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 ICAP in CS4) or assignment packages; and the answer is “essentially, yes.” Only InDesign can initiate the remote workflow by creating an InCopy package “from scratch,” that is, from a regular assignment in a layout. An InCopy user can’t do this; they can’t decide on the fly, “Oh I think I’ll work on this from home, I’ll send it to myself.” However, if an InCopy user receives a package from a designer and opens it in InCopy; then she can create another package from it. She can either return it to the designer as an InDesign package, or repackage it into another InCopy package, assumably for another editor (by choosing Forward to InCopy from her Assignments panel).

Can you explain again why the remote workflow won’t work with remote designers?

Well, I suppose it can, if the remote (offsite) designer keeps the layout on their home computer, creates assignments there, and then sends out e-mail-based assignments (InCopy packages) to the editors (and they return InDesign packages back to her).  In other words, if you keep the workflow all remote, it can work.  I actually have a few clients, some with over 60 people around the country, who are putting together publications in this way.

But when people ask this, they almost always have something different in mind. They’re thinking that the designer could “bring work home” by sending a package to himself at the end of the day, or that the editors could unpack the packages on the server since they’re all on the network, or that a production manager could create an InDesign package for a subcontracted, off-site designer. None of those work.

When the editor opens the INCP file, can you change where it unzips itself – so it’s unzipped onto a shared drive?

No, that’s built-in to the system. On PCs, the INCP (or ICAP) unzips itself into the user’s My Documents > InCopy Assignments folder; on Macs, into the user’s Documents > InCopy Assignments folder. (The first time an InCopy user opens a package, the software creates the InCopy Assignments folder on its own in those locations.) The contents of the package are copied to a folder named the same as the assignment itself. So if you look at the InCopy Assignments folder, you can see a folder representing every assignment package you ever opened in InCopy. I’m not sure why you’d want to put the contents onto a shared drive automatically, but you could always move the unpacked folder to a shared drive manually.

When we tried the remote workflow, we had a problem with elements from the Master Pages randomly “migrating” onto the layout pages. This caused the layout to be edited to contain a mess of elements that was unusable for the remote editor. Have you encountered this? Is there anyway to prevent it?

Sorry, I’ve never encountered that before. The only things that should be editable in an InCopy package are the stories that the designer associated with the assignment. The packaging step itself has nothing to do with master page items, it’s more like a “copy files and zip them up” operation. So before you package, turn on View > Show Assigned Frames to help identify them in the layout, and make sure you haven’t inadvertently included master page items in the assignment you’re about to package.

How secure is Dropbox?

Dropbox, the virtual server solution I demo’d as an alternative to the remote workflow (or even as an alternative to a local server), is quite secure. All uploads/downloads are done over an encrypted (SSL) channel, and files stored on Dropbox are also encrypted. You can read more details about Dropbox security here.

What was the format of the file you put on dropbox, i.e. was it a .incp?

No, there’s no need to use InCopy packages when you and a remote user are sharing a folder via Dropbox. You just treat the folder on your hard drive as though it was a folder on a local server. In the webinar I just put the full project folder in my Dropbox folder: the InDesign layout file (INDD), the assignment files, the linked InCopy stories, the whole shebang. Remote InCopy users open the layout or assignment from their Dropbox folder and check stories in/out as usual. It’s a miracle, I tell ya! (Except: Remember that Dropbox inexplicably allows two InDesign users to open the same layout file at once. So don’t do that.)

The InCopy Notes feature seems to be glitchy. Sometimes difficult to get the new note icon to light up. Also clicking on the note icon in Layout view does not always bring up the note in the notes panel. Comments?

The Notes feature could stand some improvement, I agree.  I don’t think it’s glitchy, though, just … hmmm … guess I’d call it “high maintenance.”   First, in order to see the icon for a note in Layout view, you have to remember that it’ll be the same cap height as the text in which it was placed. So the Note icon for 6 pt. photographer’s credit line will be like a flea speck; but the Note icon for a 60 pt. headline will be huge. I seldom bother looking for these visually; just go to the Notes menu (or open the Notes panel from the Window menu) and choose Next Note. InCopy will put the text cursor next to the note and center it onscreen. You can cycle through all the notes in a document by just using the Next/Previous Note commands.

