Participant

Answered

Threading articles between files

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
April 11, 2019
3 replies
700 views

Hi,

Does anyone know how to thread a text file through multiple page files in InDesign? Say I have a story that starts on page 1 then jumps to page 7 and page 1 and 7 are saved as individual files. Is there away to keep that text connected for editing purposes?

Thanks.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Scott Falkner

No.

L

Laubender

Community Expert

Hi deborahd48264480 ,

theoretically this should be possible if the text is added as an asset to a Creative Cloud Library.

And then is placed and linked on page 1 and also placed and linked on page 7.

Just an example where I colored the text that should be before page 7 in Magenta:

The whole story is in this document. I threaded the part that should go to page 7 to a text frame on the pasteboard.

Now the next step would be to place and link the same text from the Creative Cloud Library to the document that holds page 7.

Where the text frame's dimensions that is done on the pasteboard should be exactly the same as the one on page 1.

Unfortunately this little trick yield not the right results:

There is a different text composition in this document.

If there would be exactly the same text composition in both documents you could edit the text straight from your text asset in the CC Library by a double-click, save and close the temp document and the text would be updated immediately in both documents if they would be both open:

Have to investigate why the text is running differently in both documents.

I made sure that the text frame's dimensions are the same, also number of columns and the gap between the columns.

Maybe it would work more reliable if I'd use the Single Line Paragraph Composer instead the default one?

EDIT: Yes, that helped.

Regards,
Uwe

L

Laubender

Community Expert

Here some screenshots where I changed the paragraph composer of the applied text to Single-Line; also did an inset in the first line:

Page 1:

Page 7:

Workflow for editing text:

Do your edits with the document that holds page 1 or do it with the document that holds page 7.

Copy the text to the clipboard.

Then do a double-click to the text asset in your CC Library.

Select all the text there. Paste the contents of the clipboard.

Close and save the temp document.

The text in both documents should be update immediately.

When will this all fail?

1. In my example I did not base the text lines' composition on the document baseline grid.

If you do this the leading should be exactly the same as the document baseline grid settings.

Otherwise you perhaps get a different number of lines in the text frames that are positioned on the pasteboard.

2. The paragraph composer should be the Single-Line one.

I had no luck with the Adobe Paragraph Composer that yields different results for the same text with the same text frames in different documents. Maybe there are some rounding errors in dimensions so both text frames that are holding the text for page 1 are not exactly the same.

Regards,
Uwe

Jongware

Community Expert

Laubender wrote
theoretically ...

Sorry Uwe, but to me it looks scary and ramshackle enough to highly advise against doing this.

(Not your fault, though. The OP could have realized there are practical limits to what InDesign can do -- and plenty reasons this should not have worked. And, should one get it accidentally to work, to consider that a bug rather than an extremely "useful feature".)