Below are some tips on making InDesign generate diaries as quickly as possible.

Template Design

The following aspects of a template have been found to slow down diary generation a lot when using InDesign:

•Rotated text boxes and/or rotated text.

•Linked text boxes, in particular at the end of the diary (page number 100 and above).

The above should be avoided as much as possible.

Master Pages

As explained in more detail here, it is usually good practice for your InDesign GridTemplate's master pages to contain the page margins, as well as any fixed element of your template (lines, images, tables without tokens, textboxes without tokens, ...). This is particularly true for templates that are copied tens if not hundreds of time, such as main grids.

Placing all the non-modifiable elements of your main grid templates on master pages as described here, will speed-up the page-copying stage of diary generation and also create much smaller output files.

Generation Options for Optimal Speed

When using InDesign with Q++Studio, make sure that your diary generation options are set as shown on the right.

Note that the turn off deletion optimization also applies to QuarkXPress versions 2016-2024.

Additional Optimizations

When using InDesign, the page copying step of diary generation can sometimes get very long when generating diaries with over 150 pages and/or complex page structures (such as linked boxes and/or rotated textboxes).

To alleviate this issue, if some of your scripts take over 10-15 minutes to generate, then you can use the flush output file every x pages diary generation option:

•For daily or weekly diary scripts containing over 150 pages, set the option to a value around 25, as shown on the image on the right.

•For monthly or yearly calendar scripts, which may contain only only 10-20 pages, but which include multiple layers and objects, try to set the option to a value between 3 and 5.

Note that, when this option is set to its automatic default position, as shown on the right, Q++Studio tries to set an appropriate value for this option, roughly following the above guidelines. This default setting should be appropriate for most cases.

Finally, if the option shown on the right to fix kerning include single chars is turned on, then you can turn it off. If need be you can always include specific kerning via a macro or a sara.