Someone just sent me an InDesign document and a PDF, along with a comment to look at the notes she had written. I opened the PDF file and chose Comments > Show Comment List… but there were no comments. I opened the INDD document and looked at every page… but there were no comments. I was about to email her back when the coffee kicked in: Notes! Oh! She must have used the Notes feature in InDesign. Duh.
But how do I know if there are any notes in an InDesign document? If you open the Notes panel (Window > Type & Tables > Notes), it’ll probably be blank. I wish InDesign had some better way to show you: “Hey, this document has 47 notes in it!” But it’s hidden.
The trick is to place the text cursor inside a text frame and then click the Go to Next Note button in the Notes panel (or choose Next Note in the panel menu). Boom! Suddenly, the panel lights up with a note (if there is at least one) and even tells us how many notes there are in the whole document. Whew.
Another way to see a note is to open a story in Story Editor. The notes are plainly visible there. But in this case, there were a bunch of little stories, so opening each one in Story Editor would have taken too long. The Notes panel makes it easy and fast, no matter how many stories there are in a document.
Of course, there are other places she could have hidden the notes, too. Some people put them on annotation layers and then turn the layers off (just to confuse you). Still others send an fdf file, which has to be paired with the PDF file (the fdf file is just the comments). But the Notes panel is one of the best ways to do it… as long as everyone is awake enough to go looking for the notes.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on January 14, 2009
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