InCopy CS2, the World; World, InCopy CS2

Going Rogue

Running Mac OS X Panther, pub­lished in late 2003 by lead­ing tech­nol­o­gy book pub­lish­er O’Reilly & Associates, used an InCopy-driven par­al­lel work­flow to slash the book’s pro­duc­tion sched­ule by 10 weeks, add 8–12 weeks to the sales win­dow, and increase sales of the book by one-third.

Authoring, edit­ing, copy fit­ting, and proofreading–a lin­ear process in the pro­duc­tion of any book–all occurred simul­ta­ne­ous­ly because of a mav­er­ick author and InCopy.

In August of 2003 Apple unloosed infor­ma­tion about Mac OS 10.3 a.k.a. “Panther,” and O’Reilly’s goal was to release the book at Macworld Expo the fol­low­ing January. It was a tight dead­line to write, lay­out, copy edit, and qual­i­ty con­trol the book in time, and once released, a rapid Mac OS X update sched­ule would lim­it the book’s com­mer­cial via­bil­i­ty to only a few months. Author James Duncan Davidson had an idea to increase the life cycle of Running Mac OS X Panther. “We had to roll the final stages of copy edit­ing and qual­i­ty con­trol into the writ­ing sched­ule, which would nor­mal­ly add sev­er­al weeks to the tail end of the project, dur­ing the pro­duc­tion process,” said Davidson. “By con­duct­ing copy edit­ing and QA simul­ta­ne­ous­ly with the lay­out process, we could get the book to mar­ket much faster.”

Davidson set­up a con­cur­rent ver­sion­ing sys­tem to track file ver­sions, make back­up copies, and man­age check-in/check-out to Davidson and the Running Mac OS X Panther edi­tor team. He then cre­at­ed InDesign tem­plates mir­ror­ing the exist­ing O’Reilly for­mat and style.

Instead of allow­ing lay­out and layout-proofing to remain the final step in the work­flow, Davidson and his team worked in par­al­lel. As he wrote the first draft of each chap­ter in InCopy, Davidson flowed it into the InDesign tem­plate, post­ed the copy­fit­ted chap­ter to the ver­sion­ing serv­er, and went to work on the next chap­ter. While he did that, tech­ni­cal, copy, and oth­er edi­tors each took their turns check­ing out each chap­ter, insert­ing cor­rec­tions and com­ments in InCopy, and check­ing it back in for the next stop in the workflow. 

“The author fin­ished writ­ing the final chap­ter of this book just after Thanksgiving and it went to press nine days later–a remark­able achieve­ment,” said Chuck Toporek, senior edi­tor for O’Reilly. “InDesign and InCopy helped us get the book out eight to twelve weeks soon­er, guar­an­tee­ing that we met our win­dow of opportunity.”

The entire process was alleged­ly run rogue–O’Reilly senior staff only learned of the devi­a­tion from accept­ed com­pa­ny prac­tices after the book was fin­ished. “We main­tained the con­sis­ten­cy we sought [and] pro­duced the book almost two and a half months faster than oth­er titles, which had a dra­mat­ic impact on sales,” stat­ed Toporek. “The beau­ty is that peo­ple can’t tell that this book was cre­at­ed out­side of O’Reilly’s tra­di­tion­al pro­duc­tion process.”

O’Reilly & Associates is now using the InDesign-InCopy par­al­lel work­flow to pro­duce oth­er books.

Authors and pub­lish­ers rely on Microsoft Word to write, review, and edit man­u­scripts, but because Davidson laid out his chap­ters as he wrote them, the only way to make Running Mac OS X Panther a suc­cess was to aban­don Word. InDesign does­n’t con­tain the change track­ing fea­tures required by the edi­to­r­i­al process, and Word can’t edit InDesign files. 

Separating Content from Layout

InCopy is a word proces­sor com­pan­ion to InDesign–with unique advan­tages over InDesign’s built in Story Editor and even the ubiq­ui­tous Microsoft Word.

In addi­tion to its own INCX file for­mat, InCopy can open, edit, and save InDesign INDD lay­out doc­u­ments. It’s as sim­ple as File > Open, and sud­den­ly the con­tent from all the text frames in InDesign are pre­sent­ed in a sin­gle list, ready for edit­ing in a word proces­sor view iden­ti­cal to InDesign’s own Story Editor. InDesign’s Story Editor is, in fact, a code chunk lift­ed from InCopy. If you can use the Story Editor, you’re already one-third of the way toward mas­ter­ing InCopy.