To get the Notes panel to open when you click on the icon, you have to get your cursor hovering over the top half of the Notes icon (the downward pointing triangle), so you might need to zoom in first to see where that is. When it’s hovering in the right spot, the cursor changes to a pointing finger. Now you can click and the Notes panel will open. See? High maintenance.

———

Hoo-boy! I told you they were great questions, yes? Final part 3 (with questions about master pages, conditional text, and package errors) coming up tomorrow!

As promised, attendees, I grabbed the entire transcript from the Chat window so I could make sure and answer all your questions, which I do so below to the first section. Some of these I already covered during the 30 minute Q&A — I’ll still reprise the answers here for the benefit of my blog readers.

Q: Would you say again how do you set up layout view as default?

A: Start up InCopy but don’t open any files. Choose Layout View from the View menu. It should now carry a checkmark (before, Story View had the checkmark). From now on, when you open files they’ll open in Layout view.

If you change the default font in galley/story, will it apply to all documents you open or just the one you’re working in?

It will apply to all documents, period, even after you quit InCopy and start it up again.

Can you format paint — copy formats from one bit of text to another?

No, unfortunately you can’t. There’s no Format Paint tool like in Word, nor an Eyedropper tool like in InDesign. Maybe next version! In the meantime, though,  remember your friend, Quick Apply (Command-Return or Control-Enter), which I demo’d in the webinar. Very fast way to apply formatting.

When you showed how to ”Arrange New Window”, how did you then go to a split screen so that both views were shown on same open file?

Choosing Window > Arrange > New Window adds the new “clone” of the first window so you can have 2 different views of the same document. To see both windows at the same time, in CS3 choose Window > Arrange > Tile Vertically (or Horizontally). In CS4 you can use the Arrange Documents widget in the Application bar across the top and choose a window arrangement.

Can you assign text on one layer but not another (e.g. localized versions with text on different layers)?

In InDesign, the user can assign a text frame to a specific layer. You can’t do that in InCopy, but in your Layers panel you’ll see the frames are on those layers, and you can Hide/Show the individual layers the designer added. So the designer can set up localized versions of text on different layers, and the editor can show/hide these at will.

In CS4, the new Conditional Text feature lets you hide/show text selections, instead of entire frames, a very powerful feature and ideal for many multilingual publications. The InDesign user can create the conditions in the panel, and the InCopy users can assign text selections to the conditions as well as hide/show the conditional text.  I demo’d this in the webinar.

We work across several sites where we have our own servers. Is there a way to get In Copy Assignments folder to redirect to be placed on server rather than individual hard drives?
[And]
Can you change where the icma file is stored so it’s on a network drive — not C:?

By default, InDesign creates the assignment folder inside the folder containing the layout. So if the designers have opened a layout on their individual hard drives, then InDesign defaults to saving the assignments in the subfolder it creates on that same hard drive. If you can get the designers to work off the server, then InDesign will save the assignments there too.

Sorry, but I don’t know of any way to force InDesign to automatically export the assignments to a location other than the default, though I suppose (like anything), it can be scripted. As I showed in the webinar, designers who want to work on the layout locally need to use the Change button in the New Assignment dialog box to choose a different location for the assignments folder, its assignments, and the content folder (and its exported stories) too.

Why are icma file dates not updated with each use and save of changes?

Not quite sure what you mean here. ICMA files (CS4 assignment files) and INCA files (CS3 assignments) aren’t updated every time you update the INDD file, that’s one of the advantages of using an Assignments-based workflow.  It’s only if the designer makes a change to the InCopy frames in an Assignment (such as changing their size, or adding new/deleting existing) that the little yellow ‘Update me!” icon appears next to that assignment’s name.

