Book-syncing marks all text flows as "non-primary."

[Thomas_Calvin]

Once again I found that, all of a sudden, I was getting "overset text" errors in a document that's set up with one continuous text flow and automatic page-adding.

This turned out to be because all the flows in my 300-page book were de-flagged as "primary," apparently by a book-syncing operation. No idea what triggered it in this instance, since I've been frequently syncing all the documents in this book as I work.

I selected the text frame on a page to see if, once again, another "shadow" frame had been added behind it. Nope. There is still only one frame per page; it just isn't "primary" anymore. I checked the master pages from which the pages were derived, and they still have one flow, which is marked as primary. The frames are all still interconnected as one flow, too.

This is a really, really tiresome defect. I haven't figured out the pattern to it, because it doesn't always happen and it's not obvious when it does.

[Anubhav M]

Hello @TwoCharacters,

Could you share more details, like the version of the OS/InDesign installed, a link to a sample file after uploading it to a file-sharing service, and a small screen recording of your exact workflow and the problem, so I can better assist you?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Anubhav

[Thomas_Calvin]

Thanks for the follow-up. I'm running InDesign 20.3.1 on Windows 11 Business.

If I can find a way to reproduce the problem reliably, I will.

[Eugene Tyson]

I don't have all the answers but certainly some thoughts

When syncing documents in a Book file (.indb), InDesign's Book Sync panel has the power to override settings across all documents. If the “Primary Text Frame” setting is different across your documents or if that setting isn’t being properly respected, it may silently unmark primary frames on the synced docs  even when it visually looks like nothing has changed.

What you described (sudden overset text despite a continuous flow, parent pages still showing primary text frames) is classic behaviour when text frames on document pages stop being treated as “primary.” This breaks auto page add and text flow control, leading to overset text.

Top of my head to stop this happening (as I don't have a book file to work with to test)

Check sync options before syncing
Go to the Book panel, choose “Synchronize Options”, and uncheck anything related to Text Frame Options, Parent Pages, or Document Preferences, if you're only syncing styles or TOCs.

Only sync what’s absolutely needed.

Inspect Parent Pages

Open each .indd file and check:)

Go to the Parent Page.

Select the text frame.

In the Pages panel, make sure the frame is Primary Text Frame (it shows a little white arrow icon)
If not, re-enable it via right-click > Primary Text Frame

Reapply Parent pages to document pages

Even if the Parent still has the primary frame, the actual document pages may lose their link or priority setting.

Try reapplying the parent (hold Cmd/Ctrl + Shift and drag the master onto the document page icon in the Pages panel).

Avoid using 'Sync All' blindly
Syncing from a document that has no primary text frames or whose master doesn’t have the primary setting enabled can override and mess up others.

Pick your source document carefully when syncing.

Fixing it up manually

If all the text is threaded and single Parent Page - select all the text and cut it out
Delete all pages except page 1

Then reapply the Parent Page and paste the text back into the Frame - the text should autoflow to all required pages.

Suggestion

Package your book file before syncing so the Sync happens on a duplicate copy for testing

Always test sync on a backup copy

File a bug report or feature request if this keeps happening

If you need further assistance let us know.

[Thomas_Calvin]

Thanks for all that. I went through this. The parent pages have only one text frame each, and it is marked primary. It also flows between pages.

You mention two ways to re-apply a parent to a page. I tried dragging the parent to the page in the Pages panel, and I also tried Ctrl-Shift-dragging. The result was the same: It added a new text frame to the page, marked primary, leaving the non-primary one unchanged. So now there were two overlapping text frames.

There's no way to mark a text frame as primary on a child page, either.

As far as "syncing only what's needed:" I need everything synced. I want absolute parity between all documents in the book. I don't know why this isn't considered a common use case and motivation for using a book in the first place. It's annoying to have to manually select the "source" document and re-sync manually all day long. I want every single master page, style, and layout the same throughout the book, all day every day.

[Mike Witherell]

You should avoid using Primary Text frames with a book project. Make plain non-primary text frames. Even on Parent pages.

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/creating-text-text-frames.html

Here is an excerpt or two from the above citation.

• Set primary text frames when you want each page in your document to contain a page-sized text frame into which you can flow or type your text. If your document requires more variation, such as pages with different numbers of frames or frames of different lengths, leave the Primary Text Frame option deselected, and use the Type tool to create text frames on parents. (Italics are mine.)

