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 by 39p, Page Size should be 32p3 by 49p6. The idea is to have the editors get a good idea of page count right from the manuscript stage, but so far Im seeing a document that does not have a centered text area nor a proper depth. This should be a cakewalk so I must be missing something.

InCopy can’t really “mimic” an InDesign layout, as much as we’d like it to … but in this scenario, you can get pretty close.

Content Width and Depth

When you create a new InCopy file, you can set the *width* of the text area … so you would enter 23p for that. (The purpose is so editors can proof line breaks before the story gets poured into the layout, assuming you know the layout has a certain column width.)

But you can’t set the *depth* of the text area in a similar way.  The depth field you see in the New Document options is if you know the target length of the file … a word count or page count for example. You can leave this field empty if the story length is undefined. Even if you enter in a measure here, you can write short or long … the field just turns on the Copyfit Progress toolbar on the bottom.

Manipulating the Page Size

You can also set page size in the New Document dialog box. Normally, this should be the page size of the final InDesign file if you’re trying to get a visual in InCopy’s layout view. So in your case, you can set the page size to be 32p3 by 49p6.

When you click OK, you’ll see that you get page with a text “frame” (the Text Area you specified) that’s offset to the left a little and that’s a little too tall: it’s 43p9 instead of the 39p you wanted.

That’s because InCopy *always* puts the live text area inside of a default 1/2″ (3p) margin guide. You can’t change the default measure of the margins.

So to get the Text Area height you want, you need to change the page height to 1 inch more than that. That way, InCopy reduces the measure by 1 inch (1/2 inch top and bottom margin) and the remainder is your Text area height.

In your case, this would mean setting the page height to 45p. You’ll end up with a text area height of exactly 39p.

Do the same thing — manipulate the page size measures — if the slight horizontal offset of the text area is bugging you. Make the page width exactly 1 inch more than your desired Text Area width, and you’ll see the Text Area is “centered” on the page.

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!