How To Use The Adobe InDesign CC Book Feature

This lesson is exclusive to members

Course contents
SECTION: 3
Creative Cloud APP 5:45
SECTION: 12
Workflow Speed Tips 20:41
SECTION: 17
Photoshop & Illustrator 13:32
SECTION: 22
Exporting & Printing Tricks 8:17

Questions

You need to be a member to view comments.

Join today. Cancel any time.

Sign Up

Course info

74 lessons / 9 hours Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is Dan. I am an Adobe Certified Instructor and an Adobe Certified Expert for InDesign and I work as a professional graphic designer. This course is about advanced features, productivity & workflow speed tricks using Adobe InDesign. 

This course is not for people brand new to InDesign. It’s for people who already know and understand the fundamentals. 

If you are already happy adding text & images to InDesign documents then this course is for you. Even if you consider yourself a heavy user, I promise there will be things in here that will blow your InDesign mind. 

You’ll learn advanced font tricks using Typekit & Opentype fonts, font grouping & font pairing. Mastering colour features like the colour theme tool and colour modes as well as professional proofing for colours for print. We’ll set permanent defaults for fonts, colours & will learn how to turn hyphenation off for good, once and for all.  

What would an advanced InDesign course be without all the tactics to fully control paragraphs, auto expanding boxes, spanning & splitting columns. You’ll become a Styles master, using nested styles, grep styles, next styles & advanced object styles.  

We’ll make beautiful charts & graphs for your InDesign documents. You’ll learn the pros & cons of various digital distribution methods including Interactive PDF’s, EPUBs & the amazing Publish Online. 

You’ll become a master of long, text heavy documents, autoflowing, primary text frames & smart text reflow, cross referencing, indexes, text variables & the InDesign book feature. There is entire section dedicated to how to speed up your personal workflow & how to speed up InDesign and get it running super fast. 

We look at interactive forms & scripts. There is just so much we cover and I want to share everything here in the intro but I can’t. Have a look through the video list, there is an amazing amount we cover here in the course. 

If you’re one of those people using InDesign and you know there is probably a better way, a faster way to work then this is your course. 

Daniel Walter Scott

What are the requirements?

  • You will need a copy of Adobe InDesign 2018 or above. But you find that 95% of all the features in this course will work with earlier version of InDesign (e.g. CS6). A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • 70 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content. 
  • Create PDF Forms
  • Master Long Documents.
  • Advanced Fonts
  • Master Styles
  • Shortcut Sheet
  • Create Charts & Infographics
  • Create Interactive Documents
  • Workflow Tactics
  • Shortcuts & Speed Tips
  • Advanced Creative Cloud Features
  • Tips for working with Photoshop & Illustrator
  • Using Scripts 
  • Exporting, Prepress & Printing tricks 
  • You will get the finished files so you never fall behind. 
  • Downloadable exercise files & cheat sheet. 
  • Forum support from me and the rest of the BYOL crew. 
  • Techniques used by professional graphic designers. 
  • Professional workflows and shortcuts. 
  • A wealth of other resources and websites to help your accelerate your career. 

What is the target audience?

  • This course is for people who already know InDesign and want to take their skills and speed to the maximum level. 
  • This is an advanced InDesign course, so you’ll need basic InDesign skills to find this course useful. 
  • This course is perfect for anyone that already knows how to insert images & add text. 
  • If you a completely new to InDesign try my InDesign Essentials course before starting this one.
  • This course is perfect for anyone that has completed my InDesign Essentials course.

Course duration 7 hours 45 mins + your study.
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files

Transcript

Hi there, in this video we're going to create a Book in InDesign. All a Book does, is I've got three separate documents here. I'm working on them separately with different people. What I'd like to do is join them all up, have the page numbering, or flow through all of them. I'd like all the Styles to match up but I want to easily grab all of these guys, and just create a PDF, and it will stretch all three together and go out to the printers, but I get the benefit of working on three separate InDesign documents. That is a Book. Let's go and learn how to do that now in InDesign.

So to make a Book I'm going to-- first of all, this is the file we've been working on. There's two other files we're going to add to this Book. They're separate files, they're in your… where are they? In '05 Long Documents', there's 'Section 2' and 'Section 3'. So they're separate InDesign documents, and now I want to string them all together. They are separate because we have all decided that everyone's working on different files together. So, me, is working on this file, Jeff is working on this one, and Susan's working on this one. I don't know where I get those names from, but let's just say, for practical purposes, for our work, we need to separate these documents out.