• Selecting the Primary Text Frame option does not affect whether new pages are added when you autoflow text.

Booked documents and synchronisation of features is not something to be attempted by mere mortals nor beginners nor even medium-skilled users. Too many variably moving parts. The changes can be hard to reason through and keep up with or even comprehend. In my opinion, a primary text frame is best used on an utterly simple, singular document. To be honest, I also cast a wary eye on syncing book documents, too. 

[Thomas_Calvin]

Thanks, Mike. But then how do you maintain consistency throughout a book?

Set primary text frames when you want each page in your document to contain a page-sized text frame into which you can flow or type your text.

That is exactly what I want.

Selecting the Primary Text Frame option does not affect whether new pages are added when you autoflow text.

Well, removing the "primary" flag certainly broke auto-new-page-creation in my document.

The only potentially-problematic item I see in the synchronization options is text variables; while I want their existence to be synced throughout the book, I don't want their values to be the same in every book.

[rob day]

This is a really, really tiresome defect. I haven't figured out the pattern to it, because it doesn't always happen and it's not obvious when it does.

Hi @Thomas_Calvin , One way you could accidentally change Primary Texframes is by inadvertently clicking one of the primary frame ports on the Parent Spread:

[Thomas_Calvin]

Thanks Rob, but I immediately checked those on the parents and they were all still marked primary.

[rob day]

Depending on how you construct the document, Primary Text Frames may or may not be automatically overridden on the pages.

If I don’t check Primary Text Fame in the New Doc dialog, there’s no Primary Text Frame and I would have to construct them if needed:

If I build the Primary Text Frames on the Parent Pages, they are not automatically overridden in the pages and it would be easy to accidentally draw regular text frames on top of them:

These two text frames don’t show a Primary because they were drawn on top of the Primary Frames from the Parent that have not been overridden:

I have to override (Command Shift Click) to get at the Parent Page Primary frames and add them to the pages

[Thomas_Calvin]

I never created a new document. I always copied the last one I worked on, deleted all of its pages, and added it to my book. I also never draw text frames; they are all already set up on my master pages.

"If I build the Primary Text Frames on the Parent Pages, they are not automatically overridden in the pages"

That directly contradicts how they work on my system, and a major reason that I want the primary frame on the master pages. I don't want other people on my team or future maintainers to have to try to figure out why they can't type on a new page they create. When I create a new page from a master, you can put the insertion point in it and start typing right away.

[rob day]

This text is flowed into regular text frames set to the margins. There are Primary Text frames on the spread but they don’t show in the Layers panel because they are not overridden—they are not page items yet.

The Primary frame from the Parent needs to be overridden to show in the Layers panel .

[Thomas_Calvin]

On mine they do.

[rob day]

If you think you have found a bug report it, but you will have to provide a file.

[Thomas_Calvin]

If I can find the steps to reproduce it I will.

Then again, I don't think there's a bug-reporting mechanism anymore. Just an insulting forum where people "vote" for what defects they want fixed, with no cross-referencing to duplicate reports.

[HARSHIKA_VERMA]

Hi Thomas,

We completely understand your frustration, and thanks for sharing your feedback on the bug reporting system. We'll work towards it. While UserVoice is the official channel monitored by our product team, you can definitely report a bug here: https://adobe.ly/4kxhe54.

If you're able to identify the steps to reproduce the bug, please do share them here. In the meantime, if you decide to post on UserVoice, feel free to share the link with us—we’ll do our best to bring it to the attention of the relevant team. 

Also, have you had a chance to share the Book file with our expert, Rob?

Thanks again for your patience and feedback.

Thanks,

Harshika

[Thomas_Calvin]

Thanks, I appreciate it! I'm working on the document at the moment, so I'll recompose the text back into the primary frames and see when those get de-tagged as primary.

[Thomas_Calvin]

Well, this just happened again. I had finished my whole book, going through all eight or so remaining chapters that were still in legacy one-story-per-page form and making them one "primary" flow through all pages by manually copying and pasting the text from each page one at a time into a new document.

At some unknown point, a full-book sync (which I had previously done dozens of times during the day) broke every one of my files. The sole text flow in each one is now non-primary. And this time there are no extra "shadow" frames on the page, overlapping the primary one from the parent. There's just one. All the pages are still interconnected, but the "primary" flag has been removed from the flow.

