From the course: InDesign Secrets
287 Merge book files with a free Script - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
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.
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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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