File naming convention

Legal characters

Only letters, numbers, underscores and plain dashes are allowed when naming new files or folders. In other words: lower case a to z, upper case A to Z, 0 to 9, _ (underscore) and – (dash next to 0 on the keyboard). A single ‘.’ (full stop) is to be used between the file name and the suffix (e.g. .pdf or .indd). Any other characters are considered to be illegal.

Only by using these permitted characters can we be sure that our files and folders will be backed up, transportable and able to be used in automated processes.

Illegal characters

This is the list of the most common characters which cause problems within file names. To be safe, refer to the Legal characters section above for the accepted characters which should be used.

Spread folder and InDesign file naming

Folders are named by spread numbers as a three digit reference separated by a dash, underscore, then the spread name description of no more than 20 legal characters. This should be the same name as the InDesign document name contained within (without the .indd suffix), as per these examples:

• 000-000_WhereItGrows (folder name example)
• 000-000_WhereItGrows.indd (InDesign file example)

US, AUS or CAN editions – Same name as the UK but with the addition of “US_” or “CAN_” etc as a prefix.

• Example: US_000-000_WhereItGrows.indd

Image file naming

For the correct naming of all images please go to this link.