InCopy CS2, the World; World, InCopy CS2

Needs Improvement

As excit­ing and impor­tant as InCopy is to the mod­ern col­lab­o­ra­tive work­flow, there’s still room for improvement.

Layout assign­ments: In news­pa­per, mag­a­zine, book, and just about any type of copy-intensive, multi-page pub­lish­ing, it’s more com­mon than not for the entire pub­li­ca­tion to be worked on simul­ta­ne­ous­ly by sev­er­al design­ers. While InDesign’s Book palette and INBK book file han­dles log­i­cal­ly chun­ked long doc­u­ments like books or cat­a­logs, they don’t help the col­lab­o­ra­tive work­flow for peri­od­i­cals, which rely on mul­ti­ple INDD layouts–each con­tain­ing the issue’s full page count. In such process­es, each design­er or team is respon­si­ble for lay­ing out a sec­tion, which is only mar­ried to the oth­er sec­tions and drop-in ads dur­ing imposition.

The InDesign-InCopy par­al­lel work­flow needs to be updat­ed to allow for mul­ti­ple InDesign users to be work­ing on assigned sec­tions of the same lay­out. It needs lay­out assign­ments where­in the cre­ative direc­tor assigns one or more pages or spreads to each pro­duc­tion design­er. Then all the cre­atives on the team open the same INDD file with not only the abil­i­ty to manip­u­late the con­tent of the exist­ing frames, as is avail­able with InCopy LiveEdit assign­ments, but also the abil­i­ty to manipulate–and cre­ate or delete–the frames them­selves. Assigning cre­atives (the cre­ative direc­tor, in this case) should have spread‑, page‑, and layer-level con­trol over the access grant­ed to assigned design­ers. For exam­ple, the cre­ative direc­tor may spec­i­fy that the assigned cre­ative has access to all of InDesign’s tools and fea­tures for work on a pre-created “Foreground” lay­er, and may cre­ate new lay­ers, but that the assigned cre­ative can­not mod­i­fy, reorder, or hide the “Background” lay­er, over­ride mas­ter page items, or access the spread­’s mas­ter pages.

Giving InDesign cre­atives con­trol over what and how much pow­er is doled out to edi­tors cre­ates a one-document ‑to- many-editors rela­tion­ship, but it’s still lim­it­ed by the one-document ‑to- one-designer rela­tion­ship. It’s a huge step for­ward in the col­lab­o­ra­tion between edi­to­r­i­al and pro­duc­tion. Now, Adobe needs to unlock col­lab­o­ra­tion inside the pro­duc­tion department.

At the bot­tom of the InCopy doc­u­ment win­dow is a pop-up pages list for nav­i­ga­tion. It does the job, but is one of the least intu­itive fea­tures of the user inter­face. A Pages palette, while adding anoth­er palette, would make Layout view nav­i­ga­tion easier.

Most of InCopy’s oth­er lim­i­ta­tions aren’t because Adobe did­n’t have fore­sight. Adobe rec­og­nizes that its busi­ness mod­el and devel­op­ment process­es are not adapt­able to every con­ceiv­able pub­lish­ing work­flow. More impor­tant­ly, Adobe val­ues the rela­tion­ships it has with devel­op­ers and sys­tem inte­gra­tors who can adapt to the needs of var­i­ous mar­kets. Thus InCopy CS2, out of the (jew­el) box, answers a wide range of needs in the small- to mid-size pub­lish­ing work­flow, leav­ing larg­er, more com­plex, or high­ly cus­tomized needs to the dex­ter­i­ty of Adobe’s partners.

Out of the box, InCopy CS2 is lim­it­ed to a 2–12-person work­group. Teams of up to 30 will need to explore third-party database-less solu­tions like TruEdit from Managing Editor, Inc., a folder-based work­flow con­trol sys­tem, and Woodwing Software’s Smart Connection. Larger work­groups or those that require data­base con­nec­tiv­i­ty and content- or asset-management, are in the realm of full-blown InCopy- and InDesign-based plat­form solu­tions from sys­tem integrators.

There is also no man­age­r­i­al over­sight built into InCopy CS2. Designers work­ing in InDesign can over­ride InCopy users-to force check-in of an assign­ment that may have been left open by a writer at the end of the day, for exam­ple. However, the assign­ment list and who may or may not have checked them out is only avail­able from with­in the InDesign doc­u­ment, to the design­er cur­rent­ly work­ing in the INDD doc­u­ment. Production man­agers and editors-in-chief can­not inde­pen­dent­ly access the assign­ments list and check up on their staff.

