Expert: James Fritz - 12/19/2009

Question
Hello James, I am the local computer guy in my small town. (read I've heard of Macs but I've never seen one.)

Our local weekly newspaper has two workstations Tiger and Leopard OS.
I have just installed Adobe Creative Suite Standard 4 on both.

The paper is 24 to 28 pages in length and that is created in one 28 page file. The printer gets an individual pdf for each page.

I am not familiar with exactly how the pdfs are created. Current publishing software is QuarkXpress 5.

What we want to do is have people working on the 28 page newspaper, one at each workstation, at the same time. Not on the same page but it would be ultimately the same file.

How do you recommend I proceed? Does InDesign have some way of allowing this to happen or do we need to split the paper up into 28 individual files?

Whatever direction, advice or links you may provide will be greatly appreciated.

Here is a link to our website in case you would like to get a sense of what our paper is about.
http://www.communitynewslinesville.com/

Thank You
TomD

Answer
Tom,

If you want people to be able to work on the paper at the same time, you just need to break it up into sections. In theory you could have 28 individual documents (1 for each page). When you are finished with each section make a PDF of that single page.

I would recommend that you break up the newspaper into logical sections, sports, local, national, etc. Each section could be 4-8 pages depending on how long the section is.

In order to manage all of these sections you need to use the book feature.

1. go to file menu > new > book. Save this somewhere next to the regular pages of the newspaper.
2. The book panel will now be open on your screen. It is just like the other panels (can be docked, saved as part of a workspace, etc.). In the book panel, add the InDesign documents for the newspaper in order. This book panel will allow you to keep the pages in order and export the entire newspaper to PDF.