In episode 31 of David’s and my podcast, the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week was “Notes.” We talked about how the installation CD comes with a free Notes plug-in that’s meant for InCopy/InDesign workflows, but it works perfectly well in InDesign all by itself – InCopy is not needed. You should listen to that podcast (fast-forward towards the end, when we cover the Obscurity, if you want) to hear the details of this neat little tool.
But thinking about it some more since then – and prompted by a post about it on the InDesign listserv – I thought of a few more details that I didn’t get a chance to fully cover in the podcast.
There are actually 3 plug-ins that you’d want to copy out of the install CD’s Goodies folder and paste into your Plugins > InCopyWorkflow folder (in your ID CS2 program folder) to use Notes:
– Note.apln
– NotePref.apln
– Username UI.apln
After you restart ID, go to the new File > User menu and give yourself a unique username and color. That way your notes are identified by your name/color when multiple people add notes to a doc, similar to comments in a PDF. Go to Preferences > Notes to choose more options.
When a Note is embedded into the text flow, you don’t see the full text of the note in layout view. You just see an icon placholder for it, which appears as a non-printing special character (looks like a tiny hourglass) in your user color. If you put your Type cursor over the top half of the hourglass, the cursor changes to a pointing finger, as in a web browser hovering over a link. Click the mouse button at that point and the Notes palette opens showing the content of that note (and other info, like who wrote it and when, and navigation icons for jumping to the previous/next note).
When you view the contents of a text frame in the Story Editor (Edit > Story Editor or Command/Ctrl-Y), notes are much more visible … they appear in inline frames that can be expanded/collapsed, similar to footnotes.
If your workgroup really gets into Notes, you might also want to look at the Notes Manager plug-in from SoftCare.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on October 4, 2006
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