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Editorial Review Workflows

The right digital proofing method can simplify your process and help your whole team work more efficiently.

Keith Gilbert Keith Gilbert

This article appears in Issue 23 of CreativePro Magazine.

Adobe has been trying to drum up interest in on-screen proofing for many years, going way back to early versions of Acrobat. And now the company has recently ramped things up with the addition of Share for Review in several Creative Cloud products. But despite Adobe’s relentless promotion, getting people to use these features (and use them consistently, correctly, and efficiently) can be difficult. But the payoff makes it worth trying! With everyone on board, a digital proofing cycle can simplify your workflow, increase accuracy, and help you work more efficiently. In this article, we’ll look at a half dozen proofing workflows—Share for Review, three methods of Acrobat-based review, and workflows outside of Adobe’s tools—and help you determine which is best for your specific needs. I’ll pay special attention to the needs of an editorial workflow centered around InDesign, because this presents some unique challenges to commenting accuracy. But many of the workflows and tools described here also apply to proofing work that is done in Illustrator or Photoshop.

Share for Review

The new kid on the block is Share for Review, which works similarly in InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop and offers a low-friction workflow for both the review initiator and the reviewers themselves. This browser-based system is absolutely the easiest way to set up a multi-person review of an InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop file.

Getting started

Share for Review is accessed right from within InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop by clicking the Share button in the upper-right corner of the screen. Alternatively:

  • In InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop, choose File > Share For Review. 
  • In InDesign, click the Create Link button in the Review panel (Window > Comments > Review). 
  • In Illustrator or Photoshop, click the Create Link button in the Comments panel (Window > Comments).


After you give the review a name and click Create Link, the Share for Review dialog box (Figure 1) lets you invite any number of reviewers, and choose if the review should be public or private. If you make a review public by choosing “Anyone with the link can comment,” you create a review with a very low barrier to entry, which is ideal for many uses.

Figure 1. The Share for Review dialog box in InDesign enables you make a shared review private or public, add a password, invite others to the review, and copy a link to the review.

Figure 1. The Share for Review dialog box in InDesign enables you make a shared review private or public, add a password, invite others to the review, and copy a link to the review.

Warning: If you make a review public, no Adobe ID or sign in of any sort is required for reviewers. You wouldn’t want to use a public review for confidential government work or high-security situations, but for many uses, the cryptic URL that is generated will be secure enough. Note that you can add password protection to a public review. This option is found under Link Settings in the More (…) menu. A private review requires all reviewers to have an Adobe ID, but this option lets users tag other reviewers in comments and receive notifications as comments are made. 

How it works

Once a reviewer clicks through the invitation email generated by Share for Review or clicks the URL you send to them, they will see a pixel-perfect replica of each page in their browser, along with commenting tools (five tools for reviews initiated in InDesign, as shown in Figure 2, or two tools for those initiated in Illustrator or Photoshop). 

Figure 2. Share for Review provides five easy-to-use commenting tools for reviewers to review InDesign files: a pin to indicate a location on the page a comment refers to, a highlight text tool, a strikethrough text tool, a replace text tool, and a free-form pencil tool. Notably missing is an insert text tool.

Figure 2. Share for Review provides five easy-to-use commenting tools for reviewers to review InDesign files: a pin to indicate a location on the page a comment refers to, a highlight text tool, a strikethrough text tool, a replace text tool, and a free-form pencil tool. Notably missing is an insert text tool.

