Chapter 2: Setting up Template
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To start from scratch, you're going to have to set up a new Indesign document. This is going to mean choosing page sizes, base typography, line heights and other design and layouts.
If this isn't your forte, find another Indesign document to use a foundation, open it and delete all the content on the artboard. The styles used in the document should remain the paragraph and character styles panel.
This is the time to set up page numbers and footers. Indesign allows you to place a page number placeholder – shown here as an 'A'. This will be automatically updated as you add, subtract and move pages around within the book.
Once you have the basic of page template, go to 'Save as' and switch the drop-down at the bottom to save as 'Indesign template'. Save your document as 'your-project-name.indt'. Then close it. s
Templates are cool and useful. If you now open 'your-project-name.indt' you'll notice that your new file will instead be called 'untitled.indd' – a blank copy of what's in your template file.
If you want to update your template, you'll need to 'Save As' template again. In the earlier stages as your design develops, you'll likely want to do this to incorporate all your improvements into the template for future files. As your template matures, you'll probably have less and less need to do this.
Once you have a template, it's time to set up your book. In InDesign, a 'book' is a managed collection of Indesign documents. The reality is, there's nothing forcing you use Indesign's book functionality. You could run a single INDD document with many pages and get a perfectly acceptable result. However, there are a few advantages to Indesign Books.
You can rearrange the ordering of documents simply by dragging them up or down the list. Typically each doc is a chapter.
Chapter-sized are easier and faster to navigate and manage. It also gives you a nice overview of page numbering.
Styling is managed from a single document and synced to other pages in the books.
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Add new pages with the plus button at the bottom of the panel.
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You can save your current page collection and ordering with this button at the bottom.
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Sync your styles across other book documents with this button. You can change which document is your source doc any time you like.
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To start from scratch, you're going to have to set up
You may notice the black outlines that appear around hyperlinks after you place each ICML. They're rather ugly and I know that I took some time to work out how to get rid of them. Happily, I eventually figured it out.
Firstly make sure you've 'checked-out' the ICML document or you want be able to make any changes.
Open the Hyperlinks panel next to your document
That should do it.
Indesign can generate a working Table of Contents based on the structure of your pages. As a general rule it would make sense to use your level 1 headings (H1s) as chapters and your level 2 headings as subheadings (h2s). You might even consider having a third level of headings includes in your TOC.
Once you have your content in place and your freshly generated TOC, it's time to export your book to PDF.
This is a good time to clean up (delete) any extra blank pages at the end of each document and also to rearrange their ordering if needed. Page re-numbering should happen instantly across the book, but you may notice that this will create unsaved changes in the updated Indesign documents (little asterisks next to their titles).
Rather than re-saving each file individually (this gets very tiresome) I found you can Save All Documents hitting Shift+Alt+Command+S all at once.
In your Book panel, ensure that no documents are currently selected - otherwise Indesign will only export a PDF (or EPUB) of only THAT page.
You then should see a flyout menu at the top right with an option to 'Export Book to PDF'.
Selecting that option will give you a dialog box of export options. Set your perferences and export.
Hold down 'shift' to select all the links in the hyperlinks panel.
Switch 'Visible Rectangle' to 'Invisible Rectangle in the dropdown in the PDF Appearance panel.
Most illustrations are supplied as SVG, but unfortunately Indesign can't handle SVG. At least, not without the help of . If this isn't an option for you, you'll need PDFs.
does a good job at batch converting your SVG to PDF. Just drag all your SVGs onto the Cloudconvert window and select PDF as the output format. You can merge them into a single archive for easy downloading too.
