Newspaper Classifieds (Legals/Public Notices - Workflow)

[defaultcvnikibjb03c]

I work at a newspaper where we flow line legals into an InDesign template for the classifieds section. The legals are prepared as individual InDesign files in a legal template that allows us to measure length in column inches for billing purposes.

I'd like to find a way to select these individual InDesign files and flow them into a text box in my classifieds template. Currently, I'm opening up all the legals for that day and manually copying and pasting them into my textbox. Importing the files doesn't appear to give me the ability to flow these legals from one into the next as needed.

I'm not exactly a beginner to InDesign, but this feels like a question with an obvious answer. Maybe just a giant blind-spot? I'm aware of work-flows that use either In-copy or Word and maintain paragraph and character styles, but since we're measuring the column inches in InDesign - I'm not sure this is the right approach.

Please let me know if you have any insight into this dilemma, and let me know if you have any questions or need further clarification of this problem.

Thank you!

[Eric Dumas]

I would recommend you look into the InCopy - InDesign workflow.

InDesign is your finished document with blank text frames placed in the file, text styles saved within the file... as per usual. The difference is that you select a text frame and 'assign it' to be worked in InCopy. The InCopy article can be saved in a shared folder for several users to fill in within the space (word count) allocated, formatted with the character and paragrah styles from the InDesign document. As the InCopy files are saved, the InDesign file gets updated.

I absolutely love it!

No copy paste. You can achieve something nearly similar by linking several Word Docs using a 'live link' but without the word count limit feature.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@Eric Dumas 

I dont think Incopy will work - @defaultcvnikibjb03c needs to bulk import separately prepared "objects".

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@defaultcvnikibjb03c 

There are two options:

1) you have a text with a list of files to import - or unique parts of the name,

2) you have only required files in the folder.

Then script can either use 1) or go through the folder 2) and import your files as InLine objects.

If you have TextFrames linked as a Story - then everything will reflow automatically.

...

I would suggest that you won't place INDD files - but generate PDFs and place those instead.

Yes, it would require extra step - but InDesign will work much faster.

I have created a tool for building product catalogues that way - each product is a separate INDD file generated in bulk from a database, at the same time PDF is generated.

Then user loads list of products that should be imported - and only those PDFs are placed in a Story so everything flows nicely and it's very easy to manually add / remove / move single product - or add "extras".

And as each PDF have layers - it's easy to turn on / off layers and export specific language - probably not needed in your case.