A script for Adobe InDesign that adds menu items to the book panel menu for opening/saving/closing all documents of the active book.
To download the script, click the fat green “Code” button in the top region of this page and select “Download ZIP”, or click here. The script is the “BookDocs-OpenSaveCloseAll.jsx” file, you can ignore the rest of the ZIP package.
This is a startup script, place it in the Startup Scripts folder inside your user scripts folder (for example: /Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version 19.0/en_US/Scripts/Startup Scripts/). You may have to create the Startup Scripts folder if it doesn’t exist.
The script has been tested with InDesign 19 en-US (2024) on macOS. Use the script at your own risk. Make sure it works properly with your setup (OS, InDesign version/language) before using it with production documents!
Sources: The script is based on the “BookOpenAll“ script (Theunis De Jong, 2012). Other variants and related discussion on hilfdirselbst: 1, 2.
- More functionality: Open, Close, Save All
- Confirmation prompts for potentially dangerous actions
- “Close/Save All” actions only affect book documents that are actually open
Details see below.
The script adds these menu items to the book panel menu:
- Open All Documents
- Close All Documents
- Save All Documents…
- Save and Close All Documents…
- Close All Documents without Saving…
“Open All Documents” has two extra features:
- Hold down Option to silence any dialogs during opening (UserInteractionLevels.NEVER_INTERACT).
- Hold down Command to open without showing windows (this might be useful to speed up certain book-wide operations, like synching or updating, without having window/tab clutter; or just to “preload” documents, so that the window builds instantly when you double-click the book document later).
Applies to Save All Documents…, Save and Close All Documents…, and Close All Documents without Saving….
All functions where the menu item ends in an ellipsis bring up a confirmation prompt before proceeding (i.e. all functions that force a “save all” or “all without saving”). I prefer it this way, because it is easy to misclick a menu item, and accidentally closing all book documents without saving (or saving all) is not a nice experience.
To be extra safe, the confirmation dialog also shows the name of the book that InDesign considers to be the active book, so it should be less likely that you accidentally close/save/revert the documents of the wrong book.
(The “Close All Documents” behaves like InDesign’s regular “Close All” command, i.e. you get a dialog for each document with unsaved changes.)
Applies to all actions except “Open All Documents”.
The “Close Book Documents” function of the original script uses a somewhat odd procedure to close book documents:
app.open (app.activeBook.bookContents[i].fullName, false).close(SaveOptions.YES)This means that to close documents, the script first opens them and then immediately closes them. If all book documents are actually open, this doesn't matter much, but if you have, say, a book with 15 documents, 5 of which are open, the script will also open the 10 unopened documents (without showing a window), only to close them immediately.
I found it more straightforward to just iterate through the open documents, test if a document belongs to the active book, and close it if true. The test can be done with – IMO – sufficient reliability by comparing the fullName string (path + filename) of the open document with that of the members of the active book.
Besides being a bit faster, this also ensures that the modification dates of the files are only changed if you have actually modified the document.
So far, it works like a charm, and I'm still wondering why the original script resorted to this open-all-and-close-again strategy. But maybe I'm missing something (if so, please let me know).