Help creating a template for a journal - what are the limitations?

Question

Hello all, my new job (a publishing company) has asked me to figure out if we can adapt some newer, more modern ways to print. I'm a new grad hire and my degree technically isn't in publications, more graphic design and motion graphics so I'm trying to figure out the learning curve on my own.

Right now, we publish a journal that's around a hundred pages and mainly text. Every month we receive submissions from authors, and the way the journal is formatted is that there are no empty spaces between every new article, they're placed right underneath the end of the previous article to maximize space. I learned about inDesign book files, which automatically put everything together, and I'm wondering if that means with the current formatting they want this will not work. We take each article, move the pages into the sig document, and invidually drag the text boxes underneath.

This seems pretty inefficient to me, and doesn't work well for epublications, which I'm also being asked to do. They do the epubs in Sigil right now instead of doing it in inDesign. Without explaining further, it's a really small company and there's not really anybody who can help me learn this because the only other graphic designer doesn't know how to do it either. Some resources to help me get started in changing the way we do our templates and where to start in general would be helpful.

James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted Answer

The book feature is only partly about page count. It's also about splitting a project up into elements that can be managed as separate InDesign projects, such as book chapters that might be developed, reviewed and edited by different writers and editors. There's no hard and fast rule about either/or, but going to a Book structure does add a layer of management complexity. it's something you want to do only if it brings more advantages than disadvantages.

If you have basically one team working on the whole magazine, it's an argument against using a Book. If there's value in being able to manage each section, article, story or chapter by itself, separate files and a Book will enable that.

A Book does draw hard lines between sections, on a page by page basis, so things like having an article begin in one component file and end in another would get that much more difficult. Ditto with any element that might need to spread from one document file to another. Coordinating styles and page layouts, ditto. One file avoids these problems, but means only one person can work on it at a time.

You'll have to work through your workflow and decide; I'd lean towards keeping it in one file, so that coordination of layout and styles and separated content are all simple, at the cost of "one editor at a time." Move it to a Book only if you really, really need simultaneous editing, or (perhaps because of many images) the file size gets unwieldy.

EPUB export is the same in either case, with some slightly different setup.

I'd say that managing one version in InDesign and then having to completely reconstruct the whole thing in another app, from component elements, seems like a big time and effort sink. And without laborious cross-checking, the likelihood of differences or errors is high.

I'd say keep it in one file, and work to optimize the EPUB export from InDesign, rather than any other combination of processes. You can always adapt that approach to a Book structure and/or separate EPUB management if it doesn't work out.

James Gifford—NitroPress · Answer

There's a lot to this, so feel free to keep asking questions. I concur with Barb to do it in one file (especially with just text, InDesign can easily handle 100 pages). Using separate stories ("articles" or individual text flows) would let you work with the individual papers in InCopy for further edits, although my journal experience is that by the time a piece is handed over for layout, it is Graven In Stone and neither can be changed nor should.

As for EPUB, it's very possible to do both print and EPUB from a single InDesign document, which would both streamline the workflow and eliminate the problems that can come from maintaining two separate source files. It can be a little tricky to set up, but as journals tend to be simple in layout and static in design for a very long time, the effort to map the EPUB styles would be time well spent, with long value.

But yes, as Barb notes, this is a place to be absolutely meticulous in setting up your paragraph and character styles, and use them rigidly, without any spot formatting or overrides. That leads to easy management of each new issue, and enables more reliable EPUB export as well.

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