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• • August 6, 2010 at 12:09 pm #56607
    Jonathon

    Member

    I need some advice on a problem at work. I work at a small academic publisher, and we edit all of our documents in Word and then lay them out in InDesign. Once a document is imported into InDesign, the Word file becomes dead and no longer has all the latest changes that have been made in the InDesign version. Lately my boss has started asking us to make any changes to the InDesign documents in Word as well so that the Word file will match the latest ID version. He wants to have updated Word versions in case authors want the final print version of their pieces in a usable format.

    While I appreciate the need for up-to-date Word files, this seems to me like a huge waste of time. Keeping two live versions of a file is always problematic because it's difficult if not impossible to keep them in sync, and it doubles the amount of time spent entering changes into the files. I have a few years of experience as a typesetter, but I'm sure there's a lot I still don't know about optimizing workflows and whatnot. Is there some easier way to keep the Word files current without having to edit everything twice?

  • August 6, 2010 at 1:44 pm #56610
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I would suggest that your boss is missing how inefficient his request is. It would probably be much better to simply export a Word document (RTF) from InDesign if (and only if) they need the final print version. Or, better, just give the author a PDF — that's what a lot of publishers do.

  • August 9, 2010 at 8:58 am #56616
    Joe C

    Member

    There is another option to try out. Just like linking to an image, ID can link to a Word file, under preferences select “Create Links When Placing Text…”. That would allow the Word files to remain live but could mess up the ID text flow when the Word file is changed.

  • August 9, 2010 at 9:18 am #56617
    Jonathon

    Member

    David: We'd like to keep the documents editable and preserve things like dynamic endnotes, which we would lose if we just used PDFs. It's also a real pain to convert PDFs to other forms like HTML or plain text, though of course Word doesn't exactly produce the cleanest HTML either. Exporting to RTF would be my preferred solution, though that still loses the dynamic endnotes.

    Joe: I'll have to play around with that feature and see how well it works for us. Even with the new wrinkles that it would create, it still sounds like less work than the way we're doing things now.

    Thanks for the suggestions.

  • August 9, 2010 at 9:25 am #56618
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Linking to a word file is fine, unless you make ANY changes (apply styles, edit, format in any way) inside InDesign. Then the workflow breaks.

  • August 11, 2010 at 5:00 pm #56651
    Jonathon

    Member

    Hmm. Well, that would certainly seem to defeat the purpose. Maybe I'll just have to convince my boss that RTFs with static endnotes are worth the time savings.

  • August 12, 2010 at 2:17 pm #56665
    hyland b.

    Member

    Ouch.

    It seems like your situation contains all of the drawbacks of being OCD (e.g. being OCD is a *hell* of a lot of work) and none of the glory.

    You'll likely miss out on the glory because:

    a) The margin for human error with such a “setup” is huge, even with hard-core OCDs at the helm.

    b) Whoever would request such a setup doesn't understand [ 96% of ] the benefits of digital publishing.

    c) The inconsistenies / mistakes that will invariably occur will stand out more than the freaking incredible fact that were *only* 6 mistakes that week.

    I worked on a similarly challenging job last year. I kept thinking that we needed to move the “soup pot” off of my stove.

    If we'd moved the data to a web-based CMS, then everyone could have added anything they wanted to the pot. And we would have known for sure that everyone was always tasting the same soup.

    But they were happy with my fare, so they didn't want to think about building a new kitchen.

    All of which is to say that you might want to plant seeds for a future switch to a web-based CMS; that way you wouldn't be shouldering the responsibility of version control.

    In Sisyphus' name,

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