Go in deep for a long overdue examination of InCopy, the features new to version CS2, how InCopy cut one major publisher’s 60-day book production schedule down to 9 days, and how it will save you time, man-power, and money over Microsoft Word in a collaborative creative and editorial workflow.

I first used InCopy with version 2.0, which was current with InDesign 2.0 (2002-2003). Like version 1.0, InCopy 2.0 was available only as part of custom editorial and production solutions from third-party system integrators. It couldn’t be purchased separately, and I was one of only a handful of people with the standalone version. I fell in love with it immediately, and fervently lobbied the powers-that-be at Adobe to publish it as a standalone product.

With the release of InCopy CS, Adobe did just that, though I’m sure mine was only one of many voices clamoring for equal access to a solid editorial companion to InDesign—independent of full-blown custom newspaper or magazine workflow solutions. InCopy CS was a standalone application for Mac and Windows, and was quietly made available for purchase as a downloadable application from the Adobe Store; there was no boxed version.

Although InCopy CS2 still doesn’t have a box (outside of Japan), it does have a CD and case for the first time. It also has something else the preceding versions didn’t: Publicity. Adobe isn’t taking out full page ads in the Times to proclaim that InCopy CS2 is the biggest thing to hit publishing since Microsoft Word, but they aren’t keeping it mum anymore either. A few weeks ago, Adobe presented [1] Quark VS InDesign.com with an exclusive display of InCopy CS2. Although I had been singing InCopy’s praises from the rooftops since 2002, even I was impressed and thrilled all over again with this latest version.

Declaring InCopy CS2 a better tool for journalists and editors than Microsoft Word is a bold claim—one that Adobe itself is cautious not to make. But then, few are foolish enough to announce that they’re going after one of Microsoft’s key markets.

To understand what InCopy does, the collaborative editorial workflow must first be understood.

The Linear Workflow

In team-based workflows ranging from small advertising creative teams of a copywriter and a graphic designer to monthly or even daily periodicals with dozens of personnel divided amongst editorial and creative, copy is written and edited by one side of the team, then handed off to the other for layout. Before, during, and often after hand-off comes several proofs and revisions. In many cases, these are printouts routed around the office for markup; even in an electronic review process, disparate best-of-breed applications don’t work together well enough. Even the great equalizer XML riddles the publishing workflow with redundancy, inefficiency, and unnecessary costs.

Consider a standard monthly magazine. During a new design or makeover, the art department lays out the magazine template in InDesign. Advertisement slots are created and space relegated to features, departments, columns, and other content sections. Style sheets are built, and word counts for each space are calculated by filling text frames with Greeking. Word counts are passed to editorial, who will try to stay within them. Finally, the art department divides the full issue mockup into separate templates corresponding to the creative and/or editorial team working on each section of the content.

Production of an issue begins with editorial, writing content within the word counts. The writer or columnist submits a Microsoft Word manuscript to his editor, who either edits it herself or marks it up using Word’s built-in reviewing tools, and then sends it back to the writer. If changes are required, the writer makes them in a third version and initiates the edit cycle again. When the story is ready to go, changes are merged into the document.

As early in the edit cycle as possible, articles are provided to the art department to begin the creative work—creating or hiring out for illustrations; shooting, selecting, color correcting, and touching up photography, and; laying it all out. Ideally, editorial would be finished with its stories by the time production receives them, but that’s never the case. Articles come in too long or too short, require minor or major copy revisions, or writer-created illustrations and figures have not yet been supplied. Often production receives the first edited draft, working concurrently with the writer, who may make significant changes. Still, the art department must begin its work or the issue will never make deadline.

It’s during this phase that the greatest time and energy is wasted because the workflow is linear and redundant.

While production personnel lay out the content they have, editorial personnel are still writing, editing, revising, and even exchanging one story for another. Associate editors are writing to the hole or selecting filler stories, photographers are still shooting interview subjects, and illustrators are drawing article creative.

