Layouts and Placements

Layouts and pages

Enterprise stores InDesign files (layouts). With a layout, layout template, Layout Module or Layout Module template, pages are stored. These layout flavors are objects, but note that the pages themselves are not treated as objects. Whenever the term layout is used in the paragraph, it refers to any of the layout flavors.

Page renditions

Pages have renditions, just like objects have. And so, a thumb, preview and output rendition file can be stored per page. The output rendition is typically PDF or EPS.

Note: Page rendition files are not versioned; only the last version of each rendition is tracked. When restoring an old version of a layout without InDesign intervention, the page renditions remain untouched. As a result, the version that is ‘too new’ is still shown in the Publication Overview.

Page numbers

Per page, the following is tracked: order, number and sequence. The order stands for the logical internal numeric position, as used by InDesign internally. Per page section, you can restart this numbering. Although you choose a numbering system (alphanumeric, roman, arabic, etc), the order is always numeric. The page number is the human readable representation. This reflects the page numbering system and optionally can be prefixed with the page section prefix. The number is typically used to print on the page. The page sequence represents the page position within the layout. This is used to uniquely identify pages since the page order does not tell, as shown in the following figure.

It shows a layout with 7 pages divided into 3 page sections. Each section uses a different numbering system, respectively roman, arabic and alphanumeric. The second section has continued numbering and defines prefixes. The third section has restarted numbering.

Splitting up pages

The example above could work for small documents such as brochures. For large documents, such as magazines and books, splitting up pages into multiple layouts is recommended. Let’s split-up the pages in three layout objects, exactly the way it is split-up by page sections. You will end up with 3 layouts, each having one page section, as shown in the following figure.

Notice that the page sequence is now ‘restarted’ per layout object.

With pages split-up into layouts, they are no longer strictly bound to each other. This enables the server to put them in the Publication Overview with more intelligence. When creating a new layout (for example containing pages p6 and p7) this automatically gets inserted into the overview, without the need to open and edit “layout 2”.

Placements and Elements

With InDesign, articles and images are placed on layouts by using frames. Frames can either be textual or graphical. From a multiple frame selection, an article can be created. Images are created from a single frame. Each frame has geometrical information and is stored into Enterprise as a Placement (whenever an object is made from it).

Consider a placed article shown on the left in the figure below. It consist of five frames; one head frame, one intro frame and three body frames. The three body frames are linked for continuous reading. The figure in the middle shows how InDesign frames become Enterprise placements. Multiple frames that are linked are seen as just one story, just like single frames. A story is called Element in Enterprise (or Component for the end user). In the example, the three body frames become one Element. So the article consists of three elements/components; head, intro and body, as shown on the right.

Assume that the article is placed on the layout. The create and save requests (CreateObjects and SaveObjects) will carry out the elements and placements to the server.

For layout create/save operations in Objects -> Object -> Placements element, the structure is shown in the fragment below. The ElementID for the body placements is the same. This way, the placements are bundled per element. The FrameOrder tells the reading sequence of the placements.

...
<Placements>
	<Placement>
		<Page>1</Page>
		<Element>head</Element>
		<ElementID>CAA9DCF6-4F67-43AE-B9E0-1E01DBA40CC4</ElementID>
		<FrameOrder>0</FrameOrder>
		...
	<Placement>
		<Page>1</Page>
		<Element>intro</Element>
		<ElementID>D65C0A5F-8E0B-4456-985A-ECC03BDAE6C4</ElementID>
		<FrameOrder>0</FrameOrder>
		...
	<Placement>
		<Page>1</Page>
		<Element>body</Element>
		<ElementID>23383EBF-4740-4481-AF76-C7410744A094</ElementID>
		<FrameOrder>0</FrameOrder>
		...
	<Placement>
		<Page>1</Page>
		<Element>body</Element>
		<ElementID>23383EBF-4740-4481-AF76-C7410744A094</ElementID>
		<FrameOrder>1</FrameOrder>
		...
	<Placement>
		<Page>1</Page>
		<Element>body</Element>
		<ElementID>23383EBF-4740-4481-AF76-C7410744A094</ElementID>
		<FrameOrder>2</FrameOrder>
		...
</Placements>
...

