From the course: InDesign Secrets
251 Share one layout among many ID users with Layout Zone - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
251 Share one layout among many ID users with Layout Zone
- [Voiceover] If you work with other InDesign users wouldn't it be great to be able to share a single InDesign document among all of you? That way two or more of you could be working on different pages or even different stories within the same InDesign document, without having to break it up into a book or anything complicated like that. There's no way to do that natively in InDesign. But you can do it with a free script that's been around for a while. We haven't talked about it yet in this series. And I'm happy to take this opportunity to do so. The script is called LayoutZone. And the developer, the company's called Automatication. The developer's name is Martinho da Glorias has been updating this for free, since he designed it in CS4 along with the help of a few other people including David Blatner who's the author of many InDesign titles here. Go to the LayoutZone page on Automatication and download LayoutZone. It works for Mac of Windows. And the manual, which is short but does help understand some of the checkboxes and options you can choose. And please, if you like it, come back here and choose donate and give the guys some money. Cause this thing is incredible. I'm going back to InDesign. I've already installed it. And it appears not in the script's panel but here under the edit menu, layout zone. And you'll see in the installation instructions that you put the folder that you download into the Adobe InDesign program's script's folder. So you might need admin access and you need to restart InDesign so it appears here. Let's use this example, here is a globe bank whitepaper. And at the end here, I have a table that needs data filled in, right, right here. And I'm going to assign this table to my assistant. I want my assistant to work on this. So how do you use LayoutZone to do that? You select what you want the other person to work on, and you can make a multiple selection. You can even just select everything on the page if you wanted to. But I just want them to work on this table, and then go to the edit menu, go down to LayoutZone and choose assign zone. That just means give it a name and reserve this space for it. Assuming that I'm going to be doing this for many objects, to share this with many people in my work group. I might create a folder say on the server and call it like: globe bank whitepaper pieces, or elements or something. And put a bunch of them in there. And I'll just call this table, that is what my selection was and save it inside that folder. Then you get an options dialogue box and you can look at the documentation to see what all these are about. But the main thing is simply to say, yes it's the selection that I wanted to export, as opposed to a page in the document. And you want to turn on, it is on by default, replace objects with documents. What that means is that LayoutZone will export my selection and create a new InDesign document out of it. And then it's going to replace my selection with a link to that InDesign document, replace objects with document. So I've exported that. And LayoutZone replaced it with that InDesign file, if you look in the links panel, it's now linked to the InDesign file that it created. I've lost the wrap because the wrap was on my original element and I'm just gonna ignore it for now. But of course, I could always have it wrap around this if I wanted to. But let's take a look at that InDesign file. It is sitting here on the server, or on my desktop right now. And it is something I can email to somebody or put it on a FTP site. But for now we're going to open it up on the same computer, just because it's all I have available to you during this video. It opens up as a regular InDesign document and it's a table so I am the assistant and I can start filling in data here. I'm just gonna put in a number right there, and then I'll close it and save my changes. As soon as the person has saved changes, InDesign notes that it is out of date, just like a saved Photoshop file or something. And I can update it just by clicking right on the triangle. And there we go. Let's zoom in, there's the updated information. This would work, for say ads, or for directories, or really anything that you can select or up to an entire page to share with your coworkers. If I wanted to edit this myself, this is actually a place InDesign file so I would have to edit original. I can't really go in here and edit it with my normal tools. I'd have to hold down say the option or alt key and double click and then it opens up in the originating program, which is InDesign of course. I'm gonna close this again. But let's say now that my assistant has filled in all of the information and I want to convert this back to a regular InDesign object that I can edit myself and that no longer has a link to that external file. You go back up to the edit menu, go down to LayoutZone and choose convert zone. I forgot to mention I've selected this first. So it knows which zone I'm talking about. I click convert zone and I want to recreate the objects as in the original, with the table and a frame and so on. And there you go. It remembers the wrap, the whole bit, and the information is up there. Isn't that an amazing thing? I just love LayoutZone and I use it myself with a lot of my freelancers. You should check it out.
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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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