Anchoring Comments for Editors Working in InDesign

Over at Deke.com, I've written about how we use anchored notes to communicate between the team members who work on our bestselling One-on-One series books. As much as I like having graphically oriented authors work directly with the layout, it certainly brings up issues when it comes to editing passes. Although we've tried InCopy successfully, on books by Stephen Johnson and Eddie Tapp, it takes a special planetary alignment for InCopy to work right for our linear (as opposed to simultaneously collaborative) workflow. In truth, we've gone old school for some projects for the back-end, having them copyedited on paper so that the changes can be put into InDesign.

Although the Notes palette, new to CS3, allows for the creation of notes in a non-layout-disturbing way, it's still clunkly. The method I outline in this article shows how we use InDesign's anchored object feature to create notes that are specifically styled to indicate each editor and specifically placed to be read by the author. Let me know what you think.