What If InCopy Went Away?
Adobe InCopy is a pretty amazing word-processing tool, allowing people to edit text from an InDesign layout, or even start a new formatted text document from scratch. But what if it went away?*
I’ve been thinking recently about how these desktop client word processors are such a hassle. Instead, I’m getting quite fond of Adobe Buzzword, which is a word processor based on Flash. You can import and export RTF files, suitable for InDesign. It currently has a fatal flaw (it has no paragraph or character styles), but Buzzword is officially just still in beta, and Adobe has promised to add styles before too long.
But I just saw something even more interesting: the Flash 10-based TextLayout engine at Adobe Labs. This is a huge leap forward for Flash Text, but even more interesting, they claim to have “print-quality typography for the web.” Whatever that means, it does seem to support a great deal of InDesign’s text engine, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Adobe could even build InDesign’s text composition rules into it. Check out this demo.
So what if Buzzword got the Text Layout Framework, styles, and then… a link to InDesign. That link could come in all kinds of flavors, but one option might be a way to export a story to Buzzword and share it with others. They could then edit it and check it back in. You could then update the link and it would pull the buzzword story back into InDesign. No more InCopy. Just InDesign and Web browsers.
Or, since the Text Layout Framework is supported by AIR, we could just as easily have a standalone Buzzword AIR app (I call it InBuzzCopy) that connects to the cloud when it can, but (after downloading a file) doesn’t require being online to function.
Of course, then you hook that up to IDML (the XML-based indesign markup language), and the potential is endless. For example, what if we could hand off an IDML to InBuzzCopy, which could parse it, pull out all the relevant stories, let a translator convert them to French or whatever, and put them all back in a new IDML file, ready for you to open in InDesign.
Now I need to be clear: I haven’t heard anyone at Adobe even suggest that they’re doing any of this stuff. But I think it’d be cool if they did. I think InCopy is nifty, but doing this via The Cloud is the more elegant solution… as long as the Web tools support InDesign and its rich feature set well enough.
*(Anne-Marie, the Queen of InCopy, is going to freak when she reads this. I can only hope that she takes a picture of herself reacting. 
)
Yes, David, I tried the Text Layout demo a few days ago myself, and it’s amazing web/Flash technology! I’m with you regarding InCopy — despite that it might break dear Anne-Marie’s little heart! For we need to avoid that big, expensive ($250), complex beast like the plague — and give our clients an easy, affordable way to copy-edit our InDesign files.
David and Anne-Marie,
Does this wonderful technology work when the user is not connected to the web?
Are companies really going to trust their trade secrets to be hosted by some cloud application?
I have no fears that InDesign or InCopy will go away for Flash technology.
Especially since Adobe hasn’t been able to create CMYK colors in its current Flash Kuler panel.
I learned about this a few weeks ago … lips were/are sealed
… and I was very excited to hear about it! And more.
The reason (I think) InCopy is so cool is that it’s so easy to get integrate into so many workflows, for hardly any investment (compared to QPS et al) … and saves publications *so* much time and money in return.
“BuzzCopy” (love it) would be a logical next step! I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops.
Aw, dang… I was really hoping for some drama here from Anne-Marie. I’ll have to try harder next time.
Sandee: AIR apps can function away from the Web. Many companies are already trusting their documents to The Cloud. It’s all password protected, anyway.
I think what was exciting about this for me is that it shows that Flash is really now an Adobe technology, and that the team is serious about making it world class and applicable for both Web and print workflows. I have no doubt that they will make Kuler handle CMYK better (color managed, etc). CS4 is a bit of a clunky beginning, but I think we’ll start seeing exciting the CS5 and CS6 timeframes.
I’m with Sandee on this…until the whole world is connected to the web with ultra high speed connections that are 100% secure, Incopy is quite safe, IMO.
Actually, there are already a few online solutions with InDesign already that use InDesign Server. One is called K4 by Vjoon “formerly Softcare”. With K4 users can check out and edit files via a web browser.
The others are self built systems that use a custom flex interface that allows users input their own information into predefined templates that are processed behind the scenes and sent directly to print. Chris Kitchener and Olav Martin Kvern showcased a few different case studies at the master class on InDesign Server.
And finally dare it say it, Quarks QPS now even allows InDesign to work with its system that also allows users to use a web browser to checkout and edit stories just like K4 and InCopy.
David, were you at MAX? And I never even saw you? Pfff.
Lynn, no unfortunately I didn’t get to MAX. Oh well. Maybe next year!
Very interesting new Flex/Flash-based client-side-stuff is coming to make working with InDesign Server easier…. I havent seen anything published yet so I guess I can´t say more… be patient….=)
David. I’ve shared a somewhat similar wish with Adobe — to virtualise both InCopy and then a basic version of InDesign and also to provide the storage behind both. Once uploaded, or created online, documents won’t have to copied down when checked out. It would be like serving up InCopy and InDesign via a terminal server — you see only the screen presentations. This makes for a virtual publishing system. It makes sense that new publications might not want to invest in infrastructure, hardware and software when it could be buy this as a service and focus, instead, on content creation and marketing. Such a strategy will help Adobe profit from a print market in decline while that market transitions itself to the web. With a bit of tweaking that same virtual publishing system becomes an online content management system for web publishing. Harry
This is tres cool.
I’ve been babbling about something like BuzzCopy or InBuzz, to anyone who’d listen for a year and a half now, and pretty much begged Adobe guys for it at last year’s Max conference.
It just makes too much sense. And it could be amazingly powerful, if done right. With a Flex frontend using this Text Layout Framework, you could (I think–we’re still talking vaporware here) really build a web version of InCopy with whatever tools, fonts, styles, you wanted.
The slick trick will be hooking it up to a database of content and then pushing that into a template or IDML on ID server to make your PDFs etc. I talked a bit about at the conference in my INX-IDML session.
Here’s one example that’s not vaporware (I think it’s what you’re referrring to, Fritz):
http://branddoozie.com/demos_tutorials/doozie_demo.php
It’s a Flex frontend for creating your own branded materials. Basically InDesign Lite, in browser. I think the future of InDesign is going to be weird, wild, and wonderful. ID is going to be shattered into many different things. It’ll become a development platform instead of a desktop app.
Here’s a link to my rant on Publicious on this topic:
http://publicious.net/2008/10/15/you-heard-it-here-first/
David, great blog, I love these kind of reflections!
We at ulrich-media have good connections to censhare. It’s interesting that censhare is on the way to your scenario: they do already edit IDML. Today instead of AIR they are working with Java. But they know the advantages of AIR.
Greetings from our InDesign-Freak-Days at Berlin (Germany). This afternoon we are talking about IDML, ID-Server, AIR-Integration…
Haeme
I want buzz copy right now. If i had buzz copy. I would be able to take next week end off