*** From the Archives ***
This article is from August 17, 2006, and is no longer current.
Tracking Text Changes
[Editor’s Note: This is from 2006. InDesign has its own Track Changes feature now.]
Craig writes:
How does one track type changes within InDesign?
Quark had a XTension called black lining at one stage, is there any thing like that for InDesign?
Though I never used it myself, the same company that sells the Blacklining XT for QuarkXPress, EMS (“software development for publishers”) now has a version for Adobe InDesign CS2, Mac or Windows platforms. You can download a demo of the plug-in here.
From their site, though, I can’t tell how much it costs … per license, it’s either $395 (“Blacklining 3”) or $1195 (“Blacklining 6”). That’s a huge price difference, but I can’t find any info on the difference between the two products. Is 6 an upgrade from 3? Is one just for InDesign and the other for QuarkXPress? Neither the Purchase Product screens nor the FAQ give any clues. The Download Demo link above calls it “Blacklining for InDesign.” It’s aggravating. Well, at least there’s a demo. And an opportunity for an enterprising web designer…
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention another possible solution, Adobe InCopy ($249, Mac/Windows). It’s not a plug-in, it’s a standalone program, but you can run both on the same computer if you’re the sole user.
InCopy’s Track Changes feature provides an audit trail of any text changes made to a story in an InDesign document, whether you change the text in InCopy or in InDesign. It tracks what was changed, who changed it and when. You can turn it on or off on a per-story basis.
In InDesign, or in InCopy’s Layout View, even if Track Changes was turned on and the story was heavily edited, text appears as though all edits made to the story thus far have been accepted, as shown below. (The little icon on the frame indicates the story can be edited in InCopy.)
To see the edits made to the story, switch to one of the other views in InCopy; Story or Galley. These views are mainly for copy-editing and show only minimal formatting. For Track Changes, I’ve set my InCopy Preferences to strikethrough my deletions and put a green background behind them. I specified a yellow background for my additions.
There’s lots more to Track Changes, but I think you get the general drift. You may find it to be the solution you’re looking for.
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Just to save readers a possible headache, it should be noted that you cannot track changes to text within tables, or any text that lives in an inline object for that matter. Well, maybe the changes are tracked somewhere, but you can’t view them because these inline objects just show up as icons in Galley and Story views.
This has caused a tug-of-war between our Editorial department’s desire to track changes, and our Production department’s desire to make the files more efficient to work with.
…one more person hoping for a fix in CS3. : )
I just want to mention that Blacklining, while expensive, offers more tracking features than InCopy does. If one needs a more comprehensive edit trail for legal purposes, one should check it out. (If using InDesign, you don’t have to worry about the confusing downloads for Quark, but the BL3 is for older versions of Quark.)
Can the different Track Changes views be printed? Or would it print the text as if the changes have been accepted?
Track changes markup can be printed from InCopy, as long as you turn on the “Include tracked changes” checkbox in the Print Galley/Story dialog box. You can also export a PDF (again only from Galley/Story view) with tracked changes mark-up.
There is a free script that will print and show track changes from the layout view.
https://www.kerntiff.co.uk/free-stuff/editmarksviewer
Rich
I install this script to indesign cs3, but it doesnt work. please let me know how to solve it.
Awesome! Thanks so much!
Is there a plug-in or feature in InDesign that will alert the designer when a text change has been made in InCopy. We’re trying to go paperless, but our designers will need some sort of notification that there are changes on a page without having to open every document.
We are just making the switch to CS3 and will be incorporating InCopy into our workflow. I?ve been doing some remote work flow trial runs and have come across a problem.
For our purposes, it is necessary for a second editor to accept/reject a remote editor?s tracked changes. When I try to forward an InCopy package, the tracked changes do not show up for the second editor to accept or reject.
Is there a reason that tracked changes are not coming through when emailing (forwarding) an InCopy package?
Bailey, I’ve answered you in the comments to the post about the Remote Workflow. (If anyone else wants to weigh in on Bailey’s issue, please add to the discussion over there, thx.)
We switched over to CS3 at the beginning of this year and bought the CS3 blacklining upgrade as our financial services clients like to see tracked changes on documents. Since then, we have encountered corrupt documents, formatting being changed, old copy going back into the document and other copy deleted. We’re finding it impossible to work with.
