How Do You Know if There are Notes in an InDesign Document?
Someone just sent me an InDesign document and a PDF, along with a comment to look at the notes she had written. I opened the PDF file and chose Comments > Show Comment List… but there were no comments. I opened the INDD document and looked at every page… but there were no comments. I was about to email her back when the coffee kicked in: Notes! Oh! She must have used the Notes feature in InDesign. Duh.
But how do I know if there are any notes in an InDesign document? If you open the Notes panel (Window > Type & Tables > Notes), it’ll probably be blank. I wish InDesign had some better way to show you: “Hey, this document has 47 notes in it!” But it’s hidden.
The trick is to place the text cursor inside a text frame and then click the Go to Next Note button in the Notes panel (or choose Next Note in the panel menu). Boom! Suddenly, the panel lights up with a note (if there is at least one) and even tells us how many notes there are in the whole document. Whew.
Another way to see a note is to open a story in Story Editor. The notes are plainly visible there. But in this case, there were a bunch of little stories, so opening each one in Story Editor would have taken too long. The Notes panel makes it easy and fast, no matter how many stories there are in a document.
Of course, there are other places she could have hidden the notes, too. Some people put them on annotation layers and then turn the layers off (just to confuse you). Still others send an fdf file, which has to be paired with the PDF file (the fdf file is just the comments). But the Notes panel is one of the best ways to do it… as long as everyone is awake enough to go looking for the notes.
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That notes feature is incredibly useful in an InCopy workflow. You can just leave notes for an editor in the text where you want something changed.
I think they should make the notes panel work more like the new links panel ? simply display a scrollable list, and when the user selects one, you see the complete text in the bottom pane. The way Apple’s Pages handles notes is also quite nice, they basically place them in a sidebar with lines to the point in the document they refer to. Right now InDesign makes it hard to add notes to non-textual design elements, so I usually have a non-printing Notes & Scribbles layer in my Documents onto which I can skech with the pencil tool and my Wacom tablet, in addition to regular text-based notes.
In CS3, the path is Window > Notes (12th option down). But I can’t seem to Create New note. It is greyed out. In fact, the only option available to me is Show/Hide note info.
This is why I don’t like these Note-thingies — they’re spookily more-or-less hidden, so I feel I can’t trust finding them again. It’s much more simple and reassuring using plain text frames with notes on an extra layer. Or one can even put the notes on any layer, and just hide them from final output by changing their ParaStyle color to “None.”
To see if an ID file has notes, you don’t have to click anywhere, switch tools or select anything. Just look at the Notes menu (in CS3, that is … in CS4 you look at the Type > Notes flyout menu). If “Next Note” and “Previous Note” are dimmed, there are no notes anywhere in the file. If they’re black/enabled, there’s a note somewhere.
You can choose either of those commands to jump to the first one/last one. The document scrolls to the Note’s location in the text flow, ID switches to the Type tool automatically, the cursor appears before the note, and the Notes panel opens by default to show you the contents.
Still it’s a pain, I agree. There is so much room for improvement in UI and functionality. I would love to see, for example, ID pick up InCopy’s ability to convert Notes to Comments when exporting the layout to PDF. That would’ve saved you the hassle right there.
There is a Notes Manager plugin for ID but it ain’t cheap ($99 US). It does give you the panel you’re asking about though.
New in CS4 is the ability to use the Links panel to see if there are any Notes in the stories, and how many. It’s one of the columns you can add to the top section. But that only works for stories that are linked to the layout (InCopy stories, usually).
Helpful article, thanks! I had given up on Notes a long time ago because I could never find mine again. I just don’t think they’re obvious enough so I use the Notes layer method….
Thanks, Phyllis
So why doesn’t Adobe just have a “production notes” feature that allows us to put postie-types notes on any page? Why not?
Without this, we simply use a yellow colored text frame (with a first-point rounded corner) that is set to an attribute of non-printing. Probably lots of you do this sort of thing, too. But, what a silly work-around for such an obvious and oft-needed feature. Come on Adobe, if yellow notes and audio notes are such a good idea in Photoshop, why not in InDesign?
Is there any way of actually making the text in the notes larger? It’s tiny and I see no way of changing the font or the font size.
@Brooks: Yes, I agree that ID needs a better notes/review kind of feature, preferably something that integrates with Acrobat!
@Raphael: I don’t think there is any way to change the font size in the panel. You can adjust the size of notes (and all the other text) in the Story Editor, though (in Preferences).