From the course: InDesign and InCopy: Collaborative Workflows

Making stories editable for InCopy from InDesign

From the course: InDesign and InCopy: Collaborative Workflows

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Making stories editable for InCopy from InDesign

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Okay, so let's get this show on the road. I've opened up a layout from the server, and just to give you an idea of how large it is, it's not that big of a deal, there's just three pages from a flower catalog, a very nice-looking flower catalog. Now, the thing is that though it's on the server, and the InCopy users could open it in InCopy, they will not be able to edit any of these stories, because the designer has to make them editable for them, and they do that by exporting the stories to InCopy format. If you've ever exported a story to RTF, or to plain text, then you're halfway there. So, it's very simple to do. I'm just going to select the story, like say this one, and then go to the Edit menu, down to InCopy, and choose one of these Export commands. Now you could go to File > Export, and you'll see that InCopy is one of those choices, but I like the dedicated InCopy once myself. So I go down to Edit > InCopy. We're going to bypass all these that have Assignment in the name. I talk about those in the chapter on the assignment-based workflows. If we're using a layout-based workflow, like we're using during most of these videos, you just go straight to Export and choose one of these items. So, I want to export the selected story, and it says, where do you want to export it to? So let's expand this dialog box. This is important for all the layout-based workflows. If you use an assignment-based workflow, it'll automatically create the folders for you and save them wherever you want, which is a very nice feature of assignments, but with the layout-based workflow, the designer just has a little manual work to do when they are exporting these stories. You need to find your server, so I'm going to go to my project folder on the server. All right, so here it is that, I have open, and I'm going to create a new folder at the same level as my InDesign file called something like stories or articles or content, or InCopy users, anything that you'd like - it really makes no difference. But the basic concept is that you're going to save all of your exported InCopy files in this one folder. Now, it defaults to calling the InCopy file by the name of the layout. You can leave it like that if you want. If I'm doing selection-by-selection, I'll usually give it a little bit more information, like I just might say, I don't know, pg1intro, and click Save. Now, don't worry, designers. There are a lot faster ways to do this, but I just want to show you, just step-by-step, what happens if you just do one. Okay, so as soon as you export the story to InCopy format, a bunch of things happen. One, you get this dialog box that you can turn on Don't show again because you're going to get sick of this. It's just reminding you that you need to save the InDesign file after you export, in order for the InCopy users to see that the story is linked to that frame, and clicking OK here will prompt InDesign to go ahead and do that save for you. The story itself gets a little adornment, all right. That's what this little icon is. It's a globe in a piece of paper kind of thing, and it just means that this story is editable to any InCopy user. Nobody is currently working on it. So these other frames don't get that cool little adornment, like a little piece of jewelry, and an actual InCopy file has been generated. Let's take a look at our server, and you'll see here is the stories folder that we created in our project folder, and inside the stories folder is an InCopy file. This is a native InCopy document. They end with ICML, and they can be opened in InCopy and edited just like any word processing file. The users won't see the layouts, all right. So, that's why we like to segregate them into their own folder, called stories. We want the InCopy user to open up the actual layout file, the INDD file, not the ICML files inside it. Let's go back to InDesign and notice that in the Links panel - I'm using the Advanced workspace here, so we have the Links panel - the ICML file is actually linked to this frame. So this is the key difference between exporting the contents of a text frame to say Rich Text Format or text only, as opposed to InCopy format. When you export to InCopy format, it automatically makes a link to that frame. When somebody edits that text file, this will show that it's out of date, and you can update it. That's a secret to the entire workflow. Now, there is a special panel, in InDesign and in InCopy, that only deals with linked InCopy files, and I'm going to open that right now. It's under the Window menu. In InDesign CS5, there is a new Editorial flyout menu, where that's where the Assignments panel is. If you're coming from an earlier version of InDesign, you're probably used to that appearing first in the list. So I'm just going to drag out the Assignments panel, and I'll tell you a little hint here: what I usually do is I will add the Assignments panel to my favorite workspace, and then I'll create a new workspace with that in there, and I'll call it something like InCopy, and that way, it'll always be handy. Now, the point of the Assignments panel is that it shows all of the linked stories in this document. Right now, there's only one, but check this out. Here's another way that you can export the stories. I can Shift+Click multiple stories, and instead of choosing Edit > Export, Selection, I can just drag and drop these guys right onto this category called Unassigned InCopy Content. It's only because we're not working with an assignments workflow, so these stories are called Unassigned. Think of them like free agents, right, and then I release the mouse button over that category, and I again get the dialog box saying, what do you want to call this, and where do you want to save these? It's remembering our old folder of stories. I'm going to keep it there. It is suggesting the name of the layout. I'll just call this something like catalog. And the name that you're entering here is actually going to be used as a prefix for all of the individual InCopy files that it exports. Let's take a look. I click Save. We get the same dialog box, prompting us to save this, and notice that now the Assignments panel lists all these other stories. They all are preceded with what we entered here, and then the first word or two are the first word or two of the text frame. If it was an empty text frame, it will just say text one, text two. And if we look at our server, we can see the same thing here, is that all the stories have been exported to the stories folder. In Chapter 12, we go deeply into what the InDesign user does to prep a file for the InCopy users. There are many faster ways to do this. So, if you wanted to take a quick peek here, you go to Edit > InCopy > Export, and you say you could do all the stories once if you wanted to, or all the ones on a particular layer, and so on. Check that out for yourself, but I just want to show you the basic concept of how you make stories editable to the InCopy user. Now that they are editable to the InCopy user, you yourself are not going to be able to edit this content normally. If I try to click inside one of these frames and start to type, it's going to prompt me to check out this file, and I talk about checking in and checking out in a different video. So, for now, just know that they are special frames. The other frames are perfectly fine. You can go ahead and type in them and edit them. It's the ones that are part of the workflow that are special.

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