Adobe Indesign's Book Command

Whenever you choose New from the File menu in Adobe InDesign, you may have noticed the option to create a new book without ever knowing exactly what a book is. Well, it turns out that books are a pretty cool feature: they allow you to take a bunch of related InDesign document and treat them as a single entity; a book. All documents in the book can then share the same resources such as paragraph and character styles, colour swatches, master pages, sections and page numbering.

Once you've created a book, by choosing File-New-Book, the Book panel is displayed. It contains a panel menu with all the options necessary for managing a book. The first task is to add some documents to the book: from the Book panel menu, choose "Add Document" and select the documents you want to be treated as part of the book.

When the book file is saved, the book becomes a separate entity to the documents it contains and the documents in a book do not have to reside in the same location as the book or as each other. To save a book, choose Save Book in the Book panel menu.

Next, select one of the documents in the book to be treated as the style source. The document chosen as the style source will be used as the master document in the process known as synchronization whereby InDesign replaces the colour swatches and styles of all documents in the book with those in the style source document.

To set page numbering across the whole book, choose Book Page Numbering Options in the Book panel menu. The default is "Automatically Update Page & Section Numbers": this will cause InDesign to number pages in the documents within the book according to the order in which they are listed in the Book panel.

The Book panel can also be used as a navigation aid or launch pad from which you can open any InDesign document which has been specified as a chapter of the book. To work on any chapter of a book, simply double-click the name of the chapter in the Book panel. The chapter will open like any regular InDesign document and can be closed when you have finished editing without it being removed from the book.

Books are a wonderful tool for division of labour since the fact that a document is part of a book does not stop it from being a regular InDesign document. If a book contains six documents, six different people can work on each of those documents and then, at the end, the whole book can be preflighted, printed and output as PDF as a single unit.

Both indexes and tables of contents can also be generated for an entire book as well as for a single document. Simply design and create the table of contents or index in the normal way but activate the option "Include Book Documents".