![]() But they’ve gone a step farther than Adobe ever has: They allow editing in either InDesign or GoogleDocs (or both!). If DocsFlow just let you link to a googledocs file, it would be enough. Also, if you have comments in the googledoc, those show up as notes in InDesign (so you can see them in the Story Editor, Notes panel, or by hovering over the note icon): I’m pushing them to let us map to our own styles, but that’s not in there at the time of this writing. In this beta, paragraph styles are currently mapped to special styles the plug-in creates. Also, check out the path and other info in the Link Info section of the Links panel above! When you double-click the modified icon, it updates in InDesign. The change shows up here in a matter of seconds. The “modified” icon in the above image indicates that after I placed the story, someone edited the file in googledocs. If you look in the Links panel, you’ll see the file: Then you can choose a document to place it. You’ll have to sign in to your google account the first time. It’s slow, ungainly, and - most galling of all - it doesn’t even support paragraph styles, much less character styles.)ĭocsFlow has just entered public beta, which means it’s still a bit clunky and em software really wants feedback - what works, what doesn’t work, what could be made better.Īfter you install the plug-in, you can choose File > Place from Google Docs. The difference is that ’s Buzzword service currently pales in comparison to Google’s product. ![]() (Note that this isn’t that different than InDesign CS5’s built-in Place from Buzzword feature. Yes, I said “linking,” meaning that DocsFlow doesn’t just let you import the documents, it also lets you maintain links to them. Until now.Įm Software - a company with a very long history of plug-ins and add-ons - has developed DocsFlow, a plug-in for linking google docs files into InDesign. But there’s only one problem: I can’t easily import googledocs files into InDesign. Plus, the document lives in “the cloud” so I can access it whenever I have a web connection. ![]() I can start writing a document, let someone else edit it, and even work on the document with multiple authors at the same time. It’s easy to use, fast, and has lots of collaboration features. Or, you can click the edit original icon in the palette to immediately edit the linked story in Google Docs.I love google docs for quick and easy online word processing. After each update, if you open the story editor with change marks showing, you can see who changed what. ![]() You can view or edit the original story at any time by using “edit original” (or “without auto-update”). DocsFlow merges any changes on the Google Docs side into the linked InDesign story, even if the latter has been changed. When the Google Docs document is edited, you’ll see the link’s status change to “modified” (a yellow alert icon), and you can update the story from Google Docs with a double-click on the icon. And getting started couldn’t be easier: download and install the plugin, select Place from Google Docs…, log in, and start placing dynamically-linked documents, later merging with a double-click when the remote document is edited.ĭocsFlow’s second breakthrough is serious technology that enables you to edit both the InDesign story and the Google Docs document independently. Using DocsFlow means you need no special resources to build, maintain or learn the editorial side (which is just Google Docs), and means no learning curve on the design side (since DocsFlow builds on the native InDesign story linking and story updating machinery). So you can format, layout, and make minor edits in InDesign, while you and others edit story content together in real time on Google Docs, without losing any work.ĭocsFlow’s first breakthrough idea is to connect the freely-available and popular web-based Google Docs editing tools to InDesign, giving you a zero-cost-per-seat editorial workflow solution that is extraordinarily easy to manage. And, much more importantly, DocsFlow maintains a dynamic link so it can intelligently merge Google Docs document changes into the InDesign story contents on each link update, rather than just replacing the story. DocsFlow lets you place online Google Docs documents as InDesign story contents, just like normal text files. DocsFlow marries the collaborative editing power of Google Docs to the layout power of InDesign. ![]()
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