The fact that Share for Review makes at most only five commenting tools available can be a good thing. Anyone should be able to figure out how to use at least one of the tools to make comments. However, I do wish that Adobe would add an insert text tool. The first time a user makes a comment, they are asked to enter their name (if they aren’t logged in with an Adobe ID). That’s it—just a name. This is so that you and other reviewers can tell who has made which comment. As your reviewers make comments, you will see them appear in the Review panel in InDesign or the Comments panel in Illustrator or Photoshop in near-real time. Other invited reviewers who may simultaneously open the review in their browser will also see comments as they are submitted. In the Review or Comments panel, when you click a comment, it is highlighted on the page. (You must be in Normal view, not Preview view, in InDesign for the comments to appear on the page.) There is no “accept” feature where a text change is made for you (as with email-based Acrobat reviews in InDesign; see below). Instead, you must make changes. The review continues to exist at the link assigned by Share for Review until you delete it using the Review panel (InDesign) or Comments panel (Illustrator or Photoshop) or by visiting assets.adobe.com, where you can manage all your reviews.

Strengths:

  • You do not need to export, store, share, and manage PDFs.
  • The workflow is very low friction with a low barrier to entry for reviewers. Reviewers need only a browser and the review URL. No additional software, plug-ins, or Adobe ID needed.
  • You can accommodate multiple, simultaneous reviewers. Everyone can see everyone else’s comments.
  • Comments appear in the Review panel (InDesign) or Comments panel (Illustrator and Photoshop) in near-real time.
  • Users on mobile devices do not need an app to participate in a review cycle.
  • The workflow and user experience are similar across InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop.
  • You can add a password to a review to protect the public link from unauthorized users.

Weaknesses:

  • You can’t automatically accept editorial comments in InDesign.
  • There’s no great way to “@mention” other reviewers without Adobe IDs, because reviewers don’t need to log in. Only those who log in can communicate within the workflow.
  • The workflow is seamless for only a single review per document. In other words, there isn’t a straightforward way to send pages 1–8 to one reviewer and pages 9–16 to a second reviewer, nor to initiate one review with one set of visible layers and a second review with a different set of layers.
  • Though it could undermine the simplicity of the process, a few more types of commenting tools, like one for inserting text, would be nice.

Best for:

This review method is a good choice for reviews by groups of reviewers you don’t know well or who have limited patience and skill with technology. The low barrier to entry for reviewers all but guarantees they’ll be able to participate no matter what their skill level, hardware, or technical acumen might be. 

Acrobat’s Send for Comments

Acrobat has had the ability to add comments to PDFs since—well, it seems like forever. Yet I find that many people don’t know about (or are confused by) Acrobat’s useful Send for Comments feature.

Getting started

First, you export a PDF from whatever program you’re using. Then, open the PDF in Acrobat Pro (the version that comes with your Creative Cloud membership).  Warning: Adobe is rolling out radical changes in the Acrobat interface in what it calls the New Acrobat Experience. Use View > Disable New Acrobat to follow along with these menu items and shortcuts that presume you’re using the traditional UI.  Next, either choose File > Share File, click the Share this File with Others icon in the upper-right corner, or click the Send for Comments tool. In the dialog box that appears, ensure that Allow Comments is toggled on, set an optional deadline, then click Send (Figure 3). A copy of the PDF is uploaded to your Adobe Cloud storage, and a shareable link is generated. 

How it works

Anyone you share this link with will be able to view and comment on the file using only a browser. As with the Share for Review feature in InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop, recipients don’t need an Adobe ID to add comments. When you open the file within your Document Cloud, you will see all the comments made by reviewers. Once the reviewers are finished with their work, you can save a local copy of the PDF that includes all the comments. Then, if you are using InDesign, you can choose File > Import Comments to import the PDF comments into the original InDesign file. The comments will appear in the PDF Comments panel (Window > Comments > PDF Comments), as well as overlaid on the page.  This entire workflow is very similar to the Share for Review workflow, with the additional burden of exporting and managing PDFs. But this workflow has a couple of small advantages over Share for Review. First, you can assign a deadline to the review. Second, if reviewers use the Strikethrough tool, you can accept the deletion in InDesign’s PDF Comments panel with a single click.

What if Your Company Doesn’t Allow Cloud Services?

With some coordination and setup work, you can host an Acrobat Shared Review in-house, bypassing Adobe’s Document Cloud. The review can take place on Sharepoint, a WebDAV server, or a network folder.

