InDesign Publish Online - issues with publishing a book file

[UpStyleDesign]

Using CC2017

We have a 450 page catalogue that has been created from 34 different InDesign files using the 'Book' feature. We now want to use the 'Publish Online' feature but this does not work with 'books'.

So I thought I would export all the pages as a PDF and then start a new InDesign document and place all 450 pages as PDFs using the supplied 'Place Multi-Page PDF' script. All well so far.

Then I have published the new InDesign document. The result, and this baffles me, is that the on-screen presentation has all raster text. What's even odder, is that if I then download the PDF from the Publish Online page, and open it in Acrobat all the text is vector.

As such I am stumped as to how I can use the 'Publish Online' feature can be used for large documents created using the 'book' feature.

Any help appreciated...

[BobLevine]

Publish online treats PDFs the same way it treats any other placed graphic.

If you want to use Publish Online from a book, vote it up, here: https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601021-adobe-indesign-feature-requests/suggestions/32822884-publish-online-for-indb-book-file

[UpStyleDesign]

Thanks Bob. So I am currently stumped. I cannot make a PDF of the book files and use that, and I cannot find out a way to join all the InDesign docs sequentially into one new InDesign file that I then could publish online. All the documents use style sheets and there are occasions that the same-named style will be present in multiple documents with slight differences. I never use the 'synchronise styles' book feature.

I have drawn a blank at any script that can join the InDesign files together. I tried "MultiPageImporter2.5-CS5.jsx" but these seemed to make each page a PDF even though I was importing an InDesign document.

If someone could steer me in the right direction for a script that could merge multiple InDesign docs together and not have any style sheet complications I would be most grateful.

[BobLevine]

Try the scripting forum.

[Laubender]

UpStyleDesign  wrote

… I have drawn a blank at any script that can join the InDesign files together. I tried "MultiPageImporter2.5-CS5.jsx" but these seemed to make each page a PDF even though I was importing an InDesign document.

Publish Online requires "live", editable text in a document to convert that to SVG vector outlines during export.

So placing PDFs or InDesign pages would not work. That's a serious limitation.

On the other hand, a script that would creating one new document out of many single documents must be able to handle all kind of styles and applied masters with the same name but different properties by first renaming them and then doing the merge of pages. One main problem with that would be if text is using the document's baseline grid and the grid is different throughout all documents. Or if page orientation or size is different (but that may be not the case with your project).

You could test a script by Hans Häsler that is available in German and French:

DokumenteVereinen (merge documents)

https://www.hilfdirselbst.org/scripts/downloads.php?groupIDX=&orderby=name&sort=ASC&search_query=&it...

( I linked to the German version for CS5. Hope, that this will work in later versions as well.)

Regards,
Uwe

EDITED THE LINK.

Hans Haesler's scripts are now available at:

https://www.hilfdirselbst.org/scripts/downloads.php?groupIDX=3