Chicago InDesign User GroupMeeting Notes Archive
July 18, 2007
InCopy Workflow & New CS3 Features
Hosted by Columbia College, Chicago
Presenters:
Anne-Marie Concepcion is the top national recognized expert on InCopy, among many other accolades. She’s the owner of Seneca Design & Training, the “geek” behind her free monthly e-zine, DesignGeek, and the co-host of the InDesignSecrets.com blog and podcast. Anne-Marie just completed a new video tutorial series for Lynda.com, InDesign CS3 + InCopy CS3 Integration. We are lucky to have her in Chicago!
Jim Maivald, Owner of Desktop Design, a graphic design and training company, Chicago,; author of upcoming book: The Designer’s Guide to Adobe InDesign and XML from Adobe Press—and he’s of course our Fearless Leader for IDUG.
Finally after 20 years, we can now dispense with handwritten corrections on hardcopy that designers type in manually, introducing new errors and perpetuating endless correction cycles. Editors working in InCopy (IC) see the layout exactly as it looks in InDesign and have access to many robust tools to make this word processing application easy to use for writing, editing, copyfitting, tracking changes, annotating, spell checking, accessing synonyms/antonyms, and more. Jim Maivald said that IC can definitely replace MS Word as a word processing program. Editors can just start writing new stories from scratch or drop text into pre-existing templates and write to fit the layout. On the front end of the program, Anne-Marie and Jim shot files back and forth using InCopy CS2, Anne-Marie on the Mac using InDesign and Jim on Windows using InCopy. (A few stabs and jabs were seen flying through the air as well!) Then after the break, Anne-Marie showed us the exciting new features of InCopy CS3.
Step 1: Set up the User Name (File> User). Each member of the writing and design team must identify themselves, giving a user name and choosing a color that flags the user at various stages of the workflow. But it’s important to know that IC does not have any security features to control who does what. Each person in the workflow takes responsibility for his or her share, without software controlling permissions or not. What is controlled is that only one person can edit a story at a given time, although team members can edit other stories in the same InDesign file. All the files are saved on the network so that the collaborative workflow can be managed.
Step 2. Write a new story. It’s easy, just choose File > New Document. Set the column width and any depth you want. If you use OpenType fonts, which are cross-platform, you can avoid all those font problems that often plague workgroups. MS Word 2003 doesn’t fully support OpenType at this time, but MS Word 2007 does. The new file you create can be viewed in IC three ways: Story, Galley, and Layout views. Story view lets you concentrate on what you’re writing, no distractions. Text wraps to the window width and text is displayed in a default font you can specify. Galley view shows the text also in a default font but it displays the same line endings as Layout view, so editors can check for bad breaks. Layout view lets you see the layout exactly as the designer sees it in InDesign.
Anne-Marie Concepcion showed us how we can use Cascade and Tile to see two views at the same time using Window > Arrange > New Window to open a second window of the same story. She also showed how the IC Copyfit bar at the bottom of the screen indicates the status of your copyfitting: the bar is red when there’s more text than the layout can fit; blue, you have room to spare, and green, the fit is perfect to the last line of the final text frame.
Jim showed how easy it is to turn on spelling options (Edit > Spelling) such as Dynamic Spelling so that all misspelled words are automatically flagged with a red underline. Turn on Autocorrect to have IC (and InDesign) correct common typos as you type. Anne-Marie pointed out the Text Macro feature, which lets you insert long text strings for those names or boilerplate text that come up repeatedly. She mentioned that InCopy’s “Text Macro” feature has nothing to do with Word’s “Macros,” which are more like automation scripts.
Step 3. Email the story to the designer. As Jim was sending the file, Anne-Marie explained that the workflow can be initiated by the editor or the designer. The designer can place the IC stories in the layout, and the workflow is automatically set up. However, the designer can also place MS Word stories into the layout, but then must export the stories to create the managed workflow (File > InCopy > Export), which creates .incx files. Good to save all the stories in a folder called “Stories.”
Editors can work with pictures in a limited way. If the designer has exported a graphic or an empty graphic frame as one of the “stories,” the editor can place or re-place a picture in that frame. He can also move and scale the image within the graphic frame, possibly cropping it. And he can rotate and skew the image—but the editor has no access to moving or transforming the frame itself, whether graphic or text.