Visit Adobe Help for more information.

The Achilles heel of this workflow is the fact that you will likely begin with a PDF stored locally on your computer or network. But then, when you initiate the Send for Comments workflow, a copy is stored in your Adobe Cloud storage (which is separate from your Creative Cloud storage).

Warning: Now you have two copies of the same PDF: one local, and the other in the cloud. That means you will need to use the PDF in the cloud until you save a local copy again so that you can import the comments into InDesign (Figure 4).

Strengths:

  • Because it will accommodate PDFs from any source—not just from InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop—this workflow might be preferred if your reviewers regularly need to review and mark up content from a variety of sources.
  • You can specify an end date for the review.
  • InDesign will automatically accept deletion (strikethrough) comments.
  • It is possible to manage multiple reviews of the same source document. Just use it to generate multiple PDFs—for example, one for different page ranges or different combinations of visible layers.

Weaknesses:

  • You must export a PDF from your source files and then manage local and cloud copies of the same file. This can be confusing.
  • You can generate only public review links. You can’t use private review links or password protection.

Best for:

  • Working with teams of reviewers who need to regularly mark up content from lots of different sources and who wish to use a single tool and workflow
  • Workflows where more flexibility is required than the Share for Review workflow can deliver
  • Teams that wish to do a shared review in house, without employing additional cloud services
Best Practices for PDF Commenting

Matt Mayerchak has written an excellent guide to help reviewers mark up documents consistently and precisely. You can view and download the guide (7 pages, PDF) here.

PDF Review with Manual Distribution

Acrobat offers more than a dozen individual commenting tools that enable expert users to add very precise comments to PDFs. For your reviewers to make use of these tools, you can’t use Acrobat’s Send for Comments feature described above. Instead, you must use an “old school” distribution method.

Getting started

This workflow is entirely straightforward. You export a PDF from your InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop file, and then you distribute this PDF to individual reviewers via email, a file server, a file transfer service, cloud storage, or some other method.

How it works

The recipients then open the PDF in Acrobat, choose the Comment tool, and use Acrobat’s many commenting features to make their comments (Figure 5). After each user has done so, they save the PDF and return the file to you.

Individual reviewers work in their own “bubble” and won’t be able to see one another’s comments. You will potentially receive multiple PDFs back, one from each reviewer, and will need to sift through the comments, some of which may be duplicate comments or may contradict each other.

Strengths:

  • Reviewers can leverage the precision, speed, and flexibility of multiple commenting tools.
  • You can integrate certain types of editorial comments back into Adobe InDesign automatically. See this post for more information.
  • You can design your own workflow. For example, who will receive the PDFs? How will they send comments back? Which features should they use to make comments?

Weaknesses:

  • Recipients need to be well-behaved. For best results, they must open the file in Acrobat or Reader, not in Apple’s Preview or another third-party PDF reader.
  • The workflow is clunky for multiple reviewers performing parallel reviews, because reviewers can’t see one another’s comments.
  • You will need to keep track of routing PDF files, deadlines, and other administrative details of the review cycle.

Best for:

This review method is a good fit if you know that your reviewer(s) are meticulous and know how to use Acrobat’s markup tools well. The variety of commenting tools available enables them to clearly and precisely indicate exactly what change must be made where. This method can also work well for a serial review workflow, in which one reviewer makes the first round of edits, and then passes the PDF to the next reviewer, and so on. Being able to automatically accept comments back into an InDesign layout can be a boon to productivity for long documents.

PDF Commenting and Track Changes in InDesign

Check out this article by David Blatner at CreativePro.com for a handy tip about using InDesign’s Track Changes when accepting PDF comments.

Auto-routed Email-Based Review

Acrobat has an obscure feature that can help you route a PDF for review. This is similar to the manual workflow above, in that a copy of the PDF is distributed via email. But in this workflow, the comments reviewers make are automatically routed back to you, helping you collect comments from multiple reviewers back into a single PDF.

