Relative Link Paths

> How the hell do you make all the links in a document relative instead of absolute?

You do realise this is a feature request forum and that this thread exists precisely because it can't be done?

can't everyone stop asking why it needs to be done and just tell us how to do it. The guy wants to use relative links because he damn well feels like it so stop asking him why and just tell him how its done because I also need to know. We've got 20 staff each working on 2-3 ~150 page magazines/books each with a tonne of links and every time they're packaged and saved on to our file server and re-opened on another machine, the docuements need to be re-linked. It can be done automatically but this process just takes too damn long in some cases. We need to be able to open these docuemnts on differnt machines and be able to start working on them immediately. We've got deadlines and can't afford to waste time re-linking.
How the hell do you make all the links in a document relative instead of absolute... simple bloody question. how the hell do you do it???
if you don't know, please don't answer!!!

Bucky, that's exactly right. But assuming you just changed the name of one folder in the process (not the top level folder), then it would indeed be beneficial.

Maybe part of the problem here is the loose use of the word "relative." In Grant's OP, he specified that he'd like to be able to use the Web convention "../../image.psd" In this case, ID would know to go UP the hierarchy a certain number of levels (depending on how many ../'s there are), and THEN search down through all directories.

Currently, ID WILL automatically search down from the document directory. Thus, IN A SENSE, ID has "relative" capabilities, but only down, see?

Of course, Grant, telling ID to go up a certain number of directories before beginning a downward search won't truly solve your problem. You'd still have to be able to guarantee you didn't move anything out of the specified "top level" directory.

Grant,

If you rename a folder in the middle of the path, or move a file to a new location, how do you expect to InDesign to know the new name and/or location? I can't see how relative/absolute comes into play here, but maybe I'm just dense this week.

We've already established that you can move an entire branch or rename the root folder without losing links -- you just can't screw around in the middle somewhere.

Peter

I don't really do books/packages very often either. In fact 99% of my work is printed internally so I never really have to transport it around.

The only real reason I ever rename folders and end up with broken links is because I'm constantly refining my folder structures and file naming conventions.

I think you could both agree though, that there is some utility value in allowing both relative and absolute paths, even if for only a minority.

This comes up about once a year, so it's not a big deal. I was just explaining a circumstance where the feature would be useful. I usually end up packaging each chapter and not worrying about the duplication -- it's not that disk space is an issue any more.

Dave

I don't do a lot of booked projects, and so I don't have your scenario, I guess. Can you package a book or do you need to do the files individually? If the latter, I can see where it would take some manual work to move everything into one links folder after doing the packages. Perhaps it would be more useful to ask for the ability to package a book if that can't be done now.

But packages don't work at a project level -- think of a book with 15 chapters with a mix of project art and chapter art. You really only want the project art once. That's where relative links would help me.

Dave

I'm a little confused now about how you want to move things. Moving the whole project implies moving the links as well as the document, at least to me, and that says "package," but I'm playing with simply moving directories.

I've just moved a document from one physical drive to another on my workstation and opened it without any issue -- the links stayed where they were and were still accessible since they are on the same machine.

I've also just moved the document back, then moved the entire client folder to the second drive so nothing was left in it's original location. Again, the document opened as if it were never moved, which implies to me that I could move it to a second physical machine the same way (and in fact I have -- most of my client folders are duplicated on my laptop).

I think Grant's problem is that he is interrupting the path information by changing the names somewhere besides the top level. I don't think you can expect any application to figure out that instead of looking in fred\martha\george\larry it should look in fred\martha\josephine\larry.

Peter