unthreading and retheading cs6

[leilagold]

Hi - I've tried the various directions on threading and unthreading and what happens is I lose subsequent text.

My problem:

I have a 400 page book I'm correcting. I needed to place a chapter earlier and clearly made the mistake of moving pages rather than cutting and pasting (I had photos on the pages and didn't want to lose their placement!). Now I find that my text moved, but my threads return to the old placement of pages. 

When I try to click in the input or output arrow I lose the following text.

Any solution?

THANKS!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

If you've scrambled the frame flow of a large document, it's likely you made a number of unwise moves (literally), and I'd have to wonder if the document was set up correctly (all best practices, as a single, clean flow, etc.) to begin with. Applying fixes suggested in good faith could make it all worse.

Honest answer? You can probably sort it out, with enough effort, patience and suggestions from here... but the straight line solution is to start over. Create a completely new document with the right basic page structure, and cut and paste the old doc into that new, single flow. Then reformat and clean up, one page at a time. And clean up any style issues as you go.

I know; that sounds overwhelming. But it will probably use less time, and generate a cleaner, un-broken result that will accept more editing and changes gracefully. Hacking together a fix on the broken one will likely leave many broken things, waiting to trip you up on subsequent work, editings, export to any format but print-PDF, etc.

The takeaway here is that shortcuts are almost never the right choice with ID documents. Everything is connected, not always obviously, and it's easy to do simple things that might seem speedier or more efficient but have dreadful consequences.

My US$0.02, from (too) much experience with these things.

[leilagold]

Ha! That was me a few years ago. This time I've been quite careful. It was a single clear flowing document beforehand...I just mangled two chapters after a vacation from the project. If the photos would come over from cutting and pasting, I'd have no problem redoing it...but I can't see replacing 100+ photos...

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Well, you can try reflowing the frames page by page if it's just one middle section — all you would lose, if it's not entirely successful, is some time. Develop an absolutely meticulous work cycle so you don't lose track.

I take it the photos are not text-anchored. Yes, that would be tedious to reconstruct.

[leilagold]

Thanks, I was thinking I'd reflow page after page if I can't find a better solution. It's not that much...it's good to now that you think it possible. And right, the photos can't be text-anchored because things change just enough to make that more time consuming.