Instant InDesign: Designing Templates for Fast and Efficient Page Layout

Packaging a Template for Distribution

By creating a package, your template and all of its supporting elements are kept together in one central folder, allowing other designers to easily find everything they need to start producing documents. This also allows you to save and track versions of your template, which in turn aids template revisions down the road.

For simple templates, you’ll need to at least include the fonts and graphic links in the package. More complex templates can require even more components, such as an object library, an Adobe Swatch Exchange file, a print preset file, glyph sets, scripts, a user dictionary, and a style guide.

InDesign’s package utility can do most of the work for you. When you package a document, a folder ...