Creating a brochure to be updated by those without Adobe InDesign

Hi Alyson,

well, with the help of the WordsFlowPro plug-in for InDesign by emsoftware you can establish a workflow that might work for your clients with MSWord. You'll first do your layout with InDesign and by the help of that plug-in you could export one MSWord file for every story in InDesign to your client could edit and maintain. Read into your options and download a test version:

http://emsoftware.com/products/wordsflow/

Allow yourself some days for experimenting and testing the workflow with your clients.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

My two cents, do it in word. If that's waht your users have and use, that's the application to use.

You've been given some suggestions but the real answer to your question is no. Even with InCopy, you wouldn't be able to export a high-quality PDF.

The best way to do this is to create the brochure in Powerpoint, it can then be passed to others for revision. Anyone who has MSWord is likely to also have Powerpoint. The application is far more sophisticated nowadays than the earlier versions.

It's generally not a good idea. 

The usual workflow is that they supply you with an MS Word file and all the images required in a separate folder.

You can help them with this by providing templates of each section in MS Word. Plus stressing that images must be supplied separately.

If you create a Template in InDesign with fake text (or the real text) and then export the threaded frames to a RTF - open that in MS Word and you should retain your text styles for paragraphs and character styles. And along side this you can include all the images for that section as a separate folder - within the text you can put text markers written as <Picture 1.jpg> or whatever image is required for that location.

They can then edit this MS Word file to replace the text and supply it to you. And they can update all the images in the folder and indicate within the text where each image is required.

Something like <<INSERT IMAGE Picture 1>> then you can easily spot or find the location of the image placement.

At the end of each designed annual - you can export each section again to RTF then save as MS Word and include the images for those pages. 

This provides a clear handover procedure.

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The other method would be that they purchase a copy of InCopy.

But it require that they would need training on how to handle this workflow.

It could be more trouble than it's worth especially if it's changing hands every year.

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There are 3rd party solutions, but my exploration of these in the past were they were expensive and may not suit. But if money is not an issue, then let me know and I'll see what I can dig up again.

Or after you get the brochure in PDF format, make the areas you want to change form fields. Limiting but workable for simple changes.

You can save your file as a PDF then use Acrobat to convert to an MS Word doc. Not a clean workflow.