March 23, 2010

K4 Version 6 Now Ships with Sticky Notes!

A long-awaited feature for editorial communication finally makes its debut in K4 Version 6

Notes have been a standard form of communication between InCopy and InDesign users since InCopy was first released. Notes have given users a way to supply directions to their counterparts in the editorial workflow. However, for years there have been two major complaints surrounding the notes process. The first is the fact that notes in InDesign don't really jump out at you. Since they are contained in text, and look like small colored hourglasses, InDesign users easily could and most certainly have forgotten to check for the presence of notes. Secondly, while working in InCopy, you could only put a note in a text frame you had access to. This was very restrictive. Often times you needed to put a note on or near a graphic, but couldn't. The only thing an InCopy user could do was put a note in a text frame that was close to the graphic. Both of these issues have been addressed with the new "Sticky Note" feature of K4 Version 6.

A Short Overview of Notes in InDesign

This is the Notes panel in CS4

If you take a look at the Notes panel that ships with InDesign CS4, you can see the Author, Creation Date, Date Modified, Story, Page, Note Number, Number of Characters, and the Number of Words contained in a note. This panel has been extremely helpful to InDesign users because of the navigational buttons at the bottom of the panel. These navigational buttons allow users to navigate from one note to another without having to visually find the note. The only other way to visually see notes in InDesign is to switch to "Story View." But because "Story View" only allows you to see one story at a time, this feature is not as helpful as the Notes panel.

This is the Notes Manager panel in CS4 

To add more functionality to the Notes panel, vjoon developed the Notes Manager. You don't need to own a K4 system to use this panel; you can also purchase the Notes Manager as a stand-alone plugin. The Notes Manager allows you to view notes by date and by author. It also lists all notes in an InDesign or InCopy document. The Notes Manager was a welcome addition, especially for editorial staff that use notes as their primary form of communication.

While both the Notes panel and the Notes Manager plugin brought much-needed functionality to the notes workflow, "Sticky Notes" in K4 Version 6 takes notes to the next level.

This is the new Sticky Notes panel in K4 Version 6. Sticky Notes appear like Acrobat comments on a page.

The first major enhancement for InDesign users is that these notes really have the kind of on-screen presence that has long been needed inside InDesign. The new Sticky Notes panel also tells you whether or not a note has been sent (which means that notes can be sent without checking a story in or saving a version!), and lets you mark notes as being read. You can also control the position of a note. If you want to temporarily hide Sticky Notes, you can show and hide them from the View menu in InDesign.

The second major enhancement will be much appreciated by InCopy users. After spending years teaching InCopy, I can tell you that one of the most frequent questions I faced about notes was: "What if I want to put a note over a graphic to instruct Production to change its focus?" This is a common question, especially when Editors really know the content better than the Production staff. And since it is rare for Production staff to give graphical control to Editorial staff, it is unlikely that InCopy users would be able to use the Position tool to crop a photo.. Rightfully so, I believe graphical changes should be left to Production. It definitely leaves a lot less room for errors. 

Prior to Sticky Notes, a user would need to leave this kind of note in the nearest text frame that they were actually allowed to edit. Now in K4 Version 6 Sticky Notes can finally be placed anywhere on the page, sent and updated, separate from the story!

Unfortunately, Sticky Notes can only be used inside K4 Version 6. But if you have contemplated investing in a K4 system, this may be one of the  key deciding factors. In the future, it will be interesting to see whether or not Vjoon will make this a stand-alone product like Notes Manager.

Until then, you can rest-assured that there is a company out there listening to and addressing the everyday issues people face inside the InDesign and InCopy workflow.

Posted at 11:49 am by Robert Underwood

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