Now the first thing we need to do is, for the document we've been working on let's go to our Master page, and add some automatic page numbering. I'm just going to add it after the Running Header we've got here, and I'm going to say, page-- it's caps, PAGE, then I'm going to go to 'Type'. 'Insert Special Character'. Go to 'Markers', and go to 'Current Page Number', terrible shortcut. So page A, if I go page 1 now, it's going to say 'Page 1', 'Page 3'. So, it's got my page numbering. Same with this document, section 2, you can see, it's got page 1, 3. So it's got automatic page numbering, same with this guy, it says, on the top right here, Page 1.

Next thing we're going to do is create a book. So go to 'File', 'New', and go to 'Book'. 'Books' are those buttons you've never clicked, I bet you. And what it does is it creates a file by itself. It's a weird kind of process, right? So you create a new book, and you're like, "I can't get the file name." So I'm going to call mine 'Maynooth Furniture Catalog Book'. Hit 'Save'. And this thing opens, just a panel. And the other weird thing is that it's not connected to anything that's open. So I can close all of these down. 'Close' you down, 'Save' you. So this thing here can-- he's a Lone Ranger, he can work all by himself, with the documents open, or not. What you need to do is add the documents that you want to join up.

So, I'm going to click on the '+' button and I'm going to add the document from let's say, our 'Coursework', and that's the one I've been working on. I'm also going to add a couple more from my '05 Long Documents' both 'Section 2' and 'Section 3'. Click 'Open'. And then you go to kind of rearrange them to decide who's at the beginning, and who's at the end, because the page numbering, you can see gets made automatically, so I'm going to say, that guy's at the top. And the cool thing about it is, watch if I open up Section 2, by just double clicking in here you'll notice that automatically a couple of things will happen. One is, the page numbering is updated. You can see, my first document gets to page 17. Now this one, automatically is 18, which is cool. It's also rearranged it, so it's a left hand spread because, on this document, it finishes on the right hand spread. So it knows that the next one needs to be at right, so it adjusts that one.

The same thing with Section 3. Again, I don't have to have any of these open. Just kind of re-emphasizing the fact. And I'm going to make a PDF. Now if we go into here, it says, 'Export Selected Documents to PDF', that's because I had Section 2 selected, so if you click off, just make sure nothing is selected, and then you get the option for 'Export Book to PDF', you're the whole thing. Create that, and give it a name, that's fine for me. I'll 'Replace' one, fine. I left mine as Interactive PDF, which is not what I want. So I'm going to go into here, 'Export Book to PDF' and make sure I pick 'PDF (Print)', because this is going to my printer. 'Save'. Just your regular old PDF settings here. I'm going to click on 'Export'. There's some links that are missing, I'm okay with that. And there we have it, we have our Page 1, and our PDF. I'm going to zoom out a little bit, scroll along so I should get down to Page 17. Now it starts moving to 18, it's horrible looking, I understand. It's not my best work, nothing really matches up but it shows you a way of connecting separate documents keeping the page numbering working and exporting them as a PDF altogether.

Another option you can do, back in InDesign here you can just hit 'Print', and that will just print it to your printer. That's an option. This little thing here operates little weirdly as well. You need to kind of save the Book, that's the way to save it.

Another option you can do is, say you're working on a long document but you want to keep consistent Paragraph Styles which is obviously important over a long document. So, let's save that in Section 2. So open that up, and it will open up the document I'm working on. Now the trick is to have, under 'Window', 'Styles', 'Paragraph Styles', is to be all using the same Style name. You'll notice, when we created this document earlier on we created it, and we imported it from Section 2. That was for a reason, because I wanted the Title names to be the same. So I've got these two, Heading 1 and Body Copy 1, but let's say, in Section 2 I'm working on this document, and I'm like "Actually I don't want it to be pink anymore, I want it to be green." And I go into here, my 'Styles', and I'll 'Redefine Style' and it updates everywhere else in this document. I can find them, there it is, Shelves, it's now this green color, but Maynooth, it's still at their original pink color.

So what we can do, doesn't matter which document we have open we can decide who their boss is, it's this little option here. So I'm going to say 'Section 2'. I'm going to set the Style for this guy, this guy is the boss. And what I want to do for these two guys - I'm holding 'Command' to click in these two guys - I can say, it's 'Control' on a PC, have them both selected. You can actually just select them all, and say, let's Synchronize, guys, let's get together, Synchronize. 'Synchronize Book'. And it synchronizes the Styles. And what will happen, hopefully, is, it did. Wasn't checking, went from pink to green. So it's using Section 2 as the leader. You need to kind of force it to synchronize every time, so if you do make changes you need to, say who the boss is, select them all and then click on 'Synchronize'.

So that is how to use a Book. Cool feature, especially good when we're working with really long documents. All right, let's get into the next video.

  • Powered by Marvin
  • Terms of use
  • Privacy policy
  • © Bring your Own Laptop Ltd 2024