From the course: Learning InCopy

Create a story - InCopy Tutorial

From the course: Learning InCopy

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Create a story

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- [Instructor] As I've stated before, in the InDesign, InCopy workflow, a story can be created in InDesign or in InCopy. The advantage of creating a story in InCopy is the control that is provided to the user and the fact that InDesign and InCopy play very well together. In addition, the moment an InCopy file is placed in an InDesign layout, the workflow is immediately activated and in place. Let me show you how this works. So I'm beginning this video in InCopy and I'm going to go to the File menu and choose New. Now, the properties that you define in this dialog box are not particularly important at this point in time because we don't really have any page geometry from the InDesign layout, so you can really make this whatever size you wish. Although sometimes it is beneficial to define a Width if you're trying to create content for a specific column width and even a Depth, if you know the depth of the area that you're trying to fit. Now, that being said, in this example, I'm just going to turn off Facing Pages and I'll set the Width of the text area to three inches. The Page Size, I'll just leave to Letter, and I'll go ahead and click OK. Now if we switch to Layout view, you'll see what the actual layout looks like and you can actually type your content in either one of these views. I'm actually going to go over to Galley view and start typing in here. So I'm just going to create a caption, I'm typing the content for a caption here, and I'm just going to type some content, and I'm just going to cheat a little bit here by pasting the rest of this caption in here, so you don't have to watch me type, and if we switch to Layout view, we can now see what this content looks like, and right now, the font is just using the basic text formatting that's built into InCopy, it's called Basic Paragraph, but you could format it if you wish, and we'll cover that in a future video, but for now I'm just going to go to File and choose Save Content, and I'm going to call this, Chestnut Tree and I will save this in the Stories folder in the 02_02 folder. So I'll go ahead and click the Save button, and you'll notice that this is now called Chestnut Tree.icml; there's that icml format again. So I'm going to close that, and I'm going to jump over to InDesign for a second because here I have a layout where I want to place that caption. So I'm just going to zoom in on this area, in the lower-right corner, and I'll put my text cursor in here, and I'm going to choose File, Place, and if I select that icml file and click the Open button, you're going to see that that text is now placed inside of my layout. Now you'll notice a few things that have changed. You'll notice that the font changed and that's because my InDesign layout is now taking over and the default formatting in that InDesign layout is going to be applied to this text. The other thing you'll notice here, in the upper-left corner of the frame is a little icon with a down arrow and that basically indicates that this story is now part of the workflow. We basically initiated the workflow and this is going to enable the bi-directional editing that InCopy and InDesign are so good at. As you can see, by creating the story in InCopy, you facilitate editing of that content using both InDesign and InCopy.

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