Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Layout Zones

QuarkXPress has a feature called Composition Zones. This feature allows you to export portions of a document so that other individuals can edit them. The portions in the original document are automatically updated after a save. This means that sections of a publication can be farmed out to different parts of a team and the final publication can be put together on the fly.

InDesign, up until now, didn't have this feature. But thanks to Layout Zones, you can now do all of this and more. After installing the script, you can select sections of a page and assign them as a Layout Zone. This exports that section as a native InDesign file that then gets re-imported to the original document. You can then put that file on a server or in a public location so that it can be edited. The original file will be updated when the Layout Zone is saved.

You can also export selected Layout Zones as SWF, PDF, or IDML. This is a very exciting script and could possibly take some thunder away from Quark, yet again.