InCopy CS2, the World; World, InCopy CS2

Go in deep for a long overdue examination of InCopy, the features new to version CS2, how InCopy cut one major publisher's 60-day book production schedule down to 9 days, and how it will save you time, man-power, and money over Microsoft Word in a collaborative creative and editorial workflow.

I first used InCopy with ver­sion 2.0, which was cur­rent with InDesign 2.0 (2002–2003). Like ver­sion 1.0, InCopy 2.0 was avail­able only as part of cus­tom edi­to­r­i­al and pro­duc­tion solu­tions from third-party sys­tem inte­gra­tors. It could­n’t be pur­chased sep­a­rate­ly, and I was one of only a hand­ful of peo­ple with the stand­alone ver­sion. I fell in love with it imme­di­ate­ly, and fer­vent­ly lob­bied the powers-that-be at Adobe to pub­lish it as a stand­alone product.

With the release of InCopy CS, Adobe did just that, though I’m sure mine was only one of many voic­es clam­or­ing for equal access to a sol­id edi­to­r­i­al com­pan­ion to InDesign–independent of full-blown cus­tom news­pa­per or mag­a­zine work­flow solu­tions. InCopy CS was a stand­alone appli­ca­tion for Mac and Windows, and was qui­et­ly made avail­able for pur­chase as a down­load­able appli­ca­tion from the Adobe Store; there was no boxed version.

Although InCopy CS2 still does­n’t have a box (out­side of Japan), it does have a CD and case for the first time. It also has some­thing else the pre­ced­ing ver­sions did­n’t: Publicity. Adobe isn’t tak­ing out full page ads in the Times to pro­claim that InCopy CS2 is the biggest thing to hit pub­lish­ing since Microsoft Word, but they aren’t keep­ing it mum any­more either. A few weeks ago, Adobe pre­sent­ed Quark VS InDesign​.com with an exclu­sive dis­play of InCopy CS2. Although I had been singing InCopy’s prais­es from the rooftops since 2002, even I was impressed and thrilled all over again with this lat­est version.

Declaring InCopy CS2 a bet­ter tool for jour­nal­ists and edi­tors than Microsoft Word is a bold claim–one that Adobe itself is cau­tious not to make. But then, few are fool­ish enough to announce that they’re going after one of Microsoft’s key markets.

To under­stand what InCopy does, the col­lab­o­ra­tive edi­to­r­i­al work­flow must first be understood.

The Linear Workflow

In team-based work­flows rang­ing from small adver­tis­ing cre­ative teams of a copy­writer and a graph­ic design­er to month­ly or even dai­ly peri­od­i­cals with dozens of per­son­nel divid­ed amongst edi­to­r­i­al and cre­ative, copy is writ­ten and edit­ed by one side of the team, then hand­ed off to the oth­er for lay­out. Before, dur­ing, and often after hand-off comes sev­er­al proofs and revi­sions. In many cas­es, these are print­outs rout­ed around the office for markup; even in an elec­tron­ic review process, dis­parate best-of-breed appli­ca­tions don’t work togeth­er well enough. Even the great equal­iz­er XML rid­dles the pub­lish­ing work­flow with redun­dan­cy, inef­fi­cien­cy, and unnec­es­sary costs.

Consider a stan­dard month­ly mag­a­zine. During a new design or makeover, the art depart­ment lays out the mag­a­zine tem­plate in InDesign. Advertisement slots are cre­at­ed and space rel­e­gat­ed to fea­tures, depart­ments, columns, and oth­er con­tent sec­tions. Style sheets are built, and word counts for each space are cal­cu­lat­ed by fill­ing text frames with Greeking. Word counts are passed to edi­to­r­i­al, who will try to stay with­in them. Finally, the art depart­ment divides the full issue mock­up into sep­a­rate tem­plates cor­re­spond­ing to the cre­ative and/or edi­to­r­i­al team work­ing on each sec­tion of the content.

Production of an issue begins with edi­to­r­i­al, writ­ing con­tent with­in the word counts. The writer or colum­nist sub­mits a Microsoft Word man­u­script to his edi­tor, who either edits it her­self or marks it up using Word’s built-in review­ing tools, and then sends it back to the writer. If changes are required, the writer makes them in a third ver­sion and ini­ti­ates the edit cycle again. When the sto­ry is ready to go, changes are merged into the document.

As ear­ly in the edit cycle as pos­si­ble, arti­cles are pro­vid­ed to the art depart­ment to begin the cre­ative work–creating or hir­ing out for illus­tra­tions; shoot­ing, select­ing, col­or cor­rect­ing, and touch­ing up pho­tog­ra­phy, and; lay­ing it all out. Ideally, edi­to­r­i­al would be fin­ished with its sto­ries by the time pro­duc­tion receives them, but that’s nev­er the case. Articles come in too long or too short, require minor or major copy revi­sions, or writer-created illus­tra­tions and fig­ures have not yet been sup­plied. Often pro­duc­tion receives the first edit­ed draft, work­ing con­cur­rent­ly with the writer, who may make sig­nif­i­cant changes. Still, the art depart­ment must begin its work or the issue will nev­er make deadline.

It’s dur­ing this phase that the great­est time and ener­gy is wast­ed because the work­flow is lin­ear and redundant.

While pro­duc­tion per­son­nel lay out the con­tent they have, edi­to­r­i­al per­son­nel are still writ­ing, edit­ing, revis­ing, and even exchang­ing one sto­ry for anoth­er. Associate edi­tors are writ­ing to the hole or select­ing filler sto­ries, pho­tog­ra­phers are still shoot­ing inter­view sub­jects, and illus­tra­tors are draw­ing arti­cle creative.

As soon as pro­duc­tion lays out a sec­tion, they gen­er­ate PDF or hard­copy proofs and sub­mit to edi­to­r­i­al for proof­ing. Editorial marks up the proofs and sends them back, where­upon pro­duc­tion, work­ing from the marked up proof, man­u­al­ly trans­lates the changes into the lay­out. That’s what pass­es for an effi­cient work­flow. More often, edi­tors stand over lay­out artists, direct­ing copy, style, and imagery changes in real-time. Often pro­duc­tion staff are yanked from their work on one sec­tion of the pub­li­ca­tion to return to anoth­er in accom­mo­da­tion of the edi­tor who just walked into the bullpen. Several rounds of proof-and-revise ensue–up until (and some­times after) the issue has been pack­aged for press. Editorial waits for pro­duc­tion’s proofs; pro­duc­tion back­tracks to mod­i­fy pages they’ve already fin­ished. In this work­flow, typ­i­cal of most mag­a­zines, no department–no worker-performs with gen­uine effi­cien­cy. That’s how it’s always been done; it isn’t per­fect, but it puts words on paper and issues on the racks.

If edi­to­r­i­al and pro­duc­tion are to be work­ing con­cur­rent­ly on the same material–and, like most projects, there’s no way to avoid that in periodicals–then they should be work­ing togeth­er, not against one another. 

Imagine a dif­fer­ent mag­a­zine work­flow. It starts out the same–production makes tem­plates, doles out word counts, and every­one goes to work. From there, it diverges because the two depart­ments con­tin­ue to work, doing what each does best, with min­i­mal involve­ment and min­i­mal impact on each oth­er’s work­flow. In fact, some layouts–those for reg­u­lar fea­tures, depart­ments, and columns–production might pos­si­bly nev­er touch again after tem­plate creation–even with pho­tog­ra­phy or illus­tra­tion insertions.

Impossible? With InCopy CS2 it is possible–and it’s hap­pen­ing right now.