Chicago InDesign User GroupMeeting Notes Archive
Tuesday, May 4, 2004
InDesign User Group Meeting
Capps Digital Studio
Topics
The “bridge” workflow (Adobe InCopy®–InDesign®) with fearless leader and Adobe CS specialist Clint Funk and Adobe god Tom Petrillo, followed by WoodWing Smart plug-ins, lots of laughs, and more from Jim Cooper (XML Giant) and Shailendra Chauhan (with Onus).
The meeting started off with a bang, or, as Jennifer Mindel put it —“dueling laptops” — Tom in InDesign and Clint in InCopy. The two laptops networked together to demonstrate the fluency of designers working with editors on the same documents, even simultaneously. Tom has created an unbeatable text layout with no shortage of copy, having employed some of the thousands of words drawn from the meeting notes of our group’s “stenographer” (as Tom puts it) — Eda Warren, queen of infinite length and detail. Tom, the “designer” working in InDesign shoots his InDesign file over to Clint, the “editor” working in Adobe InCopy, at which point Clint makes a change or two and then shoots it back to Tom. That’s the short version.
InCopy is different things to different people. For the designer, InCopy is a plug-in that installs into the Plug-ins folder in the InDesign application folder and adds a few tricks to InDesign — including a Notes menu with options related to creating notes with the notes tool that the plug-in adds. For the editor, InCopy is a standalone application available from Adobe.
What’s great about InCopy is that it gives editors a rich environment for writing and editing, while seeing the layout that they’re writing for—just as it looks to the designer working in ID. But in InCopy, the layout, or “geometry,” of the page is entirely locked down. Writers can’t “muck up” the designer’s work. As Tom says, “it’s a design-driven workflow.” Multiple editors can work on the same InDesign document at the same time because, in fact, each editor “checks out” the story or stories he or she wants to work on from that layout. Only one person can check out a given story at one time.
Typical workflow: The designer exports a story from his InDesign document as an InCopy story (.incd file), and also saves his InDesign document (.indd). The editor opens that same InDesign file and can edit that story or any other exported story she chooses to “check out.”
Back to Tom, who has all five captions in his layout on a Captions layer. Using a layer is a handy trick for making quick work of exporting these stories together. But before he does the export, he shows how InDesign CS has new features that make InDesign more friendly to editors. The Info palette displays counts for numbers of characters, words, lines, and paragraphs in a story when the type tool is clicked in text. Also, the new Story Editor tool, right out of PageMaker®, lets a writer type in a separate window in which the text display can be controlled in preferences. Some of Tom’s favorite visual “themes” as the display choices are called, are yellow text on blue background and, for that retro look, green text on black. <yikes>
Selecting the Edit>InCopy Stories>Export Layer Stories command opens the Export InCopy Story dialog. Options are Include Style table (styles), Include Swatch List (colors), and Include XMP Information — Adobe’s new obsession with “meta-data” which can travel with documents between applications. Once Tom has exported his captions, there’s an icon at the top of each exported story in the layout that indicates that the text is editable to whomever checks out the story. Tom himself checks out the story and edits it — in this case, he adds a note to Clint (like an Acrobat® note) and checks in the story. Tom’s Links palette in InDesign lists the five exported .incd stories. When he clicks on the Captions layer, the five captions listed in the Links palette are also highlighted.
Now Clint gets into the act, showing InCopy as a standalone product for writers and editors. They can work with text files that have not yet been placed in the designer’s layout by placing a story right into a new story window in InCopy. For Clint to edit an existing story, however, he must check it out. InCopy has no hierarchy of permissions to control levels of access to the stories, but there are a number of other applications using InCopy as a base that offer those features, such as K4 from Managing Editor.
Clint checks out one of the stories Tom has exported by selecting the InCopy (OS X application menu)>Open > , and you’ll see all of the caption stories listed. Any story in InCopy can be viewed in three ways, using tabs at the top of the document window. Layout view looks the same as it does in InDesign. Galley and Story views are both great for editing since the editor can control the font and point size of the display for easiest reading. Galley view shows actual line breaks while Story view is comparable to the Story Editor in InDesign — the text wraps to the window width. The InCopy interface is identical to InDesign’s but there is less of it. As usual, the Window palette lists all of InCopy’s palettes: Story List, Theasaurus, Track Changes, Copyfit Info and Layout & Galley Appearance (to customize the text display).
