Your prescription for increased productivity and profitability
It has been said that there is nothing that people fear more than change. This is especially true when it comes to a change in a production workflow. Consider a workflow where copywriters and editors use their text editor of choice (not InCopy). When you assign a story to a copywriter the only criteria may be “make it about 1000 words”. From there, you, the designer need to make whatever copy you receive fit. So you cut, squeeze, modify layout, add pull quotes; in other words, you do whatever you can to make the text fit, often at the sacrifice of your well thought out layout. But more importantly, with a substantial increase in production time. The time differential is of no concern to the copywriter, it was enough to have to try to come up with “about 1000 words.”
To keep your sanity, you decide to use InCopy now that it will be included with the applications in Creative Cloud.
When you announce that you will be using InCopy for text entry and editing, you may get a taste of the 1000 reasons copywriters and editors don’t want to make the change:
In defense, you may point out that this new editor will improve overall production.
The deal-maker for users accepting the workflow change will be when you show them how easy the process can be. You make it easy by doing some of the work for them and having them use a script. The script can open the assignment file and check out stories for editing. The script below is just one idea of how this can be done.
(*Opens file based on user name and checks out stories. Files are found based on files in folder containing the user's name. If more than one file is found, the user is given a list from which to choose the file. If no files are found, a dialog is presented and the script terminates.*) try set userName to getUserName() --get list of file names in working folder which contains name of user set publicFolder to path to public folder from user domain as string set workingFolder to publicFolder & "Newsletter:Newsletter Assignments" tell application "Finder" set nameList to name of files of folder workingFolder whose name contains userName end tell --If file is found, pass file path to handler to have InCopy open it if length of nameList = 1 then set filePath to workingFolder & ":" & item 1 of nameList openFile(filePath, userName) else if length of nameList = 0 then error ("No assignments for user " & userName) else set fileChoice to choose from list nameList if class of fileChoice = list then set filePath to workingFolder & ":" & item 1 of fileChoice openFile(filePath) end if end if on error errStr activate display alert (errStr) return end try --======== --HANDLERS --======== (*Opens file and checks out stories for assignment*) on openFile(filePath, userName) set myAssignment to missing value tell application "Adobe InCopy CC" set origPref to user interaction level of script preferences set user interaction level of script preferences to never interact open file filePath activate set docRef to document 1 set active page of window 1 to page 1 of docRef set view tab of window 1 to story view set user interaction level of script preferences to origPref set assignList to assignments of docRef repeat with i from 1 to length of assignList if user name of item i of assignList = userName then set myAssignment to item i of assignList exit repeat end if end repeat if myAssignment = missing value then error ("No assignment found for user " & userName) end if set myStories to assigned stories of myAssignment repeat with i from 1 to length of myStories set myStory to story reference of item i of myStories tell myStory to check out end repeat end tell end openFile (*Returns user name*) on getUserName() tell application "Adobe InCopy CC" set userName to user name end tell return userName end getUserName
The purpose of the script above is to demonstrate one way this part of the workflow could be handled. You may have another approach in mind, one which may incorporate a similar script. Because scripts are fairly lengthy, they will be posted for download from our website.
In the next blog, we will show you how to set up your document and assignments to make this workflow possible.