How-To: InDesign/InCopy Collaboration: the Designer

1. First, save your doc­u­ment. (This tuto­r­i­al assumes at least a pro­fi­cien­cy in using InDesign on the job and does­n’t cov­er basic InDesign tasks; how­ev­er, regard­less of your expe­ri­ence lev­el with InDesign, a reminder to save is always a good idea.)

2. With the Selection tool, select the arti­cle’s first frame–text or graphic–for assign­ment to a writer or edi­tor. Then select the remain­ing frames in the arti­cle. Remember to select all the frames Editorial is respon­si­ble for fill­ing with­in this one arti­cle, includ­ing: main sto­ry, head­line, illustration(s), caption(s), pho­to credit(s), pull-quote(s), and so on. Any frames thread­ed to the select­ed frames, even if they span mul­ti­ple pages, will auto­mat­i­cal­ly become part of the assign­ment. Even anchored objects are assign­a­ble. Don’t select any frame you’d rather Editorial not touch.

3. Selected? Good. Right-click (CTRL-Click for the mouse-challenged), and choose InCopy > Add to Assignment > New. When you’re prompt­ed to save an .INCA file, save it to a loca­tion such as a com­mon net­work serv­er to which both Production and Editorial have full read-write-modify access.

Create a new assign­ment via the con­text sen­si­tive menu. [Click to zoom in new window]

How you name the .INCA depends on your work­flow. Predicated upon the length of your doc­u­ment and the size of your Production and Editorial teams, you may end up cre­at­ing quite a few assign­ments. Therefore, the file­name must be both human-readable and unique among all oth­er .INCA file­names. Find what works for you, but I rec­om­mend build­ing a nam­ing scheme based on: the names of the per­son­nel to whom con­tent is assigned, a descrip­tive title for the con­tent itself (for exam­ple, “Letters” for a mag­a­zine’s “Letters to the Editor” depart­ment), or sec­tion and/or page numbers.

4. After choos­ing the .INCA file­name and loca­tion, the New Assignment dia­log will appear. The Assignment Name field here spec­i­fies how the assign­ment appears in the Assignments palette itself; you can be a lit­tle more descrip­tive here than in file­names, and the two don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to match. Choose to whom the con­tent is assigned, enter­ing that per­son­’s InDesign or InCopy user name.

The Assignment Options Dialog. [Click to zoom in new window]

Assignment col­ors are used for visu­al sep­a­ra­tion of var­i­ous assigned frames. It changes their frame col­or, over­rid­ing lay­er col­ors, and tints cer­tain icons and labels that will appear on frames to indi­cate their sta­tus (checked in or out, in need of update, and so on).

Include, the last sec­tion of the New Assignment dia­log is where you, the design­er, the mas­ter of the LiveEdit work­flow, decide what kind of mas­ter you are. Are you good or evil? Do you like the assignee, or do you sus­pect he’s the one who has been eat­ing your clear­ly labeled lunch out of the fridge?

One of the great ben­e­fits of the LiveEdit work­flow is InCopy’s lay­out view, which shows, with­in InCopy, the InDesign doc­u­ment lay­out. A snap­shot of the lay­out as it exists at assignment-creation time is embed­ded in the .INCA file, and may be updat­ed by you, O’ Great and Glorious Master of the LiveEdit Workflow, at any time in the future. (I’ll bestow upon you that won­drous pow­er below.) Which of the three Include options you choose deter­mines the lev­el of detail pre­sent­ed in InCopy’s lay­out view:

• Placeholder Frames: The assign­ment includes in the snap­shot only the assigned frames–and only the spreads con­tain­ing them–graying out the con­tent of any oth­er frames.
• Assigned Spreads: Only spreads con­tain­ing assigned frames are includ­ed, but all con­tent on those spreads is shown.
• All Spreads: Embeds in the snap­shot all doc­u­ment spreads and their con­tent as they exist at assign­ment time.

Your benev­o­lence or malev­o­lence as a mas­ter, rul­ing over Editorial’s InCopy expe­ri­ence, is exhib­it­ed by your Include choice, which deter­mines the size of the assign­ments file, how quick­ly it loads and updates in InCopy, and how much of the lay­out InCopy users see. Many edi­tors like to see not only their own work but also con­tent sur­round­ing theirs. For oth­ers, how­ev­er, too much unre­lat­ed con­tent becomes confusing–especially if the edi­tor or writer is accus­tomed to work­ing in a word proces­sor with no view of the lay­out. A tru­ly benev­o­lent mas­ter asks his Editorial team their preferences.

