🚀 go-pugleaf

For some reason I've been thinking this morning about magazine "Index to Advertisers" construction/automation (haven't been involved with a magazine for more than a year), and I've come to the conclusion that it probably makes more sense, from an organizational point of view, to use an actual index instead of a TOC. It's a lot easier to organize an index by service area.

This may or may not be a problem, depending on whether you also need a conventional index, as many magazines do, so part one is to ask for the ability to have more than one index.

Part two has to do with HOW you would get the ads indexed at all, and I've come to the second conclusion that it probably makes the most sense to add an "ad tag" frame with the name of the advertiser as you want it to appear in the index. You could easily create an object style to pre-format the tag frame with the correct style and to make it non-printing, but I think lots of users would prefer to have these tags on a separate layer that they could turn off, but at the same time they need to be able to group them with the ad so they can be re-positioned together. That means you need the ability to group objects across layers and maintain the layer structure (and this isn't limited to this particular application, I'm sure).

Rambling on, I think users might want to create libraries with an ad-tag frame, or even a grouped standard size ad frame and tag combination, which means also that it would be really cool if you could store layer information along with the frame in the library (can we already do this? I'm not a big library person, but I'm beginning to re-evaluate the potential).

I know some of you are magazine people. What do you think?

Peter