Clint sees the note Tom left him — it can, in fact, be spotted in all three views. In the Galley and Story views, it appears as a small box with green brackets, while in Layout view it is a green hidden character that can be seen when Show Hidden Characters is turned on. By grazing his cursor over the box, the contents of the note are displayed just like in Acrobat (no surprise). Notes can also be viewed in InCopy’s Notes palette, so editors can easily sequence through all notes using arrows at the bottom of the palette. Clint knows that Tom wrote this note, not only because he watched him type it, but also because of the green brackets. Everyone on the design and editing team claims his or her own color so that an author’s changes can be easily spotted. This is especially relevant in InCopy, where numerous editors can each be editing different stories from the same InDesign document. By using the Track Changes feature when editing in the Galley view, another editor can easily determine by color the author of any change. Also, the Change Info palette in InCopy lists each text edit by the author’s name (as they have named themselves), main type of edit (e.g., “added text”), and the date and time of the edit.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Tom makes another change and saves. On Clint’s machine, the title bar of his InDesign document now reads “[Out of Date]” after the file name, that is, changes have been made. Clint chooses “Update Design” from the Story List palette menu while in the layout view so he can spot the change. InCopy will display an alert box indicating that all stories will be saved before the design is updated, thereby ensuring that no data are lost. When Clint makes an editing change in InCopy and saves, Tom sees a yellow triangle alert icon in the upper left corner of the first frame of that same story in his layout. Tom retorts with an Update Link from the Links palette menu to bring his layout up to date. And so the process goes from one to another, each updating as they go.
More on InCopy — To do text macros, what Jim Maivald says is called “auto-text” — boiler plate text or any text that you know you’ll need again, the editor can just select the New Macro command with the option to Remember Text Attributes. When Anne-Marie and Eda disagreed on their speculations as to whether this feature might include styles, Jennifer M. piped in again with “dueling consultants” (the verdict is still out because no one has InCopy!). Tom now adds (in editing): “Verdict is in and character styling is remembered.” (Ah!, but not paragraph styles. Anne-Marie and I are both right!)
InCopy’s Print dialog is somewhat different from InDesigns’s. You can print the layout, galley, and story views of the text. You can choose in the dialog box the font and size you want. Printing from InCopy uses a baseline flattener for printing layouts with transparency but there are no controls.
On to the Onus part of the show…
Next Shailendra Chauhan and Jim Cooper took the stand. Both are with Onus, a solutions provider that focuses on consulting, content engineering, and solutions integration. Shailendra, an Onus partner, gave an overview of Onus’ main schtik — namely, taking existing technology and creating and redesigning workflows, targeting publishing work methods that function more efficiently and cost-effectively. In short, they come up with innovative solutions that are pulled together from whatever is out there. A key player for Onus is WoodWing, a development company that writes plug-ins for the InDesign–InCopy bridge workflow.
Shailendra talked about the four basic elements of publishing: content, layout, structure, and style. Up until now, you’d make a layout for an ad by composing and styling the supplied content. As the layout goes through a sequence of updates, the changes are not easily tracked. If there is a second ad with the same layout, you have to force new content into a copy of the existing layout — hard to do, since layout and content are inextricably bound. But the Onus solution is to keep all four elements independent to maximize flexibility. Using InDesign, frames are linked to an external data source with variable data, which can come from an Excel spreadsheet, a database, or XML.
Then, using WoodWing’s Smart Catalog plug-in for InDesign, you can transform a template of empty frames into a finished layout in one click. The type is autostyled and the picture is autoplaced in the layout when you Update Document from the Smart Catalog palette menu. Save it, and then, in a flash, fill it again with another data set. Layout #2 ready to go. The layout stays the same, but the content changes. Smart and sassy.
