345 View track changes and export with InCopy

- You may know already and be big fans of the track changes and insert notes feature in InDesign, that is, you can click inside any text frame, and then go to the type menu, down to track changes and after you've enabled track changes, which I have already, that's why it's dimmed, then it will track any of your text changes. Similarly, you can insert a note within a story. If you look at it in Story Editor by going to edit, edit in Story Editor, you can see all of your tracked changes and all of your inserted notes, and the different colors represent the different people who have been working on this story, you've been sharing this InDesign file.

The problem here is what if you want to print this out or export a PDF? Keep some sort of archival record before you accept all of the track changes. Maybe you just want to print it out or send yourself a PDF, or send an author a PDF to have them respond to some of these changes. There's no way to do that in InDesign. You cannot print or export PDF from the Story Editor, it's always grade out. But you do have a secret weapon. You do have a program that can very easily open up this InDesign file and show you all the tracked changes and all the notes that you've inserted in all the stories, and will let you export to PDF or print them out.

What is that? It's a program called InCopy. InCopy is the editorial adjunct to InDesign. Most typically, it's used in workflows where editors are editing their stories that the designers have already flowed into InDesign. They're editing them in InCopy. They're editing to fit, but you don't need any of that. Even if it's just you, you're trying to track your own changes, you can go ahead and install InCopy and use it just for this feature of being able to print out or export your notes and track changes.

The first thing you need to do, of course, is download and install InCopy if you haven't done that already. It's part of your Creative Cloud subscription. So find your Creative Cloud app, scroll down to wherever you might find InCopy, there it is. I already have done so. And install it. So if I jump over to InCopy, I have already installed it, and I've tweaked a couple settings, like I switched to the advanced workspace, and I made sure that the default view was layout. You have three different views in InCopy, so instead of a separate floating window for Story Editor, it's always available here as a story view, and there's a third view called galley view that lets you see all of the content of all the stories with the same line breaks as it has in the layout view, which Story Editor can't do.

And check this out. It also shows you every single story within the document and all the track changes. So unlike InDesign, you don't have to keep opening up every separate story in Story Editor to see them. Now that's another great feature of InCopy, is that it just shows, in one scrolling window separated by these story bars, all of the different stories in the document and you can see all the track changes. From here I could choose print, and if I had a printer installed, you could see that you could print these, but the same dialogue box will appear in the export to PDF dialogue box.

So I'll just choose PDF, click save, and this is what the print dialogue box looks like anyway. You have your choice of printing either the layout view, or galley and story, and this is where the feature of printing out your notes and tracked changes is, because just like in InDesign, in InCopy's layout view, you can't see any of this markup. So you'd want to switch to galley and story, and then down here make sure and include inline notes and include track changes if you want to include them. If you just want to have a record of all the notes that people have entered and not the track changes markup, you could turn that off and then click export.

Now, let's start from the beginning because I'm working with a finished cake here, right? So let's say that, I'm going to close this up, and in InDesign I'm going to close this one up. Let's say that you're starting out with your own fresh copy, and I have one here called start, of an InDesign layout. If I try to open up that in InCopy, and you open up layouts in InCopy by the way by going to file, open in InCopy, if you double click on them they're going to open in InDesign, right? And here it'll open up start.

You're going to get yelled at because there's one step that you need to do before you're going to be able to see story view and galley view in InCopy and that is you need to export the stories to InCopy format. It's just a little housekeeping stuff. You don't need to do anything else with them other than export. The fastest way to do this step is to go to the edit menu, go down to InCopy, export all the stories, okay? Just export them all. It's going to ask you where to save them and what folder to put them in, so I'm going to make a new folder.

I'll call it stories2, notice I already had done so in a previous folder to show you the finished cake. And then click save, and what it does is it exports every editable text frame to an InCopy format and it puts little globes on all the text frames that it did that to, alright? Now we can go to InCopy and even if we left it open in InDesign, choose file, open, find the start document, click open.

There you go. Now we can go to story or galley and we see all the markup. We can print or export to PDF. That's about it. Now, if you only want to do this once, then you can just go right back to InDesign and unlink these, so when you export to InCopy format they become linked, so their ICML counterpart that you just exported. If you want to continue being able to jump to InCopy to see your notes and track changes markup, you're going to have to get used to checking out a story before you can edit it which is simply clicking inside of any story, tapping any key, when it says "Do you want to check it out?" say yes, and then make your edits and so on.

But assuming that you don't want to have to do that all the time, you should probably just export them once, print out your track changes, then come back here and unlink all of the ICML stories. So I'm just shift-clicking them, coming to the links pile menu, and choosing unlink. That's it. Now they're just regular old InDesign text frames, and you can delete your export. That is a cool way that you can see all your notes and track changes, and print out a record of them just using the tools that come with Creative Cloud.