If the designer made a change to other elements on the spread, or to things not part of the assignment at all, then there’s no need to update the assignment. Thus the editor isn’t bothered by constant “Out of Date” messages for the layout as the designer saves changes to the InDesign file. However it does mean that the designer needs to pay attention to the status of their assignments in the Assignments panel as they work on the layout, and to keep updating assignments as necessary.

OR maybe you’re thinking that when the InCopy user saves changes, the assignment file should show a new modification date? A common misconception. Actually, there’s no possible way an InCopy user can change anything about the assignment file (or a layout file, if they’ve opened an INDD document). That’s why the command in InCopy is “Save Content” and not simply “Save” like every other program.

The InCopy user is actually saving changes to the external, linked InCopy stories (the INCX or ICML files) that the assignment or layout is giving them access to. So if you look in the project’s folder where the linked story files are contained, you will see the modification dates update as the InCopy user saves changes. But only the InDesign user can modify (and save changes to) the assignment and layout files themselves.

You can read Part 2 here.

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 later open the file in InCopy where I do all of my formatting, knowing it will be there when I place the InCopy file in InDesign.

That was pretty neat … and I know that using InCopy to “prep” Word files for InDesign is standard practice  in a lot of my client’s workflows.

Tom had a question about something, though:

I have a workspace named Newsletter, and InCopy opens in that workspace. But when I open a story from Word, all of my paragraph styles, etc., disappear and I have to take a second to reload them. I’ve tried saving the workspace with the paragraph styles open, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

As Tom discovered, paragraph styles (or any styles) that are within the panel are ignored when you create and save a workspace. Instead, the styles panels list the styles contained in the active document, regardless of which workspace you switch to. If the program is running but no documents are open, the styles panel lists the application’s default styles (usually, only [Basic Paragraph]). When you create a new blank document, the new file contains the same default styles.

So what Tom did was to add his custom Newsletter styles to InCopy’s paragraph styles panel when no documents were open, which turned them into default styles, a clever and time-saving solution.

And indeed it would work great if he were writing newsletter articles from scratch in new InCopy files. But he wasn’t doing that — he was converting existing Word docs to InCopy. And in that case, the converted file is counted as an existing file, so the paragraph styles panel only shows the styles contained in that active document — the styles that were in the Word file.Yuk!

The solution, as I replied to Tom, was to simply stop converting Word files into InCopy format. (”Doctor, it hurts when I do this with my arm.” “Stop doing that.” Ba dum-bum!)

Instead, to retain custom styles, you should import (File > Place) them into new, blank InCopy files. Remember that new InCopy files contain default styles, including any custom ones you added to the defaults. Importing a Word file will just add the Word styles (if that’s what you want) to the paragraph styles panel. Your custom styles remain intact, ready for applying to the text.

Also, as long as you remember to turn on the checkbox for Show Import Options during the import (or hold down the Shift key when clicking the Open button, which is the equivalent):

… then you’ll still get the same Word Import Options dialog box as you would with the conversion method:

At this point you could even choose the Customize Style Import option at the bottom to map Word styles to your custom InCopy styles … now you’re cookin’!

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 question reminded me of the ingenious solution that Russell Viers, InDesign trainer/newspaper expert extraordinaire, came up with recently for this exact situation.

Essentially, you link the same InCopy file (ICML) to the two InDesign layouts, and then use the Conditional Text feature in InDesign/InCopy CS4 to show/hide text at the jump. So, no plug-in is necessary (nor do I know of any that would do this), but you do need the current CS4 version of InDesign and InCopy .

You can read Russell’s step-by-step instructions in this post on InDesignSecrets.com, the sister site to this one.

Curious about the Conditional Text feature? You’ll find a 10-minute video on using Conditional Text in InCopy CS4 in my ID/IC CS4 Workflow title on Lynda.com. (Scroll down to Chapter 7, “Advanced Text Editing in InCopy” to find the link.) But to really do a deep dive into the topic, check out the five videos (about 40 minutes total) in the Chapter 4: Conditional Text chapter in my InDesign CS4 New Features title.

