A Down and Dirty Way to Lock Content
I’m occasionally asked how an InDesign user can lock certain content to prevent it from being edited. The short answer is that it’s simply impossible to fully protect the content of any document short of keeping it locked away on a password protected computer.
But for a workgroup where various people may be working on one layout, once a story is finalized it’s good to let others know. While there’s no straightforward lock content command, there is a way to do it.
Right click (control+click with a one button mouse) the story you wish to lock and from the contextual menu choose InCopy > Export Selection.
Choose a location and name for the file and click save. The frame will display a new icon in the upper left corner.
The icon indicates that the content is available for editing using an InCopy workflow, but that content must be checked out first in order to edit it. Any attempt to make edits will bring up this warning:
This is obviously not a perfect solution, but in a collaborative workflow where more than one person is working on a layout it’s a quick and easy way to make sure content isn’t changed by accident.
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Here’s an odd wrinkle:
(For the record, I’m using InDesign CS3, without InCopy.)
I work a lot of technical manuals that share stories. Though I’m not in an InCopy work flow, I store and synchronize those shared stories by exporting to .incx, just as described in this hint. So, after reading the hint, my first thought about securing an InCopy story was changing the exported .incx file to Read Only. Here’s what happens:
I tested this in Windows by right-clicking the .incx file to access its Properties dialog, and selecting the Read Only check box. Afterwards, I could still check-out, edit, and check-in the story, (after reopeing it in InDesign). If that’s all you do, the edit(s) appear to stick. Even if you close and reopen the file, again in InDesign, the edits are still there, and the link shows as up-to-date in the Links panel. So it appears Read Only didn’t secure the contents of the .incx file.
However, if you place another instance of the .incx file, you’ll find it doesn’t contain the edits. The InCopy story wasn’t overwritten.
By the same token, if you select the edited instance of the story, (the one that still shows the edits), and then use the Links panel’s Relink function, the edits disappear, again proving that the Read Only attribute of the .incx file did indeed take hold.
Interesting…
This can also work for images. Repeat the process above on a graphic frame with a placed image and the user will not be able to replace or reposition the image without first checking out that respective frame.
@Fritz
Yes, but graphic frames can simply be locked… ;)
True Harbs, but you can still replace the content by placing a new image, or loading the cursor and alt(?)* clicking into the frame.
(?)* means I’m not sure if that’s the right key.
When you make the content for InCopy you can’t replace the image without checking the image.
I have come across the particular conundrum recently in the shop I work at. We have a set of files that are generic text templates that should always stay the same (timestamp also!).
A few in the team have mistakenly checked out the file, forgot to rename it, thus when they check-in the file it changes the generic.
What I have done to try prevent accidental changes to the generic templates is check them all out. Now if anything ever changes in the generics they know who to point the finger at! ;)
I am working on technical manuals that share text and images that should not be changed. I created one master page for each manual page with those shared text and images. This is a way I found to “lock” the elements I dont want people to edit, by separating the fixed area from the editable area.