Baseview Products is now bringing the features of its publishing tools to users of Adobe’s InDesign layout application.
Baseview’s DragIn and CopyTools plug-ins are designed to expedite the pagination process by hooking Adobe’s InDesign to Baseview’s NewsEditPro writing and editing software. NewsEditPro and NewsEditPro IQue were the first Baseview applications to be Mac OS X native.
The plug-ins are used with both NewsEditPro and NewsEditPro IQue. With DragIn and CopyTools, editors and paginators can, for the first time, work in an all-Mac OS X, Unix-based environment on their Macs, according to Baseview spokesperson Jodee Taylor. Taylor added that more firsts are the ability to automatically generate PDFs in the IQue database and the ability to split multi-page documents into individual print jobs for page-pairing and imposition systems.
Paginators can also: drag and drop stories, pictures and headlines from NewsEditPro directories onto InDesign pages; jump the stories (complete with jumplines); keep all copies of stories and pictures in sync with what’s being published; use a 660,000-word thesaurus and dictionary to spice up copy; fix fractions; and more.
The DragIn pagination plug-in automatically draws text boxes for NewsEditPro stories and pictures (as well as cutlines and headlines), lets users save changes made on the page back to NewsEditPro files, checks for updates to stories and pictures that have already been placed and more. This cooperation works both ways, Taylor said. You can assign a text box on a page and the resulting file in NewsEditPro will have the proper length already measured for the writer, for instance.
Baseview’s plug-ins can handle your InDesign style sheets. You can format stories in NewsEditPro — complete with bylines, headlines, bulleted text and more — and all the formatting is carried over to your InDesign pages, Taylor said. DragIn can be set up to check for updates when a page is opened, when saving a page and when closing a page. It can also be set to automatically save any changes made on the page back to the NewsEditPro file. Or it will ask you first whether you want to save the changes.
All document data entered in NewsEditPro (Creator, Publication, Creation Date, etc.) is passed on to InDesign — and vice-versa. You can even tell DragIn to stamp a printed page with its release time to help you track deadlines. Thanks to InDesign’s flexibility, you can create PDFs of each page at the same time you’re printing it, according to Taylor. What’s more, you can set the PDF style (e-book, screen, print and press or custom styles) as defaults.
Baseview’s CopyTools plug-ins takes the most frequently used tasks by newsroom paginators and turns them into simple commands, Taylor stated. CopyTools also offers an overflow box for editing stories down to size; it will alert you when you go to print that there’s text that isn’t fitting on the page. You can set up “Smart Keys” with commonly used strings of text, such as bylines, so they’re inserted with one keystroke. CopyTools is also where the Fix Fractions command and the thesaurus are found.
The Style Sheet Admin program (for both NewsEditPro and NewsEditPro IQue) is the software needed for importing InDesign style sheets to NewsEditPro. The style sheets can be copied from your server or your main preferences file to and from an InDesign page.
For more info on the Baseview products, including pricing structures, go to the company Web site.