How-To: InDesign/InCopy Collaboration: the Designer

1. Beginning with a spread of so far unas­signed frames, select all the frames that must be assigned. Right-click and choose InCopy > Add to Assignment > New.

2. Save the .INCA file, then choose the options for the first assign­ment. All frames from the cur­rent page will gen­er­ate entries on the Assignment palette.

3. Click the New Assignment but­ton on the bot­tom of the Assignments palette, save the .INCA file, and then choose the options for the sec­ond assign­ment. It too will appear as an assign­ment entry in the Assignments palette, but will con­tain no sto­ries. Repeat this until you have all the assign­ments you need; all but the first will be empty.

4. On the Assignments palette, select and drag the need­ed sto­ries from the first assign­ment to the desired sub­se­quent assign­ment. When all sto­ries are dis­trib­uted, save your doc­u­ment and choose Update All Assignments from the palette menu.

Removing con­tent from assignments–unassigning the frames–is just as easy; at the bot­tom of the Assignments palette is an entry for Unassigned InCopy Content. This lit­tle fea­ture is great time saver when freez­ing arti­cles; if the arti­cle must be unfrozen at any lat­er time, just drag the unas­signed con­tent back into an assign­ment, save, and update. It will then be avail­able once again to the InCopy-based edi­tor who does­n’t under­stand the mean­ing of the word frozen.

Pushing your lay­out changes to InCopy users, so they see the most recent ver­sion of your design and each oth­er’s assign­ments in the InCopy lay­out view, occurs auto­mat­i­cal­ly when you choose Update Selected Assignment or Update All Assignments from the Assignments palette fly­out menu. When you update assign­ments in InDesign, InCopy is noti­fied through LiveEdit that the lay­out has changed, cre­at­ing yel­low cau­tion signs to alert InCopy users to update the design from with their Assignments palettes.

Canceling Collaboration

On occa­sion, writ­ers or edi­tors will for­get to check in their assign­ments when you need them. Upon clos­ing InCopy they would be prompt­ed to save and check in any out­stand­ing sto­ries, but you know how writ­ers can be–it may be days before they actu­al­ly exit their word proces­sor. So, are you stuck, your entire pub­li­ca­tion hang­ing over the week­end, des­tined to blow its Monday AM dead­line because some­body in Editorial for­got to check in the sto­ry before head­ing home Friday evening? Of course not! You’re the mas­ter, remember?

If you ever find your­self in this dilem­ma, fol­low the below steps. Caution: Be aware, how­ev­er, that, if the writer did­n’t save her sto­ries in InCopy, any changes will be lost.

1. In most cas­es, although an Editorial staffer for­got to check in an assign­ment, she will have saved the sto­ries. Saving, of course, updates the .INCX files on the serv­er. Therefore, your first step is to select Update Assignment from the Assignments palette menu.

2. Select the checked out frame(s) and open the Links palette. The rel­e­vant .INCX files will be highlighted.

Parents, at this point, please ask your young edi­tors to leave the room. The fol­low­ing is infor­ma­tion for Production only.

3. At this point, if you look on the Assignments palette menu, the Check Out com­mand will be grayed out. Here’s a secret: The Links palette also has a Check Out com­mand. From the Links Palette fly­out menu choose Check Out. InDesign will alert you that the .INCX file is already checked out, but it will also give you the option to embed the con­tent and check it out. You’ll be prompt­ed once for each frame or .INCX file.

4. Edit the con­tent as needed.

5. If the assigned .INCX con­tent needs to be accessed by Editorial afterward–say, for the next issue or edition–unembed the con­tent again by choos­ing Edit > InCopy > Unembed Story. The frames will then be relinked to their orig­i­nal and still exist­ing .INCX files, but you’ll need to add them again to assign­ments manually.

When you get to step three above, over­rid­ing some­one else’s check out, you may be tempt­ed to use the Unlink com­mand on the Links palette menu. At first, it may appear to have the same func­tion as Check Out, but there are dis­tinct dif­fer­ences. Unlink embeds the sto­ry, true, but it fore­goes check out. The select­ed frame is embed­ded and treat­ed as a nor­mal, native InDesign object; there will be no option to relink it to an .INCX file. Moreover, none of the unlink or check­out com­mands can be com­plete­ly undone with CMD+Z/CTRL+Z. Be care­ful.

In addi­tion to the Links palette fly­out menu, there is a Check Out com­mand under InCopy on the context-sensitive menu. These are iden­ti­cal in func­tion, so use whichev­er method is more con­ve­nient for you.

If the .INCX files have moved or for some oth­er rea­son won’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly relink when you choose Unembed Story, there’s a fast work-around: Undo the Unembed Story com­mand, then select Unembed File from the Links palette fly­out menu. Going that route will cause InDesign to prompt you about re-linking to the orig­i­nal files or shuf­fling the con­tent out to new­ly cre­at­ed files, and, if the for­mer, enable you to browse for them.

