He writes:

I’ve been plugging away with DocsFlow over the last few months and found it that it’s been a huge time saver. What I love most is that it takes away the trouble I often run into with the conventional edit, proofread, approval, repeat system. My clients are also very happy that they get to interact with a live document and see how their text edits change the way the design looks and feels.

Our first “DocsFlow project” came back from press recently, 5 contributors were involved, each updating their own docs and everyone is very pleased with the results, check it out here: http://davidrager.org/pr-ecocen-evolve05.php.

Thanks!

The resulting publication looks great!

Changes at 6/7.1.4 release

• Added support for browser-based authentication (OAuth 2) in the redesigned Sign In dialog.
• Added an Edit Original without Auto Update menu item which behaves like InDesign’s own Edit Original, but without Edit Original‘s automatic update afterwards. It will start you off editing the link’s original copy, but any changes you make while editing will not automatically used be when you return to InDesign. Note that this action remains available for any kind of link (in all the same menus as Edit Original), not just DocsFlow links.
• Added a shift-key modifier to the Links panel’s Edit Original button. When either shift key is held down while clicking the Edit Original button at the bottom of the panel, the link’s original copy is edited as if Edit Original without Auto Update had been selected. This is useful for visiting Google Docs documents for workflow reasons (e.g., to make online comments about the document’s status) when you don’t want the automatic update when returning.
• Added support for the Google Docs ruler’s First Line Indent and Right Indent settings.
• Improved the speed with which the Place From Google Docs dialog displays (rather drastically, actually).
• Improved DocsFlow’s performance on documents containing many GDocs links.
• Fixed a problem where canceling an operation could cause a long pause.
• Fixed a problem where copying a placed story would make it un-updatable.
• Fixed a problem where updating with a GDocs document containing empty comments could fail.
• Fixed an issue with the Links panel menu where the Relink File Extension option wasn’t being disabled for Google Docs links. (CS5+ only)

Changes at 6/7.1.9 release

• Added ExtendScript access to the importDataFrom() and importDataFromFile() methods in Mac OS.
• Added scripting access to a document object’s ‘prototype story‘ property (or ‘prototypeStory‘ in ExtendScript), which corresponds to the InData > Use Story as Prototype setting in the UI. This is a read/write property of documents and contains either nothing/null (if not set) or a reference to a story within the document containing the active prototype story.
• Added scripting access to a story object’s ‘InData story name‘ property (or ‘indataStoryName‘ in ExtendScript), which corresponds to the InData > Name Story… setting in the UI. This is a read/write property of stories and is a string containing the story’s InData name. Note that the InData name is separate from a story’s name and label properties.

Changes at InCatalog 6/7.2.9.4

• Fixed a problem introduced in 4/5/6.2.6.5 where an update of an InDesign Tags-tagged field with text beginning with one of the start tags (like <ASCII-MAC> or <UNICODE-WIN>) would fail with a “malformed in some way” error.
• Fixed tagged text initialization to look for a flavor-specific initialization file if a (Tags Initialization)file isn’t found in the DD set. For imports using InDesign Tags, a file named (InDesign Tags Initialization) is used if found in the DD set. For imports using XPress Tags (via the DD qualifier <”X”), the file (Xtags Initialization)is used for initialization if found in the DD set. A “.txt” extension on these file names is optional.

Changes at 6/7.1.3.1 release

• Improved the speed with which an InDesign document containing many GDocs document links is opened.
• Removed a limitation where only the first 100 GDocs documents were being listed in DocsFlow’s Place dialog.
• Changed the handling of expired sessions, which are now automatically renewed without user intervention if Stay signed in was selected while signing in.
• Removed the “Missing plug-ins” warning that was being given when a document created with the DocsFlow plug-in present was being opened with the DocsFlow plug-in removed. Note that this fix only applies to documents created with the DocsFlow 6/7.1.3.1 (or later) plug-in present.
• Fixed a problem that was causing intermittent pauses when working on documents containing many GDocs document links.
• Fixed a problem where paragraph styles were sometimes being mis-mapped.
• Fixed a problem where paragraph spacing was sometimes too large.
• Fixed a problem where dates in placed spreadsheets were off by one day.

A note for those folks using ODBC who are updating from a version of InCatalog prior to 6/7.2.8.2: if you run into a problem where updated text seems to stop right where an accented (or other special) character should be, try adding %"win" (for a Win-Latin-encoded source) or %"mac" (for a Mac-Roman-encoded source) to your DD’s key field (SKU[K %"mac"], for example). Since the 6/7.2.8.2 release, InCatalog expects UTF-8 characters from an ODBC data source if the encoding isn’t otherwise specified. Adding %"win" or %"mac" to your DD will tell InCatalog that your data source is using an 8-bit character encoding instead and should restore those accented and special characters.

Changes at InCatalog 6/7.2.9.3

• Fixed a problem introduced in 6/7.2.8.1 where updates would only use the first 63 characters of a long key. (Keys may normally contain up to 255 characters.)
• Fixed a tagger palette problem that could potentially cause a crash during application shutdown.

Changes at 6/7.1.3 release

• Added support for drag-and-dropped GDocs spreadsheet URLs (you must be logged in to GDocs from DocsFlow to the same account from which you’re dragging).
• Added an Ignore font family, font size, and font color checkbox to the Import Options dialog, which, when selected, prevents undesirable or hard-to-detect type changes from creeping into a placed document.
• Added support for mapping the “Title” and “Subtitle” Google Docs paragraph styles.
• Added progress bars for long imports.
• Improved the speed of document imports and merges.
• Improved support for very long documents.
• Improved style mapping for imports and merges.
• Improved support for numbered lists.
• Improved support for spanned table cells.
• Fixed a number of document import and merge issues.
• Fixed a problem where a bookmark at the top of the GDoc would cause the import to fail.
• Fixed a problem that prevented colons from being used in style names.

We’ll have a table in the conference area. We’d love to show you what we’re doing and make new friends while catching up with the old!

David and Anne-Marie always put on a rousing conference, and this looks better than ever. Plus, you’ll get a peek at what’s coming out in CS-next from Adobe.

Our last year’s conference trip was a resounding success, and we hope to repeat that in Bagdad-by-the-Bay.

See you there!

The server plug-ins will be freely downloadable from our website; however, to try them you’ll need to contact us to obtain a trial license or to purchase a full license.

For the time being, we’re only providing Windows versions of our server plugins, since Adobe is emphasizing the 64-bit server (available only under Windows), and since most folks are using this version. If you need the Mac OS X version of a server plugin, please contact us at the coordinates above.

As an additional help for your development and testing, we can provide a free desktop license along with the server license of our plugins.

Watch for the individual server product releases over the coming weeks (Xtags for InDesign is already available), and feel free to contact our support crew, if you have questions about availability, or would like to discuss how our plug-ins could fit into your server workflow.

Changes at 6/7.1.4.2 release

• Fixed a scripting problem where imports resulting in non-critical errors (like translation table file not found) were being automatically undone.
• Dealt with a scripting problem where importing directly from a long string would sometimes cause InDesign CS4 to crash on OS X 10.6. (Mac OS only)