How To Combine Book Chapters To Export One PDF or E-book

Mon, Jun 25, 2012

Digital Publishing, How-to, Tip

This question came up today:

“I created a book in QuarkXPress, using separate documents for each chapter and connecting them with the Book feature. I created a Table of Contents for the whole book and built that TOC in the Master Chapter. How can I export a whole book as one PDF and have a TOC that is hyperlinked to the different chapters?

Currently, when I export as PDF it only includes the current Layout. When I print from the Book feature, and save as PDF, it exports only the Master document as a PDF.”

The solution is simple, if annoying:

You have to combine your documents into one Layout in QuarkXPress, then export to PDF. That’s the only way you’ll keep your hyperlinks.

The good news it’s a simple thing to do: just open your main document and all the chapter documents. Change your view to Thumbnails (View> Thumbnails). Select all the pages in each chapter and drag them onto the end of your main document. It shouldn’t take but a few minutes.

This technique also works for combining chapters before generating an EPUB book or iPad app.

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This post was written by:

- who has written 1452 posts on Planet Quark.

Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.

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3 Responses to “How To Combine Book Chapters To Export One PDF or E-book”

  1. Max Says:
    28. June 2012 at 5:17 pm

    Thank you for the information. I’m using QE 9. I can’t open the main document. It exists only as a window showing all the chapters. Please advise as how to open the main document.

    Max

  2. Mark Says:
    10. July 2012 at 12:44 pm

    Aargh. I’ve brought this issue up to Quark support and suggestions so many times and it still remains absent. It seems so obvious to use the Book Palette as a one-stop service to output multiple chapters to a single PDF. All the POD services like Amazon’s CreateSpace, or Lightning Source, or Lulu, etc. request PDF. InDesign does this function with it’s book palette easily.

    I’d love to know a different workaround than creating a new layout.

  3. jr Says:
    4. August 2012 at 11:30 pm

    I had QE 4.x and I could highlight all the chapters in the book window, hit the print icon, select PDF, and it would open and print each chapter to PDF. Then I would bind them in PDF. This creates bookmarks in PDF as chapter links. Works slick. In QE 9, this feature to PDF print from the book window does not exist. Real bummer, real maddening. They went backward in design, and that’s not the only one I’ve found.

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