From the course: InDesign Secrets

287 Merge book files with a free Script - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

287 Merge book files with a free Script

“

- [Narrator] There are a lot of scripts out there that will take a long document and split them into smaller documents; but until now, there have been no scripts that will take multiple InDesign documents and merge them into one. That's what I'm going to show you in this tip, and I will show you where you can download it from too; it's a free script. Typically, you might want to run this on a book file that is made up of multiple chapters, because you want one long InDesign file that is the entire book; but you might also have a collection of documents that you want to merge into one InDesign document. You know, lots of other reasons: one, you might want to merge files together. It is of course possible to do so manually. Here we are looking at multiple chapters having to do with this small book, A Brief History of San Francisco, and I could open up the cover and front matter file, which is about five or six pages long; and also the intro, which is also quite short; and then I could drag these pages over here, or I could use the Move Pages command, and so on. But if you have a book with 20 or 30 chapters, that is a lot of work. That's why I was so thrilled to hear about this script. Here's how it works. First of all, you need to download the script; and you can download it from indesignsecrets.com . Go to Resources, Plug-ins and Scripts, and there will be a section here that I'm going to add called From Lynda.com Videos, and I will include the script here. Now the script was written by a guy who's not a professional scripter; just a nice gentleman named Michael Zaichenko who chimed in on a thread in one of our forums where somebody asked, did they have a huge folder with many files that they need to merge into one document. Nobody knew of any script until Michael said "I have a better version of a script," and I asked him if I could distribute it and show it in this video, and he said "Sure." So I already have it installed; you're going to download it and install it from our website, and we have instructions about how to install scripts there in InDesign, and the script is called MergeFiles-2016.jsxbin ; and it works not just on book files, but also folders full of files. But let's go ahead and close this up. You don't need to close the documents, but I like to keep things nice and clear. All right, so we have an active book file here; I'm going to double-click on the script, which is how you run it, and you can see that it will work on All opened documents that you currently have open in InDesign; so you didn't really have to close those documents, but I get confused when there's lots of documents open and it's creating a new document. The Active book documents, which is what I'm going to run here, or All documents in a folder, Including subfolders; and if I chose that, I'd get the pop-up menu saying where's the folder full of documents. So if you want to merge disparate group of documents together, no need to assemble them in a book first; just get them all into the same folder. I'm going to click Cancel; I know no folder's selected. And I'll say Active book documents, and it automatically sucks this in. Now Michael says that his script; as I said, he's not a professional scripter. There might be some glitches that you'd encounter, but you can always e-mail him via that topic on the forum. One of them is that it doesn't rename master pages automatically, so it uses the very first document as the source, or the style; so it's going to be using this one as the source. The other option, he said, was to automatically rename all master pages as you combine them into one document, which you might end up with a document with 400 master pages. So just be aware of that, that if you have two different documents, both with A-hyphen-Master, but they look quite different, they are going to look the same; the second one's going to look like the first one after you merge them, so you might want to rename the master pages before you do this. I don't have to worry about it, because I've already taken care of that in my book file. Anyway, also, you can select this and you can use the up and down arrow key to move them in different order. I'm tapping the Up arrow key on my keyboard. That's about it; those are the only instruction that he has. And we'll just go ahead and click OK, and then you wait. There's no progress bar, I noticed, so you just have to sort of hang on. See, a page has come up; there's no bing when it's over. And while I think it might be over, let's take a look at the Pages panel. Yeah, there we go; 30 pages. It looks like it re-numbered the last chapter. I'm not sure why, 'cause this used to be 29 and 30; but those things you can fix. So take a look; isn't that beautiful? It did a fantastic job. It is one document for the entire book. Now I have found sometimes, when I've been testing this, that sometimes you'll end up with split pages; like you'll have a left-facing page here, and no right-facing page, and the next spread is just a right-facing page. But you can always select them and use our friend Allow Selected Spread to Shuffle. You can turn that off to drag and drop them yourself to merge them back into two-page spreads. But in this document, it did a perfect job; it probably knew that I was recording, and so it behaved well. Thank you so much, Michael! This saves many people many hours of work; this is fantastic, and I hope you guys enjoy it too.

Contents