Versioning pages in an Adobe InDesign document

Question

In designing many new student worksheets and their corresponding answer sheets, we frequently have to modify them. The problem then is there are mismatches, a student will hand in an older worksheet and we have a newer answer sheet to grade it against. What I want is a version number on each page in a document. So when that page is modified, its version number is increased as well.

Is there a way in Adobe InDesign to do this automatically? I don't care about the versioning scheme, only that we can check against the above kinds of mismatches.

Answer 1

Without a custom script, there's no built-in way for InDesign to increment a number based on whether a file has been changed. It would be a bit of a challenge to work with, I suspect, because you'd have to be very disciplined about not closing a file until all changes had been made and verified (fixing a typo would create a new version number, for example), but it's definitely scriptable as a function. Probably you'd want to have the script add a menu item "Increment Version Number" rather than leaving it fully automated.

There is a way to ensure that your version numbers in worksheets and answers sheets stay coordinated if they are in separate files, and that is to create a linked story by exporting the text frame with the version number as an InCopy assignment, and placing that in both worksheet and answer documents. Any change in one document will show up as an out of date link in the other.