The initial version of CopyFlow Gold for Adobe InDesign CS/CS2 exports text in RTF, plain text or InDesign tags as separate files, and re-imports the same as Batch operations. There are Word macros included in the demo for building a single RTF file for translation. Their use is described in a Word file which accompanies the delivery.

Topics covered below:

• Labelling Frames
• A Translation Workflow
• Single Tagged File Format

CopyFlowGold for InDesign is compatible with InDesign CS/CS2 for the Macintosh platform and InDesign CS2 for the Windows platform.

Labelling Frames

The text frame (InDesign story) naming can be done automatically or story by story by selecting a single menu item.

The screen shot above shows the CopyFlow Gold floating palette. A single pop-up selects the import/export format. In this case it is set to RTF. CopyFlow Gold uses the filters built into the InDesign application for import and export.

The menu item to open the CopyFlow Gold palette is found under the Windows menu of InDesign CS.

A Translation Workflow

If you are using CopyFlow Gold for language translation the workflow is:

1.) Open a copy of the document to be translated. Use the "Label All Frames" menu item to label the text frames. The labels are assigned automatically to any frame that contains text. A series of linked text frames (a story) is named as a single item. The story names are established by taking the first 10 characters of the document name and then appending "_story_" and a number.

2.) You can clear any boxes you do not wish to export by unlabelling them using the "Label A Frame" menu item. You can also use this same item to interactively name or rename other stories.

3.) Select the format from the popup on the palette. In this case : 'RTF'

4.) Then use the Batch Export item of the menu hung off the upper right of the palette to begin an export. You will be asked to select a folder to export into, after which the program will export all the named stories with content to individual files in the export folder - as part of the export process a file extension signifying the export type is appended to the frame label to produce an output file name - e.g., Adobe Hist_story_22.rtf.

5.) Save the copy of the document you began with -- this preserves the frame labels in the document.

6.) Translate the text. ( N.B., we provide Word macros to combine the separate RTF files into a single RTF file for easier handling during this stage. - In the case of tagged text an export/import option for a single file of tagged text is provided. [CS] )

7.) Place the translated files into an empty folder and open the copy of the document, re-open the CopyFlow Gold palette and use the Batch Import menu item to begin the batch import process. You will be asked to select the folder where the text files reside. (If you are importing a single file of tagged text, you will select the .tag file.) CopyFlow Gold will then examine each named text frame and if it finds an importable file of the selected format in the selected import folder the file will be imported into the document. If there is no file matching the name and format in the selected folder, no change will be made to the story.

To identify which frames are which in the document - CopyFlow Gold uses the Adornment feature of InDesign. If a frame is labelled and the 'Show Frame Edges' option in the View menu of InDesign is on - the labels will be visible as readable text adjacent to the first box of each story. These adornments are not printable. They appear in a default type in bright red as seen below.

Single Tagged Text File Format

An export/import option is provided to produce a single file of Adobe Tagged Text from an entire InDesign document.

To export to a single tagged text file, select the export option "Single Tagged Text File" and then select the export folder. The export will begin. You will be asked once to establish your export preferences for the Adobe tagged text file. (Please avoid using the Verbose format - it results in very slow processing and very large files. )

The exported file will be named docname.tag . Each story's tagged text is delimited by a line which begins with a '#' mark followed by the frame label. So the story in the frame pictured above would be marked: #Adobe Hist_story_25 . The hash mark is the first character on a line of text. The frame name is followed by a carriage return. The tagged text for the story follows this line and runs until the next frame tag or the end of file marker "#end". ( Hint: Avoid translating the frame names or Adobe tags )

To import a single file of tagged text, select the import option "Single Tagged Text File" on the CopyFlowGold Pallete and then select the tag file. After a few seconds the cursor will beome a spinning beach ball and the import process should begin. The import process looks through the front InDesign document for each of the labelled frames and tries to find the tagged text with the same frame label within the .tag file. If it cannot find text for a particular frame it begins to look for the text for the next labelled frame in the document.