193 Printing tracked changes

- If you share an InDesign file with other people in your office or with freelancers, some of you might be editing the same block of text, and if you are smart, you're using the track changes feature that has been part of InDesign for a few versions now. Not turned on by default, but if you click inside of a text frame, you can go to the Type menu, go down to Track Changes, and Enable Track Changes which I've already done to this story. What that does is it allows you to see who changed what in the text. It works just like Word's Track Changes, very similar.

The problem is that you can't see the track changes in layout view, you wouldn't want to, you don't want that accidentally ending up in the final print version. What you do is you go to the Edit menu, open up that text in Story Editor, and there you see all the changes. So if we go to the Window menu, Editorial, Track Changes, we get this little dialogue box that if you didn't happen to memorize who's what color, you can click here and see, oh, Joe made this change, and AMC made that change, so on.

I get asked about this feature a lot because a lot of my clients are publishers and what they want to know is, after I accept these changes, what happens if we change our mind? Is there any history attached to it? And the answer is no. Now once you accept the changes, then the markup goes away. Well publishers being what they are, they want to always have a record before they make a commitment. So they want to be able to print or export to pdf, or something, the track change markup, before they accept or reject it.

And unfortunately InDesign still does not allow us to print or export from the Story Editor. Very aggravating and a frequent feature request. However, if you have Adobe InCopy then you can consider it to be a plug-in that allows you to do that kind of work, and if you have CC, a subscription to the Creative Cloud, you can download InCopy for free. It comes with the Creative Cloud. Look inside your Creative Cloud menu and if you scroll down to InCopy you can go ahead and download it and install it.

Even if you're not going to use if for it's main purpose which is to set up a congruent editorial and design workflow, you can just use it to print out or export your track changes and notes for that matter because it has access to all that cool stuff that's in the Story Editor. So let me show you how that works. I have this InDesign document and I have already done some track changes in my department with this, and now we want to print out the track changes for this story. We just need to jump over to InCopy which I have already running and open up the InDesign file.

I go to File, Open, and go to the Desktop. There is the InDesign file. Click Open and you're going to get this alert because there's one more step that I didn't tell you about. It's saying that Galley View and Story View are not available and those are the views where we see the markup. So this little step, don't be scared. It's very easy. Go to the Window menu, go down to Editorial, and Assignments. Assignments are shared workflow stories. I'm going to twirl this open and do you see this category called Unassigned InCopy Content? The stories that you want to access in InCopy in order to view or print the track changes, you need to drag over into this category.

Just select them with the selection tool and drag and drop them right on top of that. It's going to export them to ICML. Save them wherever. It's going to ask you to save the InDesign document. Go ahead and do that. If you want to drag out another one, you can do that as well. Let me twirl this open so you can see what's happening here. So this one doesn't have any track changes but I'm going to add it anyways and just drag it right on top of there or underneath here. It wants to give it the same name. I'll just call it 2, I don't want to override it. So what it's doing is it's exporting an InCopy format of the text content for this story.

You don't need to worry about that. All you need to know is that you get InCopy for free. In order to see the track changes you need to export that frame to InCopy format, which you can do right here. You can also, by the way, just go to the Edit menu, choose InCopy, and choose Export, Selection, if I have a selection. So you don't even have to look at the assignments panel at all if you don't want to. Jump back to InCopy and we're going to close this and then open it again. This was the indd file.

That's what you want to open at the icml files, those are the InCopy stories, and boom look at that. It jumped us to this other view that it has. Here's the layout view and the stories that have been exported to InCopy appear at these little globe icons, but what's important to us is that in story and in galley view, we can see the track changes markup. So let's say right down here we want to print out this story. I'm going to collapse the first one. We just want to deal with this story. So I'll go to File, Export. We're going to export to pdf and we want to export Galley and Story.

So I'll say include the track changes, we don't need the names, the paragraph styles down here, and we're going to export in galley view, which means that we want the accurate line endings, the ones that match the layout. That's fine. Let's take a look at that pdf when we're done and we want to show track change backgrounds in color. Export, and there is our story. Right there. With all the track changes markup. So though you can't print or export from InDesign's Story Editor, you can from that neato helper app to InDesign Adobe InCopy.