247 Use InCopy to create linked boilerplate text for layouts

- [Voiceover] If you've ever wished that there was a way to have multiple InDesign publications linked to the same external text file, so that somebody could update the text file and that would update all of the corresponding links in those publications without them having to be open, and without messing up their formatting, it is actually possible to do. It's possible to do for free because it's possible to do with Adobe InCopy. This is not a video about how to collaborate with editors who are using InCopy.

If you're interested in that, I have a big course on Lynda.com, Collaborative Workflows with InDesign and InCopy. InCopy is the editorial adjunct to InDesign, and it lets editors open up a layout in InCopy and edit to fit, it's pretty cool. I do a lot of training consulting with this. But here is a little side shoot of this program that's available to all of us. It's part of the Creative Cloud subscription. And that is that you can use InCopy files as those text files that are linked to multiple InDesign files.

Let me show you how that would work. First thing you need to do is install InCopy. If you haven't yet, go ahead and download it from Creative Cloud. It's right up here. Choose it from your Apps. Install it on your machine. And you can have InCopy and InDesign installed on the same computer, but you want to give yourself a different user name. Both programs identify stories with a user name. You do that from the File menu, so in InCopy, go down to File, User, and enter a file name. Here I'm AMC Designer.

You don't need to worry about the color so much here. That's more for workflows. And in InCopy, do the same thing, go to File, go to User, give yourself a different name. Don't give yourself the same name because that will mess things up. Now, in this video, I'm showing you how to do all this on the same computer. Let's say that you are a one-man band, and you want to have text files that link to multiple InDesign files on you computer. You could also expand this by having an editor who's using InCopy be in charge of all this kind of boilerplate text on their own computer, as long as the files are stored on the server, and everybody can link to them it'll work just fine that way.

But for now let's just keep it small, one person doing all this work. So let's say that what we want to turn into this boilerplate text that we're going to use in lots of different documents is this blurb down here. Let me zoom in, and it's just a bit of text. You can trust Globe International Bank to learn more about our small business loans. This bit we want to use at the bottom of different ads in different publications. So the first thing you need to do is you need to turn this block of text into an InCopy file.

And it's very easy to do. Select it with the selection tool, and choose File, Export, and you're going to choose InCopy. One thing I want to mention is that the entire frame, all the text in that frame, is going to be exported. If there is other text in that frame that you don't want to be part of your boilerplate text, get rid of it, cut it, paste it into a different frame. Only the boilerplate text should be here. Alright, so I'm going to choose Export. And from here, we'll choose InCopy document. And, it gives it the same name.

Usually as the layout, but here I've already been playing with it, so it's just called GB-boilerplate, icml is the file extension for InCopy files. I'm going to put it into a new folder on my desktop, and we'll call it Boilerplate blurbs. You're going to have one InCopy document for every instance of the kind of text that you want to repeat in different publications. And I'll save it there. It says that you have to save the document after exporting. And I'll say yes please save it. And you'll note that that frame gets a little icon above it, indicating it is a workflow story.

It's linked to an external InCopy file. And let's go ahead and place this boilerplate text in another document. So here in GB brochure, I have some space where I want to put that in. And to get it, you just go to File, Place. And you place the InCopy file. So, it is on our desktop inside Boilerplate blurbs, there it is. Even if Show Import Options is turned on, you're not going to see any dialog box. There is our text, and I'll go ahead and drag it out here.

And it's a little bit overset. Now the problem is that we don't have enough space in this document as we do here. Now, here is the key to making this all work. You should never edit the contents of this boilerplate text in InDesign. Only do that in InCopy, only have one person be the traffic manager. What you can do in InDesign is edit the attributes of the styles. So here, if I look in paragraph styles, it brought over the style from my brochure ad copy.

But here, I want it to be a little bit smaller. So I can go ahead as long as I don't change the name of the style, everything will work. I'll go to basic character formats, and I'll make this eight points on 11. And then maybe I'll change the spacing a little bit, space after right now is nine points, I'll make this three points. Okay? And I'll do the same thing so that it sort of matches. Let's zoom in, here we go.

So this is eight on 11, and this is already eight on 11. That's perfect. Okay, so we have not checked it out. We haven't done any editing to it. To edit it, you have to check it out, meaning it's locked to everybody else. We don't want to mess around with that. We just want to keep it linked, but we can edit the style attributes. I'll go ahead and save this document. And you can see over here in our white paper at the bottom of the ad everything is fine. And this type is still 10 on 12.

And I'll save this document, too. Oh, it's already saved. So now we go to InCopy, and let's say that somebody wants to change some of that boilerplate text. In InCopy, we'll open up that file from our boilerplate folder here. And we don't see the same layout because we're opening up just the plain, old InCopy document, that's fine. Say that we want to get rid of the word international. Just Globe Bank, that's all. And maybe we change our phone number to 1111, that's it.

We close it, we save our changes. Now, in InDesign, if you happen to have the document open, you're going to see that it is out of date. That linked story here is out of date. If the document is closed when we open it, we'll be offered to update it. And we can update it in either place, so here I'm going to select the story and choose update content, and there the numbers changed, and international is gone. And now let's open up the brochure on the desktop.

And we get a message that we have one modified link, and that's what it's talking about. I'll say Update Links. And here that also gets updated. So there you go. You could have 100 documents all linked to the same boilerplate text about the ad, and it would work perfectly. Just make sure that you don't edit the contents here. If you do need to edit the contents by the way, you can always select the frame and in the links panel choose Unlink. Now, it's no longer linked to the boilerplate text, and you can edit as you see fit, and it's not going to effect any other documents.

Pretty cool!