User iden­ti­ties in both InDesign and InCopy are sim­ple, inse­cure, and not tied to sys­tem user­names or oth­er authen­ti­ca­tion schemes. At any point (except with an assign­ment active­ly checked out) users may change their names in the application. 

Adobe’s feel­ing is is that, if your work­flow is large enough and com­pli­cat­ed enough to require man­age­r­i­al over­sight or user authen­ti­ca­tion, chances are you have oth­er spe­cial needs that are bet­ter addressed by a cus­tomized solu­tion than by a boxed product.

Another lim­i­ta­tion of the stand­alone InCopy is its lack of sup­port for remote work­ers. As designed, LiveEdit only works via direct LAN connection–assignment files should be saved to, and opened from, a cen­tral serv­er or even the InDesign cre­ative’s local hard­drive. Writers can, of course, copy assign­ment and InCopy sto­ries to their lap­tops to work off the net­work, but they must copy the files back to the orig­i­nal loca­tion man­u­al­ly upon recon­nect­ing. Going off-line also dis­ables the check-in/check-out con­trol of LiveEdit, leav­ing assign­ment files acces­si­ble to oth­er per­son­nel, and thus intro­duc­ing the risk of users over­writ­ing the work of oth­er users. And, of course, all the oth­er ben­e­fits of the LiveEdit con­nec­tion are ren­dered moot the moment a user dis­con­nects from the network.

Even off-line, the doc­u­ment snap­shot is still vis­i­ble in Layout view, but can­not be resyn­chro­nized with the InDesign layout.

Although Adobe says users dis­liked auto­mat­ed con­tent updates to keep the InCopy Layout view fresh as well as auto­mat­i­cal­ly refresh assign­ment con­tent with­in InDesign, and rec­om­mends cre­at­ing a cus­tom script to enable such updates, few users of boxed prod­uct are savvy enough to write InDesign and InCopy scripts. A bet­ter solu­tion would be to build-in the func­tion­al­i­ty as a pref­er­ence or Assignments palette menu option, and turn it off by default.

In Part Six of “InCopy CS2: In Production,” we’ll look at InCopy-based solu­tions that address most of the lim­i­ta­tions of the stand­alone prod­uct and amaz­ing feats of pro­duc­tion and efficiency.

A Different Workflow

Now that you know what InCopy CS2 is, and how it inte­grates with InDesign, imag­ine the typ­i­cal mag­a­zine work­flow with InCopy in place of Word.

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, but text frames need not be filled Greeking and word counts need not be cal­cu­lat­ed. 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, then gen­er­ates assign­ments for the edi­to­r­i­al staff.

Editorial goes to work on its assign­ments, know­ing at all times exact­ly how many words they need to fill, pre­cise­ly how their arti­cles will warp and look. The writer or colum­nist writes his sto­ry in InCopy, then checks it in for his edi­tor’s review. She checks out the sto­ry, acti­vates the change track­ing fea­ture, and edits the sto­ry. When she’s fin­ished, she checks it in and e‑mails the writer to review the changes. The edit cycle con­tin­ues, and at some point the writer or edi­tor fills in the head­line, kick­er, call­outs, cap­tions, pho­to credits–even the pho­tos them­selves. Production is nev­er both­ered with copy or image place­ment changes to reg­u­lar fea­ture pages.

Freed to focus on their own areas of the mag­a­zine, edi­to­r­i­al and pro­duc­tion come togeth­er only to dis­cuss non-standard sec­tions of the book, such as fea­ture arti­cles, the cov­er, and spe­cial sec­tions. Hardcopy or PDF proofs are nev­er gen­er­at­ed for edi­to­r­i­al review because the edi­to­r­i­al depart­ment can see and enter notes on the entire lay­out from with­in InCopy. Everyone stays focused on her own work, the entire team works effi­cient­ly, cre­ates bet­ter work, and the issue is put to bed early.

Join us Friday, 21 October 2005 for “A Newsletter Designer Looks at InCopy CS2,” part two of our six-part spe­cial series, “InCopy CS2: In Production,” when Samuel John Klein will pro­vide a per­son­al account of inte­grat­ing InCopy CS2 into the real-world pro­duc­tion of the Columbia Overlook, the newslet­ter of the Sierra Club, Oregon Chapter, Columbia Group.

InCopy CS2: In Production 6‑Part Special Report:

Part 2: A Newsletter Designer Looks At InCopy CS2

Part 3: Proposing Efficiency with InCopy CS2

Part 4: How-To: InDesign/InCopy Collaboration: The Designer

InDesign, InCopy, InDesign CS2, InCopy CS2, Adobe, VDP, Microsoft Word