Portland InDesign User GroupMeeting Summary
July 10 Meeting: InCopy CS3
Thu, Jul 10th, 2008 at 6:30 PM
TOC in Tigard
Event Details We had 27 of the registered 35 attend the July 10, 2008 meeting. Paul introduced tonight's guest speaker, Jim Cooper, the chapter representative for the Reno InDesign Users Group. Jim was here to talk about Adobe InCopy. InCopy is not meant to be "InDesign Lite" -- InCopy is an editor-friendly portal to InDesign layouts.
Adobe InCopy is a separate text editor that you can use with InDesign while the designers and production artists prepare the layout side of the design. Adobe InCopy keeps track of all the various changes. You can add editorial notes, XML tags, design elements, even fit copy within the layout, all separate from the actual InDesign layout.
Adobe InCopy looks very similar to InDesign, but it has fewer tools in the toolbox: Type tool, Position tool, Note tool, Hand tool, and the Zooom tool. The panels on the right side include Change Info, Text Macros, Thesaurus, and others.
To use this software, you need to first identify yourself as a user in the workflow of both InDesign and InCopy. They call it being "checked out." You use the File > User command in both programs. You can assign yourself as an editor or author, and you get a color assigned to you. You need to be authorized in InDesign before you can change anything inside of InCopy.
In InDesign, you go to the Edit > Incopy > Export > All Stories command, and you can save the text of your layout as an INCX InCopy document. If you aren't checked out, you will be asked if you want to do this first.
InCopy has tabbed dividers -- Layout, Story, and Galley modes. It defaults to Layout mode. Visually, you could easily confuse this with InDesign, except that you don't have access to the layout, only the text that is assigned to you. Everything else is grayed out or has a pencil with a slash over it to let you know that this isn't the text that you can access.
Story View mode simply shows the text, not unlike Story Editor in InDesign. There is a sidebar that explains what the style is assigned for what particular text. If there have been any changes to the text, that text is highlighted in color showing the time and who made the change (providing that "Track Change" has been turned on). This is perfect for billing back, or showing the amount of changes your document has gone through.
Finally, there is Galley mode. This tab shows the same text as the Story mode, but shows the line breaks too.
Jim seemed to work mostly in Layout mode to see if the text was where it needed to be inside of the layout. He was free to alter the text to his heart's content. Editors in the workflow can add styles themselves using the Paragraph Style panel. The layout isn't really the layout, but just an XML vision of the layout. The INCX document is very tiny in size because of this, and you can easily distribute this as an e-mail attachment.
Instead of a designer laying out separate heading boxes, intro boxes, body text or column boxes, etc., he or she only needs to set down the boxes and link them together, and the editor can assign the styles to the text itself and it will go where it needs to go. This way the designer handles the design work and the editor handles the text, and they meet together inside InDesign.
Jim showed us the Text Macros panel. If you use a long name and don't want to type it over and over again, type it up here, and assign it a name. Now you only need to type the macro name inside of your text and the long, drawn-out text will appear instead.
There is a free trial version of InCopy available on the Adobe website. There are also videos available that explain how InCopy works. To purchase InCopy, it's about US$160.
Next, Paul introduced Gabriel Powell. Gabriel was the founder of the Portland InDesign Users Group. He has instructed our employees in InDesign, but has been recently traveling back and forth to the European Community and around the U.S., as well as writing his book, "Instant InDesign." His website features a blog and a monthly video podcast (http://www.instantindesign.com/). Thank YouThank you to Adobe Systems for software and raffle prizes and to Gabriel Powell for some books as raffle items. Next MeetingThe next meeting is scheduled for September 11, 2008. |
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