Is there a way to prevent writers from turning off track changes in InCopy? I am sure the answer is no, but just in case HerGeekness or other Geeks:-) Know a secret, please share.
Another question, are user names computer specific? i.e. if a computer is shared, can more than one user name be assigned to note the person actually working on the document?
Does anyone have any insight as to why InCopy does not track formatting changes? (font, etc…) Most other apps that track changes track that sort of thing…
Is there an alternative for InDesign yet?
Responses in reverse chrono order:
Dieta: No, no alternative for ID yet. What’s described in the article is the current situation for CS3 (and CS4). Bummer, I know!
Kevin: Sorry, no insight on that (why IC doesn’t track formatting changes). My *guess* is that when Adobe first programmed the feature, tracking formatting changes added too much overhead (not so relevant now with $900 supercomputers)? Or perhaps they ran out of time before it had to ship? And since then, not enough people have rattled their cage that they want it. So, go over to their Feature Request form and ask for it. (They do read those.)
ClaireK: User names are *user account* specific, in general. So if 2 people are sharing the same logon/password for OS X or Windows XP (the same “My Documents” folder or Home folder), then their username in IC/ID will be the same. (Remember though that it can be changed at will, as long as no stories are checked out of any open documents.) To change just the Note color, but not username or color, use Preferences > Note. That way you can have two+ unique users who share the same Note color, if that’s what you want.
ClaireK again: There’s no way to prevent someone from turning off Track Changes other than telling them to please never do that (which works pretty well). ;-) That’s because the basic IC/ID workflow doesn’t have a user role/privileges feature. You can get that, though, if you add on K4 or Smart Connection plugins to the workflow.
Can you create change bars in indesign?
Or with Blacklining?
We would like change bars in the margin (left or right) of lines or paragraphs that have been altered.
Could this be applied manually — i.e., as a style? It doesn’t need to be a tracked change, I just don’t want to have to draw them on the page.
You could make a paragraph style for the text that has a rule above and below, just make a copy of the style you’re replicating (that way it’s the child style and it will change with any change you make to the parent (the one you copied).
You set the paragraph rule to be a negative left indent and the push the right indent all the way over until you’re satisfied with it’s width.
Increase the point size of the rules and voilla, you have change bars.
For every paragraph you change you can apply this new paragraph style instead.
Although, the heights of paragraphs will change all the time, so there’s no sure way that I know of, perhaps someone here does, to get the bar to be exact size of the text.
So the alternative would be perhaps use a dotted line with a large dot.
I would also make a spot colour and set the paragraph rules to overprint, just incase.
It’s not perfect, but it could work?
When you’re finished you could just delete the paragraph style and replace it with the original.
Or you could just print/export it without the spot colour.
Careful though, don’t need any change bars showing up in the final print.
The other option would be to draw a simple line, and then anchor it and make it an object style.
Then you could anchor this line into any paragraph of text and apply the object style.
There’s no automatic way to remove the line when you’re finished though, I don’t think there is anyway?
You can search on anchored object markers and replace them with nothing.
It sounds like what’s needed here is the ability to spec a paragraph rule as a percentage of the paragraph height, instead of an absolute point size. It would make an interesting CS5 feature request.
In the meantime, the only other thing I can think of would be to put the text in a table. Set the cell strokes on the top, right, and bottom to zero. Then the left stroke is your change bar. Since the cell expands with the text, so would the bar. It might be too much trouble, for what it’s worth though.
I had thought of tables, but thought it would take an age to set up and get rid of. And the thought of a percentage for the height of the paragraph cropped into my head too.
I know David had a cool trick a while ago with the vertical pipe “|” which I can’t remember what he did or find his post. But it was cool.
* Thanks for the tip on replacing an object with nothing *
You can even make little flags out of it :)
https://tinyurl.com/64zs5a
I don’t have overprint turned on, but you get the idea.
And you have to set the rule below, which didn’t upload because I forgot to select it.
Thanks for these tips, I didn’t know about these differences before!
Another tip for you is CtrlChanges by Ctrl Publishing. Please note that I am myself working at Ctrl Publishing, so take this for what it is. It’s a quite recently released product, so I thought I should post the information about it here.