And there's no straightforward way to fix this, because of more bugs. Here's the best you can do when this happens:

1. Go into story editor and cut all the text to the clipboard.
2. Delete all but the first page of the document.
3. Delete the now-non-primary text frame from the first page.
4. Re-apply the parent to the first page. There will now be a primary text frame.
5. Paste all the text back into this frame.

This still sucks for at least two major reasons (bugs):

1. Section breaks aren't copied.
2. All cross-references are broken. My TOC is now all a pile of unresolved references, every one of which must be fixed manually.

We can't rely on this junk.

[rob day]

Can you share one of the Book docs with the problem text frames?

[Thomas_Calvin]

Further investigation has revealed a couple things.

I have fixed my book's files now at least three times. I've then closed the book, re-opened it, and opened and examined every file to confirm that yes... the text frames are still primary.

I then closed InDesign, and compressed the entire book directory (with all assets) into a zip file and copied it to another volume. Then I re-opened the original, did a full-book sync, and found once again that the frames are all detached from the primary... except two out of 10 files. One was set to be the sync source. The other has something odd about it; I found that one of its parent pages was different from the identically-named one in all the other documents in the book, despite having been synced many many times. The difference was on an "intentionally blank" parent page that wasn't based on any other, and no other was based on it. Even stranger is that, after another book-sync, that page was updated to match all the others. But... I found why some files can remain unbroken. Noted below.

I then restored the full directory from the known-to-be-good zip file and opened it... to find that there, too, all of the files' text flows are detached from the primary. Remember, I had verified all of them just minutes earlier.

So now it became clear that the book file stores hard-coded full paths to the member files, instead of relative paths. Not great. Likewise the linked graphic files in the individual documents.

The good news is that the "primary" frames in the indd files are still OK when I open them individually.

But I can't even find an option to tell InDesign to use relative paths to assets, or even a way to forcibly re-link things. Really?

Now the test: I copied the archived INDD files over the now-broken ones in the original location. And yep, their primary flows are fixed. But... do a book sync, and they break. So now I have a reproducible case. Furthermore, if I have files open when I do the book sync, you can actually see the instant the frame becomes non-primary. After the sync, if you close the file and say "don't save," it remains OK. All files that were NOT open during the sync will be broken.

[Thomas_Calvin]

Now that I can restore files to uncorrupted, I did extensive tests on the 10 files in my book. Out of the 10, files 6 & 9 do not have the "primary" frame from the parent on their pages. So there's no way to say if primary status would have been retained or not.

SYNC SOURCE    RESULT
1                            all others broken
2                           all others broken       
3                           1-3 OK, all others broken
4                           3-10 OK
5                           all others broken
6                           all broken (this file's children don't use primary frames)
7                           all others broken
8                           all others broken
9                           all broken (this file's children don't use primary frames)
10                         all others broken

Subsequent tests:

Sync all with 4. This leaves 3-10 good.
Fix 1 & 2, and sync them with 4. This leaves 1-4 good.
Resync all with 4. This leaves all good.
Resync all with 5: all others broken

So there's definitely a bug in book-syncing parent pages. That functionality must be considered unsafe for use at this point.

[oldcastle]

I've just been struggling with the same thing:

After adding a set of .indd files to a book that all have primary text frames, then later syncing, the text frames in the individual .indd files have all lost their primary text frame status. I finally figured out that this happens when the "Parent Pages" option is enabled in the book Synchronize Options. All of my parent pages that get synced have primary text frames, so it's not that the syncing grabs non-primary text frames from the parent pages and applies those to the individual book documents. If I disable the "Parent Pages" option from the Synchronize Options and sync, then I don't lose the primary text frames in the individual documents that I synced.

This seems like a bug to me. I'm using InDesign 20.3.1 on MacOS 15.5. 

[oldcastle]

Just tried another test, my problem doesn't seem related to book syncing per se, it's more about loading parent pages from another document. I can get the same things to happen, ie primary text frames are changed to non-primary text frames, when loading parent pages from another document using "Parent Pages->Load Parent Pages" from the flyout menu in the "Pages" panel. The parent pages in the source document have primary text frames, but loading them into a new document changes the existing primary text frames into non-primary text frames. 

[Thomas_Calvin]

Thanks for contributing your findings.

This makes sense. Presumably the book-syncing routine calls the "load from" routines for parent pages, styles, and whatever for each document in the book.