Your prescription for increased productivity and profitability
With all the benefits that come with using Adobe InCopy to edit text for InDesign, one may wonder why some workflows are not centered around its use. This is especially true, now that InCopy is included with Creative Cloud.
One reason might be that it is generally believed to be designed specifically for design-first workflows where copy is written to fit the constraints of a pre-determined design.
Contrary to the idea that InCopy works best with Design-First Workflows, is the fact that one of the strengths of the InCopy/InDesign workflow is its flexibility. There are actually any number of ways a workflow can be put together. With a little imagination, you can customize how they work together, seamlessly, to fit just the way you want to work.
On top of this there are the well-known advantages:
Powerful Text Formatting. The big benefit for using InCopy is that it uses the same text engine as InDesign. This means that in addition to having the benefit of InDesign’s powerful text formatting features, what you see in InCopy will be what you get in InDesign.
Collaborative Workflow. When an InCopy document is placed in an InDesign document it retains its link to the original, allowing a two-way collaborative workflow between designer and editorial.
Copyfit Information. Stories can be written (or edited) to fit the needs of the final document, or tagged with copyfit information to aid in planning the final document.
Scriptability. As with InDesign, InCopy’s dictionary is exposed to scripting. Just about anything you can do in InCopy can be done with a script. This means that you may design a workflow in which your editors will need to learn little more than a few keyboard shortcuts.
Today more and more publishers are relying on outsourced collaborative workflows. With this comes the possibility of text being submitted in any number of application formats, most notably Microsoft Word, TextEdit, or Apple’s Pages.
For this workflow, you will want the submitted text files to be placed in a common folder, perhaps DropBox or other network service. The ideal way to work with these documents is to use an InCopy template to create the document into which the text file will be placed. The template defines column width and text styles so styling and text fitting can be accomplished with little additional work on the part of the editor. The following step by step illustrates:
The following script outline can be used as a starting point for your own PlaceTextFile script. The script relies on the InCopy template having paragraph and character styles established for text styling. Paragraph styles that have a next style established are in a named paragraph style group defined by the variable styleGroupName. With the template created and saved in a specified location, we can use the following.
(*Establish variables*) global styleList global myStyleGroup set styleGroupName to "Crossroads" (*Define default location from which to choose the text file for editing. The following uses a folder inside Dropbox. Change this as needed for your setup.*) set parentPath to (path to home folder from user domain) as string set folderPath to parentPath & "Dropbox:ArticleSubmission" set dLocation to folderPath as alias (*Have user select the file to edit from this location*) try activate set textFileRef to choose file with prompt "Select file for editing" default location dLocation on error display alert "User Cancelled" return end try (*Define where template is located. The following uses a template named 2Column.icmt in a folder named Templates inside the application folder for InCopy. Again, change this as needed for your setup.*) tell application "Adobe InCopy CC 2014" set appPath to (file path as string) set templatePath to appPath & "Templates" set templateAlias to (templatePath & ":" & "2Column.icmt") as alias end tell (*Create a new document using the template. See docFromTemplate handler below*) set {docRef, styleList} to docFromTemplate (templateAlias, styleGroupName) (*Place the text file chosen into the document. See placeStory handler below*) placeStory (textFileRef, docRef) (*Style the text if styling chosen. See styleStory handler below*) if length of styleList > 0 then set chosenStyle to getStyleListChoice () if chosenStyle is not missing value then styleStory (docRef, chosenStyle) end if end if (*HANDLERS*) on docFromTemplate (templateRef, styleGroupName) tell application "Adobe InCopy CC 2014" set docRef to open templateRef tell docRef set myStyleGroup to paragraph style group styleGroupName set styleList to name of every paragraph style of myStyleGroup end tell activate end tell return {docRef, styleList} end docFromTemplate on placeStory (textFileRef, docRef) tell application "Adobe InCopy CC 2014" set storyRef to story 1 of docRef tell insertion point 1 of storyRef place textFileRef end tell end tell end placeStory on styleStory (docRef, chosenStyle) tell application "Adobe InCopy CC 2014" tell docRef set storyRef to story 1 set thisStyle to paragraph style chosenStyle of myStyleGroup set textRef to (object reference of paragraph 1 of storyRef) set paraCount to count of paragraphs of storyRef repeat with i from 1 to paraCount set applied paragraph style of paragraph i of storyRef to thisStyle set nextStyle to next style of thisStyle set thisStyle to nextStyle end repeat activate end tell end tell end styleStory on getStyleListChoice () activate set chosenStyle to choose from list styleList with prompt "Select Text Styling" without multiple selections allowed if class of chosenStyle is list then return item 1 of chosenStyle else return missing value end if end getStyleListChoice
If your publication uses more than one column width you may wish to have a template for each situation. In this event, you will want to give your user the option of choosing the template from which the document is created.
Assign a keyboard shortcut for the script (Option+Shift+D suggested). You may also want to assign a keyboard shortcut to a script that cleans the text of double spaces, tab indents, double hyphens, and so on.
Now, all the editor needs to do is key in the shortcut to have the script open the template and create the document. Next, the editor chooses the file to edit from the list of files presented.
With the file placed, the user now selects styling for the story from the list of styles presented.
The text is edited and checked for spelling (Command+I).
For the final check, it is advised that the user switch to Layout view (Command+L). Here it is easy to see how story will look and determine its length.
The user can then save the story as an .icml file using the story length as part of the file’s naming convention.
Now that you have an overview of working with InCopy, you might want to explore some of its more esoteric features:
Glyph panel (Type > Glyphs) For all those special characters that are hard to find on the keyboard
Document setup (File > Document Setup) To change column width and text depth for copy fitting information.
Notes (Notes menu) Create, alter, or delete note, convert text to note, and more.