Step 4. Designer places the InCopy story in an InDesign layout. When the InDesign file is saved (on the server), at this point, if the story was created in IC, everyone on the team can now open the InDesign file and each member of the team can in turn edit a story using a check-out/check-in process. When a story is checked out, in this case by Anne-Marie, other team members, like Jim, can read and print that story but not make any changes. Everyone on the team can instantly see the “status icons” that appear at the upper left corner of the frames, indicating when a story is checked out, is available for editing, out of date, and so forth. IC users can see the status icons in Layout view, as well getting that feedback in the other two views. It may come as a surprise to designers that they must check out a story to apply text formatting! When the editing or formatting is done, the story is checked back in, and is now available for another member to edit.
Another way that files can be exchanged is using Assignment files (.inca). Instead of passing the entire InDesign file back and forth, which can be a burden on the network, the designer or another designated team member using InDesign can select any number of page elements and assign them to a given team member. Selecting one frame of a story includes all pages that contain the threaded frames of that story.
Step 5. Update changes. When Jim makes a change and saves it in InCopy, Anne-Marie, with the same InDesign file open, is immediately alerted to update her copy of that story to the latest version. Then when Anne-Marie makes and saves changes to any of the page geometry (moving, sizing, transforming frames, adding or removing pages, coloring shapes and lines—none of which requires a “check out”), Jim is immediately alerted in InCopy and can choose Update Design to see Anne-Marie’s changes. In this way, the stories and the layouts are completed with designers managing the layout and formatting and editors typing their own text and corrections themselves.
Before showing IC-CS3, Anne-Marie talked about how her InCopy clients have saved a lot of time and money going with the InCopy workflow, in some cases, cutting turnaround time down by 80%, giving advertising folks another week to sell ads and the designers time to work on other projects. She also addressed the issue of InCopy and other third party plug-ins for InDesign (SmartConnect, K4, etc.) that provide a more structured InCopy workflow, especially useful for larger installations, such as 30 editors and designers working on the same big monthly magazine. Adobe says to go with plug-ins when you have more than 10–12 workgroup users, but Anne-Marie says that it’s really more about how many people are working on the same publication at the same time. You might have a total of 60 editors and designers at your company, but if each of your publications only has 5 or 10 editors and designers working on it at once, you’re fine without the plug-ins, which can be quite expensive.
Anne-Marie created a fun, fake Java Co. newsletter to show off the new features of InCopy-CS3. Here are the highlights:
-
No longer exports master page items when you export all stories from InDesign (previous versions did export master items, confusing the editors, making the Export All feature unusable).
-
To export stories from InDesign, designers can now drag and drop them onto the Assignments panel’s New Assignment button, which creates an .inca assignment file and a Content folder containing the stories, now converted to InCopy format (.incx). To add a story to an existing Assignment you can just drag and drop the frame onto the Assignment name, and InDesign exports it for you.
-
Solution to major problem in the past, story names listed in the Assignments panel were automatically named by IC using the first so many characters of the story text. Now you can edit the story names more appropriately.
-
Change the order of story listings in Galley or Story View, using drag and drop. This is a huge help—by default, stories are listed in order of their creation in InDesign.
-
Another big breakthrough—support for remote users. In the past, when freelancers were part of the work group, it was very awkward to keep their stories integrated into the managed workflow. Now an InDesign user can create an InCopy Package (.incp) from the Assignments panel, including the appropriate stories, and immediately email it using a direct link to her default email program. The workflow system knows that the remote user is part of the team. The freelancer can then email the edited Assignment back to the designer or to another remote editor.
-
New features for working with text: text variables (conditional text such as running headers), advanced features for bullets & numbering, special characters, GREP pattern-matching searches and Quick Apply, now including searches for IC menu items. All these features are pulled right from InDesign CS3’s engine.
-
Also pulled from InDesign, when you place graphics, you see a preview image to help you identify the image.
—The Chicago InDesign User Group meeting notes have been prepared by Eda Warren, Adobe Certified Training Provider and Adobe Certified Expert on InDesign CS2,
http://www.go-training.com/.
Thanks to Anne-Marie Concepcion and Jim Maivald for help with these notes.
Meeting Notes Archive
View notes from past meetings of the Chicago InDesign user group.
• Read notes from other meetings!
Meeting Topics Archive
With user group chapters across the United States, Europe, and Australia, we have gathered quite a bit of information from presenters, Adobe representatives, attendees, and industry experts during the past four years.
• Read all of the notes
|
|
