From the course: Learning InCopy

Approaches to using InCopy - InCopy Tutorial

From the course: Learning InCopy

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Approaches to using InCopy

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- [Instructor] Throughout this course, I'm going to refer to InDesign and InCopy working together as the InCopy workflow. Although you may hear the term LiveEdit Workflow used as well, which is a term used by Adobe to describe the same thing. The strength of InCopy lies in its flexibility, although there are general ways by which many users utilize InDesign and InCopy, to some degree, each company tailors how they use InCopy and InDesign to suit their needs. Broadly speaking, here are some general ways you can approach working with InDesign and InCopy. The first option is what I refer to as the design first workflow. In this situation, the designer designs the product in InDesign and exports the stories to initiate the workflow and make the content available for users to edit in InCopy. The second choice is the write first workflow. In this situation, content can be written and even formatted in InCopy prior to the design being created and then flowed into InDesign later in the process. The third option, which is very broad speaking, is what I refer to as the hybrid workflow. In this situation, content can be written separately from the design and/or the designer can flow in content into InDesign and make stories available for editing in InCopy. There's no right or wrong method here, but as I say to my clients, this is a great time to evaluate your internal workflow to ask questions such as: why are we doing it this way? Could we be doing it more efficiently another way? Should we make an adjustment to our workflow to take advantage of InCopy and its capabilities? Now I'm not an advocate of change for the sake of change, but when you're implementing InCopy, it's a good time to evaluate things to see if you can streamline the way that everything works, and by the way, if the answer to any one of the above questions is, because that's the way we've always done it, ask more questions, or get a better answer.

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