In neither case, though, do I show that uber-cool solution that Russell Viers came up with. The guy’s a genius!

But when I’m on-site, training a company’s publication staff in the IC/ID workflow, I’m hyper-aware of the clock. These are busy people I’m training, and our time is limited to the day or two we set aside to work together. So I’m always keeping an eye on the time display on my computer, adjusting the content on the fly, to make sure I cover the material most critical to this particular company’s success with their first projects.

Here are three features that I’m often forced to skip during training. They’re not critical to anyone’s success, but they’re useful nonetheless. (I console myself with the thought that users really can’t appreciate their utility until they have a few InCopy projects under their belt, anyway.)

Number One: Rename Stories

Any InDesign or InCopy user can rename the stories in the Assignments panel so they make more sense. It’s easy: Just check the story out, then click once on its name. The current name becomes selected in an editing box, and whatever you type replaces the selection. For instance, in a feature article, you might want to change the automatic names InDesign used for its stories, “Magazine-Blah,” “Magazine-Blahblah,” and “Magazine-Blahba” to something more human, like “Headline,” “Body,” and “Sidebar.”

Here’s an assignment named “Basketball Meet” with the default story names:

And after renaming the stories in the panel:

Doing so doesn’t rename the linked InCopy files on the server, just in the interface, so you don’t have to worry about breaking any links. Best of all, through the magic of a little XML file that’s created in the background, your new names stick with the file — whoever opens the document in InDesign or InCopy will see the custom names. And they’ll thank you.

Number Two: Edit the Toolbars

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a dropdown list of paragraph styles in a toolbar, a la Microsoft Word? You can make this happen in InCopy (but not in InDesign … drat!). In InCopy, find the Paragraph Styles panel (it’s probably in the dock on the right side of the monitor) and drag its name to any empty area in the top or bottom toolbar. When you see a vertical blue line appear at the left of the empty area, release the mouse button. Done.

To convert it back to a floating, dockable panel, drag it out of the toolbar by its handle, a dark grey vertical strip to the left of its section in the toolbar .

You can even create a completely new toolbar. Drag a panel name directly under the top toolbar or above the bottom one until you see a long blue horizontal line appear, then release the mouse button. A new toolbar is created and the controls in the panel you were dragging appear within it.

Not all panels can become toolbars, but try it with your favorites. It’s amazing how much time you can save by placing the controls you use most often in more convenient locations for you. To save the new arrangement, choose Window > Workspace > Save Workspace, and name it.

Number Three:  View Story and Layout Side-by-Side

The three views available to InCopy users — Galley, Story, and Layout — are great, but they’d be even more useful if you could see them side-by-side once in a while, instead of flipping between the tabs. You might want to edit copy in Story view, for example, but would like to see how your edits affect the Layout view as you work.

You can do that by creating multiple windows for the same document. Start by selecting one of the views you want in the current document window—let’s say Story, for this example. Now, go to the Window menu and choose Arrange > New Window. You’ll see a duplicate window appear in the same View mode as the original window.  It’s important to note that you’re not duplicating any files here, you’re just opening up more views of the same file. Whatever you do in one window is replicated in the other window, and in the single document both are showing you.

The new window has the same View mode active as the other one, so switch its view to Layout. Also, the window is overlapping the original one, so choose Window > Arrange > Tile Vertically. InCopy resizes both windows so they fit completely on your monitor, side-by-side.

Now, as you edit text in one window (in Story view), your edits are immediately reflected in the other window (in Layout view). You may need to click in the other window occasionally to see a cleaner view of your changes, the screen redraw can get a little wonky.

There is one limitation to this method: The windows don’t scroll concurrently. (That’s actually a feature, not a bug — it means you can edit a story in one window and see how it affects the jump in the other window in real time.) For same-page edits, this method works great, but if you’re moving around the document in one window and want the other window to keep up, you’ll have to manually scroll it into position.

