Claudia McCue

Productivity can be cool: InDesign CS3 and CS4 allow you to select multiple files in the File>Place dialog, and this is a great way to get multiple text and graphics files into the page quickly.

But did you know you can shop among multiple folders as you’re gathering up files to place in the page? You can, but there’s a little trick required.

If you choose File>Place, select some files in a directory, then switch directories and select more files, you’ll only pick up the latest group of files — earlier selections are ignored.

But if you select files from one folder, then return to InDesign without clicking in the page, you can choose File>Place again, and gather up another bunch of files. When you return to InDesign, you’re carrying all the files you selected from all visited directories.

My thanks to Bob Bringhurst of Adobe Systems for adding a comment to the earlier post. I thought it deserved its own post, since he was kind enough to share: Bob’s blog post is here.

In the circumstance that prompted my earlier post, a customer needs to add a TOC to the first page of their multi-page InDesign files in order to generate bookmarks in the exported PDFs. That’s the only purpose the TOC serves. For various reasons having to do with workflow and tracking, they can’t add an extra page (this is a retail environment, and they’re using multiple pages to hold multiple versions).

The solution is a bit of a kludge, but it works: they create the TOC, and then position the TOC text frame in the pasteboard, overlapping the left edge of the page by just a skosh. The text itself is off in the pasteboard, and doesn’t appear in the page when the PDF is generated.

There’s (almost) always a way

If you generate a Table of Contents in a file (or book) in InDesign, hyperlinked bookmarks are automatically generated when you export to PDF with Hyperlinks and Bookmarks options checked in the export dialog. Bookmarks make it easy for readers of the PDF to find information quickly: displayed in the Navigation pane in Acrobat or Reader, they serve as a dynamic table of contents that’s always available.

Sometimes I want the bookmarks in the PDF, but without a visible table o’contents in the file. In the past, I’ve generated my TOC in InDesign, but put it in the pasteboard. The text isn’t visible in the PDF, but the bookmarks are created.

Today I discovered that this trick doesn’t work in InDesign CS4! Instead, the TOC text frame has to have at least an edge hanging into a document page for the bookmarks to be created. While this isn’t fatal, it’s weird that the functionality has changed.

In previous versions of InDesign, if you dragged a frame containing a graphic to a Library, the library item would be named by the filename of the graphic in the frame. If you dragged multiple objects, the group was just labeled “Untitled.” Fair enough; it’s page geometry, and it’s up to you to pick a name for the library item.

But in InDesign CS4, everything dragged to the Library is initially named “Untitled”— there’s no recognition of a graphic filename. Bummer!

There’s no mention of this in the user guide, and no options available in the Library panel to force it to behave as it did in all earlier versions. It’s like going into a real library, and finding that all the books just say “Book” on the spine!