Exporting Final PDFs from InCopy: Yes, With Gotchas
Many users want to know if editors — the InCopy users — can use the program to create “final” PDFs of the InDesign layouts they’re editing. I don’t mean press-ready PDFs for a commercial printer (they’ll leave that up to the InDesign users); but the “straight to DVD” ones that are going to be distributed [...]
InCopy Templates: Page Size and Content Area
A hard-working staffer asked for help with InCopy templates: We are a simple mass market paperback company and would like to create InCopy templates that mimics our final book. I do not seem to be able to create an InCopy document that has a proper Text area. E.g. Document Setup: Text Area should be 23p [...]
Q&A from the InCopy Tips Webinar, Part 2
Picking up where I left off, here are some more great questions (and my answers) that the attendees of my InCopy Tips & Techniques webinar had during and after the main presentation. Q: Can you only create packages in InDesign? A: I know you’re referring to e-mail-based Assignments, aka InCopy packages (INCP in CS3, or [...]
Q&A from the InCopy Tips Webinar, Part 1
We had a great crowd at last month’s webinar, InCopy/InDesign Tips and Tricks! People logged in from all over the world and with all sorts of publishing backgrounds. Since no one dropped out during the 90 minute session, and everyone rated the session “good” or “great” in the poll at the end, I’d say it [...]
Using InCopy to Clean Up Word Files
Tom, a journalism professor and InDesign/InCopy user, e-mailed me about his interesting use of InCopy as kind of a “Word cleaner plug-in:” Because I like and understand InDesign and have had quirky problems using Word files, I’ve come up with a new workflow that puts InCopy in the middle. Quickly: I edit in Word then [...]
Jump Stories Between InDesign Files
Sumil wrote: How can two newspaper pages (in two InDesign files) share a common InCopy file. So that one half of the story flows in the first page and rest in the second page. These are called jump stories in my part of the world. Is such a thing possible without using any additional plug-ins? Sumil’s [...]
3 Often Overlooked Features in InCopy
I really enjoy recording videos about InCopy, and writing articles about it, because I can luxuriate (yes, luxuriate) with the practically unlimited amount of time and space I have to get across what I want to get across. But when I’m on-site, training a company’s publication staff in the IC/ID workflow, I’m hyper-aware of the [...]
Give a Little Air to the Editors
Here’s an interesting tip I thought some of you could use. A few clients of mine have their designers routinely extend text frame depth into white space below (below the point where they actually prefer the text to end), sometimes into the pasteboard. Then they use ruler guides to show the editors where the text [...]
InCopy’s Hidden Dictionaries
InCopy’s hyphenation and spell-checking routines are automatically set to the default language on your computer, such as US-English on most InCopy installs in the USA. Therefore, when you run a spell-check (or you turn on Dynamic Spelling from the Edit > Spelling flyout menu, as I’ve done here), foreign words and phrases will likely be [...]
Paragraph Indents in Story/Galley
You can identify paragraph starts and ends in Galley/Story view by turning on Hidden Characters so you can see the non-printing characters like paragraph symbols, tab chevrons and spacebar dots within the text. Any line ending with a paragraph symbol is the end of that paragraph. To turn on Hidden Characters, click the pilcrow — [...]