Collaboration with colleague who does not have indesign

[garethirwin1234]

Hello there.

I write tenders, once done I pdf to my collegue who checks for spelling etc. Whilst there are colab tools in indesign I guess this is only for others with indesign. There are also colab tools with acrobat, but she only has acrobat reader.

In order to collaborate does everyone need to be paying? I am just trying to find an easier way for her to check my grammar which is terrible 🙂

[BobLevine]

The best collaboration tool is InCopy which is only $5/month and comes with a lot of extras.

What exactly do you hope to be able to accomplish? Reader is fine for commenting/marking up a PDF. 

[garethirwin1234]

Ok thanks I will advise her.

[Colin Flashman]

Bob Levine also suggests "reader is fine for commenting/marking up a PDF". I 100% agree and this is the method of round-tripping I suggest to my clients. This lets them mark up their comments using Adobe Acrobat Reader and then I can take the comments into InDesign using InDesign's "Import PDF Comments" feature (although I'm still using a plugin from DTP tools that does this a bit better) but this workflow seems appropriate.

InDesign does have the ability to "share for review" since 2020 that posts the proof to an HTML page so that the user doesn't need acrobat and only needs a web  browser. Has this been tried?

If you want direct editorial workflows, as Bob suggests InCopy is another way to go, but other posters here may recommend Wordsflow or Docsflow by EmSoftware but haven't used these myself.