From the course: InDesign and InCopy: Collaborative Workflows

Creating assignment packages in InDesign

From the course: InDesign and InCopy: Collaborative Workflows

Start my 1-month free trial

Creating assignment packages in InDesign

When InCopy users want to work on this project from a remote location, like from home or when they're traveling from the hotel, some place on the road, it's really not feasible for them to be able to dial into the server at work and work that way. They'll tell me, "We have FTP," but what you need is the ability to read and write quickly onto the server. You're not copying things locally, right, when you're working with an InDesign/InCopy workflow. So, really none of those solutions will work here. So to answer that, what Adobe has done is come up with a way to do a remote workflow that's created by the designer and the editor exchanging packages. Assignment packages to be specific. So it is possible, I suppose, to do this manually. You could go to the server. Let's say that I'm the designer and the editor says "I want to work on the openingspread from home," I could send them the openingspread file and then the stories that are associated with that, if I happened to know what they were. Then when they send them back, then put it back up, but that is actually a lot of trafficking. And if you have more than one editor who wants to work from home or you have a lot of files, forget about it. Instead, you're going to use the built-in feature in InDesign and InCopy. So, let's see how that works. I'm going to go to InDesign, where I have a document that's already created with a bunch of assignments. Now, if you're using a layout-based workflow, you should know that the remote package workflow requires that you start with an assignment. So, definitely watch the chapter on assignments, even just the first couple videos. That's all you need. If you only have one editor that's working on the layout, which is very common, there's one designer and one editor collaborating, you might think well, why would I create an assignment if there's only one person? Well, you still need an assignment, so what would you do would be you go to the Edit menu, go down to InCopy, and choose Add All Stories to and then a new assignment. So in another words, you have one single assignment that has all the stories in the layout. Okay, so it's equivalent of the layout itself. Okay, so let's say that Joe, who wants to work on the openingspread from home, says, "I'll be working home this weekend. Please send me an assignment package." So what you, the designer needs to do is go to that assignment in InDesign. Make sure that all the stories are checked in and up-to-date, so they're available, right. Select the assignments in the Assignments panel and choose one of these commands: Package for InCopy or Package for InCopy and Email. So, these commands are in the Assignments panel menu. It is not the same as the Package command under the File menu. That Package command is for prepping the entire layout for a commercial printer. These are just going to send the assignments and the stories to the offsite editor. So, if you choose Package for InCopy and Email, that's like the lazy men's way. If it's saying, an addition to make in the package, please attach it to an outbound message in my default mail program. Which you might want to do. So instead, I'm going to choose this command, which shows you that InDesign actually needs to name this file and then prompts me where it's going to save it. So, I'll save it onto my Desktop. It's going to name the file the same as the assignment, which is perfectly fine. Just leave that as is. The file extension is ICAP for "InCopy assignment package," nice and neat. Click Save. Now what happens is creating a package locks out everybody who's on the local network from editing these stories, which makes sense. We don't want anybody editing the stories locally who don't happen to be aware that Joe is working on these stories offsite. It puts this cute little package icon next to the assignment name, which I think is worth the cost of the software itself, really. I love that icon. So, I can still work on this locally. We can check out the other stories. Other editors can open up the layout or their assignments and work on things. I can still do whatever I want to with these frames, as I'm working with them, but I can't really edit the contents of these stories. So, let's see what happens now when Joe receives the package. Well, first of all, I need to e-mail it to him. So, I'm going to jump to my e-mail program. I'll make a new e-mail to Joe. I'll say Joe Editor. Here's the InCopy file for you. I'll attach that ICAP file. It's kind of big, because it's got a lot of pictures in here. I'll say him Joe here you go, have fun! Anne. And I'll send it off. Now, Joe is at home. When he goes to check his e-mail, he sees that Anne has sent him the package. Now, it's up to him to continue working on this file.

Contents