From the course: InDesign Secrets

331 InCopy with InDesign workflow - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

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331 InCopy with InDesign workflow

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- [Instructor] Let's do a quick five minute overview of how InDesign and InCopy work. InCopy is the program from Adobe that allows editors and writers who don't have InDesign to open up your layout and to edit the text in there, making for a very fast, streamlined collaborative publishing, and shaving days and weeks out of turn-around time for getting your projects out the door. A little bit of setup information, and then I'll jump right in. InDesign comes with InCopy, but your editors will need to subscribe to InCopy single app from Creative Cloud in order to use it. They can't use your copy of InCopy. And my copy of InCopy is right here. But if you want to test it on the same computer, like what I'm doing, then go ahead and install InCopy. For them, it's only $4.95 per month per user, much cheaper than what the full Creative Cloud costs, that's nice. And in InDesign, you want to give yourself a unique user name. Go to File, down to User, this is just used to identify yourself in the workflow. I'm AMC - Designer. And over here in InCopy, which I've already installed, I go to User, and here I am Joe the Editor. Give yourself two different user names if you are testing this on the same computer. The other thing you need to know is that the InDesign file needs to be in a place that is accessible to every writer and the designers who need to work on it. Typically, that's in a shared file server on the network. Any kind of file server. If you don't have a file server, you can use Dropbox, you can use Google Drive. Here I'm going to use a fake server since I don't have access to one, just a folder on my desktop, and I put a shortcut to it out here in my favorites. What you need to do, designers in InDesign, is you work off the server or that shared Dropbox or Google Drive folder. Going to go to File, do Save As, navigate to the server, I'll make a new folder, call it Pixelford Project, this'll be our production folder, and then save the InDesign file to that. The second thing that you need to do is make these stories editable to the InCopy user. Very fast, go to Edit, InCopy, yes, I bet you didn't even know you had an InCopy menu, and we're just going to go right down to Export, All Stories. Bypass anything that says Assignment in it, you don't really need that. Choose All Stories, navigate again to your server, make sure that you're there. Create a subfolder to hold these guys. We're going to call this Stories. And just click Save. It's reminding you that you have to save the document, yes, that's fine. You see these little icons next to the stories? That means that they are shared. When we exported all these stories to InCopy format, InDesign exported ICML files for every one of the stories in the InDesign file. And these could be opened by InCopy. ICML is the native file format for InCopy, but your InCopy users would not see the layout, they would just see the text, which is disconcerting. That's why you want them to open the INDD file in InCopy, not the Stories, that's why we hid them in this folder. So in InCopy, we go to File, choose Open, navigate to the server, open up the InDesign file, and there it is, there's the file with the same globe and piece of paper icon. InCopy users get three views of the document, as opposed to us in InDesign, you only get one view. The Layout view, the Story view, which lists every editable story, one right after the other without formatting so they can concentrate on just the text, and Galley view, which is a combination of both of those. It has accurate line endings from Layout view, but most of the formatting is gone, so they don't need to be distracted by it. I find that most InCopy users don't like to work in Layout anyway. I'm going to zoom in with our usual commands of Command or Control + Plus, and I want to fix this story here. So I'll just start typing. As soon as I start typing, InCopy says you have to check out the content of this frame in order to make changes. It offers to check it out. So, checking out the story means that I'm the only one who can edit the contents. We left this open in InDesign, let me switch back, and I want to show you in InDesign, it has a pencil with a slash through it, indicating that somebody else is working on the story, in fact, Joe the Editor, as you can see from the tool tip. In InDesign, I can still move things around, I just can't edit the contents of the story while they're working on it. So, engagement photos that tell everyone how much you love each other. That's fine. Now I'm going to save the content, just press Command or Control + S. Over here in InDesign, it says oh, somebody saved the content. Similar to somebody updating the Photoshop file that you've already placed. You can update it here, you can update it in the Links panel. I'll just use the Links panel. There's also a special panel just for InCopy linked stories. Now we see what the editor did. So the one or more editors can open up the same InCopy layout concurrently. From InCopy, I can, as an editor, print this out, print out the layout view, I can export it to PDF, so I don't need to wait for you to send me a PDF or layout, I can do it myself, it's wonderful. Let's say I've gone through the entire document, and I have edited all the stories that I can, and note that's all I can do is edit stories. There is no selection tool, so I can't change frame sizes or add frames or anything like that. All I can do is edit the contents of the frames that you gave me permission to by exporting them in InCopy format. When I'm done, I just close the document. I check in all the contents, yes please. And then in InDesign, any updates that have been made, I can update 'em. And then when I'm done, I would just unlink all of the stories. And let me open up that panel for you, it's called the Assignments panel. Where these are all the stories that I have exported to InCopy format, I'm just going to Shift + Click all them, and delete the link. There you go, these stories are no longer editable by InCopy. The InCopy user can still open this InDesign file, but it's read-only. That's it, that is how the InDesign and InCopy workflow work in a nutshell.

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