From the course: InDesign Secrets
265 Keep your templates current - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
265 Keep your templates current
- [Instructor] When you are creating a series of documents that are all essentially the same just with different content, the best practice is to create a template and then base all of your documents on that template, that way they all have the same master pages, style sheets, artwork, swatches, and in fact I have an entire title here that's all about using templates with Adobe InDesign. But in this tip I want to focus on one glitch that often occurs with me and with many other designers when you're using templates, and that is the templates get out of date. I'm gonna show you what I mean and I'm gonna show you a fast way to fix that. Here is the slide template that I created for my training company a few years ago. It has the logo centered, it has this tint background, it's using Myriad Pro as the font, it has my Twitter address preceded by twt. On the next page I have a little cheat sheet that reminds myself of what my styles look like. Everything is Myriad Pro, the bullet is this red circle. Of course everything is using paragraph styles and master pages. Now here is an example of one of my more recent slideshows that I've done in the real world. The logo is on the left, the tinted background is gone, the TWT is gone in frnot of @amarie because I figure these days everybody knows what a Twitter address looks like. The font is also different, it's using Adobe Clean instead of Myriad Pro, and my bullets are different as well, they have this little red triangle. I have other presentations that are kind of like an amalgam of both of those. Here is one that I did a while ago that doesn't have the tinted background but it still has the TWT and so on. What I'd like to do is simply update my template, and that's what I suggest that you do as well to keep your templates relevant to your workflow. Instead of taking the most recent issue, whatever it is that you're working on, and then doing a Save As and then having to spend time getting rid of all the pages and elements and links and swatches that you don't need, just update the template, and a fast way to do that is to use the book panel. The book panel will let you sync your styles, your master pages, and other elements from a good doc to one that needs updating. And all we're going to do is take a good example document which is this one called ID and EPUB3 slides current, and we're going to update the definitions used by those master pages and style sheets in our template. That way we'll have an up-to-date template that we can use from then on. Key here is that I have not changed any of the style names or master page names. So you'll see here in Paragraph Styles, this is called Slide head, this is called Headline, and here in my slideshow, this is called Headline, and so on, same thing with the master pages. A Master and B Master, and A Master and B Master. All I need to do is find a good example of the source for the new updated attributes and my template and add them both to a book. So I go to File, New, Book, and I'll save it here on the desktop. I'll call it template update.book and then I add these two documents here. So I'll go to Desktop, and here is my current document and I'll add my template. You want to make sure that the style source, the one that has this icon, notice I can just click here, is next to the most current version of your document, the one that you want to pull the new attributes from. And the template is the one that's going to get synced to this one. Then the next step is to go to the Book Panel menu and choose Synchronize Options, and choose here what it is that you want to update. I like to be very careful here and only update the things I'm positive about, so I usually start out by de-selecting everything and then going through here and selecting the things that I do want to sync. I do want to sync the master pages, and I do want to sync the character styles and paragraph styles and swatches. Okay, that's good. I can just click Synchronize here, and it's done, and now let's check out my Seneca slide template. And there it is updated, it has the triangle bullet, at the bottom it just says @amarie, because the master page has been updated, and the styles themselves, let's move this out of the way, are using Adobe Clean. Now my template is up to date, and when I create a new slideshow I can again confidently rely on my template and create a new untitled document from that template, and I'm good to go.
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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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