As soon as production lays out a section, they generate PDF or hardcopy proofs and submit to editorial for proofing. Editorial marks up the proofs and sends them back, whereupon production, working from the marked up proof, manually translates the changes into the layout. That’s what passes for an efficient workflow. More often, editors stand over layout artists, directing copy, style, and imagery changes in real-time. Often production staff are yanked from their work on one section of the publication to return to another in accommodation of the editor who just walked into the bullpen. Several rounds of proof-and-revise ensue—up until (and sometimes after) the issue has been packaged for press. Editorial waits for production’s proofs; production backtracks to modify pages they’ve already finished. In this workflow, typical of most magazines, no department—no worker-performs with genuine efficiency. That’s how it’s always been done; it isn’t perfect, but it puts words on paper and issues on the racks.

If editorial and production are to be working concurrently on the same material—and, like most projects, there’s no way to avoid that in periodicals—then they should be working together, not against one another.

Imagine a different magazine workflow. It starts out the same—production makes templates, doles out word counts, and everyone goes to work. From there, it diverges because the two departments continue to work, doing what each does best, with minimal involvement and minimal impact on each other’s workflow. In fact, some layouts—those for regular features, departments, and columns—production might possibly never touch again after template creation—even with photography or illustration insertions.

Impossible? With InCopy CS2 it is possible—and it’s happening right now.

Going Rogue

Running Mac OS X Panther, published in late 2003 by leading technology book publisher O’Reilly & Associates, used an InCopy-driven parallel workflow to slash the book’s production schedule by 10 weeks, add 8-12 weeks to the sales window, and increase sales of the book by one-third.

Authoring, editing, copy fitting, and proofreading—a linear process in the production of any book—all occurred simultaneously because of a maverick author and InCopy.

In August of 2003 Apple unloosed information about Mac OS 10.3 a.k.a. “Panther,” and O’Reilly’s goal was to release the book at Macworld Expo the following January. It was a tight deadline to write, layout, copy edit, and quality control the book in time, and once released, a rapid Mac OS X update schedule would limit the book’s commercial viability to only a few months. Author James Duncan Davidson had an idea to increase the life cycle of Running Mac OS X Panther. “We had to roll the final stages of copy editing and quality control into the writing schedule, which would normally add several weeks to the tail end of the project, during the production process,” said Davidson. “By conducting copy editing and QA simultaneously with the layout process, we could get the book to market much faster.”

Davidson setup a concurrent versioning system to track file versions, make backup copies, and manage check-in/check-out to Davidson and the Running Mac OS X Panther editor team. He then created InDesign templates mirroring the existing O’Reilly format and style.

Instead of allowing layout and layout-proofing to remain the final step in the workflow, Davidson and his team worked in parallel. As he wrote the first draft of each chapter in InCopy, Davidson flowed it into the InDesign template, posted the copyfitted chapter to the versioning server, and went to work on the next chapter. While he did that, technical, copy, and other editors each took their turns checking out each chapter, inserting corrections and comments in InCopy, and checking it back in for the next stop in the workflow.

“The author finished writing the final chapter of this book just after Thanksgiving and it went to press nine days later—a remarkable achievement,” said Chuck Toporek, senior editor for O’Reilly. “InDesign and InCopy helped us get the book out eight to twelve weeks sooner, guaranteeing that we met our window of opportunity.”

The entire process was allegedly run rogue—O’Reilly senior staff only learned of the deviation from accepted company practices after the book was finished. “We maintained the consistency we sought [and] produced the book almost two and a half months faster than other titles, which had a dramatic impact on sales,” stated Toporek. “The beauty is that people can’t tell that this book was created outside of O’Reilly’s traditional production process.”

O’Reilly & Associates is now using the InDesign-InCopy parallel workflow to produce other books.

Authors and publishers rely on Microsoft Word to write, review, and edit manuscripts, but because Davidson laid out his chapters as he wrote them, the only way to make Running Mac OS X Panther a success was to abandon Word. InDesign doesn’t contain the change tracking features required by the editorial process, and Word can’t edit InDesign files.

Separating Content from Layout

InCopy is a word processor companion to InDesign—with unique advantages over InDesign’s built in Story Editor and even the ubiquitous Microsoft Word.

In addition to its own INCX file format, InCopy can open, edit, and save InDesign INDD layout documents. It’s as simple as File > Open, and suddenly the content from all the text frames in InDesign are presented in a single list, ready for editing in a word processor view identical to InDesign’s own Story Editor. InDesign’s Story Editor is, in fact, a code chunk lifted from InCopy. If you can use the Story Editor, you’re already one-third of the way toward mastering InCopy.

