263 Sync master pages

- [Instructor] When you go through a re-design, you often need to update older files with new branding. If you use master pages, you can save yourself a lot of work by updating the old files master pages to match the new ones from the new branding. And the fastest way to do that, especially if you have a lot of documents to work with, or allotted master pages in those documents is to use the book panels sync command to sync only the master pages throughout a collection of documents. They don't need to be chapters in a book, they can be all different kind of documents.

Let me show you an example. We're looking at three documents right now, and these are actually from my own training company, they are slide presentations. So this is using the new branding with my new logo and the new colors. And here are a couple old presentations. One when I used to be all into blogging and podcasting, well I guess I still am, and here's another one from CS3, Getting to Know InCopy CS3, with my old logo and so on. You can see that each of these documents uses master pages.

So here in this one, I have one called a slide master, and in my blog and podcast slide show I have one called main master. And then this one, with the new branding just says A master. What we're going to do, is we're going to have InDesign automatically update the master pages in these old documents with the look from this master page. But there is one important preparation step that you need to do first before you bring these into the book panel and then sync the master pages.

And that is to make sure that the master page names match. If they don't match, what will happen is that the older documents that you're syncing to, will only get the master page names added to their master page section, they won't actually replace the existing master pages. Sometimes that's what you want. Because you just want to have the source there to pick and choose from. But if you really want to automate things, check the older documents and rename the master pages to match.

So this one is A hyphen master, which is the default name for master. I'm going to go up to this master, right click, choose master options and change this to master so that it'll say A hyphen master. Now it will not replace existing master pages that don't exist in the source. So you don't need to worry that in blog and podcast slides we're going to lose single headline master. However, since this one's based on A master, hopefully that will also automate formatting this one as well.

I have this other slide presentation that has different names, A hyphen slide master and I'm just going to leave that as is, so you can see what happens if you don't change the names to match the style source that we're going to be using. I also added this one weird one with the green star, just to show you that when you sync master pages across a collection of documents, master pages from the source document that don't exist in the target documents get added.

So we'll see the green star master page added to the master pages for both of these documents. Okay, so let's go ahead and create our collection of documents to do the syncing. Go to the file menu, choose new book, and I'll just save this right on the desktop and we'll call it sync master pages. And we're not really going to use this again after syncing so it's just like a one off book. Don't need to worry that much about it, and we're going to add these documents, it would be nice if you could add all open documents to it, but it doesn't let you do that, so you have to find the documents, there they are, it's okay if they're already open.

And one of them says they have some missing fonts, I don't need to worry about that, I'm just curious about the master pages. Okay, so an important step here is to choose which one of these is going to be the style source. The one that has the good master pages that you want to use to update the older ones. And in our case that is this one, EPUB 3 presentation, right? This guy. So I will click to the left of EPUB3 presentation, telling it sync from this one. And then in the book panel menu, go down to synchronize options and turn off all other settings, just clicking twice here, to get them all turned off, except for master pages.

We don't want to sync colors or anything else, or style definitions, you don't want harm the older documents, you just want to change the master pages. So I'll turn on master pages now, you know of course if you did want to update matching styles and so on, with ones from this document, you could. But right now we're just going to do master pages. I'll turn that off, I'll click OK. Then click in a blank area down here below all of the names of the documents and click the sync icon. That's it, we're done. Okay, let's take a look.

So here are blog and podcast slides. Aha! They use the new branding, isn't that nice? And here's b, right? Using single headline which was based on A. And it got the green star added. Yes, let's get this guy out of the way. What happened to this guy? Nothing, because the file names did not match. But, we did get the new master pages added. And we could delete one and replace with another, pick and choose what we want from the new master pages and add them or modify the old ones with that.

Alright? So that is the fastest way to update documents with your new branding. If they're using master pages, you're good to go.