Un-Linking Text Boxes in an InDesign Document

Many InDesign templates are set up with a series of linked text boxes. For example, if you're using CatBase to create your publication, you'll flow the published data through the document via the linked text frames.With all the text linked in this way, if you make a change to a block of text or an inline image, it's likely to cause all the rest of the data to re-flow. In many cases this is fine, but sometimes it causes nasty problems!

Fortunately, it's very easy to un-link all the text frames. Each frame then becomes a stand-alone box, so if you edit the contents of one box it won't affect the flow of the text in the rest of the document.

How to Un-Link all the Text Frames in an InDesign Document

There are a number of scripts included in a standard InDesign installation, and one of those will do exactly what's needed here.

1. Click into any one of the linked text frames.

2. Open the Scripts palette: From the Window menu, choose Utilities->Scripts.

3. The Scripts palette contains two folders:

• Application

• User

1. Expand the Application folder.

2. Expand the Samples folder.

3. Expand the Javascript folder.

4. Scroll down to the script named SplitStory.jsx.

5. Double-click on the SplitStory script to run it.

#InDesign #textbox #textframes #unlink