Story view shows the document stories in a single, collapsible column. Beside the text are paragraph style indicators and, new to CS2, the depth of the story in configurable units (column inches, for example) as set in the InDesign layout. This, the most common editing view, focuses entirely on the copy. Lines wrap to the window and formatting is limited the bare basics of normal/Roman, italic, and bold.

The Galley view is very similar to Story view, but with two important differences: Copy is shown with accurate line breaks, exactly as it would wrap in the layout, and the addition of a line number column for reference.

Layout view shows the InCopy user an accurate and interactive snapshot of the InDesign layout, including her assigned frames. From this perspective, writers and editors can put their text in context. Depending upon the settings chosen by the InDesign designer, InCopy users may see the full layout, only their assigned sections, or the whole layout with everything but their assignments greyed out.

Text may be edited in any of the three views. If editors want to make copy or even style changes to text while watching the effect on the layout in real-time, they merely click in an assigned text frame in Layout view and begin typing.

Included in InCopy are identical palettes for all text creation and styling functions, including the Character, Paragraph, Table, Story, Swatches, Layers, Paragraph Styles, and Character Styles palettes, among others. Menus for Edit, Type, and Table add to the functionality of the palettes, leaving writers and editors to write or place, then format and fit their own copy. Accurate word and character counts, as well as a life-saving Copyfit Progress Info bar, which indicates the number of remaining lines in the text frame or the number of overset lines, take the responsibility for copyfitting off the shoulders of designers and put it where it belongs—on the editorial team.

Inline notes and document review features enable collaboration and editing without involving the production department. And, most remarkable of all, editorial personnel can now place images in frames or inline in text.

Many journalists and editors are responsible for choosing their own photographs, figures, and illustrations, and for captioning and crediting those images. At the InDesign creative’s discretion, picture frames may be incorporated into assignments, thus empowering the InCopy user to place and position her own imagery. InCopy supports placement of any image format that can be placed into InDesign, including TIFF, EPS, AI, and even layered PDF or Photoshop PSD files, with the same control over layers and layer comps. A fully functional Links palette enables imagery to be updated, replaced, and edited in their originating applications.

Regular departments and columns of a magazine—a “Letter from the Editor” column, for example—can be updated for the current issue entirely by the editor, who can copyfit, replace the illustration, and finalize the page. Production is then freed to focus its energy on sections of the publication that genuinely require their skills.

Word Processing, Not Page Layout

What editorial cannot do is change the layout.

Opening an InDesign document does not grant the InCopy user the ability to add, remove, or change frames or pages; such things are the sole domain of the designer, and are exclusive to InDesign. Although the wonder twins of publishing software share a common code base, making overlapping tools and features such as the Character and Paragraph palettes perfectly identical, all container-level functions are absent from thinner sibling InCopy.

All container-level tools are disabled—they can edit the content of frames created by the designer, but cannot modify the frames themselves. Placed images may be scaled, rotated, sheared, and fitted, but the picture frame is inviolable. Similarly, no tools exist for creating or converting objects to frames or even creating guides. Instead of the Selection and Direct Selection arrows in InDesign, InCopy CS2 users have a PageMaker-like Position tool with which to move, crop, and modify the contents of picture frames.

A limited Layers palette allows InCopy users to show or hide InDesign-created document layers, but they can neither modify layers—including renaming and reordering—nor create or delete layers. To further unclutter a Layout view, editorial staff can adjust display performance—including object-level display performance—as well as hide frame edges, guides, grids, and rulers.

So focused is InCopy on separating editorial from layout, that the Tools palette consists of only five buttons: the Type, Notes, Position, Hand, and Zoom tools.

The Control Palette has been replaced with four repositionable and customizable toolbars. Standard tools such as file Open, Close, and Save, as well as Find, Check Spelling, and Show/Hide Invisibles appear on the Command Bar. On the Reviewing toolbar are buttons to Accept or Reject changes, and to navigate between document changes and comments. The Galley & Story Appearance toolbar, which controls the on-screen only typeface and colors of those view modes, is a live user interface to the same options in InCopy’s preference. The final toolbar, the Copyfit Info bar, displays various statistics such as word and character counts, line numbers, and column depth relative to the whole story, the currently selected text, or from the cursor point to the beginning or end of the story.

