Comments on: More Info on the Free Notes Plug-in

By: David Wolfe

David Wolfe — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 02:28:07 +0000

Carlos, there is currently no way to print Notes on the page using InDesign. The tip Anne-Marie gave for InCopy is a (horrible) workaround for now. Many have been complaining to Adobe for at least 2 years about this. More people need to do the same. The Notes feature is the only means Adobe has given for Editors using InCopy and designers/production people using InDesign to communicate back and forth. To not be able to print those communications is not just a feature request–it’s a serious flaw in the feature.

By: Carlos F. Meneses

Carlos F. Meneses — Thu, 31 May 2007 17:10:51 +0000

Anyone have any luck with getting the notes printed on the page? We are currently copy and pasting notes to an additional page at the end of our documents, which seems to kill the advantage of having this plug in.

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Tue, 08 May 2007 14:07:20 +0000

Jason, yes, those are correct. I think the .apln is for Windows, and .framework is for Mac.

By: Jason Cutler

Jason Cutler — Tue, 08 May 2007 04:06:44 +0000

I installed the InCopy demo and I have these three files in there (plus others) :
Note.framework
NotePref.framework
Username UI.framework

are these the right ones? The file extension is different. They have the same name as the ones in InCopy’s Plug-ins/InCopyWorkflow folder.

By: Dave Saunders

Dave Saunders — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 15:52:32 +0000

It would certainly be possible to write a script to extract the text of the notes and put them into text frames on a notes layer with each located adjacent to the corresponding note’s position in the document — having seen some document with such notes, some logic might be needed to prevent notes at “the same position” from colliding.

I put “the same position” in quotes because they’re in consecutive character positions in the text stream, but those characters would share the same location.

For that matter, there’s also the issue of notes that are merely close but not adjacent.

The way things are, I wouldn’t be able to work on such a script before I return from the conference in Seattle where I’m conducting a 3.5 hour hands-on JavaScripting InDesign class.

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 13:38:10 +0000

Iow, unfortunately you can’t print the notes from InDesign, nor have them show up as comments if you exported the layout to PDF, not even with the Notes Manager plug-in. (Calling Dave Saunders … calling Dave Saunders … ) heh.

Having notes appear as comments in exported PDFs is a feature of InCopy, however. You might want to consider buying one copy ($249) as a “plug-in” if this is important to you. Or download a free tryout of InCopy to check it out before making a decision.

To include Notes as comments in a PDF, just open the layout from InCopy’s File > Open command, and immediately go to IC’s File > Export, choosing PDF as the format. When exporting layouts to PDF from InCopy, the options aren’t nearly as exhaustive as InDesign’s, but one of the options is “Include Notes as Annotations”. (Which means comments.)

By: low Jackson

low Jackson — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 08:22:37 +0000

Cool, this is gonna be really useful! But is there a way to print these notes at the side of the page like commenting in acrobat?

By: Dave Saunders

Dave Saunders — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 16:46:56 +0000

I’ve been recently doing some scripting that includes notes. It’s a great way for one script to pass information to another while identify places in text or even a range of text.

I’ve grown seriously attached to them. The InDesign Scripting Reference does a half-hearted job of describing them (at least, in the JavaScript section). At least there’s an entry for the Note object, but none for the Notes collection. For that, you need the InCopy Scripting Reference.

Dave