Nesting InDesign documents

- [Instructor] Though it might be a little bit unconventional to some, nesting Adobe InDesign files together can really make your document far less complex. In this exercise, we need to reference a different InDesign document and place it in our main InDesign composition. And Instead of copying and pasting information into my document I'll place it into Adobe InDesign instead. Here inside of Adobe InDesign I'm on this page here where at the bottom I already drew a graphics frame that I will use to hold my other InDesign file. And that other InDesign file is a card. Now, I have this card open here as well and you can find this inside of your links folder. So this is just a separate design that we can just send off for print if I want to because it comes with bleed settings. It's all perfect and ready to go for print. Now if I take a look at the Layers panel you can see that I'm actually using two layers as well. One for text and one for the graphics. Now, the idea is very simple. I have these cards that I would like to use in print and I have my magazine where I would like to advertise these cards. Now, what many people tend to do now is go back to this file, select everything, and then group everything together. And the problem with this is that first of all I also have bleeds which means that if I were to take everything I'm also going to take the actual bleed information with it as well. So you have to come in and maybe make this a little bit smaller so it only uses the exact document dimensions. So that's one problem. The other problem, and let me quickly undo this here, the other problem is this here: text and graphics. So, as I select everything you can clearly see by these two colored squares that I have objects both on this layer and on this layer. Now to make that even more clear I'll just quickly open this up here so you can see what's going on. The moment you hit the group shortcut key, which is Command G on Mac or Ctrl G on Windows you'll see that all of a sudden it will move everything to one layer. So I'm basically changing the structure of my document simply because I want to group everything together. Why did I want to group everything together? Simply because it might be very difficult for me once I paste this in here to select individual items later on down the line. So this is what a lot of people do but it's not really what I want to do in this exercise. I'll just quickly choose File and just revert back to the original. Now I'm not going to do anything from here instead I will just place this directly from this file instead. I'll quickly come in and I'll select this frame, I'll choose File, Place and I'll navigate to the correct folder which is Chapter 4 Number One. And inside the Links panel there is a Cards folder where I can click and select my InDesign file. Now it is important to have these show import options selected so when I click open I have additional options. Now of course I can choose to place this without any text or without any graphics but in this case the main reason why I'm opening this up using the import options is simply because I would like to set the bounding box options. So right now as you can clearly see by this dashed line I am not placing everything. I am only placing this file according to its bounding box which is the actual size of my page. If I were to come in and choose bleed bounding box you can see that the dashed line will expand which means that I am also putting in the bleed settings. So I'm placing everything I have of my document including the bleed. A bleed is something that we only need for print. So because of that while I'm presenting my work I want to choose the page bounding box instead to be able to present my card exactly the way that it will be finished and printed. So I'll just click okay and this will place my card exactly where it is supposed to be. Now keep in mind that when you do this that this will still have a link to the original which means that if I quickly come in and zoom in a little bit here, there we go, I can see everything the way I want to see it and if I go back to the Links panel you will see that now I have also placed a cards.indd which on its turn is also using different external source files as well. So it is really important to keep this InDesign file completely intact which means that all the links should be in order and all the fonts should be synchronized before I can successfully place this here inside of this document as well. And just so you know if you ever were to choose the File, Package command then of course every single file that is required in order to build this InDesign document as in fonts and external links will also be collected in that package. Now the cool thing about this is that from now on this is a very light image that I can work with. I don't have to work on all these tedious selections and individual frames and text boxes and if I ever want to make a change I can just take this frame, right-click choose Edit Original and now just make my change. For example, that's a lot of sugar I'll just say that we want 1/3 of sugar instead. The moment I save this and go back to my project file you'll see that this will update beautifully.