Getting started

See “Start an Email-Based Review” at Adobe.com for more information about setting up and using this type of review.

Strengths:

  • In addition to all the strengths of a PDF review with manual distribution enumerated above, this method adds some helpful email routing features. 
  • Comments from each reviewer are routed back to you for easier merging into a single PDF at the end of the review cycle.

Weaknesses:

There’s no way to customize the routing order of the PDF. All reviewers receive the emailed PDF simultaneously and cannot view each other’s comments.

Best for:

This workflow can be helpful when you have a large number of reviewers that you wish to independently review a document at the same time and you want some help compiling all the comments back into a single PDF.

Reader-Enabled PDFs

Creative Cloud users can always open any PDF in the full version of Acrobat and add their comments. But what if reviewers have Adobe Reader only, i.e., they aren’t a Creative Cloud or Document Cloud member? You can solve this problem by opening the PDF in Acrobat and choosing File > Save As Other > Reader Extended PDF > Enable Commenting & Measuring. When a user opens the file with Reader, (which normally doesn’t feature any commenting tools), the same commenting tools as available in the full version of Acrobat appear, ready to use for markup.

Third-Party Proofing Services

There are myriad web-based proofing systems that exist outside of Adobe’s tools. These all come at a cost, of course, and pricing and features vary widely. But most of them go far beyond Adobe’s offerings in terms of proofing tools and features, routing options, and workflow tools such as deadline enforcement, rights for different groups of reviewers, notifications, and more. How well each service integrates with InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop varies. Most offer plug-ins for these applications that function like the Review panel in InDesign or the Comments panel in Illustrator and Photoshop.

Here are a few leading proofing tools: 

Best for:

These third-party solutions are ideal for high-volume, long-term workflows where you can get buy-in from clients to use a third-party tool. These solutions also are ideal for proofing a wide variety of media beyond PDFs, such as web pages, audio, and video files.

Build Your Own Solution with Cloud Storage

If you routinely use a cloud storage service like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive to share files with your clients, you may find that the PDF viewing and commenting features built into these services are enough to meet your proofing needs. You will need to build your own workflow around these services, but the fact that these tools are available right in the context of where you are already storing, sharing, and accessing your files may tip the scales in their favor. 

The commenting tools built into all these cloud storage systems are pretty rudimentary. Box offers the most commenting functionality, followed by Google Drive and Dropbox, with OneDrive offering the least.

Fair warning: Online comments added to a PDF in Box, Dropbox, and OneDrive don’t appear in the PDF if the PDF is later downloaded and opened in Acrobat. The comments appear only when the PDF is viewed using the online viewer built into Box, Dropbox, or OneDrive. The exception is Google Drive. The comments added to a PDF in Google Drive appear properly if the document is downloaded and opened in Acrobat (Figure 6).

Project Management Services

Some project management services like Asana, Basecamp, and Wrike include the ability to markup PDF and other file types within the service. These are all paid services, so they will work only if your proofing partners work for a company that subscribes to the service. But for clients with whom you have an ongoing, long-term relationship, these tools may be the simplest solution to get buy-in for electronic proofing from your clients.

How to Choose?

Which of these various methods is best for your workflows with your proofing partners is based on many factors, of course, including the strengths and weaknesses of each option outlined above. If you are a freelancer, you may be forced to use multiple methods depending on the whims of your clients.

For my own work, I’ve found PDF review with manual distribution to be best for the long book projects I’ve worked on. On these projects, my editorial partners are really good at marking up PDFs using Acrobat’s commenting tools in such a way that I can quickly auto-accept most of their comments back in InDesign.

For other types of work, I’ve found InDesign’s Share for Review feature to work well enough, and I love the extremely low friction this workflow offers for clients and proofing partners, resulting in them actually participating in the reviews.

If I worked with a wider variety of clients in larger volume, I would probably analyze the costs/benefits of the many third-party proofing systems and pony up the monthly fee for one of these in order to benefit from the additional workflow features these platforms offer.

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