Relative Link Paths for InDesign
At this company we work in teams on many project simultaneously along with a massive server of shared assets. Talking to my colleagues in other companies this is quite a common thing these days. We mostly work off of InDesign for the majority of our projects. As InDesign uses linked files for composition/layout, we keep our server organized. All IDD files are worked from directly off of our server, no files are stored on any person's computer locally.
We don't need to package everything (only rarely, for sharing to external entities) because all of the content already exists on the server.
The problem we're seeing continually is this: the absolute file path on the server starts off with a person's login to the server, then the file path itself. When someone else opens up the same InDesign file, links are broken because their login to the server is different from the other persons, yet the files have not moved at all.
Relative file paths would solve this since our file organization does not change.
Since this type of work environment is happening across major companies that use your app, we believe this isn't an isolated request. It needs to happen ASAP.
It can be as simple as a setting under general preferences so a person can choose to set up a file with relative or absolute link paths.
Alex Amerri
shared this idea
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Andy W
commented
I don't think this would be an indesign issue.
I have worked at many companies where all indesign files and links are kept on a shared server where multiple people edit these files. I have never experienced an issue with broken links due to shared files (unless someone link images from their desktop). My current workplace has individual logins for each computer (Macs) and those logins are used to connect to the server (Windows) and files are shared constantly.
The links in our indesign files starts with the top level server folder (i.e. DATA/Design/Job/Links) however if I do a file info from Apple Finder the complete file path is indicated (i.e. afp://123.456.78.90/DATA/Design/Job/Links).
Your described situation would drive me insane! I think you may need to liaise with your IT people to resolve this.
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Kelly Vaughn
commented
I have a similar issue> this may help: http://documentgeek.blogspot.com/2011/01/indesign-absolute-vs-relative-links.html