Pages and subdocuments

[polyphenol]

I've moved almost entirely over from Word to Pages. And, mostly, I'm finding it easier to achieve what I want.

There is, though, one thing which defeats me.

Word had a master document option. While it resulted in terrible performance and loss of data, the aim was good. Allow one master document to "contain" several sub-documents. This (at least theoretically) allowed you to work on one sub-document and yet, when you went to the master document, the sub-documents would automatically be the updated versions.

Last time I tried, years ago, it failed in a horrible heap and even Microsoft said "Don't use master documents!".

What I have done in changing to Pages is divide some documents up into, say, four parts. Which is trivial. This was done because I revised what I was aiming at to make it easier for people to sue the documents. Technically, I could have left it as one document.

But each part needs two or three appendixes which are common to all four. Again, trivial to copy and paste them in.

The rub is that if I change anything, I want the changes to appear in all four documents. I want them to act like a glorified boiler-plate mechanism that updates every document the item is used in. (At least, boiler-plates that update next time I open the document containing it. It doesn't have to search for all documents!)

And I don't want to do things like merge PDFs - because that would fail to handle the Table of Contents properly. (There is a ToC in each of the four "master" documents. And I want the appendixes themselves, as well as headings within them, to appear in the ToC.)

There might be some really simple, obvious way of doing this. But, despite lots of playing around and searching, I haven't found that way.

While I wouldn't want to buy InDesign (who would?), I wouldn't be averse to paying a modest price for some utility or add-in that would help.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

As you've done with splitting one bigger document into 4 documents, split out the TOC and Appendix as their own documents too. Then you would have 6 documents and the ability to update the TOC or Appendix in one place to apply to the other 4. All could live inside of 1 folder that represents/houses the overall work/document/creation.

If the 4 are evolving drafts working towards a final, when you get to that final, you can merge the 4 into one and tack on the TOC and Appendix. It reads like they also each have their own Appendix too, so then it will be a decision of tacking on the overarching Appendix items before (via insert) or after (via append) their custom appendix... but nothing to that.

A bit of a hack option if you are dynamically inserting content vs. only adding on (linearly): perhaps use the "Comment" option to highlight (for you) what you want to reference in the master TOC & appendix. If you comment each spot to be "indexed", from time to time you simply check where comments are located now to update the master appendix information in its document. For example, if you have a reference to some lines currently on page 32 with appendix or TOC references to that page, if that bit of content is tagged with a comment, you can- at any time- start clicking through comments to see what page they are on now and update the master TOC and/or appendix accordingly. If the reference on page 32 is now on page 34, you could fairly easily catch it that way and adjust the reference in the other documents.

Another hack: while you are probably looking for some kind of linear approach to the tags for the appendix entries, you could customize those to better fit what you are doing here. Thus, instead of references like A, B, C, D, or 1, 2, 3, 4 you might assign some identifier to each of the 4 documents and then put the linear part after that. For example, doc 1 of 4 could be A, doc 2 of 4 could be B, etc... and then Appendix references/tags could be A.1, A.2, A.3 for doc 1 and B.1, B.2, B.3 for doc 2, etc. Think like the old printed software manuals where one could insert only a few new pages when something new was added... thus, when they needed some new content in content currently on page 11 and 12, the new pages might be named 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 or even 11.100, 11.101, 11.102 etc.

Else, yes, you are looking for something beyond Pages capabilities and hopefully someone will know the app for you and post. I realize you are probably looking for some automatic & dynamic TOC and appendix option and there's probably some such app for that.

 

[polyphenol]

split out the TOC

I very much appreciate your reply.

But if the ToC is in another document, it won't populate with what is in the primary documents. Will it? (I'm using the built-in ToC facility and using appropriate styles to get what I want included.) Your last comment recognises this!

It is too big to feel comfortable doing this with any manual approach. (The original Word document was around 600 A4 pages. I've shrunk the Pages documents to A5 which has tended to increase the numbers of pages but made other changes which have reduced the volume a bit.)

Imagine that I created a single document for the UK. But have now split it into England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. And they will remain separate. (After all, to a large extent those in each of the nations don't have so much interest in the other three.) But some bits, some appendixes are common. Like information about the UK government.

If I edit the appendix of UK government information, I don't want to have to re-do that to the copies of the appendix I've already put into the four documents. But nor do I want to have to edit each document identically. The changes could be anything from correcting a typo to a wholesale revision.

I'm quite thankful that the nature of the documents means an index isn't really needed. Especially as they will almost always be accessed as PDFs so search would be an option.