In addition to 100% accurate copyfitting feedback and the Copyfit Info bar, InCopy has a few other advantages over the InCopy-lite-like InDesign Story Editor. The most useful of these is the Thesaurus palette. Supporting all of the same languages as the spell checker, synonyms and antonyms are at the writer’s fingertips, in a compact palette. Track changes enables editorial revisions and collaboration without going outside the actual publication.

In both Story and Galley view, overset text is highlighted, and the Copyfit Info bar’s indicator turns red and counts the number of overset lines. InDesign’s Story Editor provides no such feedback on overset text.

As a word processor, InCopy CS2 includes all the new language features from InDesign CS2, including optional dynamic spell checking, exportable user dictionaries, and workgroup dictionary integration. Of course, it also includes all the localized dictionaries installed with InDesign.

A trio of automation features helps eliminate repetitive tasks. With the fully-functional Scripts palette, advanced automated control of the application is enabled. InCopy supports not only its own scripts, but also InDesign scripts that use the tools and commands available in InCopy. The new automatic text correction dynamically replaces misspelled or user-defined words with other words on the fly. And text macros, unique to InCopy, function similarly to automatic text correction, but with some very useful differences. While automatic text correction is limited to words or short phrases, text macros can insert several paragraphs at a time—boilerplate passages need never be hand-typed or copied and pasted again. Another benefit of text macros is that invocation is user-configurable; macro text may be inserted automatically as replacement for a typed code or keyword, or manually via a user-assigned keyboard shortcuts. Text macros also enjoy the extremely useful extra convenience of optionally storing character and paragraph style attributes in the macro text.

InCopy can also save templates of its documents, enabling reusable pre-sized text areas, color swatches, styles, and document-attached dictionaries.

While InCopy can directly open, edit, and save INDD files, that isn’t the typical workflow.

Concurrency = Efficiency

Adobe calls it the “LiveEdit” or “parallel” workflow. Working in InDesign CS2, designers assign portions of the layout content to editors for editing in InCopy CS2. From there, it’s hands-off those sections for the art department until the final layout check.

Previous versions of InCopy worked with stories, single or threaded text frames forming a single text flow. Each story was exported from InDesign as an InCopy INCX file. Writers and editors worked on stories in InCopy while the Bridge plug-ins (not to be confused the Adobe Bridge digital asset management application) used a check-in/check-out system to lock stories from concurrent editing by both other InCopy users as well as the InDesign-based designers. When editing was completed, the InCopy user checked the INCX file back in, releasing it for modification by other editorial personnel or allowing designers to update the InDesign layout.

One or many stories could be edited in InCopy simultaneously, which was necessary because stories and INCX files were limited to a single text flow each—one story for the body copy, the headline in another, a third for the byline, the kicker was another story, yet more INCX files for each photo caption, callout, and pull quote, and so on. A single editor often worked on a dozen stories comprising a single article. Designers had to export and manage every editor’s dozen stories.

Recognizing that articles are laid out in multiple text and image frames, and that editors are often responsible for editing the content of more than one frame, Adobe has significantly improved the collaborative InCopy-InDesign workflow. Version CS2 introduces assignments.

Individual stories may still be delegated to InCopy users, but most often multiple stories and even their accompanying artwork are handed off to editorial in the form of assignments or groups of stories. InDesign creatives simply select the frames to assign, and, on the new Assignments palette, delegate the level of control and, optionally, to whom the material is assigned. The LiveEdit plug-ins then automatically generate INCX InCopy documents and an INCA assignment file to wrap them together with a snapshot of the layout. Editors working in InCopy then open the assignment file via the matching Assignments palette in their application, check-out the content, and edit all stories in the article simultaneously.

To help limit the confusion for editorial personnel not accustomed to seeing an in-progress layout, the InDesign creative has control over what is visible in InCopy. When making assignments, creatives may choose to include all spreads, only those spreads containing assigned content, or merely the assigned content, which consists of only spreads on which appear assigned content and also greys out non-assigned frames.

Throughout the process, a live link between the story and layout allowed editors to view a frozen snapshot of the InDesign layout from within InCopy.

In both the InCopy Layout view as well as the actual InDesign document, are optionally visible frame adornments that communicate critical information about assigned content. Colored borders corresponding to the individual InDesign and InCopy user identity colors give at-a-glance information about what content is assigned and to whom. Icons at the top of assigned frames denote the status of the content—whether it is checked-out and editable by the current user, checked-out by another team member, available for check-out, or out of date.

