Is there a way to lock my styles (paragraph, character, tables) in InDesign?

[valeriatn]

Hello,

I'm currently working with and InDesign-InCopy workflow for book editing and I'm in charge of designers, translators, editors and more.

Is there a way to lock the styles like paragraph, character and tables in InDesign so the translators and editors see everything but can't change the styles in the document?

I saw that maybe I could write a script for this specific need I have, but it might be too complicated.

Any suggestions?

Thanks, Val.

[jmlevy]

If you use InCopy assignments, users will not be able to modify styles; they only will be able to apply them.

[valeriatn]

I know. I don't want them to be able to apply them even, because there's no way to see that as a change in InCopy.

We're working with long books, I'm talking 600+ pgs, so we need to have a lot of control over these things and there's no way to see this as a change from InCopy.

[BobLevine]

Without the use of expensive third party applications, the answer to your question is no.

[valeriatn]

Do you think that by writing a script for this I could solve it?

Or what kind of third party apps could we use?

[Dirk Becker · Accepted solution]

Would you actually want to see the changes, or prevent them?

A script could at least produce a report of differences.

A plugin could do all of this, and much more.

It can disable or hide many UI elements including menus and buttons, or provide your own specialized panels.

It can observe any kind of change, force undo, report the change or interfere in any other way. Only allow overrides with certain attributes or values, dependent on additional context. Only allow a subset of styles.

One of my plugins protected arbitrary parts of an XML structure against edits.

Do you have inlined/anchored images? Should they stick to their sizes, crops etc., or will they get localized too? Prevent relink? I guess you'll need different right profiles per job ...

As you mentioned translation, you have to consider the workflow of the external services - while you interchange InDesign files, they may bypass all protections, export the whole document as IDML, pipe it thru an automated or manually supported process and rebuild the completed document. Google for Trados and IDML. A plugin could even prevent that workflow (suppress IDML export) but would you want that?

After translation words may shift around and with them their character styles. Even if preserved in general, styles may need rework when you translate to different scripts (roman / arabic / cjk) where you have to use different fonts, sizes, hyphenation settings and other attributes. Otherwise, should the attributes of the actual styles get locked? What about Copy-Paste - should that also strip all styles? Only unknown styles? Only incoming from the same document?

Some of these features may already be implemented by editorial systems - probably what Bob meant with "expensive third party" - if you happen to have one it might be worth checking. They also cover multi user workflow - separate status per content components, locking, a shared storage, versioning, accounting and so forth. Some other features will be too specific and require custom development, but they are all doable.

Regards,

Dirk

[valeriatn]

Thank you so much, Dirk.

This was of great help.

I guess I'll be using a plugin to protect my styles.

About the translation, that's the first thing we do in the process, so we get the translation approved and then fit the content to the templates generated by the designers. So that won't be a problem and we won't need Google for Trados.

[Emmanuel Balan]

Hi! Which kind of plugin does this, please? I need to send an idml to someone and I want to see the changes he will make. I aslo need to lock one specific style to prevent changes to the text to which this style is applied. Thanks!

[BobLevine]

There is no way of doing this without very expensive editorial systems.

[Geоrge]

Why don't you fear that InCopy user can apply styles that you are do exactly for this publication?

Just teach users where he can apply some styles, where no.