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.