InDesign Best Practices 3: Large Documents/Long Documents

[keithconover]

Over the decades, I've come to think that two of my main purposes in life are to (a) push InDesign to the limits and beyond (Slower than molasses in February! Freeze! Crash!), and then (b) get help from the experts on this forum on how to deal with it. This is the third in a series entitled "InDesign Best Practices" in which I hope to give back to the forum, specifically to newbies like I was, with the benefit of my painful experiences. And, as usual, to probably get some corrections and additions from the real experts on this forum. 

Note that the title is not just "Long Documents." I put that there because I think people may search on that term. But if you have a long document that is just text, without any crosslinks, hyperlinks, or linked graphics, you probably won't have much in the way of the (Slower than molasses in February! Freeze! Crash!) type of problems this post is designed to help you avoid. But as soon as you start putting in things other than simple text, InDesign starts having to work harder. A large document such as I'm well-known on this forum for making (Slower than molasses in February! Freeze! Crash!) need not be all that long, if you load it up with computationally-complex things that make InDesign really work for its money. And, after all, if your long document is just text, why not just do it in a word processor? Page-layouty things like graphics and useful things such as internal Cross-Reference are the kind of computationally-intense things that InDesign is InDesigned for. So, here goes. If you have a document you just can't hardly edit at all, you might see one of these threads:

• https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/performance-and-hard-disk-swapping/m-p/14718137#...
• https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/three-documents-freezing/m-p/14647074#M575637
• https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/one-document-freezing/m-p/14157843#M545868

• Graphics: If you have a short document, you can embed graphics. But for longer/larger documents, if you want to put in a frame with a graphic in it, it's almost always better to link to graphic files on your hard drive. Using your mouse to drag the graphic file into a frame in your InDesign file creates such a link. You can see and manage those links using the Links Panel.
  • If your document is short/small, it's nice to link to the original-format Photoshop (.psd), Illustrator (.ai) or other InDesign (.indd) files. Why? Because, in your main InDesign .indd document, you can right-click the graphic and select "Edit Original." In a matter of seconds, you're editing the graphic in Photoshop (linked .psd files), Illustrator (linked .ai files) or directly in Indesign (linked .indd files). If the edits you made don't update in InDesign automatically, you can update the link just by clicking the yellow triangular icon on your frame that, when you hover over it with your mouse, invites you to click and update the link. Very convenient for making tweaks. 
  • However, if your document is going to be long/large, do not link directly to any Photoshop .psd or Illustrator .ai or other InDesign .indd files. Why? Because this causes a very big performance hit for InDesign. Instead, export your original-format Photoshop (.psd), Illustrator (.ai) or other InDesign (.indd) files to another format and link to those files.
    • Photoshop .psd files: export to a standard graphic file format such as JPEG (.jpg), PNG (.png; necessary if your Photoshop .psd file uses transparency as JPEG format does not support transparency) or TIFF (.tif or .tiff). There is sometimes a problem with graphic files having lots of metadata that can make them larger than you want for linked images; see the thread https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/indesign-best-practices-1-graphic-formats/m-p/14... for more about this topic.
    • Illustrator (.ai) and other InDesign (.indd) files: export to PDF.  In your main InDesign file, select the frame you want to put the graphic into, then use the menu: File > Place. If your PDF is multiple pages and you want to select which page(s) you want to insert (you can only insert one PDF page in an InDesign frame), after using the menu for File > Place, at the bottom of the dialog box that lets you select the file, check the checkbox to show options, then choose the appropriate page. You can do this multiple times for multiple pages. 
    • Anchored vs Non-Anchored Graphics: You can anchor graphics to particular places in your text. See the thread https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/best-practices-for-manuals-with-images/m-p/14703... for more about it. This seems to add significant complexity to a document, and for most of my documents I move them about manually. Pro tip: if you use a spread layout with different margins on facing pages, and sometimes have graphics that extend into the outer margins, and you need to add pages in the middle of your document, use the Pages Panel to add two pages at a time. That way, your graphics that extend into the outer margins still extend into the outer margins rather than the inner margins.
• Lumping vs Splitting: A single very long (hundreds of pages) document with graphics and crosslinks is going to make InDesign choke, and then you won't be able to even edit it at all. (Personal experience.)
  • Book Panel: Learn to love InDesign Book Panels, also known as Book Files. Emphasis on the word "learn" as Book Panels take some getting used to. But they are very powerful, and by having not one really long/large file, but say 6 smaller files in a Book Panel, each of those smaller files will be easy to edit without the performance issues of a single larger file. The Book Panel will allow you to:
    • Synchronize page numbering across all of the files
    • Synchonize Paragraph, Character and Object Styles across all of the files (although, to my regret, style synchronization only synchronizes additions or changes, but does not synchronize deletions or, if you've manually organized your styles, the order of the styles)
    • Table of Contents Styles: Supposedly a Book Panel will synchronized Table of Contents styles. I have found this unreliable, and have had to use the very arcane Table of Contents management tools to manually sync my Table of Contents between documents in a Book Panel. I have been able to, with difficulty, generate a Table of Contents for an entire Book Panel Volume in the first document in the Book Panel, and individual Table of Contents for the individual documents. In my case, the Book Panel is a Volume, and the individual InDesign documents in the Book Panel are Chapters. If you want to see how it is done, my .indd files are in http://www.conovers.org/ftp/AppSAR-Source-Files/.
    • Cross-References: Using a Book Panel, you can have Cross-References between different documents in the Book Panel. I have Cross-References from one Chapter to a section in another Chapter. This works if the Chapters are all in the same Volume (Book Panel). You can create individual Chapter (document) PDFs or a single Volume (Book Panel) PDF. The cross-references work within the PDF if it's a single PDF but they will also work if users download all of the Chapters (document) PDFs and put them in the same folder.
  • Stories: I have had problems with documents that are on the order of 100-200 pages long but have lots of cross-references and linked graphics (Slower than molasses in February! Freeze! Crash!). My file was not a magazine with "continued on page 5," it's a textbook chapter. I found that for the smaller chapters, I could have it as a single Story with all of my sections in the same Story. (In InDesignese, a Story is a single chunk of text with a beginning and an end.) But for the longer chapters, I had to break the text up into so that each section was a separate Story. This fixed my performance (Slower than molasses in February! Freeze! Crash!) problems. I also realized that, as the longer chapters were just that – longer – that I should change how I formatted them. The shorter chapters have an Important Points box at the end of each chapter, and now the longer ones have an Important Points box at the end of each section. I suspect that traditional textbook publishers will be aghast at this, but I think it works really well and is transparent to the reader. And, as Ralph Waldo Emerson says,  A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. 

