We are often asked about support for Adobe InDesign files in Newforma Project Center. Of course, if you double-click on an InDesign (.INDD) document file in Project Files or any other activity center in Newforma Project Center, you can view the document in InDesign if the application is loaded on your system. However, the Newforma Viewer does not support the .INDD file format for viewing or markup, and Newforma Project Center cannot index or search the .INDD file format. The latter limitation is due to the fact that there is, to our knowledge, no iFilter available for the .INDD file format. However, with a few tips and a simple adjustment to your work process, you can very effectively manage content created with InDesign in Newforma Project Center:
First, if you want to view an InDesign file, you probably should use InDesign (or InCopy) to ensure visual fidelity due to the graphical nature and complexity of layout that is common in most InDesign documents.
Second, get in the habit of saving your InDesign documents as PDFs as a integral part of your work process. Some people object to having to separately create the PDF file, but InDesign does make that incredibly easy, and there are many benefits to doing so:
• The resulting PDF can be indexed and is searchable via Newforma Project Search.
• You can distribute the resulting PDF to other team members who may not have InDesign, yet they can easily mark up the resulting document using the Newforma Viewer and send their review comments back to you as a marked-up PDF.
• The resulting PDFs are more portable than InDesign files; for example, InDesign files do not embed the fonts, so if you are using any non-standard fonts, the recipient of an InDesign file may not see exactly what you saw in composing the page. On the other hand, font definitions are embedded in the PDF generated by InDesign.
Third, always place the InDesign document filename in some standard, inconspicuous location in your InDesign documents, typically in the footer of the last page. If you just can’t put the filename in the footer, at least adopt a filenaming convention for the PDFs you generate in the preceding tip. For example, giving the PDF the same name as the InDesign file, would enable you to search for a document using Newforma Projecct Search, which would find the PDF, and based on either the InDesign filename in the footer or the file naming convention for the PDF, you could easily locate the corresponding InDesign file.
A final tip, if you work with people who routinely send you InDesign files, but you don’t have the application, you might want to purchase a license of Adobe InCopy in order to view InDesign files and convert them to PDF file format. Although InCopy was designed primarily as part of the InDesign workflow, it functions quite nicely on its own as a tool to view and convert InDesign files to PDF. InCopy sells for $249 vs. InDesign for $699.
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