InCopy CS3: The Editor's Right Hand

It’s not includ­ed with any CS3 edi­tion, not even the Master col­lec­tion, but if you have a design­er work­ing with mul­ti­ple edi­tors, it’s an appli­ca­tion you real­ly ought to know about. 

It’s Adobe InCopy CS3. It just may be what you need to enable col­lab­o­ra­tion between you as the design­er and your edi­tors, allow­ing you to pol­ish and update the design whilst your edi­tors work on con­tent simultaneously.

What It Is

The face of InCopy CS3 (click to enlarge)(graphic cour­tesy Adobe)

InCopy CS3 is the lat­est iter­a­tion of the InCopy edi­to­r­i­al soft­ware, a word-processing adjunct to InDesign. In its CS3 incar­na­tion, as in past ver­sions, it shares the Creative Suite GUI regime–which, in CS3 means dock­able and com­bin­able panels–and deals with Illustrator and Photoshop-placed files native­ly. It shares a com­mon code base with InDesign, which means that quite a few fea­tures that InDesign has that affect chara­cater and para­graph for­mat­ting are there, and work similarly.

If one took InDesign, took out the lay­out func­tions, added network-based and e‑mail based col­lab­o­ra­tion fea­tures, and gave the Story Editor more cow­bell, you’d have InCopy. And that’s good news for edi­tors who need to work at the same time as designers.

Working As One

One of the biggest rea­sons to get and use InCopy CS3 is the col­lab­o­ra­tive fea­tures inher­ent. InCopy has always been nim­ble at net­work col­lab­o­ra­tion, and now it’s even more so at e‑mail based collaboration. 

With InCopy e‑mail assign­ments, you’re in the loop.

The design­er sets up assign­ments in InDesign CS3, using the Live Edit plu­g­in which con­nects InDesign to InCopy. The “Package for InCopy and Email” func­tion, new with InCopy CS3, col­lects and pack­ages InDesign CS3 Assignments for quick rout­ing to an e‑mail con­nect­ed edi­tor through your favorite e‑mail client. It works quick­ly and smooth­ly enough that it’s as near seam­less as e‑mail col­lab­o­ra­tion could be. What’s more, if the design­er has a change to make they can sim­ply repack­age and re-e-mail even before the edi­tor has returned their InCopy pack­age for inclu­sion into the file.

The design­er can design and the e‑mail based edi­tor can craft con­tent and copy­fit with­out hav­ing to drop what each oth­er is doing and con­fer, pro­vid­ing for tight col­lab­o­ra­tion even when no serv­er is available.

Everything You Need To Know

One of the rea­sons a pro­gram like InCopy exists is because if you’re an edi­tor, you might want some idea of how your con­tent looks in the design, but you typ­i­cal­ly won’t need to mess with the design. InCopy allows this, and keeps the con­tent you’re work­ing on “front and cen­ter” no mat­ter where it is in the lay­out, with gen­er­ous use of color-coding, “fad­ing back” of con­tent an edi­tor is not assigned to, and easy-to-spot “adorn­ments” on every assigned frame.

The var­i­ous view­ing modes–accessed by tabs in the main doc­u­ment window–allows the edi­tor to look at the con­tent three dif­fer­ent ways: Layout mode shows the con­tent in con­text; Story mode shows the sto­ry in a tex­tu­al dis­play, with infor­ma­tion about para­graph and char­ac­ter styles and col­umn inch­es along the left side, and Galley mode, which shows the text in a Story mode dis­play but con­strained by the lay­out specs. Each of the character-based dis­plays shows at a glance where the over­set text starts, and is cus­tomiz­able for just about any com­bi­na­tion of view­ing con­di­tions and com­fort demands (our favorite is the Terminal present–green text on black background–you just nev­er for­get your first green screen).

Capability by Design

InCopy shares a com­mon code base with InDesign. What this means for the edi­tor is that many new fea­tures found in InDesign can be found also in InCopy, such as Paragraph and Character Styles and Style Groups, which can be import­ed from oth­er doc­u­ments; map­ping MS-Word input styles; the improved Search func­tion­al­i­ty, inl­cud­ing GREP search­ing; the abil­i­ty to import Excel spread­sheets and tab-delimited text, and to style them quick­ly with Table and Cell Styles; InDesign’s new Text Variables; even Expanded Quick-Apply, which works exact­ly like the one that InDesign supports.

InCopy is a stand-alone pro­gram, which means an edi­tor work­ing with InDesign design­ers can get it and begin col­lab­o­rat­ing with them right away. It also func­tions as a fair­ly nifty stand-alone word-processor, with its InDesign-esque para­graph and char­ac­ter styling; it can even cre­ate con­tent for an InDesign lay­out with­out hav­ing the lay­out available–all the edi­tor needs to know is the size of the text area, and InCopy can cre­ate text to fit.

The Skinny

InCopy has grown and matured with InDesign to become a worth­while tool for the tool­box of any edi­tor work­ing with an InDesign-based lay­out artist. With the new e‑mail based col­lab­o­ra­tion tools, you don’t even need a file serv­er to take part–editors can get just what they need and no more, and once they have thi­er assign­ments, they can go to town with InDesign-styling: para­graphs, char­ac­ters, tables, and cells. 

InCopy is used by com­pa­nies like Woodwing in craft­ing pub­lish­ing solu­tions for the enter­prise, but you don’t have to be an enterprise-level cus­tomer to get the ben­e­fits of this CS3-level good­ness. A sin­gle seat of InCopy CS3 goes for US$249, and upgrades can be had from US$89.

InCopy has always been an impres­sive per­former with much to offer. InCopy CS3 works superbly and is worth the upgrade.

Check it out at Adobe, right here, right now.