So, instead of handing the editors a text frame like this one (text frame is green, margin is magenta, bottom trim edge is the heavy black rule):

They make the text frame extra deep, like so:

The advantage is that it gives the editors some leeway on how far down the copy is allowed to appear without having to bug the designers all the time to adjust the frames “just one more line deep.”

In the example above, the ideal situation (to the layout designer) is that the last line of text aligns with the bottom of the picture to the right—and they’re communicating that to InCopy users by placing the light blue guideline there (one of my clients uses specially-colored orange guidelines for this purpose). But, there’s nothing really objectionable to anyone if the editor needs to include two or three more lines of text, since it would still end above the margin.

Notice that in this case—the second screen shot above—the designer was extra-generous and extended the text frame a couple lines below the bottom margin. That’s because his editors prefer to edit overset text in Layout view when possible. They can plonk in all the text they want, format it and see how it looks in Layout view, then copyfit visually to the blue ruler guide or to the magenta margin guide.

The disadvantage to this technique is that writers can’t rely on the Copyfit Progress toolbar for these extra-deep frames. (That’s the toolbar that says how many lines you’re over or under for the active story.) Since CP’s reporting relies on the height of the text frame, it would always report that you’re “Under 4 lines” or whatever, even if the copy is right at the bottom margin.

Nonetheless you might consider such a solution, even on a case-by-case basis, if the issue of “just one more line deep, please” crops up a lot in your workflow.

Here, in the little bit of Spanish text on the second line, InCopy thinks both “quiares” and “ir” are misspelled.

If I right-click on “Quiares,” InCopy’s spell-checker suggests corrections in English:

Not very useful!

The solution is to tell InCopy to use the right dictionary for foreign words — but how? Where are the other dictionaries?

Reveal the Extra Dictionaries

Inexplicably, the Character panel’s “Language” dropdown menu — the one that lists InCopy’s thirty-odd alternative language dictionaries — is hidden from users by default. (If one Character panel option must be hidden, Adobe, I hereby nominate the Vertical and Horizontal Scale fields instead.)

To reveal the hidden dropdown menu, open the Character panel’s fly-out menu and choose Customize. Then, in the Customize dialog box, turn on the checkbox for Language, and click OK:

Now you’ll see the Language dropdown menu appear at the bottom of the Character panel, just as it does (by default) in InDesign:

At this point, you might want to edit your custom workspaces, or create a new one (Window > Workspace) that has the Language option enabled. That way you don’t have to root around for it again. None of the default workspaces bundled with InCopy reveals the option in their Character panels.

Apply the Right Language to Foreign Text

To tell InCopy “this text is in Spanish” (or whatever language it’s in), select the text and choose the language dictionary to which it should be linked from the dropdown menu:

Associating a language dictionary to a text selection does not translate that text to that language — which would be neat, actually! No, all it does is tell InCopy which dictionary to use for spelling and hyphenation. (So translators: No worries.)

Notice how, in my example, InCopy is still flagging “Quiares” as misspelled, even though it knows it’s a Spanish word. That’s because it Quaries is misspelled — in Spanish! When I right-click on the flagged misspelling, I get a list of suggested Spanish corrections from which to choose:

I happen to know that “Quieres” is the correct spelling, so when I choose it, all the mean red squigglies go away, and I can be fairly certain that the phrase is spelled correctly:

But, since the hidden characters are always the same color as the text (with a slightly lighter shade), long stories sometimes appear as huge blobs of undifferentiated text. Having more control over how much paragraph formatting Story/Galley can show is in my top five feature requests for the next version of InCopy.

Take paragraph indents, for example. I think it’d be easier to identify paragraphs in a long article in Galley/Story if the first line of every paragraph had the same indent as they have in Layout view. (Or if they don’t have a first-line indent, then Galley/Story would show the space above/below the paragraph.)

