File setup for a Indd file for 2 pdf exports with similar page

Hi and thank you for the responses and follow up questions - appreciate the interest and help!

Clarifications :

• It may be that from the 50 pages, selected pages 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 22, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42-50 are needed for the condensed pdf as single page pdfs - in this flow.
• However the 50 pages full version still remains as the 1-50 in its flow too.
• They do not need to be exported at one go, or both at a time. A & B can be exported 2 separate times. 
• It's more the organization/ visual maintenance of the 50 pages that I'm hoping to have.
• So for the selected pages for the condensed pdf, it would be great to have them shown on the indd somehow as well. 

I imagine it may work ' alternate layouts' but its abit finicky for me even and so it is not going to be usable for others who want to upkeep it simply.

@TW25 

More info is needed:

1) Facing Pages or not?

2) how "mixed" would those "A" pages be with "B" pages?

3) will the order/location of the "A" pages change or will remain the same?

Unfortunately, you can't save Page Range with a PDF preset - so if location of pages "A" won't ever change - you could save them in a TXT file and then just copy&paste every time you want to export PDF "A".

Of course, it can be easily automated in more than one way - depends on how many of those files you will have and where those PDFs should be uploaded, etc.

I can think of two "integral" approaches (using just ID features, no outside support or tools).

One would be to use conditional text to remove the "B" materal for export as Version A. This would work best if the content is a single flexible flow, so that removing material would allow what remains to collapse into a neat pagination. (High mastery of paragraph styles would help a lot here.)

The other would be to set up the "A" content in a document of its own and then place those pages as either an INDD file or PDF in the master document. Export document A for, well, Version A, and the combined document, with B interlaced with the A pages, for Version B. This would work best if the content is highly paginated and would not reflow or repaginate smoothly.

Anything more complex and I think it's simply going to have to be a user-controlled process more than something with an A/B switch you can flip.

I think it would be fair to say you want to be able to export both PDFs at the same time with the minimum of fuss.

A javascript that can run from InDesign's script panel would be a solution I would use. That said, there isn't one "on the shelf" I can offer so it would need to be written, but in the age of chat GPT there are a few avenues:

• another poster may read this thread and either offer the script to the community; suggest how to write it; or that they write it for you commercially;
• an AI web service like ChatGPT may be able to write a script like this with the appropriate prompts;
• a paid InDesign AI plugin such as Omata Mate might do the same as the above, but remain within InDesign's framework.

If you want to tackle this script yourself, I'd suggest going to the InDesign Javascript API that particularly references the PDF export preferences which is here: https://www.indesignjs.de/extendscriptAPI/indesign-latest/#PDFExportPreset.html