CopyFlow Gold

CATEGORIES: Plug-ins, Product Reviews | Jeff Gamet | May 15, 2009

EASY ROUND-TRIPPING OF YOUR TEXT IN INDESIGN

Extracting text from an InDesign file can be a pain if your document has lots of text frames, but CopyFlow Gold for InDesign CS2 and higher turns the export into a drop-dead simple process. In addition to exporting a document’s text, it can reimport the copy, making this plug-in especially useful for designers that need to hand off text for editing (or, according to the company, for translation purposes).

CopyFlow Gold sports an easy-to-use panel interface that manages importing and exporting text, file export formats, document settings, and its own activity log. It supports plain text, RTF, Adobe Tag, XLIFF, XML, INX, and IDML file formats to accommodate most any reason for exporting copy, including editing and archiving, and it can export a document’s stories as individual files or as a single document.

Every text frame in a document needs to be tagged before copy can be exported, and CopyFlow Gold handles that for you, too. It can auto-name each frame, or lets you apply names on a frame-by-frame basis. Exported text files can be edited and reimported, although RTF and plain text documents will lose their formatting when imported, so don’t spend time on formatting before those files come back.

While importing and exporting is amazingly simple, installing CopyFlow Gold takes extra effort. There isn’t an installer, so all of the components need to be copied to the appropriate directories before launching InDesign. Clear instructions are included, which makes the process a little bit friendlier.

Despite the manual installation process, CopyFlow Gold is a breeze to use for repurposing or archiving text, and its round-trip text control can be a lifesaver for designers that work with several copy editors.
—Jeff Gamet

Company: North Atlantic Publishing Systems, Inc.
Price: $495
Web: www.napsys.com
Rating: 4.5

Hot: Easy to use
Not: Manual installation process

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