Can one create a "Master Document"?

[Bohdan Chreptak]

I've created a brand deck for one of my clients that is about 30 pages.  This brand does collaborations with other brands for which I create a modified version of this document with a different cover and a few extra pages.  These graphic heavy (large files) collaboration decks are adding up.  My workspace is filling with multiple near copies of this document. I loathe unnecessary redundancy.  To make matters worse, when I need to adjust the original brand deck, I've got to manually iterate those changes through 50 collaboration decks.  Not a sustainable practice.

So, is master document a thing???

A thousand thanks.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

What about alternative layouts? You can link the text edits across versions.

You don't need to change the page size or copy styles to new group (if you want the same formatting throughout).

For text that is different between versions, you can put in separate text blocks and either not update them or break the link in the Links panel.

[Bohdan Chreptak]

Thanks Ideas.  Text will usually match the original doc.  It's creating a copy of that document with additional pages, and keeping the original pages actively linked so that changes will be shared throughout all versions.    For simplicity's sake lets say I want 50 copies of the document, each with a different cover and I want to be able to change content in all of them simply by editing the "master".

To be clear, I'm no InDesign master, so I might be missing something in your answer?

[Michael Riordan]

Either approach will work, Alternate layouts keep the versions under one InDesign document, you create and access the alternates in the pages panel. Otherwise you can link content across documents and yes change page count and make other independent edits in either case.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Sounds like a good job for alternative layouts.

Another option is to use a book file and break the document into logical sections.

You could have 50 separate books, some linked to the same documents, others with unique documents.

OR, you could have one book and just replace the cover document per output.

Another option is just use 51 layers, with all the global info on the "master" layer.

[Michael Riordan]

Yes in a sense this is possible. It's what the content conveyors in the tool panel are for.

Edits in the original doc will show up as modified links in the child documents. Works with text and images.

[Bohdan Chreptak]

From my limited perspective, this looks like a tool for managing elements within the document?  I'm not familiar with these.  I shall have a closer look at what they do.   I think I'm after something like having 30 trans-document master pages?

Thanks for your thoughts.