Collaborating without Assignments, Part 2 of 3

If assign­ments have kept you from incor­po­rat­ing InCopy into your pub­lish­ing work­flow, don’t let them intim­i­date you. You don’t have to use assign­ments to ben­e­fit from using InCopy.

In this series of tips, we’ll show sev­er­al meth­ods to col­lab­o­rate effi­cient­ly in InCopy and InDesign with­out assignments.

Method 2:

Method one dis­cussed begin­ning the col­lab­o­ra­tion in InCopy. This method revers­es the process for pro­duc­tion, begin­ning in InDesign, and is most use­ful when pro­duc­tion knows the space into which a sto­ry must fit, and thus the copy word count.

Within InDesign, design­ers cre­ate frames to hold the stories–either sin­gle holes or linked frames. Then, one at a time, the design­er exports the select­ed sto­ry frame or frames to a new InCopy doc­u­ment stored in a cen­tral loca­tion on the serv­er. Writers and edi­tors then open the stories–which may or may not be blank–in InCopy, and go to work. Once saved from with­in InCopy, changed sto­ries will cause a prompt in InDesign to update.

Again, at all times, the InCopy sto­ries remain avail­able to the edi­to­r­i­al depart­ment, right up until the moment of final pub­li­ca­tion output.