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

A couple of comments…

Graphics:

TIFF files support transparency too. PNG files only support RGB and Grayscale; if you need CMYK or Black-only line art, use PSD or TIFF.

Sync. Styles:

It would make sense that it would not sync deletions. How would ID know if it was a deletion vs. a style that is unique to a single document? HOWEVER, I could see a Global Style Rename or Delete function being very handy.

TOC:

I’ve never had a problem with the TOC, even for bilingual (two TOCs) and 1000-page books. The error is usually in the style management/naming between documents.

Stories:

I’ve had (by necessity) documents that were over 350 pages as part of a larger book. The documents were slow to respond, but that was because of the linked graphics. As I test, I removed the graphics and the files were very “spiffy” when navigating and editing. Since it is greatly dependent on computer setup, one’s mileage may vary.

One should also mention the availability of Adobe FrameMaker. While it formatting is basic compared to InDesign, its long-document features exceed InDesign’s, especially the Book panel.

[keithconover]

Thanks very much for your expertise and comments! Just what I was hoping for. I have one advantage over you and the other experts: I make a lot more mistakes and end up discovering things I have to fix, so I can relate the fix to others. I agree that linked graphics are the major source of (Slower than molasses in February! Freeze! Crash!) However, the chapters in my textbook have lots of cross-references, and given that, I've found that, even after fixing all graphics issues, I had to break the chapters up from one Story to several Stories to prevent (Slower than molasses in February! Freeze! Crash!) If you don't have lots of cross-references, your mileage may vary.