Peter,

Are you saying that you have several clients whom you would want to have work with InCopy for a short period of time?

Why not buy your own copy of InCopy and then let them install it and activate for a while, and then de-activate after the job is done.

You could then let other clients use that copy. You could also charge them a small fee for the use of your copy of InCopy.

It wouldn’t take long for you to recoup your investment in the InCopy application.

And you wouldn’t have to worry about the legality of using the demo version. And you wouldn’t have to worry about the 30 day time limit.

However, since the word count is not affected by the length of the words in the text, I find the placeholder text method to be more accurate for short amounts of text (such as medium length image descriptions) since they are too short for the word lengths to cancel each other out on the average. This is also where the Lorem Ipsum’s paragraph length comes in handy since there are very few paragraph breaks that might affect the text length. But then again, neither method gives perfect results.

But then again, many Word users don’t know that there is a word count indicator in Word and end up counting words manually…

I’m just wondering — would it be legal to have a client install a trial version of InCopy and just email them the layout for their text as a CS3 assignment package? 30 days would more than suffice in most cases…

By the way, I think there is some kind of InDesign plugin that mimicks that Quark Jabberthing somewhere out there, I thinks it’s even free, but I don’t remember the link, though.

Another method to make sure that no placeholder text makes it into print I have seen some people use is to color any dummy text with a special temporary spot color swatch. If a pdf of just that spot color is exported with empty pages disabled, only things that have been missed show up. Or one could just search for that special color. The swatch is then deleted before the document goes into print.

Fascinating. I don’t remember early versions of the program doing that.

Sandee, ID does hyphenate the default placeholder text, even with US English (or any language) as the active language, even if the word’s not in its dictionary. So I think it’s got to be using some sort of generic hyphenation rules set in addition to the dictionary, no?

Lorem ipsum is not English. It won’t be hyphenated if hyphenation is turned on.

It is too dense compared to a real language. The words are much too long. It doesn’t give the right color for your settings.

I myself actually loved Quark’s Jabberwocky but I made my own text that used a lot of computer terms since that’s what I write about the most.

I even once took the Jabbered text from Quark, exported it, and then used it as my ID placeholder text.

It is much better than Lorem Ipsum but not too close to something that makes sense.

I think Anne-Marie’s fables are probably closer to what people write today.