Keeping assignments and layouts in synch is similar to updating linked images, with the Assignments palette taking the place of the Links palette in this case. As an InCopy user checks in a story, the InDesign Assignments palette and, if visible, the frame adornments, change to denote that the content requires updating. The same holds true in InCopy: When the production department saves its InDesign document, InCopy reports that the layout is out of date. InDesign can even push layout updates to InCopy.

Designers and editors work concurrently and independently, coming together only when actual layout—not content—revisions are required. Finally, genuine efficiency is injected into editorial and production collaboration.

Safety First

Stories and assignments managed by the LiveEdit plug-ins—either at the direction of an InDesign user or by simply opening an INDD in InCopy—are secured through a check-in/check-out system. Before editing the content of frames, InCopy users must first check-out the story or assignment, which prevents other InCopy or InDesign users from simultaneously editing the same material. When the writer or editor has completed her work, she simply checks the story or assignment back in, releasing it to check-in by other team members.

Although checking material in and out for editing may sound like a hassle, it’s actually an easy and almost instant process. And, as with most features of InDesign and InCopy, there are several ways to do it.

Once content is delegated by the InDesign user for editing within InCopy, either InCopy or InDesign may manage assignments via the new Assignments palette. Highlight an assignment or individual stories within an assignment, and click the Check Out Selection button. On the File menu InCopy users may check-in one or all stories instantly, or cancel the check-out, reverting the content to its prior state while releasing the lock. Context-sensitive menu entries (right-click or CTRL-click [Mac]) as well as keyboard shortcuts are fast and easy. Even more facile is the ability to simply click in a story in any of InCopy’s three editing views, and begin typing; an alert will popup asking if the user would like to check-out the story. Provided the assignment isn’t already checked out to someone else, which is indicated in Story and Galley views as well as on the Assignments palette, the process is near instantaneous.

Like InDesign, Illustrator, and all of the Creative Suite 2-version applications, InCopy CS2 includes support for Adobe Version Cue. Version Cue managed files, which includes support for InDesign INDD files as well as InCopy Assigment INCA and InCopy document INCX files, are given an extra level of protection from double-modifications. And, of course, Version Cue can be configured to create automatic backups and multiple restorable versions of InCopy-edited content.

The InDesign creative is in the driver’s seat of the LiveEdit workflow, and may cancel assignment checkouts or force a check-in at any time. By putting InDesign in control of LiveEdit, Adobe has ensured that the production department isn’t left hanging when a writer forgets to check-in an assignment.

Not Your Father’s Word Processor

Those making the leap from Microsoft Word to InCopy will find the path easy.

In addition to its tight integration with InDesign, its copyfitting features, and its safety features, InCopy holds numerous other advantages over Word in collaborative creative-editorial workflows.

At some point, nearly every writer and editor must insert accented or non-keyboard special characters such as the Euro symbol or a middle dot into a story. InCopy contains InDesign’s Glyphs palette. Accented or special glyphs may be inserted on the fly with just a double-click, as opposed to Word’s Insert Special Characters function buried two levels deep on a menu, then spread among a tabbed dialog that must be invoked for each and every new glyph insertion point.

What truly makes InCopy superior to Word on the editorial desktop is as much what it doesn’t have, as what it does. There are no mail-merge features, no forms functions, no address book, and no mangled code Web page design tools. Themes, text-to-speech, and document maps are irrelevant to writing, so InCopy doesn’t include them. InCopy is a purpose-built editorial word processor. It fulfills that purpose elegantly, powerfully, and without the head-spinning tool glut of Microsoft Word.

When considering a change in mission critical applications there are five primary concerns for any workflow: Direct equipment (or software) cost, cost of requisite collateral equipment and software, cost of user education and loss of productive time during that education, compatibility with other users, and support for legacy documents. Adobe has taken great care to address those concerns.

Making the Switch

The direct cost of equipment or software when moving to InCopy is simple: US$249 retail and $89 upgrade per copy. Volume discounts are, of course, available.