Story view shows the doc­u­ment sto­ries in a sin­gle, col­lapsi­ble col­umn. Beside the text are para­graph style indi­ca­tors and, new to CS2, the depth of the sto­ry in con­fig­urable units (col­umn inch­es, for exam­ple) as set in the InDesign lay­out. This, the most com­mon edit­ing view, focus­es entire­ly on the copy. Lines wrap to the win­dow and for­mat­ting is lim­it­ed the bare basics of normal/Roman, ital­ic, and bold.

The Galley view is very sim­i­lar to Story view, but with two impor­tant dif­fer­ences: Copy is shown with accu­rate line breaks, exact­ly as it would wrap in the lay­out, and the addi­tion of a line num­ber col­umn for reference.

Layout view shows the InCopy user an accu­rate and inter­ac­tive snap­shot of the InDesign lay­out, includ­ing her assigned frames. From this per­spec­tive, writ­ers and edi­tors can put their text in con­text. Depending upon the set­tings cho­sen by the InDesign design­er, InCopy users may see the full lay­out, only their assigned sec­tions, or the whole lay­out with every­thing but their assign­ments greyed out.

Text may be edit­ed in any of the three views. If edi­tors want to make copy or even style changes to text while watch­ing the effect on the lay­out in real-time, they mere­ly click in an assigned text frame in Layout view and begin typing.

Included in InCopy are iden­ti­cal palettes for all text cre­ation and styling func­tions, includ­ing the Character, Paragraph, Table, Story, Swatches, Layers, Paragraph Styles, and Character Styles palettes, among oth­ers. Menus for Edit, Type, and Table add to the func­tion­al­i­ty of the palettes, leav­ing writ­ers and edi­tors to write or place, then for­mat and fit their own copy. Accurate word and char­ac­ter counts, as well as a life-saving Copyfit Progress Info bar, which indi­cates the num­ber of remain­ing lines in the text frame or the num­ber of over­set lines, take the respon­si­bil­i­ty for copy­fit­ting off the shoul­ders of design­ers and put it where it belongs–on the edi­to­r­i­al team.

Inline notes and doc­u­ment review fea­tures enable col­lab­o­ra­tion and edit­ing with­out involv­ing the pro­duc­tion depart­ment. And, most remark­able of all, edi­to­r­i­al per­son­nel can now place images in frames or inline in text.

Many jour­nal­ists and edi­tors are respon­si­ble for choos­ing their own pho­tographs, fig­ures, and illus­tra­tions, and for cap­tion­ing and cred­it­ing those images. At the InDesign cre­ative’s dis­cre­tion, pic­ture frames may be incor­po­rat­ed into assign­ments, thus empow­er­ing the InCopy user to place and posi­tion her own imagery. InCopy sup­ports place­ment of any image for­mat that can be placed into InDesign, includ­ing TIFF, EPS, AI, and even lay­ered PDF or Photoshop PSD files, with the same con­trol over lay­ers and lay­er comps. A ful­ly func­tion­al Links palette enables imagery to be updat­ed, replaced, and edit­ed in their orig­i­nat­ing applications.

Regular depart­ments and columns of a magazine–a “Letter from the Editor” col­umn, for example–can be updat­ed for the cur­rent issue entire­ly by the edi­tor, who can copy­fit, replace the illus­tra­tion, and final­ize the page. Production is then freed to focus its ener­gy on sec­tions of the pub­li­ca­tion that gen­uine­ly require their skills.

Word Processing, Not Page Layout

What edi­to­r­i­al can­not do is change the layout.

Opening an InDesign doc­u­ment does not grant the InCopy user the abil­i­ty to add, remove, or change frames or pages; such things are the sole domain of the design­er, and are exclu­sive to InDesign. Although the won­der twins of pub­lish­ing soft­ware share a com­mon code base, mak­ing over­lap­ping tools and fea­tures such as the Character and Paragraph palettes per­fect­ly iden­ti­cal, all container-level func­tions are absent from thin­ner sib­ling InCopy.

