Special Report: InCopy CS2: In Production

A special six-part series introduces InCopy CS2, reviews the features and limitations to the InDesign/InCopy workflow, and explains why design and editorial both need to use InCopy CS2--beginning yesterday.

The InDesign/InCopy work­flow is an extreme­ly sim­ple, pow­er­ful, and, in col­lab­o­ra­tive creative-editorial envi­ron­ments like peri­od­i­cals and books, impor­tant leap for­ward with mas­sive bottom-line ramifications.

Every InDesign user knows that InDesign by itself boosts cre­ative free­dom, stream­lines pro­duc­tion method­olo­gies, and increas­es effi­cien­cy and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, but it brings lit­tle to the dynam­ic of design and non-design col­lab­o­ra­tion. This one-sided advan­tage is a bar­ri­er to wide­spread InDesign adop­tion in high-volume peri­od­i­cals and oth­er work­flows in which cre­atives and non-creatives work simul­ta­ne­ous­ly on projects. Adding InCopy to the work­flow unlocks the true pro­duc­tive poten­tial in envi­ron­ments where edi­to­r­i­al and cre­ative col­lab­o­rate to build a sin­gle pub­li­ca­tion. Yet in any InDesign 2, CS, or even CS2 books, InCopy rarely rates more than a brief men­tion in a resources appendix.

Few pro­fes­sion­al train­ers and con­sul­tants have ever seen InCopy, let alone employed it to pro­duce mission-critical pub­li­ca­tions in a pro­fes­sion­al col­lab­o­ra­tive envi­ron­ment and can offer expe­ri­enced, workflow-specific instruc­tion in it. We found less than a hand­ful, and I am one of them.

Even most arti­cles and Websites that men­tion InCopy con­tain lit­tle more than point­ers back to the basic resources on Adobe​.com. InCopy has nev­er been giv­en the atten­tion it deserves. After hav­ing used InCopy CS2 in our own projects and hav­ing replaced clients’ slow, redundancy-plagued work­flows with effi­cient, intu­itive InDesign-InCopy sys­tems, we here at Quark VS InDesign​.com feel like walk­ing door-to-door among the pub­lish­ing and adver­tis­ing world, hand­ing out free copies of this amaz­ing appli­ca­tion. Obviously can’t do that, so we’re going to do what we can do: We’re going to not only tell you about InCopy CS2, its func­tion and fea­tures, we’re going to show you how to use it—first from the per­spec­tive of a design­er mak­ing assign­ments and using assigned con­tent in InDesign, then from the per­spec­tive of a writer or edi­tor, open­ing InCopy and work­ing with assigned content.

So, exact­ly what is InCopy CS2? What makes it a threat to Word’s stran­gle­hold on pro­fes­sion­al edi­to­r­i­al and copy­writ­ing? How did one major book pub­lish­er shave a full 10 weeks off the pro­duc­tion of a title? And, most impor­tant­ly, how can you use InCopy today?

Part 1 In a six-part series of spe­cial reports begin­ning with “InCopy CS2, the World; World, InCopy CS2” on Friday, 14 October 2005, Quark VS InDesign​.com will 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.

Part 2 In part two, “A Newsletter Designer Looks At InCopy CS2,” Samuel John Klein pro­vides 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.

Part 3 Part three is a case study of the migra­tion of the pro­pos­al gen­er­a­tion process of a real-world land devel­op­er from four sep­a­rate depart­ments work­ing lin­ear­ly and redun­dant­ly in InDesign and dis­parate appli­ca­tions, to a par­al­lel InDesign-InCopy work­flow. “Proposing Efficiency with InCopy CS2” details the expe­ri­ence of Omega Industrial Environs, a fic­tion­al com­pa­ny based upon an actu­al multi-national land devel­op­ment firm, as they leap their mul­ti­ple depart­ment work­flow to InCopy CS2. The Acme Industrial Environs work­flow includes design­ers lay­ing out graph­i­cal­ly rich 250–600 page pro­pos­al books, brochures, and DVD-hosted web con­tent that include edi­to­r­i­al con­tent from a team of pro­pos­al writ­ers; finan­cial charts, graphs, and tables from the account­ing team, and; floor­plans, maps, and schemat­ics from the engi­neer­ing and archi­tec­ture teams. With copy, finan­cial data, and even tech­ni­cal draw­ings chang­ing through­out the pro­pos­al process up to the very last moment, the exit­ing Omega Industrial Environs work­flow put tremen­dous strain on the lay­out depart­ment to con­stant­ly update and revise large por­tions of the pro­pos­al books. By migrat­ing from Word to InCopy and writ­ing a few cus­tom scripts, Omega Industrial Environs removed the bur­den of updat­ing oth­er depart­ments’ con­tent from the shoul­ders of the cre­ative team, speed­ing the pro­pos­al gen­er­a­tion process and leav­ing the cre­atives to focus on what they do best.

Part 4 â€œHow-To: InDesign/InCopy Collaboration: the Designer,” part four of the series, is a hands-on tuto­r­i­al from the per­spec­tive of the cre­ative. It will explain step-by-step how the cre­ative team ini­ti­ates, con­trols, and con­cludes a typ­i­cal InDesign/InCopy workflow.

Part 5 Next, in part five, “How-To: InDesign/InCopy Collaboration: the Editor,” is a hands-on tuto­r­i­al writ­ten for and from the per­spec­tive of the edi­tor or writer. It explains step-by-step how to use InCopy with­out hav­ing to become a lay­out artist.

Part 6 Capping off our spe­cial series is “InCopy CS2: Bigger than the Box.” Although InCopy is avail­able as a stand­alone appli­ca­tion for small cre­ative and edi­to­r­i­al teams, it was ini­tial­ly conceived—and con­tin­ues to thrive—as the foun­da­tion for robust third-party edi­to­r­i­al plat­forms. We’ll talk with some of the com­pa­nies inte­grat­ing cus­tom InCopy- and InDesign-based sys­tems into large work­flows, as well as exam­ine the spe­cif­ic needs sat­is­fied by those pub­lish­ing platforms.

If you think InDesign alone is a great inno­va­tion in print pub­lish­ing, wait until you see what it can do with a lit­tle help from its friends. The most indepth cov­er­age of InCopy CS2 avail­able any­where begins Friday–only on Quark VS InDesign​.com,