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InCopy
Adobe InCopy is a standalone application, purchased separately, that provides robust text-editing tools for non-designers. Like Story Editor, InCopy focuses almost entirely on the words and is intended to be used by the editors and writers who work side by side with designers. At less than half the price of InDesign, it’s more cost effective to give editors and writers InCopy instead of InDesign. Although InCopy has nearly all the features of a normal word processor, such as Microsoft Word, it also provides some important advantages.
First, it’s fully integrated with InDesign—for example, the menus and commands for editing and formatting text are identical. When you open an InDesign file or assignment within InCopy, you have direct access to all the Paragraph and Character styles and color swatches stored in the document. Second, InCopy provides a direct connection to the other people involved in your workflow—keeping track of who is currently working on it, what changes have been made, and then updating the layout or text as necessary. Finally, nothing beats InCopy’s advantage of working in the actual layout, especially when you need an accurate visual to fit text into a tight space, wrapping it around graphics and other stories.
The XML features in InCopy are almost the same as those in InDesign. For example, InCopy has both a Structure pane and a Tags panel. And tags and elements can be created, edited, imported, and applied exactly the same way you do as in InDesign and Story Editor.
So, in this section, we don’t waste time repeating the ways these programs are similar; instead, we briefly describe the ways these applications differ. If you need a refresher course in tagging or XML structure, turn back to the earlier descriptions of the XML features in InDesign and Story Editor.
Basically, the program has four methods of working with XML. InCopy can:
- Open an InDesign document to edit or add XML structure.
- Open an InDesign assignment or InCopy .INCX file to edit or add XML structure.
- Open an XML file directly.
- Create an XML file from scratch.
Installing InCopy Plug-Ins in InDesign
The capability of creating, editing, and opening InCopy assignments and files is an add-on feature to InDesign enabled through plug-ins. These features are installed automatically in CS3, but you have to add the plug-ins manually for CS2. The plug-ins are stored on the Resources and Extras disc in the CS2 disc set or on Disc One in the stand-alone version of InDesign CS2, as seen in Figure 2.72.
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Opening an InDesign Document with InCopy
Open xml_interface_9.indd using InCopy. Here you see the Layout view of InCopy. Can you see the similarities between InCopy and InDesign, such as the Structure pane and Tags panel and their respective menus? Although InCopy users can’t create or modify the layout, they can open the actual InDesign file itself and work on the text either on the page or within Story or Galley view. However, there’s one catch: Before the InCopy user can make any changes, the InDesign user must first create an assignment or export the layout content to InCopy .INCX files. In Figure 2.73 you can see the InCopy Assignment Available icon above the main text frame.
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Opening an InCopy Assignment
InCopy provides three working spaces: Layout view, Story view, and Galley view. Layout view shows the actual page layout of the InDesign document, including text, pictures, graphics, margins, and column geometry, as seen in Figure 2.73. The exact amount of detail is determined by the InDesign user, who controls access by making the assignments. In Figure 2.74 you see Story view, which is similar to Story Editor in InDesign. It provides access only to the words within a story, whether it’s in a single frame or a set of linked text frames. InCopy’s Galley view also provides access to the words with the added benefit that it depicts the line breaks or line count as they appear in the actual InDesign layout. Once in an InCopy workflow, you can’t modify anything in the document until you check it out for editing as shown in Figure 2.74.
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Opening an XML File
We don’t know or understand why, but InCopy has no ability to import XML. (It probably has something to do with the fact that InCopy cannot create text frames or pages in the InDesign layout). If you want XML in your layout, you first have to import it using InDesign. However, unlike InDesign, InCopy can open XML files directly (Figure 2.75). In a pinch, InCopy can be used as an XML editor, allowing you to assign, create, or delete tags, edit and restructure content, and do whatever else you need to do to prepare the file for use in your workflow.
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Creating XML in InCopy
In Figure 2.76 you see the Export dialog (File > Export) showing XML as one of the possible file formats the program can create. In Chapter 3 we’ll show you how to create XML content in InCopy as well as several other programs. To get a full appreciation of the features and utility of InCopy, check out The Adobe InCopy CS2 Book (Adobe Press) or the DVD and online training available from Lynda.com and Totaltraining.com.
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