Senior Field Engineer

As Senior Field Engineer at DPCI, Rob Underwood is responsible for a wide range of services including training, technical support, and systems integration.

The co-author of six Adobe training books, Underwood is an Adobe Certified Print Specialist, an Adobe Certified Expert in InDesign, Photoshop, and Acrobat, and Certified Technical Training (CTT). In addition to articles on the Creative Suite, Rob also writes on K4 Editorial System.

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June 11, 2009

InDesign Libraries: How to a Build a Versatile InDesign Library that Everyone Can Share

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Maybe years ago you used Libraries inside of Quark to store clipart or logos. They were a great time saver, an easy way to quickly drop commonly used graphics and text frames into your layout. Now that you’ve been using InDesign, perhaps you have not decided to rebuild those Libraries. If you’re not using Libraries inside of InDesign now then you should be aware of just how far Libraries have come. Not only can you store graphics in Libraries, but you can also store layouts, and even share Libraries with other users.

If this is your first time using Libraries, I’d first like to tell you how useful they can be, and then show you how to build one.

Think of Graphics that you use all the time in your layouts. Maybe you need headshots with names under them from your contributors. You may store them in the pasteboard of your InDesign documents. I'm sure you run into times during production that you either forget which document contained a particular headshot, or worse, you're re-designing them over and over. How about logos? Do you find yourself constantly searching across your server for just the right logo? Do you need the white one, or the one with transparency?

Instead of constantly searching and importing the wrong image, you can streamline your workflow with a Library. Once you build or import any graphic or set of graphics into InDesign, you can simply drag that item into a Library for later use. This makes re-purposing commonly used graphics easier and saves you a ton of time. It can also help your develop a more standard look to your publication, ensuring that you don't place the wrong logo, or build one differently than you did for a previous issue.

To build your Library you choose File > New > Library inside of InDesign. You can call your Library whatever name you like. You could decide to have a separate Library for the different elements you place. However, I recommend just making one Library with all the elements you need and then naming them correctly so that you can search for specific items. To add items to your new Library, you can drag any item over your Library using your Selection Tool.

Adding files to an InDesign Library.

Once the graphic is added to a Library, you can double-click that graphic to edit the item's information. This is the information that is vital to performing searches on your Library items. You can start by giving your item a specific name. You may also want to include what type of item it is. You can then pick the object type to make your searches that much more precise. Finally, you can give it a detailed description.

Changing the item information of a Library item.
Once your Library is filled with all the graphics you commonly use, you can then search your Library for those items by clicking on the binocular icon at the bottom of the Library panel.

Searching for specific items in your Library.

Now that you have your basic graphics inside of this newly built Library it is time to think outside of the box. Why not store entire layouts inside of your Library? Imagine being able to look through a visual Library of all the different Layouts you've used for a certain section of your publication and being able to choose a layout you haven't used in a while. You may already use Master Pages to perform this task. But, items on a master page are locked when you drag them over your page. This makes you perform the extra task of unlocking each item you need to use.

Even worse, if you unlock all of your items at once by choosing "Override all Master Page Items," you often unlock items you want to stay locked to a master page, and leave the risk that you may accidentally move or edit those items. (This would undermine the fact that you have your page headers and footers on master page for just that reason, you don't want them unlocked!) Instead, consider this: leave all static items such as folios, header, and footers on master pages, and store your layouts inside of a Library.

Next, how can you ensure that when you place these items on the page, they have the correct positioning? When you drag and drop an item in a Library it just drops onto the layout without any real control. Actually, InDesign remembers the exact positioning of the item you selected before you dropped it into your Library. Instead of dragging and dropping an item onto your page, you can choose "Place Item" from the Library panel. This will place your layout exactly where it was before you made it a Library item. As you start to perform this task more and more you can give this action in shortcut inside of Keyboard Shortcuts.

Saving a layout in your Library.

Placing a Library item in your Layout.

Now that you've built this amazing Library you'll most likely want to share it with your co-workers. The first thing to remember is that all of your images are not stored in your Library file. They are still linked to the places you originally found them on your server or desktop. If you want to share this file with other people in your network, you should make sure all of your graphics are linked to a server, and not your local computer. If they are linked to just your machine, people will still be able to use the Library, but the links to the local images will be broken.

If you want your co-workers to have access to your Library, you could let them take a copy of your Library and drag it to their desktop. But wouldn't it be great if everyone could work from one standardized Library? The added bonus of a one Library workflow is that if one person is in charge of the Library, that person can make changes to the common Library to make sure everyone is using the correct Library items. However, no one else can add to the Library. If the "Library keeper" updates a certain logo, the next time someone opens the Library they will see the new logo.

To share a Library using a Macintosh, you only need to select the Library and choose File > Get Info. Lock the file by checking the Locked checkbox in the General section. On Windows, right click the Library, choose Properties, and select Read Only. Now that the file is locked, multiple people can open the Library, but no one can add to it. To add to the Library it must be unlocked again.

As a feature request for Adobe, I'd like to request that InDesign Libraries work more like those in Flash or Illustrator. In the Symbol Libraries of both these programs, if you update a Library item, all instances of that item would change across your document. You cannot change a Library item in InDesign to update instances of Library items across a document. It would just be nice to have a check box that let you decide how a Library item behaves, either like a symbol or not.

If you're really starting to become a Library junkie like me than you should check out this free plug-in from rorohiko.com. It is called the Image Library Loader. The plugin itself is free, but the APID Tool Assistant that makes it work is $25 (if you do not purchase the Assistant, the plugin will work for a 20-day trial). Once you load this plugin it makes building quick Libraries for things such as multiple image placements, and laying out ads easy. You can actually choose a folder full of images, and this plugin will automatically create a Library for you! It can also add and reload a Library as well. Follow this link to find out some more information.

As a final word of precaution about building Libraries, I'd like to offer up this piece of advice. Library items remember things like Character and Paragraph Styles, Object Styles, and Swatch names. That means that if you drop a Library item onto a page and that Library item has a "Headline" Paragraph Style defined differently in that document than in the document the item was created, the library item is going to take on the look and feel of the way "Headline" is defined in the new document.

There are a couple of ways to approach this. You could remove all styles from items before you made them Library items. Or, you could make sure your styles have either more section-related names or are contained in a specific style group. Finally, you could make it work for you. If "Headline" looks different in one section of your publication than it does in the other, it may be OK if the look and feel change. Simply understanding the way styles travel between documents is the real idea to grasp. Because knowing how things work in InDesign is half the battle!

Posted at 01:40 pm by Robert Underwood