A few newbie questions about InDesign CS

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I've recently gotten the entire Creative Suite Premium, and need to put together a manual-like book for private use, which will be a great way to get started with InDesign. I always used CorelDraw, and still use it, but with all the hullabaloo about InDesign, and a great increase of AI and PDF files we've been receiving at work, we had to get ourselves the Creative Suite.

Anyway, here are a few things I can't seem to find out how to do, while in CorelDraw they're too easy:
- setting text or images as "symbols" (like the kind of symbols Macromedia Fireworks and CorelDraw use) to use instances of in the document. Is there no way other than taking copies of a placed file and reusing that? With a symbol, changing one instance, makes all instances change (great for book titles, or if a logo needs to be changed, among many many other things).
- using a master layer on a document so all pages have the same basic look. In CorelDraw, I can create a layer that will be used on all pages, so they will all contain a certain graphic, or text, or background color/image in exactly the same spot, and by changing the master layer, all pages will see the same change. It's much easier to do that, than to copy and paste it onto each page, especially if something needs to be changed after 15 pages have been finished.

I think that's it as I've found the answers to my other questions by looking at "old" topics.

TIA,
Roland

[Jens Schulze]

> - setting text or images as "symbols" [...]

As for images, you can overwrite the original file, so every instance of it
used in the document will be updated. This is the way it is done in everyday
work.

> - using a master layer on a document so all pages have the same basic

look. [...]

Please look in the manual for "master pages", this is what you are looking
for.

Jens

[[email protected]]

InDesign does not have symbols as in CD or other draw programs.

To facilitate keeping logos, pictures even strings of text that you will be
using repeatedly, InDesign uses librarys. These are quite easy to set up,
and changing the orginal items, will allow changes to flow through the open
libray and to the InDesign document.

Give that a read in the help file.

Good luck

Larry

[[email protected]]

Thanks for the suggestions. I had already read the help files, but apparently missed the part of double-clicking the master page in the pages panel to actually edit the master page. At least that's working now.

I have two new questions which searching these forums and the help didn't answer (or maybe I didn't look in the right place?).

Is it possible to re-use hyperlinks?
I know I can copy and paste the original link and edit it as it'll show as a new link in the hyperlinks panel, but it would be so much easier if you could set links and drag them to selected text or images to assign the link.

Also, in a document I'm working on, I use three icons (AI files) to show "tips", "links" and "important info". I'm not done with the document yet, but when I exported to PDF to see what it'd look like, I noticed those icons tend to disappear from the pages after scrolling.
Is there any way to prevent that without using special characters in the text instead of those icons? Perhaps by putting them in a library instead of copying and pasting them whenever necessary?

- Roland