One feature of QuarkXPress 7 that has always intrigued me was composition zones. This feature would let more than one person work on one file at a time. The problem was that it was convoluted to use and inherently broken since there was no way for you to bring all aspects of the file back into Quark once you let someone else work on it.
But last week an amazing script called Layout Zones was released for Adobe InDesign CS3. This FREE scripts does everything that combustion zones does, but better. To use this script, just unzip to to the root level of your Scripts folder (Applications/Program Files > Adobe InDesign CS3 > Scripts).
Inside InDesign create a frame for the portion of the page that you want someone to work on. Select this frame and choose edit > layoutzone > Object to InDesign Document. This creates another ID document for someone else to work on. You are also linked to this file now.
Have someone else work on this ID file and when they save it, it will update on your page. Next, once your design is complete, select the linked ID file and go to: edit > layoutzones > Linked ID page to Objects, and everything comes in like you created it yourself.
This scripts is truly amazing that I hope it becomes standard inside CS4.
Here is the link.
http://automatication.com/downloads/LayoutZone.zip
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