Finalizing Collaboration

Collaboration begins with the Production depart­ment, and it must also end there. As in any suc­cess­ful monar­chy, the ruler estab­lish­es the foun­da­tion, del­e­gates the man­u­al labor (copy­fit­ting and copy changes) to min­ions, but always checks over the work of min­ions before trust­ing that a project is built correctly.

During your final check of the lay­out before press, fol­low this LiveEdit-specific final checklist:

• No assign­ments in the Assignments palette dis­play red cir­cles or yel­low triangles.
• No frames in the Unassigned InCopy Content sec­tion of the Assignments palette dis­play yel­low triangles.
• No sto­ries are checked out.
• There are no notes in the document.

As you may recall, the LiveEdit plug-ins installed a Notes tool and Notes palette. Notes allow Production and Editorial to com­mu­ni­cate with, and among, each anoth­er with dis­creet anno­ta­tions embed­ded with­in sto­ries. Because notes do not print unless some­one delib­er­ate­ly directs them to in the Print dia­log, it’s not real­ly nec­es­sary to remove them. If your hands are the last to touch the InDesign document–if you’re print­ing it PostScript or export­ing PDF, for example–you may elect to leave notes. But if you’re pack­ag­ing and send­ing native .INDD files some­where… Well, are you absolute­ly pos­i­tive no one will check that lit­tle box in the Print dialog?

The fastest way to remove notes is to check out all sto­ries for edit­ing by you, open the Notes palette from the Windows menu, and then, from that palet­te’s fly­out menu, choose Remove All Notes.

Should you have the desire to close col­lab­o­ra­tion per­ma­nent­ly, add this to your final check­list: Highlight assign­ment entries in the Assignments palette, and, from the palette fly­out menu, select Delete Assignment. When InDesign prompts for con­fir­ma­tion, answer in the affir­ma­tive. Warning: This deletes the .INCA file! To re-create the assign­ment, you’ll need to select frames and cre­ate a new assign­ment by hand all over again.

In con­trast to that dras­tic move, you can pro­tect the lay­out from changes while also afford­ing Editorial the oppor­tu­ni­ty to lat­er print out its assigned con­tent. Simply high­light all the .INCX files in the Links palette and choose Unlink from the palet­te’s menu. Again, this com­plete­ly merges the frames with the doc­u­ment as native InDesign objects.

Final Thoughts

On the Edit menu is the InCopy sub­menu, which con­tains such document-wide com­mands as Add Layer to Assignment, Add All Stories to Assignment, and Add All Graphics to Assignment. The caveat in using these com­mands is that they will add to the cho­sen assign­ment all frames in the doc­u­ment, on all pages, even on mas­ter pages. Use with extreme caution.

Though I would hope this goes with­out say­ing, if you intend to col­lab­o­rate across the net­work, all your assets should be on the serv­er and acces­si­ble by both Production and Editorial. Paths to linked images are rel­a­tive. Even if InCopy users have access to your local hard­drive, those unac­cus­tomed to a cre­ative work­flow will be con­fused and frus­trat­ed by miss­ing link warn­ings and the need the relink to assets in InCopy. If you’re an evil mas­ter, you should real­ize that it will come back on you: you’ll have a night­mare on your hands when you update assignments.

Alternative to using assign­ments, espe­cial­ly with short­er doc­u­ments, is to have Editorial open the InDesign .INDD files direct­ly in InCopy. See part-one of this series, “InCopy CS2, the World; World, InCopy CS2″, for more on the advan­tages and lim­i­ta­tions of open­ing .INDD files in InCopy.

Using and man­ag­ing the LiveEdit work­flow myself in InDesign CS2 and InCopy CS2 near dai­ly since May of this year, and hav­ing taught dozens of design­ers to become Masters and Mistresses of the LiveEdit Workflow, I can hon­est­ly tell you that the work­flow is more com­pli­cat­ed to write about than to actu­al­ly per­form. Of course no tuto­r­i­al or even series of arti­cles can take the place of a con­sul­tant or train­er help­ing you inte­grate InCopy into your spe­cif­ic work­flow. This tuto­r­i­al cov­ers the most com­mon work­flows, and broad strokes. 

Follow the sim­ple instruc­tions above–and have Editorial fol­low next week’s “InDesign/InCopy Collaboration: the Editor,” and both depart­ments should be able to adapt it to your work­flow, with the con­trol each of you needs. Moreover, the respon­si­bil­i­ty for copy­edit­ing and copy­fit­ting will final­ly be borne by the cor­rect set of shoul­ders, leav­ing you to focus on the design. Of course, through the Assignments palette you’ll always be able to check in on, and exer­cise your supreme mas­tery over, your min­ions in Editorial.

InCopy CS2: In Production 6‑Part Special Report:

Part 1: InCopy CS2, the World; World, InCopy CS2

Part 2: A Newsletter Designer Looks At InCopy CS2

Part 3: Proposing Efficiency with InCopy CS2

InDesign, InCopy, InDesign CS2, InCopy CS2, how-to, tutorial