InCopy Workflow Posts

Are there people at your workplace who don’t use InDesign but occasionally need to open native InDesign layouts — perhaps to check the filename of an image it uses, to make a print-out or PDF, or pick up some copy from an old project for pasting into an e-mail or Word file?
Install InCopy CS2 on [...]

Is this Cell Height season or something? Suddenly I’m receiving lots of requests for help in dealing with overset table cells. David is as well, as you can see from his recent post, “Hidden Limits of Table Cell Heights.”
David’s story was about the default Maximum Table Cell Height in Cell Options, but the questions I’ve [...]

In episode 31 of David’s and my podcast, the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week was “Notes.” We talked about how the installation CD comes with a free Notes plug-in that’s meant for InCopy/InDesign workflows, but it works perfectly well in InDesign all by itself — InCopy is not needed. You should listen to that podcast (fast-forward towards the end, when we cover the Obscurity, if you want) to hear the details of this neat little tool.

But thinking about it some more since then — and prompted by a post about it on the InDesign listserv — I thought of a few more details that I didn’t get a chance to fully cover in the podcast.

Craig writes:

Though I never used it myself, the same company that sells the Blacklining XT for QuarkXPress, EMS (“software development for publishers”) now has a version for Adobe InDesign CS2, Mac or Windows platforms. You can download a demo of the plug-in …

While it doesn’t appear that my particular gripe-of-the-moment was solved, Adobe has just released a free update to 4.04 that does squash a large number of bugs and problems that people have been experiencing. In particular, it appears that the behavior around images that have had their canvas size changed in Photoshop has been resolved. That is, Adobe “fixed” a problem in 4.03, many customers complained about the “fix,” and Adobe has quickly responded by removing the “fix” and returning to how InDesign worked in 4.02.

As I read through the 4.04 notes, I see that dozens of other issues have been resolved, too. Note that you should be able to update InDesign from within the program by choosing Help > Update. However, as I type this, that doesn’t appear to be working yet. Alternately, you can visit the 4.04 update page Mac OS X or Windows.

Adobe released InDesign 4.0.3 and InCopy 4.0.3 for both Macintosh and Windows today. The latest patch fixes a number of bugs and glitches with graphics, text, converting documents, and “performance” (slow downs and unexpected quits).
InCopy CS2 users will be especially interested in this update since according to the ReadMe that accompanies the update, 4.03 squashes [...]

The problem: InCopy users can’t edit any text in an InDesign layout until the designer has explicitly selected the text frames the editors need to work on and exported them to InCopy format. But InDesign’s “Export All Stories to InCopy” (seems like a logical choice, no?) exports every text frame on the master pages as well as the document pages to InCopy format. Which means that every folio, every header, every footer, etc. becomes an entry in the Assignments palette. And editors sometimes inadvertently edit master page text frames in InCopy. Not good.

You know how it is when you go crazy trying to fix something with software, and then days later someone informs you, “oh yeah it’s a known problem. That’s how it actually works”? Man, I hate it when that happens. So I thought I’d kick off the InCopy Workflow section with two such pesky problems that a number of my InCopy/InDesign clients have asked me about.

Known problem #1: Folios aren’t accurate

Say you start with a 48-page InDesign document using automatic page numbers (folios) on the master pages. You create an Assignment of a few stories on pages 22-23 using the default type of Assignment (Assigned Spreads) [...]