Collateral equipment costs are non-existent: InCopy requires no other product to replace Word; it can make its own PDFs and export its own XML. And, to be used within a parallel workflow with the art department, requires only that InDesign be installed on the creative team’s computers. Editorial need not have InDesign installed to participate in LiveEdit collaboration.

The cost of user education is minimal, even if a professional trainer is brought in to ease the transition. Because InCopy works like any other word processor, experienced Word users will find themselves instantly familiar and almost instantly productive.

One of the most important features of InCopy speaks directly to the concern over compatibility with other users in the workgroup and with other workgroups: It’s cross-platform. Any mission-critical application must have platform parity, with mirrored interfaces and functions between the leading operating systems. InCopy looks and acts exactly the same on a Macintosh, the preferred operating system of designers and journalists, as it does on Windows, which is steadily penetrating not only the business production sector but all areas of publishing. More to the point, the LiveEdit workflow is platform homogenous: Creatives may create assignments in InDesign on the Mac (or Windows), then seamlessly hand those off to editors working on either Mac or Windows without the slightest alteration in the workflow.

Finally, support for legacy documents is crucial. If the workflow has used Word for ten years, amassing a library of content, that can be a powerful inducement to maintain the status quo. Fortunately, InCopy not imports Microsoft Word and ubiquitous Rich Text Format documents, but it can export to them as well. It can also import and export application-independent XML to move data in to, or out from, a database, Web design application, or for any other purpose. Thus both legacy support and workgroup compatibility is addressed.

Like InDesign’s ability to use QuarkXPress or PageMaker keyboard shortcuts to ease users’ transition from those applications, InCopy includes a keyboard shortcut set for Microsoft Word users, reducing the learning curve while increasing comfort level.

Word users will find InCopy’s clean interface and purpose-built word processing commands a refreshing change from the kitchen-sink-too Word. The transition from proficiency in Word to proficiency in InCopy is remarkably easy, and brings with it a new level of productivity in its collaboration with InDesign creatives.

Needs Improvement

As exciting and important as InCopy is to the modern collaborative workflow, there’s still room for improvement.

Layout assignments: In newspaper, magazine, book, and just about any type of copy-intensive, multi-page publishing, it’s more common than not for the entire publication to be worked on simultaneously by several designers. While InDesign’s Book palette and INBK book file handles logically chunked long documents like books or catalogs, they don’t help the collaborative workflow for periodicals, which rely on multiple INDD layouts—each containing the issue’s full page count. In such processes, each designer or team is responsible for laying out a section, which is only married to the other sections and drop-in ads during imposition.

The InDesign-InCopy parallel workflow needs to be updated to allow for multiple InDesign users to be working on assigned sections of the same layout. It needs layout assignments wherein the creative director assigns one or more pages or spreads to each production designer. Then all the creatives on the team open the same INDD file with not only the ability to manipulate the content of the existing frames, as is available with InCopy LiveEdit assignments, but also the ability to manipulate—and create or delete—the frames themselves. Assigning creatives (the creative director, in this case) should have spread-, page-, and layer-level control over the access granted to assigned designers. For example, the creative director may specify that the assigned creative has access to all of InDesign’s tools and features for work on a pre-created “Foreground” layer, and may create new layers, but that the assigned creative cannot modify, reorder, or hide the “Background” layer, override master page items, or access the spread’s master pages.

Giving InDesign creatives control over what and how much power is doled out to editors creates a one-document -to- many-editors relationship, but it’s still limited by the one-document -to- one-designer relationship. It’s a huge step forward in the collaboration between editorial and production. Now, Adobe needs to unlock collaboration inside the production department.

At the bottom of the InCopy document window is a pop-up pages list for navigation. It does the job, but is one of the least intuitive features of the user interface. A Pages palette, while adding another palette, would make Layout view navigation easier.

Most of InCopy’s other limitations aren’t because Adobe didn’t have foresight. Adobe recognizes that its business model and development processes are not adaptable to every conceivable publishing workflow. More importantly, Adobe values the relationships it has with developers and system integrators who can adapt to the needs of various markets. Thus InCopy CS2, out of the (jewel) box, answers a wide range of needs in the small- to mid-size publishing workflow, leaving larger, more complex, or highly customized needs to the dexterity of Adobe’s partners.

