How to Use InDesign Books (INDBs) to Make Digital Planners Out of Multiple InDesign Documents

· Introduction
· InDesign Book Basics
· Hyperlinking
· Packaging
· Exporting

Introduction

InDesign is a fantastic tool for creating digital and physical planners. However, when you’re making a planner, the organisation can get pretty chaotic. Digital planners can have thousands of pages with many more hyperlinks, and that can be hard to keep track of.

In addition to that, having a massive InDesign document with so many pages isn’t easy on your computer. There are ways to make things a little faster, such as changing your preview display settings, but after a certain point it doesn’t help. With an InDesign Book, you can create many InDesign documents (say, one for each month of the year) and hyperlink between them to export as one massive PDF file.

Not only that, but you can sync your paragraph styles, parent pages, and more between all of the files. You set one file up as your style source, and then all of the InDesign files have access to them.

So, let’s get started.

InDesign Book Basics

First, I am going to create my InDesign Book (INDB). We do this by going ‘File’ (at the top), ‘New’, and then ‘Book’. This will then make us save our book.

Once it’s saved, your book will open immediately. But, it’s empty, so we need to create our documents to fill it up.

My workflow works best when I create all of the documents I need first and add them all to the book. I always have a planner 100% planned out before I start creating it, and I don’t deviate from that plan. Your workflow might look different, so feel free to explore as you create your planner.

So, my document will have an intro, where the yearly overview and other yearly layouts will live, and then one document for each month. This means I have 13 documents in my book.

Once I’ve created all of those, I need to add them to my book. Click the little plus at the bottom of the panel to add documents. We can add all of our documents at once, which will add them in a random order, but we can rearrange them after by just drag and dropping them.

Then, we can click on the empty square next to the document’s name to change our style source.

By default, InDesign doesn’t sync parent pages, so we have to do that ourselves. Click the hamburger menu (the three lines) and choose ‘Synchronise Options’ to choose what aspects you would like to copy across to all documents.

I’m going to add a word to the parent page of the style source document to show how these changes work.

Once we’ve done that, we need to sync that change across the documents. We need to do this after we make changes, otherwise, they won’t be reflected.

Use shift to select all of the documents in the book, and then click the two arrows icon at the bottom of the panel. This will update our changes.

If I open all of the documents, we can see the parent pages have been updated.

Now, let’s move on to hyperlinking.

Hyperlinking

Hyperlinking across documents is easy. Just hyperlink as you normally do. I have a blog post on how to make hyperlinking easier. The only difference is that we choose a document from the drop-down menu.

When you’re hyperlinking, you need the document that you’re hyperlinking to open. Once the hyperlink is created, you’re free to close it.

However, you might notice that the page numbering is incorrect. It continues on from the preview document, but that can make hyperlinking tricky. You can use the trick in that hyperlinking blog, but we can also adjust our page numbers to be independent of the book as a whole.

Go to the document by double-clicking it in the book panel, and then right-click the page and choose ‘Numbering and Section Options’. Choose ‘Start Page Numbering at’ and then input 1. Now your page numbering will behave how you want it to.

If your page numbering hasn’t updated, you can click the hamburger menu, go to ‘Update Numbering’, and then ‘Update Page and Section Numbers’.

You can also just select the document in your book, click the hamburger menu, and choose ‘Document Numbering Options’, which will bring up the same menu.

Packaging

In InDesign, we’re working with big documents, and we might want to transfer our work to another computer, or just move it to a different location on our existing device. Because of this, we need to package our document.

Packaging just means that InDesign will collect all of the files and fonts associated with our document and copy them into one folder.

If you have images that aren’t embedded and they move location on your device, InDesign will give you an error when it can’t find it. Packaging your document resolves this issue, and we can package entire books as well.

To package our book, click the hamburger menu and then select ‘Package Book for Print’.

A dialogue box will pop up, and then we’ll click ‘Package’.

Then, another package dialogue will pop up, and there will be a whole heap of options, but the default should suit you just fine.

(You might notice that a PDF is included, but this isn’t an interactive document, so we can disregard it.)

I don’t have any images in this document, but there’s also usually a links folder too.

Now, you can zip this folder and move it around with everything totally organised for you.

But, we haven’t saved our PDF with working hyperlinks, so let’s do that now.

Exporting

Exporting your document is easy. Right below the packaging button is our PDF export option.

You can choose either a Print PDF or an Interactive PDF. Selecting which one you want will then open the next dialogue.

I prefer the print dialogue options, but if you choose this route make sure you tick on ‘Hyperlinks’ at the bottom to make sure they export also.

And that’s it! You can play around with different PDF settings to compress your planner, also, because that will depend on what images you have in your planner. You can now use InDesign books to create digital planners.