For article create/save operations in Objects -> Object -> Placements element, the structure is shown in the fragment below. It lists the three elements.

...
<Elements>
	<Element>
		<ID>CAA9DCF6-4F67-43AE-B9E0-1E01DBA40CC4</ID>
		<Name>head</Name>
		...
	<Element>
		<ID>D65C0A5F-8E0B-4456-985A-ECC03BDAE6C4</ID>
		<Name>intro</Name>
	...
	<Element>
		<ID>23383EBF-4740-4481-AF76-C7410744A094</ID>
		<Name>body</Name>
		...
</Elements>
...

[Since 9.4] When two articles would share the same Element IDs (GUIDs), placing these articles together on the same layout could lead in content loss. Therefore, if a client other than InDesign, InCopy or InDesignServer calls the CreateObjects service (with Lock=false) for a WCML article, Enterprise Server generates new Element IDs (GUIDs) and updates the Elements and the article WCML before saving it in the database and filestore.

Articles and graphics

Articles can consist of a mix of text frames and graphic frames. The figure below shows an article with one graphic frame and two text frames, as shown on the left. In the middle, it shows there is just one object involved, which is the article. On the right, it shows that there are three elements.

The very same example could be made differently. The figure below shows a graphics frame that holds a placed image object. (Note the little chain icon on the left of the butterfly, which is shown instead of the little pencil icon on top.) The two text frames belong to the article object, as shown in the middle. Also here, there are three elements involved, as shown on the right.

Placements and Editions

Placed objects (such as articles and images) can be assigned an Edition on the layout. InDesign allows users to set Editions per story element (changing one frame affects all frames that belong to the same element). Nevertheless, Editions are tracked by Enterprise at a more granular level, which is per placement.

An example. Imagine you have written a manual about your InDesign CS3 plug-in. Then CS4 comes out, but you are still doing heavy maintenance to the document and update your readers on a regular basis. Actually, the CS4 update doesn’t have much impact to your document. It affects just some articles and the InDesign logo that is used in several places. Obviously, you would like to share as much as possible between the two manuals and publish both simultaneously. This is where editioning could help. By simply placing the CS3 and CS4 logo in the same InDesign layout, and tagging CS3 Edition for one and CS4 Edition for the other. The figure on the right shows how the result could look like in InDesign.

CS3	CS4

When saving the layout, the request from InDesign (SaveObjects) looks like the fragment shown below. because there are three objects related, there are three Related elements. They are all on the same page and share the same parent. For the images, a specific Edition is specified. The article is published for both Editions, and so nil is given, which means all Editions.

Note that adding CS5 and CS6 Editions later (in the Maintenance pages), this article will still get published for those future Editions. But there won’t be any logos available yet, which must be created and placed on the layout at that time, just as it was done in this example for CS4.

...
<Relations>
	<Relation>                      <!-- CS3 logo -->
		<Parent>1710</Parent>
		<Child>1711</Child>
		<Type>Placed</Type>
		<Placements>
			<Placement>
				<Page>1</Page>
				<Element>graphic</Element>
				...
				<Edition>
					<Id>1</Id>
					<Name>CS3</Name>
				</Edition>
				...
	<Relation>                       <!-- CS4 logo -->
		<Parent>1710</Parent>
		<Child>1712</Child>
		<Type>Placed</Type>
		<Placements>
			<Placement>
				<Page>1</Page>
				<Element>graphic</Element>
				...
				<Edition>
					<Id>2</Id>
					<Name>CS4</Name>
				</Edition>
				...
	<Relation>                       <!-- article -->
		<Parent>1710</Parent>
		<Child>1713</Child>
		<Type>Placed</Type>
		<Placements>
			<Placement>
				<Page>1</Page>
				<Element>body</Element>
				...
				<Edition xsi:nil="true"/>
				...