Track Changes in InDesign and InCopy

When teams collaborate on a document or review one another’s work, it’s important to have a system to track each person’s changes, to compare what was in a story and what is now in a story. Both InDesign and its editorial counterpart, InCopy, have long had change tracking. (Note that when I talk of “changes,” I mean changes to text—text formatting, images, or the position of objects on the page cannot be tracked.) Allow me to walk you through the steps of configuring, making, reviewing, and printing tracked changes in and between copies of InDesign and/or InCopy.

1. Define Your Identity

Before you can begin collaborating on a document, you have to identify yourself so that you and your collaborators know who made what change. Additionally, each person can choose a unique color to visually identify the changes. Go to File > User to reveal the User dialog box (Figure 1). In the User Name field, enter your full name or at least as much of a name as required to identify you to the rest of the team. As you can see by the user name I’ve chosen, if you work in both InDesign and InCopy, or multiple versions or platforms of either, it can also be helpful to identify the software, version, and operating system in your user name.

Note that neither InDesign nor InCopy enforces

the uniqueness of either user names or user colors. There is nothing to prevent two different people from using the same color or even the same user name. You can get third-party commercial systems to ensure user identi- ties, but those are usually pricey add-ons that come as part of larger publishing workflow sys- tems based on InDesign and InCopy. Within a small workflow, I recommend good old-fash- ioned communication with team members to assure that user names and colors are unique.

2. Enable Track Changes

Now that you’ve told InDesign and/or InCopy who you are, it’s time to configure individual stories to begin tracking changes. You do this only after the initial layout or writing. Changes are tracked per story in both InDesign and InCopy. Follow these steps to enable change tracking on one or more stories. InDesign: Place the Type tool cursor inside a text frame—or open the story contained within that frame in Story Editor—and choose Type > Track Changes > Track Changes in Current Story. In files with more than one story, you can initiate change tracking in all stories in one fell swoop by selecting Type > Track Changes > Enable Tracking in All Stories. These options are also in the Track Changes panel menu (Window > Editorial > Track Changes). InCopy: In any of InCopy’s views—Galley, Story, or Layout—place the text cursor inside a story (or text frame in Layout view). Then either choose Changes > Track Changes in Current Story, press the keyboard shortcut for that command—Cmd/Ctrl+Y—or click the Enable Track Changes in Current Story button on the Track Changes Toolbar (Figure 2). To track changes on all stories in the document, choose Changes > Enable Tracking in All Stories.

Once you’ve enabled change tracking on the desired story or stories, save the document. From this point forward, the software will track any text changes you make.

3. Make Changes

The applications changes are now tracking changes, so go ahead and make some! What types of changes are tracked? [Pariah grabs a ukulele and sings the following. Actual audio recording removed to prevent your dogs from howling and your ears from bleeding.] Oh… Track Changes tracks changes like… Additions and deletions: “Add this and remove that” Replacements and revisions: “Let’s change that to this” Notes and comments: “Did you see the game last night?” But what it doesn’t track is: Frame changes, page changes, font changes Size changes, image changes, style changes Alignment changes, inserting placed content (Yes, even placing documents within a tracked story), and… Any other type of change except typed changes and note insertions. Each change made by you or someone else will appear in the story in InDesign’s Story Editor and InCopy’s Story and Galley views. Additions appear highlighted in the reviewer’s color (Figure 3).

Replaced text—which is actually the process of deleting existing copy and adding new copy—appears like both, with the addition highlighted and immediately followed the highlighted and struck-through text it replaced. Moved text—for example, text that you’ve drag-and-dropped or copy-and-pasted from elsewhere in the story—appears highlighted, with a black line around the highlight. And this is important: Changes do not appear in the document layout in either application. In InDesign, you can see the changes only in the Story Editor window (Edit > Edit in Story Editor). If you need to see changes on the layout page, pick up a copy of the CtrlChanges plug-in from CtrlPublishing.

4. Add Notes

In addition to tracked text-content changes, both InDesign and InCopy can include notes within text. Notes aren’t technically tracked changes because you can insert and review notes even if change tracking isn’t enabled. Moreover, change tracking does not keep track of edits made to note content. Still, notes are an important part of document collaboration, so I’ll touch on them here. InDesign and InCopy have a Note tool, which you’ll find on the Tools panel. Clicking the Note tool somewhere within text—even in the layout—will create a note, a non-printing comment, in the text story. An alternative to using the Note tool is to choose Type > Notes > New Not e in InDesign and Notes > New Note in InCopy. Note: You can’t attach notes to objects, only inline within text. Once the note is begun, you can then type the content, which will be visible in InDesign’s Story Editor and InCopy’s Galley and Story views. Although the note content itself will be invisible in the layout view of a document, you will see a colored marker in the layout to indicate the presence of a note at that location (Figure 4).

You can even convert normal story text into a non-printing note—perhaps to see if the story works better without the highlighted passage without actually deleting it—by high- lighting the story text and choosing Convert to Note from InDesign’s Type > Notes menu and InCopy’s Notes menu.

5. Review, Accept, and Reject Changes

Now that your document has made the rounds among the reviewers, it’s time to review all the changes and decide whether to accept or reject them. Each change to a story records within the document not only the change itself, but also who made the change and when. After inserting the text cursor inside a changed bit of text (remember that in InDesign, this appears inside the Story Editor only), that information can be viewed on the Track Changes panel in InDesign and the Change Info panel (or toolbar) in InCopy (Figure 5).

The three fields identify first the user who made the changes, then the date and time of the change, and what type of change was made—either Added Text or Deleted Text. Note that replaced text appears as two separate changes, both Added Text and Deleted Text. You move from one change to the next, as well as accepting or rejecting the change, via the buttons along the top of InDesign’s Track Changes panel. In InCopy the buttons are not on the Change Info panel but on the Track Changes toolbar (Figure 6). The first two buttons are, respectively, Enable/Disable Track Changes in Current Story and then a toggle to View/Hide Changes. Choosing to Hide Changes in the story does not discard or remove tracking, but rather gives you an uncluttered view of the document as it would be if all changes were allowed to stand. The next two buttons let you jump forward and back in the story. The latter four buttons are how you decide whether to accept or reject a change. Clicking the Accept Change button makes the current change a permanent part of the document, and it is no longer tracked. For instance, if you accept a replacement, the inserted text will become part of the story, while the replaced text is permanently removed. The Reject Change button does the opposite: restoring deleted or replaced text and removing inserted text, as if the edit had never occurred. Accept All Changes in Story and Reject All Changes in Story, the last two buttons, accept or reject all unaddressed changes in the story at once. To accept every edit by one particular reviewer but leave other edits tracked, place your cursor inside one of the edits and choose Accept (or Reject) All Edits By This User.

5. Printing Tracked Changes

You don’t have to accept changes. If you’re happy with the changes made by your collaborators, you can simply leave the changes as they are, including their highlights and tracking data, and print or export the document. The end result of the changes will output, but highlights won’t. Nor will struck-through text. Thus you can retain tracked changes within the InDesign (or InCopy) document itself without fear that those changes or even removed text will appear in your final output document. On the other hand, if you do want to print change tracking data, you can with a little extra effort—but only in InCopy. With a change-tracked story opened in InCopy, choose File > Print (Figure 7). In the Options section, select the radio button beside Override Current Galley Settings (which apply to Story view as well), and then check Print Tracked Changes. Set the dropdown field to its right to either Visible, which will print only those tracked changes are shown, or All, which will print even hidden changes. Also select Show Tracked Changes Backgrounds in Color if you’d like to output change highlighting matched to the reviewers’ user colors.

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