Out of the box, InCopy CS2 is limited to a 2-12-person workgroup. Teams of up to 30 will need to explore third-party database-less solutions like TruEdit from Managing Editor, Inc., a folder-based workflow control system, and Woodwing Software’s Smart Connection. Larger workgroups or those that require database connectivity and content- or asset-management, are in the realm of full-blown InCopy- and InDesign-based platform solutions from system integrators.

There is also no managerial oversight built into InCopy CS2. Designers working in InDesign can override InCopy users-to force check-in of an assignment that may have been left open by a writer at the end of the day, for example. However, the assignment list and who may or may not have checked them out is only available from within the InDesign document, to the designer currently working in the INDD document. Production managers and editors-in-chief cannot independently access the assignments list and check up on their staff.

User identities in both InDesign and InCopy are simple, insecure, and not tied to system usernames or other authentication schemes. At any point (except with an assignment actively checked out) users may change their names in the application.

Adobe’s feeling is is that, if your workflow is large enough and complicated enough to require managerial oversight or user authentication, chances are you have other special needs that are better addressed by a customized solution than by a boxed product.

Another limitation of the standalone InCopy is its lack of support for remote workers. As designed, LiveEdit only works via direct LAN connection—assignment files should be saved to, and opened from, a central server or even the InDesign creative’s local harddrive. Writers can, of course, copy assignment and InCopy stories to their laptops to work off the network, but they must copy the files back to the original location manually upon reconnecting. Going off-line also disables the check-in/check-out control of LiveEdit, leaving assignment files accessible to other personnel, and thus introducing the risk of users overwriting the work of other users. And, of course, all the other benefits of the LiveEdit connection are rendered moot the moment a user disconnects from the network.

Even off-line, the document snapshot is still visible in Layout view, but cannot be resynchronized with the InDesign layout.

Although Adobe says users disliked automated content updates to keep the InCopy Layout view fresh as well as automatically refresh assignment content within InDesign, and recommends creating a custom script to enable such updates, few users of boxed product are savvy enough to write InDesign and InCopy scripts. A better solution would be to build-in the functionality as a preference or Assignments palette menu option, and turn it off by default.

In Part Six of “InCopy CS2: In Production,” we’ll look at InCopy-based solutions that address most of the limitations of the standalone product and amazing feats of production and efficiency.

A Different Workflow

Now that you know what InCopy CS2 is, and how it integrates with InDesign, imagine the typical magazine workflow with InCopy in place of Word.

During a new design or makeover, the art department lays out the magazine template in InDesign. Advertisement slots are created and space relegated to features, departments, columns, and other content sections. Style sheets are built, but text frames need not be filled Greeking and word counts need not be calculated. The art department divides the full issue mockup into separate templates corresponding to the creative and/or editorial team working on each section of the content, then generates assignments for the editorial staff.

Editorial goes to work on its assignments, knowing at all times exactly how many words they need to fill, precisely how their articles will warp and look. The writer or columnist writes his story in InCopy, then checks it in for his editor’s review. She checks out the story, activates the change tracking feature, and edits the story. When she’s finished, she checks it in and e-mails the writer to review the changes. The edit cycle continues, and at some point the writer or editor fills in the headline, kicker, callouts, captions, photo credits—even the photos themselves. Production is never bothered with copy or image placement changes to regular feature pages.

Freed to focus on their own areas of the magazine, editorial and production come together only to discuss non-standard sections of the book, such as feature articles, the cover, and special sections. Hardcopy or PDF proofs are never generated for editorial review because the editorial department can see and enter notes on the entire layout from within InCopy. Everyone stays focused on her own work, the entire team works efficiently, creates better work, and the issue is put to bed early.

Join us Friday, 21 October 2005 for “A Newsletter Designer Looks at InCopy CS2,” part two of our six-part special series, “InCopy CS2: In Production,” when Samuel John Klein will provide a personal account of integrating InCopy CS2 into the real-world production of the Columbia Overlook, the newsletter of the Sierra Club, Oregon Chapter, Columbia Group.

InCopy CS2: In Production 6-Part Special Report:

Part 2: [2] A Newsletter Designer Looks At InCopy CS2

Part 3: [3] Proposing Efficiency with InCopy CS2

Part 4: [4] How-To: InDesign/InCopy Collaboration: The Designer

InDesign, InCopy, InDesign CS2, InCopy CS2, Adobe, VDP, Microsoft Word