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InDesgin: Master "objects"

C

CreatorOfMyth

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 8, 2009
10
0
I am familiar with the use of master pages in InDesign and I would like to do essentially that, but without the "page" part.

I have a complex object made up of many textboxes and graphics. I would like to have several of these objects on a single page. I'd like them all to be linked back to a single source object, so that if I update that object that same change is reflected into all the copies. I'd also want to be able to override some of the master traits on the copies so they can be independent of the source, for example what text is within the textbox.

This is exactly like master pages, except I want this to apply to objects on a single page, not across many pages.

Any thoughts?
 
Multiple Masters?

A little confused on what you are going for, but couldn't you use multiple master pages and apply them as needed in your design? Selecting what pages go with which master is pretty easy.

Is this a very large project?
 
This is a huge project. To help everyone get the idea of what I'm talking about I'll release a few details.

I'm designing a card game. I can fit 9 cards onto a single page. I will therefore have many hundreds of pages, each with 9 cards on it. I could make a master page with 9 blank cards on it and use that to create all the pages, so when I update the format on the master page that change will be applied to all the cards I've made.

The problem is the master page has 9 cards. Any change I make I would have to do 9 times, once to each blank card on the master page. I would much rather just have a single card that I can change and have that change be made to every single card I've created.

Does that help? Any ideas?
 
What are you using to create the cards themselves - Illustrator? Photoshop?

Not sure if this helps for your project, but if you place a Ps or Ai file in an InDesign document then any changes you make to the source file will be updated in the InDesign document next time it's saved.

Is that any use?
 
The card format is made of a collection of textboxes in InDesign. I then copy paste an image created in photoshop into the appropriate textbox to create a small piece of the final card. The card is made of roughly a dozen of these textboxes.

I considered the "import from Illustrator" idea, but the problem there is that once imported, I can't make any changes to the textboxes within the object. It's a hard copy of the Illustrator file that I can rezise and move about, but can't break apart to modify the individual pieces. If I update that Illustrator file, the copies update, which is awesome but I need both functions, but just one.
 
FourCandles said:
What are you using to create the cards themselves - Illustrator? Photoshop?

Not sure if this helps for your project, but if you place a Ps or Ai file in an InDesign document then any changes you make to the source file will be updated in the InDesign document next time it's saved.

Is that any use?
Click to expand...

Especially when you use LAYER comps in PS. Setting your files up for something this size it is worth the time and effort, but if you don't have any control over then you are in for the long haul! Sorry.
 
The only thing I can think of thats a half-solution to what your doing is to make One card and save it as an indesign document. Then import that document into your actual 'game' doc.

Indesign will import it as a link, and whenever you edit the original, all instances in your 'game' doc will be updated. The only disadvantage is that i'm not sure how to override the original linked-document.

You can also try to use the object library, as well as snippets.

Hope that helps. lmk how it works out.
 
Or perhaps Object Styles in combination with Paragraph and Character Styles? Could you upload a sample card and explain the different parts that you're hoping to change?
 
In the individual copies of the cards I would like to be able to change the text and images contained within their textboxes.

What I want the master to control are the locations and sizes of the textboxes.

My cards are designed using layers.

And the idea of resizing the page to be the size of a single card is absolutely brillant!!!! *sigh* But now I'm struggling with getting it to print multiple cards tiled on a single page.

Help please?

NOTE: I looked up tiling. Tiling is when you have a document that's too large for a single page, so it prints it across multiple pages and then you can reconstruct it. I want the opposite of that. The document is so small that I can fit multiple of it on a single page to conserve paper.
 
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