In the meantime, though, there’s a little-known feature in CS2 and CS3 that helps to visually indent the first line of every paragraph in Galley/Story. It doesn’t affect formatting — the lines aren’t actually indented in Layout view — it’s just for visual navigation.

Go to the View menu and choose Show Paragraph Break Marks. Nothing changes in Layout view, but in Galley/Story, you’ll see a new special character indenting the first line of every paragraph, even if the paragraph has no actual first-line indent. The special character looks like a double-right chevron and pushes the first line in approximately 2 em’s worth of space.

The next time you’re in InCopy, give it a try. I think you might like it.

(Listen to Scotty’s “Hello, computer!”)

You can get close to that functionality, actually, if your publication’s styles use two advanced InDesign features, Nested Styles and Next Styles. They work exactly the same in both InDesign and InCopy, but again, can only be added to a publication’s styles from within InDesign because the controls appear in the Paragraph Style Options dialog box. (On the other hand, If you’re working with a standalone InCopy document, you have full access to this dialog box and can create them yourself.)

Nested Styles

A nested style is a pre-defined character style that is “embedded” into a paragraph style’s definition. The program automatically applies the nested character style to some of the text in a paragraph whenever the so-configured paragraph style is applied to it. One or more nested styles can be included in a given paragraph style, saving at least two or three steps every time you apply the paragraph style.

Let’s say you have a paragraph style called Body-First that gets applied to the first paragraph in a story. This paragraph has no first-line indent; instead, the first three words should be bold and all caps. Normally, you apply the Body-First style to the paragraph, then select the first three words, open the Character Styles panel, and click BoldCaps-LeadIn to format them.

Instead, in Body-First’s style options, you can specify that the first three words should be formatted with the BoldCaps-LeadIn style. From then on, applying the Body-First style to a paragraph automatically applies not just the paragraph style, but also the specified character style to the lead-in phrase without you having to select the words or click on the character style. Magic!

Because they can be chained and looped, nested styles can do all sorts of automatic formatting for you. If you find yourself having to apply the same character style over and over, consult with your designers and the online help documents to see if you can use them for your publication.

Next Style

By default, “Same Style” is set up as the Next Style for every new paragraph style. You know this intuitively already — when you hit Return/Enter to start a new paragraph, the new text has the same paragraph style as the previous paragraph. But in the Style Options dialog box for Body-First, for example, the designer could specify that the Next Style should be (the plain) Body instead of the same Body-First style. That way the paragraph style will automatically switch to the correct one as soon as you start a new paragraph.

Similarly, specifying Body as the next style for Subhead, or Answer as the next style for Question (and vice versa) allows InCopy to automatically switch to the correct paragraph style as you start new paragraphs in the story you’re writing.

What if the story’s already written, but unformatted? Clicking inside the first paragraph and choosing Body-First from the Paragraph Styles panel applies that style to the paragraph, but won’t automatically apply Body-First’s Next Style to the subsequent paragraphs.

To use the Next Styles feature on existing text, you have to employ a slightly different technique. Make a text selection that starts with at least some of the text in the first paragraph (the one you want to apply the “starting” style to — Body-First in our example) and includes additional, subsequent paragraphs that should be formatted with the Next Style feature. Then right-click on the starting style’s name in the Paragraph Style panel and choose the command “Apply Body-First then Next Style.”

The “Apply [this style] then Next Style” command only appears in the context menu when you’ve made a text selection that includes text from two or more paragraphs, so be sure and do that first.

While the Nested Styles and Next Styles features are unrelated, they can of course work together. Imagine being able to select all the text in a story, choosing Apply Body-First and then Next Style, and then, “Hello, computer!” all the text is formatted with the correct paragraph styles and character styles. Sweet … and definitely possible.