5. Once your options are set, InDesign will per­form the export, prompt­ing you for a pre­fix and loca­tion to save the .INCX files, which hold the actu­al frame con­tents or sto­ries (text and graph­ics). Each .INCX file con­tains one sto­ry. By default, the name of the .INDD lay­out will be used as the pre­fix for the .INCX files, but you’re free to change this to some­thing more descrip­tive. For asset man­age­ment pur­pos­es, save the sto­ry files to a fold­er beneath where you’re saved the .INCA assign­ment file. And, of course, you’ll be prompt­ed to save the InDesign doc­u­ment itself.

6. Notify the assignee that her assign­ment is ready, then get back to work doing what you do best: design­ing. Leave the copy­fit­ting to Editorial.

Managing Collaboration

Because you are the mas­ter, you also have the pow­er to mod­i­fy and man­age the LiveEdit work­flow. Here’s where that thirty-ninth palette comes into play.

Just as you man­age image assets on the Links palette, assign­ments are super­vised via the Assignments palette. Here, a tri-level nest­ing lists the doc­u­ment, assign­ments, and each assigned frame and.INCX file. Assignments show both the assign­ment name and the assigned to name (if set), as spec­i­fied in the Assignment Options dia­log. Each list­ed frame (which cor­re­sponds to an .INCX file) reveals the type of con­tent in an icon on the far right; a box with an X through it is a graph­ic frame while a box con­tain­ing a T is a text frame.

The InDesign Assignments palette

In order for any­one to edit assigned content–from with­in InCopy or from with­in InDesign–the frame must first be checked out. From the Assignments palette, sim­ply high­light the desired assign­ment (or indi­vid­ual frames), and click the Check Out but­ton at the bot­tom. Alternatively, you may right-click on an assigned frame on a spread and choose InCopy > Check Out from the con­text sen­si­tive menu. The most con­ve­nient method of check­ing out con­tent, though, is to sim­ply begin edit­ing. When you click with­in and try to change an avail­able for check­out frame with the Type or Direct Selection tools, you’ll be prompt­ed with a sim­ple Yes/No dia­log to check­out the frame.

Once checked out, no oth­er InDesign or InCopy user may edit the con­tent of a frame. When you’ve fin­ished edit­ing the frames, check them back in through the Assignments palette or context-sensitive menu, thus enabling some­one else to check them out.

If you acci­den­tal­ly check out a frame, the Assignment palette menu includes a Cancel Check Out option that, well, as unlike­ly as it sounds, can­cels the check out. I know; it’s crazy. The frame is returned to avail­able sta­tus, ignor­ing any changes you may have made.

Double-clicking an assign­ment entry will re-open the Assignment Options dia­log (here is your pow­er to be mis­chie­vous, chang­ing assignees and their col­ors willy-nilly), while double-clicking the assigned con­tent entry jumps the doc­u­ment win­dow to zero-in on that frame.

Notice that, when Show Assigned Frames is enabled on the View menu, the col­or of assigned frames’ bound­ing box­es match the col­ors you chose in the Assignment Options dia­log. You’ll also see in the top-left cor­ner an adorn­ment or icon that com­mu­ni­cates whether a frame is out of date (a yel­low cau­tion tri­an­gle icon), avail­able for check out (a blue globe and clean white page), checked out and being edit­ed by you (a pen­cil icon), or checked out to some­one else (a pen­cil with a slash through it). Adornments mir­ror the icons on frame entries in the Assignments palette.

With Show Assigned Frames enabled, frame edges change to match assign­ment col­ors, and sta­tus adorn­ment icons appear. [Click to zoom in new window]

Like links, a ques­tion mark in a red cir­cle beside the assign­ment entry indi­cates that the .INCA assign­ment file is miss­ing, and an excla­ma­tion point in a yel­low tri­an­gle denotes that the assign­ment file exists, but is out of date and has been mod­i­fied. At the bot­tom of the Assignments palette, a famil­iar Update Selection but­ton enables you to update the lay­out with the most recent assign­ment content.

At some point in the pro­duc­tion of a pub­li­ca­tion, assign­ments may change. Maybe you goofed (unlike­ly; you’re the Master of the LiveEdit Workflow and you don’t make mis­takes), maybe cer­tain sto­ries and spreads need to be frozen, maybe edi­to­r­i­al assign­ments expand or shift from one writer to anoth­er, maybe an edi­tor took your park­ing spot and you just want to mess with him. The Assignments palette makes it easy to both add new frames to exist­ing assign­ments, and to unas­sign content.

To add a pre­vi­ous­ly unas­signed frame to an exist­ing assign­ment, the eas­i­est way is to select it, and then right-click (or, again, CTRL-click for those Mac users still suf­fer­ing with one-button mice) and select InCopy > Add to Assignment > [Assignment Name]. Of course, the same method can be used to add sev­er­al frames to an exist­ing assignment.

If you need to cre­ate mul­ti­ple assign­ments on a spread, there’s tech­nique to make short work of the task.