Two versions of a catalog - with and without pricing, best way to do this?

Question

I'm an in-house designer for a furniture manufacturer. Every year we put out a catalog, but last year they decided they wanted two, one with pricing and one without. The pricing version goes to our dealers and the no-pricing one the dealers send out to their clients.

Last year, before I started, they had decided to put a layer over top the tables in InDesign and replace the dollar amounts with dollar signs. It was a tacky solution, but it was a last-minute decision to do a no-price version, and our printer had told us that putting the information in spot black would make it so they would not have to swap out plates.(That didn't work anyways)

So now as we start this catalog, I'm looking for a more elegant solution. We don't want two separate files, as it is a 200+ page catalog and we have to update our digital versions frequently, so we prefer having only one document to edit.

My first instinct was to put white rectangles over the pricing part, but because of how the tables are they'd be disjointed, and it would make the layout appear off-center in most cases.

Anyone have a better idea on a way to do this?

Answer 1

I would..

Create 2 character styles.

One style for the price as it is to appear, then duplicate the style, and set the color to white. Then it's a simple find style 1, replace with style 2.

This does leave a "blank" visually. If the blank is unacceptable, you could try something like a background color/underscore in the second style which merely creates a black box, so pricing looks more redacted than missing. That would maintain the visual balance a bit more. It gets really subjective at this point.. what is acceptable? A blank? a black box. dashes....

(A spot black for the pricing should have worked if the file was set up correctly - only actual prices in the spot color. Which could be handled in character styles as well.)