You may remember that the methods I explained, while do-able, entailed somewhat convoluted manual workarounds because the stock InDesign/InCopy workflow doesn’t come with any back-up or versioning features. (And so far, I’m sorry to say, Adobe’s free Version Cue CS3 appears broken for InCopy/InDesign workflows, per user reports on the Adobe forums.) To gain these features you need to move to an expensive publication management system like K4 or Smart Connection Enterprise, which are beyond the reach — and often, overkill — for many publications.

We’re left with the simple fact that when you’re working “commando-style” in InDesign and InCopy, everyone is locked into working on a single version — technically, the final version — of each story’s contents. There is no Save Story As command when you’re editing content in a layout or assignment.

It’s not a deal-killer, obviously; since thousands of companies are getting along just fine without it. And in many respects, it’s-a-feature-not-a-bug to always be working on the final version of a story. Still, it would be nice to have options.

The designers had their turn, now the editors are at bat.

Track Changes … Up to a Point

Editors can get some control over content changes in text stories by turning on Track Changes (Changes > Track Changes in Current Story) and keeping it on. That allows a user to change their mind on each edit made to the story by anyone who worked on it, even after saving the file. Choosing Reject Change reverts an edit back to its original state before Track Changes was enabled. Printing out (or PDFing) a Galley or Story view of the file offers the option to include Track Changes markup, useful for documenting edit history.

But, Track Changes has limitations. For one thing, if more than one user edits the same instance of text without accepting or rejecting their predecessor’s change, InCopy gets confused as to what is the original text.

Also, to do any sort of roll-back operation like “Reject all changes made since last Friday,” or “Accept all Mary’s changes but reject John’s” — options that Track Changes doesn’t offer — will require tedious manual work, vetting every change with the Change Info panel before making an accept/reject decision for each one.

Roll Your Own Versions

For these reasons and others, InCopy users have found it helpful on occasion to make their own back-up versions of critical stories, even though it does take a little extra work. (Note there’s no way for an InCopy user to save a version of a layout itself or even an assignment; only the individual stories contained within.)

Following are three ways for editor to make a version of a story.

Method 1: Copy/Paste into a New Document

I think the simplest way is to select all of a story’s text (Edit > Select All), copy the selection (Edit > Copy), create a new InCopy document (File > New, default settings are fine), and in the new empty InCopy file, paste in the text (File > Paste). That’s Command or Control-A-C-N-[Enter]-V, one after the other, if you’re a keyboard shortcut type. (The mnemonic “All Children Need [Extra] Versions” works well.)

Other than track changes markup — which is lost; the changes get accepted during the trip — all the content comes through in the new file, including formatting, styles, inline notes, tables, even text with XML tags. (A way to create a version that includes tracked changes markup is covered further down.)

Note that you can Select All and Copy text from any story in a layout or assignment, even if someone else is currently working on it; even if the story was never made editable by the designer. The only limitation is that you can only do one story at a time. But if a story spans multiple threaded frames, don’t worry, the Select All step gets all the text in all its frames.

Save this new InCopy document with a useful filename (”FeatureStory_v1.incx”) in a folder on the server that you maintain just for that purpose.

Now, let’s say that back in the “live” document, you continue to work on that feature story. You make some changes and check it in. Then — horrors! — you realize you accidentally deleted an important section that had taken you hours to write. Since you checked it in, it’s too late to Undo or Revert.

FeatureStory_v1.incx to the rescue! Just open that .incx file directly in InCopy (File > Open), select the section’s text and copy it to the clipboard. In the live document, check out the story, turn off Tracked Changes if it’s on (to avoid a huge swathe of “Added Text” markup from what you’re about to do) and paste the text where it should go. Turn Track Changes back on, save changes and check the story in again. Saved!

If you ever need to roll back — completely replace a story with a saved version — you might find it easier to simply Place (i.e., import) the .incx file into the document instead of copying and pasting from it. Remember that the external .incx file has no tracked changes markup, so consider printing out a Galley/Story view (with change markup) of the current story before proceeding. Also think about making a external version of the story in its current state before rolling back.