Of course, to have these layouts happen seamlessly, the template objects must be tagged correctly by a (dedicated) staff member. The easiest way is by dragging out a tagged library item, or by copying and pasting a template page item to another page. If there are text or picture changes, nothing is manually handled in InDesign. Just reimport and, since the text is again automatically styled, no time is lost reformatting. If you want to transfer the content downstream, you can export XML, which can be converted back to text or to Excel.
Smart Catalog is pretty similar to how people are using XML to transfer structured content from one place to another, but happily the WoodWing plug-in does it in a way that’s palatable for designers who freak when they’re shown code — or worse, expected to write code. Smart Catalog is a GUI, a graphical user interface that makes XML look geeky and ghastly. How nice — you don’t have to look behind the screen.
After Shailendra’s slide show, Jim Cooper summarized the main points, reemphasizing that you don’t have to hand-tool everything. It can all be linked to data and format on the fly, seamlessly, with practically no human intervention! No worries either about the integrity of the content, such as when the designer enters text changes by hand — that workflow is history.
Jim showed an NCAA “Center Piece” newsletter. He blamed software for the common rifts that develop between designers and editors when they’re pitted against each other. Jim says that WoodWing’s Smart Connection plug-in for InDesign and InCopy can lessen these conflicts. Instead of having a gazillion stories passing back and forth, with every story a separate file, Smart Connection creates a more intuitive approach to checking stories in and out that works in both InDesign and InCopy. The designer, can send a collection of different story files as one InCopy document, which is less work for the designer and easier for the editor to keep track of all the parts — main story, headline, captions, figures, etc. — all in one.
Smart Connection also helps designers and editors overcome some of the obvious communication pitfalls relating to the status of a given story. It provides the bridge workflow, with tools for creating a folder structure to organize the various stages of editing rather than simply leaving the files to be picked up on the server. When a story has been through a particular phase of editing or revision, it goes in the “Round One” folder or the “Approved_MaryW” folder, ready for the next taker to move it along.
Here’s another fix Jim suggested that did not require Smart plug-ins. Designers tend to lose a lot of time fiddling with drop-caps and kerning space wider after the cap. Writers can be given an additional small task to circumvent this designer obsession — not by teaching the editors to kern, but by letting them use a more automatic, “dumbed-down” solution. Let the editors fix up those drop-caps in InCopy by adding a fixed space after the drop cap letter (Insert White Space> “Thin Space” or “Hair Space” from the Context menu), which can then be automatically controlled through point size in a Drop Cap character style that’s part of an InDesigns-nested paragraph style.
Jim showed another neat trick for designers using InDesign — transferring an InDesign color palette to a client by using Tagged Text, an export file format (File> Export> Adobe Tagged Text). Instead of emailing a big InDesign file with his color palette, Jim exported as Adobe Tagged Text an InDesign table filled with colors. He then placed this teeny 4K tagged-text file on his InDesign page — imagine the ease of sending such an unimaginably small file! After placing, Jim’s new colors were added to the color palette and there was a pleasing swatch book (table) of colors on his page. Note that tagged text can store character and paragraph styles but can’t be used to transfer graphics or images.
Jim also showed the WoodWing Smart Styles plug-in again (for more details, read the notes from our meeting on July 18, 2003). Jim showed this very complex table with merged cells, various cell colorings, styled text, and more, which he said took him 2.5 hours and two pints of beer to create. Imagine having to do that all over again for the next chart. Wait, Smart Styles to the rescue! Once you’ve got one table, your worries are over. Easily create a table style that retains the exact table structure and visual formatting that you used in your placed Word table or one you created in InDesign. Smart Styles can replicate object style attributes, text styles, and table styles. All you have to do is drag and drop a styled page item to the Smart Styles library, and the intelligent Smart Styles engine will automatically recognize formatting structure.
The Wrap-Up
The Onus guys capped off the evening with a donation of a WoodWing Smart Styles plug-in to the already-generous raffle. Thanks for a great presentation and for the extra “goodies.” In fact there were so many raffle prizes that a good portion of the attendees walked away with something — and plenty to percolate on as well!
—Delivered to you fresh after each meeting by Eda Warren, Adobe Certified Training Provider and Adobe Certified Expert on InDesign CS
Special thanks to Jim and Tom for help in preparing these meeting notes.
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