All container-level tools are disabled–they can edit the con­tent of frames cre­at­ed by the design­er, but can­not mod­i­fy the frames them­selves. Placed images may be scaled, rotat­ed, sheared, and fit­ted, but the pic­ture frame is invi­o­lable. Similarly, no tools exist for cre­at­ing or con­vert­ing objects to frames or even cre­at­ing guides. Instead of the Selection and Direct Selection arrows in InDesign, InCopy CS2 users have a PageMaker-like Position tool with which to move, crop, and mod­i­fy the con­tents of pic­ture frames.

A lim­it­ed Layers palette allows InCopy users to show or hide InDesign-created doc­u­ment lay­ers, but they can nei­ther mod­i­fy layers–including renam­ing and reordering–nor cre­ate or delete lay­ers. To fur­ther unclut­ter a Layout view, edi­to­r­i­al staff can adjust dis­play performance–including object-level dis­play performance–as well as hide frame edges, guides, grids, and rulers.

So focused is InCopy on sep­a­rat­ing edi­to­r­i­al from lay­out, that the Tools palette con­sists of only five but­tons: the Type, Notes, Position, Hand, and Zoom tools.

The Control Palette has been replaced with four repo­si­tion­able and cus­tomiz­able tool­bars. Standard tools such as file Open, Close, and Save, as well as Find, Check Spelling, and Show/Hide Invisibles appear on the Command Bar. On the Reviewing tool­bar are but­tons to Accept or Reject changes, and to nav­i­gate between doc­u­ment changes and com­ments. The Galley & Story Appearance tool­bar, which con­trols the on-screen only type­face and col­ors of those view modes, is a live user inter­face to the same options in InCopy’s pref­er­ence. The final tool­bar, the Copyfit Info bar, dis­plays var­i­ous sta­tis­tics such as word and char­ac­ter counts, line num­bers, and col­umn depth rel­a­tive to the whole sto­ry, the cur­rent­ly select­ed text, or from the cur­sor point to the begin­ning or end of the story.

In addi­tion to 100% accu­rate copy­fit­ting feed­back and the Copyfit Info bar, InCopy has a few oth­er advan­tages over the InCopy-lite-like InDesign Story Editor. The most use­ful of these is the Thesaurus palette. Supporting all of the same lan­guages as the spell check­er, syn­onyms and antonyms are at the writer’s fin­ger­tips, in a com­pact palette. Track changes enables edi­to­r­i­al revi­sions and col­lab­o­ra­tion with­out going out­side the actu­al publication.

In both Story and Galley view, over­set text is high­light­ed, and the Copyfit Info bar’s indi­ca­tor turns red and counts the num­ber of over­set lines. InDesign’s Story Editor pro­vides no such feed­back on over­set text.

As a word proces­sor, InCopy CS2 includes all the new lan­guage fea­tures from InDesign CS2, includ­ing option­al dynam­ic spell check­ing, exportable user dic­tio­nar­ies, and work­group dic­tio­nary inte­gra­tion. Of course, it also includes all the local­ized dic­tio­nar­ies installed with InDesign.

A trio of automa­tion fea­tures helps elim­i­nate repet­i­tive tasks. With the fully-functional Scripts palette, advanced auto­mat­ed con­trol of the appli­ca­tion is enabled. InCopy sup­ports not only its own scripts, but also InDesign scripts that use the tools and com­mands avail­able in InCopy. The new auto­mat­ic text cor­rec­tion dynam­i­cal­ly replaces mis­spelled or user-defined words with oth­er words on the fly. And text macros, unique to InCopy, func­tion sim­i­lar­ly to auto­mat­ic text cor­rec­tion, but with some very use­ful dif­fer­ences. While auto­mat­ic text cor­rec­tion is lim­it­ed to words or short phras­es, text macros can insert sev­er­al para­graphs at a time–boilerplate pas­sages need nev­er be hand-typed or copied and past­ed again. Another ben­e­fit of text macros is that invo­ca­tion is user-configurable; macro text may be insert­ed auto­mat­i­cal­ly as replace­ment for a typed code or key­word, or man­u­al­ly via a user-assigned key­board short­cuts. Text macros also enjoy the extreme­ly use­ful extra con­ve­nience of option­al­ly stor­ing char­ac­ter and para­graph style attrib­ut­es in the macro text.

InCopy can also save tem­plates of its doc­u­ments, enabling reusable pre-sized text areas, col­or swatch­es, styles, and document-attached dictionaries.

While InCopy can direct­ly open, edit, and save INDD files, that isn’t the typ­i­cal workflow.