Dynamic page planning

Dynamically adjust the number of pages when adding or removing layout content in a flatplan.

Overview

With this feature, the flatplan is controlled by the InDesign layout documents intended for the chapters. This is especially useful for books that consist of chapters aligned in a row. If the total number of pages in a chapter changes, this chapter should receive the pages needed in the flatplan and the page numbers in the following chapters should be altered automatically.

In the flatplan, the number of pages of layouts can be automatically adjusted.

For magazines, papers and brochures there are two modes:

• When the page planning team (Chief Editor, Managing Editor, Advertising Department) determines the position and extent of the layout and the designers have to react and adjust their layouts accordingly by performing a geometry update.
• When designers define the scope of the layout themselves and the members of the page planning team must react accordingly.

To allow these two directions in the page planning, the feature  "censhare:planning-mode"  with the following values is available:

• censhare:planning-determines-pages  - Planning determines the number of pages
• censhare:pages-determines-planning  - Pages determine planning

This feature can be defined for issues and layout assets.

The feature "Pages determine planning" can be applied either as an automatic action or as a manual server action. The automatic action is triggered by checking in a layout asset. When the number of actual pages is modified, it will alter the number of total page elements in the layout asset. Either the missing target elements are generated and are linked to the new actual pages, or the target elements which represent the deleted elements are removed. In a second step, it alters the target structure of issues where this layout asset is placed.

When the feature censhare:planning-mode is set for an issue with the value pages-determines-planning, then the page structure is matched with the reference structure of the placed layout asset. When adding new pages to the layout, the new pages are generated in the issue and the pages are linked to the layout as a child-element relation. After pages have been deleted in the layout asset, all pages in the issue linked to those deleted layout pages are removed. Pagination, page prefixes and sheet index are recalculated for the planned pages and are then transferred to the layout pages.

The server action can be run not only with layout assets or with issues. When the user selects an issue and executes this action, then all layouts placed in that issue are checked and the target structure is adjusted to the actual structure. The issue is then synchronized with the modified asset states.

Configuration

You can access the settings dialogue in censhare Admin-Client under "Configuration · Modules · Dynamic page planning". You have to enable 'Asset check in' as a trigger event in the configuration input screen for the automatic action. Select "Asset filters" and choose "Layout" to set the filter to (Type = “Layout*”). When using a server action you must select type "Layout" or "Issue": (Type = "Layout *") or (Type = "Issue*")). The Planning mode for an issue or a layout must be specified in the tab "Metadata · Advanced".