To do the rollback you’ll need to check the current story out first. Then turn off Track Changes, select all the text in the story, choose File > Place and in the Place dialog box, select the .incx file of the version you saved. When you click the Open button, InCopy replaces the selected text with the previous version of the story. Note that if you don’t select all the text first, the older version is added to the current story (starting at your cursor position) instead of replacing it. If that happens, just Undo.

Method 2: Export to RTF or Tagged Text

If you’re not using (or don’t mind losing) inline notes or XML tags as well as tracked changes, you could export a story to Rich Text Format or Adobe InDesign Tagged Text instead, which saves a few steps compared to the “create a new InCopy file” method above.

With your cursor blinking in the story, go to File > Export and choose either of these formats in the Export dialog box’s Format menu. Name the file and select the folder where you want InCopy to export it to, preferably a folder dedicated to that publication’s versioned stories on the server. When you click the OK button, InCopy exports a copy of the current story as an RTF or Tagged Text file and you’re returned to the live document, good to go.

Either format retains all the tables and text formatting, including styles. The difference between the two is that RTF files are generic, and can be opened by virtually any program (including Microsoft Word) that works with text files; while Tagged Text (which refers to formatting tags, not XML tags) is for InDesign and InCopy only because it’s a plain text file with proprietary text codes that only those programs understand and can convert back to formatting instructions. Either format is fine for our purposes; they both retain the same info.

Like standalone .incx files, InCopy can open RTF and Tagged Text files directly (converting them to .incx in the process) allowing you to cherry-pick text to copy and paste into your live document. You can also Place them as described above, for wholesale rollbacks to previous versions. In either case, though, you should turn on the Show Options dialog box when opening/placing these, and in the Options dialog box, specify that formatting should be retained, before clicking OK.

Method 3: Dupe the Linked .incx File(s)

It’s a little tricky, but there is a way to create a version of a story that retains everything, including tracked changes. And even if you don’t care about tracked changes, you may end up using this method because it can be applied to many stories at once, instead of one at a time.

You know that every story listed in your Assignments panel exists as a distinct .incx file on your server, yes? Just use Windows Explorer or the Finder to navigate to the file server, find the project folder containing the publication and all its .incx files (probably in a subfolder), and physically duplicate the live, linked .incx document — the one you want to make a version of.

Rename the duplicate file to something you’ll remember with a version number (Feature_v2.incx) and move it to a special folder you created to hold these. You could even shift-click multiple .incx files from the server’s project folder and copy/paste them in one fell swoop to your versions folder, then rename them there.

The tricky part is finding these .incx rascals. InDesign buries them a few subfolder levels deep on purpose so users don’t have to see how the sausage is made.

So here’s a tip: The fastest way to locate a story’s .incx file is in InCopy itself, with its Links panel (Window > Links). Go to Layout view and click inside a story. Now look at the Links panel, and you’ll see the name of the .incx file belonging to that story is selected in the panel. Keep it selected while you open the Links panel fly-out menu and choose Reveal in Explorer (or Reveal in Finder, on a Mac).

The Finder/Explorer obligingly comes to the front, drills down to the correct subfolder on the server, and selects the .incx file that was highlighted in the Links panel. That’s the one you want to duplicate, move and rename to make a version out of. And maybe its brothers and sisters too, which likely live in the same location.

Be sure to rename the files after you duplicate them, otherwise things will get messed up (recoverable, but a pain). It’s okay to rename the duplicate ones because they aren’t linked to the layout any more; they’re free agents.

When you open one of these free agents directly in InCopy (File > Open), you’ll see all the tracked changes are still intact, along with everything else — formatting, etc. However, if you copy and paste from it, or import (Place) the file into a layout story to roll back, you lose the tracked changes markup, just as with the other methods. The only way to keep them during a rollback is to check in the story, and then ask the designer to Relink the story in InDesign’s Links panel; so the frame in the layout links to the older version (the duped .incx file) instead of the current one.