Help Me Test the InVersion Plug-in

For the past few months I’ve been working with my friends Jim Birkenseer and Peter Truskier of Premedia Systems on a new plug-in for InDesign and InCopy CS3 and CS4 called InVersion. It lets you save versions of stories (contents of a text frame or text thread) while you’re working on them, and, of course, restore to any previous version you saved.

For example, here’s a screen shot of part of the contextual menu you see when you right-click on a story:

All text and formatting is retained in each version, and you can add comments as well. It has nothing to do with VersionCue, by the way.

We mainly see the plug-in being used by InCopy-using editors, but InDesign users might find it handy too, even if they’re not sharing the layout with any InCopy users. It would let you save independent versions of each story in a layout without having to do a Save As to the INDD file itself, for example.

Right now we’re in beta and we need more testers. At this point InVersion is fully functional but only for InDesign or InCopy CS3 (Mac or Windows). We wanted to get a lot of feedback before rolling out the CS4-compatible …. um … version. ;-)

You can learn more about the plug-in (and read some feedback from early beta testers) in my post on InCopySecrets.com. If you’d like to help us out with testing it now with CS3 or when the CS4 beta is ready, please email me at amarie [at] incopysecrets.com with INVERSION in the subject line and I’ll get you started!

As is customary, active testers (those who post feedback to our private forum) will receive a free copy of the plug-in once it’s released.