Master Pages Sorting

[Gioyer07]

I have a >1000pages Book (a catalog) composed by 12 ID documents. Each document uses approx 50 different Master Pages ("MP" in this post) while the whole Book has 200MP in total (some pages remain the same in all documents but some documents have peculiar MP). To keep the thing as ordered as possible, I have a separate (1 page) document named "MasterPages" that collects all the MP of the documents.

When checking the document I really miss an option that would allow me to alphabetically sort/order the MP of my documents. Checking 12 documents to find the different MP is quite frustrating and can introduce errors.

Why do I need so many MP? That's because I use a plugin that automatically paginates my documents... and it uses MP's guides.

I've searched deeply here in the Community and outside and the only partial help I've found is this script https://www.corullon.com.br/scripts/product/load-selected-master-pages/. Not really what I was looking for but at least helps a little allowing to pick a specific MP (much as moving styles among documents).

Looks like Master Pages section has not received any evolution recently. Can anybody help? Am I the only one to require (at least) an alphabetical sorting of the Master Pages section and a selective import/export option? Thank You.

[Gioyer07]

Normal frequency is once a year.... (after many thousands copies-printing rush)....order is much required and during last-minute changes there's no time to sync everything...

Thank you

[Abambo]

I've now tested your solution. Everything you wrote is true. I marked your answer as the Correct one but the workflow is much too time-expensive to be implemented. Moreover I'm not sure how to get back to the complete data of the *.indd format.

By @Gioyer07

You do the reverse operation. Zip...change to IDML...Read in InDesign. If you did not mess up the structure, it should be a clean InDesign file again. And it seems that the workflow is not that time intensive. You could even use a sorting tool either in your text editor or Exel or Word to sort the data alphabetically. It's, btw, far less complex than your whole catalogue structure.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@Abambo

You can't do sorting - because names of XML files are random - do not correspond in any way to the real name of the Master.

[Laubender]

Hi @Gioyer07 ,

you wrote:
"I've now tested your* solution. Everything you wrote is true. I marked your answer as the Correct one but the workflow is much too time-expensive to be implemented. Moreover I'm not sure how to get back to the complete data of the *.indd format (the workaround of extracting the content of an *.indd file of course doesn't work). "

* @Robert at ID-Tasker 's solution marked as Correct Answer.

Well, if you are on Windows you could edit the contents of the IDML package file directly inside the package.

Simply open the IDML package in the file system, no need to extract its contents.

To @Robert at ID-Tasker :

I wonder if we could extract the idmlComponentName of every parent page (technical term with scripting is masterSpread)… That should correspond with the name given in src  of that XML file in the IDML package.

No time to test this right now…

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Those are XML / txt files - so anything can be done. 

I could even add it to my tool as a fully automatic solution...