open your Find/Change dialogue box. I'll do that by pressing command+F, or control+F on Windows, then switch to the GREP tab. And in the Find what: field, I want you to type .+ then click Change all. It goes through the whole document and deletes every text from every paragraph. It goes through your whole document and deletes all the text, but it does leave a bunch of empty paragraphs. So we can take care of those by changing this to \r not /, but \r+ and then Change all again. There's probably a faster way you can do this with just one GREP expression, but this is so easy and fast I don't even worry about it. Let's go ahead and close this dialogue box and close these panels, and we can see that this is now an empty document. However, the last thing I often want to clean up is guides. I'll often have a bunch of page guides sitting around that I want to get rid of. And you can do that really quickly by pressing command+option+G on the Mac, or control+alt+G on Windows, and that selects all the guides on a spread. Then, again, you just press the delete key on your keyboard. So, like we saw before, it's just one spread at a time, but it goes pretty quickly. In no time at all, we've gone from a filled document to a nearly empty one, ready to repurpose as a template for our next project.
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.
Contents
-
-
229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
-
230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
-
(Locked)
231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
-
232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
-
(Locked)
233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
-
-
-
161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
-
162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
-
(Locked)
163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
-
(Locked)
164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
-
(Locked)
165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
-
-
-
(Locked)
111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
-
(Locked)
112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
-
(Locked)
113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
-
(Locked)
114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
-
(Locked)
115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
-
(Locked)
108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
-
(Locked)
109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
-
(Locked)
110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
-
(Locked)
090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
-
(Locked)
091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
-
(Locked)
092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
-
(Locked)
093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
-
(Locked)
094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
-
(Locked)
052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
-
(Locked)
053 Understanding component information6m 39s
-
(Locked)
054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
-
(Locked)
055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
-
(Locked)
056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
-
(Locked)
048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
-
(Locked)
049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
-
(Locked)
050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
-
(Locked)
038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
-
(Locked)
039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
-
(Locked)
040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
-
(Locked)
041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
-
(Locked)
042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
-
(Locked)
028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
-
(Locked)
029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
-
(Locked)
030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
-
(Locked)
031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
-
(Locked)
032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
-
(Locked)
008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
-
(Locked)
009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
-
(Locked)
010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
-
(Locked)