By Jane Fitzpatrick AE, Editors Victoria Professional Development Officer (edvic.profdev@iped-editors.org)
Kevin O’Brien, the trainer for our course “Using PDF mark-up effectively”, recently got in touch with some advice that might be handy for those who work with PDF proofs and InDesign paging software.
Kevin reports: You can import comments from a PDF that’s been marked up in Acrobat directly into InDesign.
With the native InDesign file open, you just go to File, Import Comments and navigate to your marked-up PDF, and the comments are loaded in.
You can then click through them one by one in the dialogue box in InDesign and either click a button to automatically accept or reject each one, or click out of it and make changes manually. It’s a very efficient way of working.
And you can import comments from multiple PDFs (such as the author’s and the proofreader’s). You just have to make sure the text and layout are identical in all PDFs and the native InDesign file before you begin taking in the changes, so they are correctly mapped to the right places. And this workflow really works best when everyone is using the Comment tools, as I describe in my workshops: i.e. using insertion, replacement and deletion as much as possible, and avoiding the drawing tools and other inefficient annotations.
More info can be found on the Adobe Support website by searching “InDesign import comments”.