Anyways, CtrlChanges is built on top of the existing Track Changes functionality in InDesign/InCopy, and adds on the following features (this is taken from our website):
? Show changes in layout mode in InCopy and InDesign
? Turn viewing on/off
? Turn Track Changes on/off for document
? Accept all changes in document
? Mouse over tip showing editor, time and deleted text
? Able to print changes
? Include changes in PDF-file, including notes for deleted text
? Use the CtrlChanges Pro panel to see all the changes in the document
and navigate through them easily
? Users are separated using different color markings in document
? Step through the changes and accept them as you go
It is available for both InDesign and InCopy CS3 and CS4.
Hi,
I have tested CtrlChanges for InDesign CS4 and I must say it is a very nice tool. Just the fact that you can finally see the changes in the layout view and take action to it, you can now quickly eliminate the discussion regarding proof reading since it is so easy to spot where the changes are on the printed page.
I am going to have to sign up to receive your feed. This is good stuff
I am new to InDesign and have been researching InCopy to see if it will be an effective program for our workflow. One of our designers asked me if she could see which editor (who would be using InCopy) made what changes at what time in InDesign. I know that the editor can see the track changes in InCopy and that any changes will let the designer know that the file has been modified, but can the designer actually see the track changes made by the editor in InDesign before accepting/updating the content? Is this possible without an additional plug-in? Please forgive me if this point has already been clarified, but I wanted to confirm this before making the jump to InCopy.
No, the designer cannot see what changes each editor made to the copy. All they know is that the story is out of date and so they update it.
It’s like a designer updating an out of date Photoshop file. They don’t know what the artist changed, all they know is it’s out of date.
However if it’s really critical to your workflow; you could get the editor to export Story or Galley view to PDF and inlclude the track changes markup, then supply the design with that PDF; or the designer could purchase InCopy and think of it as a $249 plug-in ;-) So they can see the track change info for themselves.
Thanks so much Anne-Marie! I appreciate your expert advice.
I’m wondering if Adobe added any new features in CS4 to address tracking formatting changes per Kevin’s question on April 2nd, 2008 and Anne-Marie’s response on October 10, 2008.
Thanks,
Laura
@Larua B – CS4 did not change the ability for InDesign Users to see tracked changes.
Maybe at some point in the future they will add this ability.
Though this discussion is rather old, it is not outdated. And when you search for ‘track changes’in the help of CS5, it brings you here.
Blacklining still has some features that track changes doesn’t have. For example: you could see all the changes that were made in revision round 1, 2, etc. You could merge changes into one revision. You could make a printout of a specific revision. However: the combination of Blacklining AND InDesign AND InCopy is terrible! It leads you to many problems. I would even say that this combination is not tested properly.
The track changes option of CS5 is an improvement in combination with InCopy: in CS4 you would have to open all stories in InCopy, activate track changes there, and then check all the stories in again. Now you can activate change-tracking without going to InCopy first.
We use Blacklining with InDesign CS3 in our current workflow and we are finding it an absolute nightmare to work with. We have discovered CtrlChanges but it doesn’t have the ability to merge revisions like Blacklining does. Peter’s thread above is freaking me out as we are launching an InCopy workflow into our studio next month. Please help, has anyone used Blacklining previously but found another, more stable and affordable alternative?
Hello All:
I’ve been to the EMSxt website to enquire about the blacklining software and their email, phone number and online inquiry form are not functioning. Is this company still in business?!
Hello Rose,
EMS is still very much alive and kicking!
You should be able to get hold of some one by emailing:
info [at] emsxt.com
Hope that helps.
Hello,
An old thread I know.
Check out EditMarks, the plugin for InDesign 4 and 5 that has blacklining functionality.
https://www.kerntiff.co.uk/products-4-indesign/editmarks
and there is a free plugin that shows the changes in the layout view.
https://www.kerntiff.co.uk/products-4-indesign/editmarks-lite
Great info, need info on CS6 tracking changes with multiple users
There is now a free script that helps navigate track changes and can produce a report.
https://www.kerntiff.co.uk/products-4-indesign/editmarks/editmarks-navigator