Mainly it’s editors who ask the question, but designers too would appreciate the ability to occasionally save a version of the contents of a text frame being shared with InCopy.  Well, I now have a solution, but need your help. More on that further down.

As InCopy users know, versioning is not built in to the workflow. When you check out a story in  a layout or assignment, even the Save As command is dimmed. You can only do a Save As with standalone InCopy files. So editorial users make do with Track Changes, or with some manual workarounds. (Note that K4 and SmartConnection systems have a versioning feature, I believe, but I’m talking about the “normal” InCopy workflow here.) And in InDesign, even if you do a Save As to the layout, the text frames are still linked to the first version’s InCopy stories.

So last year I joined forces with a couple InDesign/InCopy developer geeks (and I mean that as a compliment), Peter Truskier and Jim Birkenseer, to address the issue. Last month we released the first beta version of InVersion. It’s a low-footprint plug-in for InDesign and InCopy that lets you save and restore versions of each story in your publication, whenever you want.

For example, here’s a screen shot of part of the contextual menu you see when you right-click on a story you’ve checked out:

Unlike VersionCue, InVersion doesn’t require a database or anything special like that, it just uses your existing project folder to store and track versions of InCopy stories. Also, InVersion only saves a version when you specifically choose the Save A Version command, instead of every time you save a story or check it in, which we think makes the most sense.

It works the same in InDesign as it does in InCopy.  In fact, InDesign users could use InVersion even if their company isn’t using InCopy. They’d just need to use InDesign commands to export the story to InCopy format first (kind of like exporting the story to RTF format), and from then on they could use InVersion to save and manage iterations of main stories or sidebars, without having to do Save As’s to the full layout.

We Need More Testers

For the past month we’ve had a small group of InDesign/InCopy users download the beta and the PDF how-to, use it, and give us feedback to a private forum we’ve set up. The very first bit of feedback we received was so great to hear:

“I’ve done some testing in an InVersion installed InCopy and a standard InDesign without the plug-in, and it works fine. [...] I deleted the Versions folder to see what would happen and if the workflow still works using the latest incx file – it works fine. I can see the most use on the InCopy side where editors needs versioning (without the hassle of Version Cue). It’s simple, elegant, it works. Me Like! ”

But before we release it into the “wild” commercially, we need many more InCopy and InDesign users to try it out and tell us what works and what’s missing. There’s not much to test, it’s actually quite straight-forward and simple, and it would help us immensely (plus, active testers get a free copy of the final release!).

Right now the InVersion beta is only available for CS3 (Mac and Windows), but CS4 will follow shortly.

So if you’d like to join the fun and you’re using either CS3 or CS4 of InCopy or InDesign, please e-mail me at amarie [at] incopysecrets.com with INVERSION in the Subject line and I’ll get you signed up. Thanks!

Chris, a production manager at a catalog company, sent me an e-mail. He said that his company’s art department uses InDesign CS3 to put together their catalogs, relying heavily on Meadows Publishing Solution’s AutoPrice plug-in and Virginia System’s Sonar IndexPro. Chris really wants to move everyone to the InDesign/InCopy workflow, but during testing, discovered this:

I export stories (copy blocks) in InDesign for editing in InCopy on the Windows machine. I open up the same document in InCopy (windows) to test, edit some copy, save, check in, close.

Now, open this same document again in InDesign (Mac), copy updates needed, update the copy, but wait! All of the third party markers are gone! Everything that was tagged, or marked for the index, and all the pricing tags are gone.

I’ve found out when the InCopy document is saved, this is when this happens. It strips out all third party invisible text, placeholders, etc.

Painful! But the fact is that while InCopy is very much related to InDesign, and shares a lot of its code, it is a different program with its own plug-ins folder. If InCopy doesn’t support whatever the InDesign plug-in does, you’ll need to purchase the plug-in in “matching sets,” one for the InDesign users and an InCopy version of it for the editors.

However, there are a number of InDesign plug-ins that simply don’t have an InCopy version, for various reasons.

Probably the most common reason is that the basic InCopy file format, the .incx file, is a bare-bones sort of format (based on XML) and so doesn’t support whatever the plugin expects will be available in an .indd file format. Remember, when you’re using InCopy you’re never really editing the layout–the .indd file–you’re editing the bare-bones .incx files “through the window” of the layout.

In fact InCopy doesn’t have support for some text-related things that even InDesign supports internally … for example, you can’t make text hyperlinked in IC. You can’t insert index markers. And so on. (But at least it doesn’t strip out ID-created index markers and hyperlinks when the InCopy story is saved.)

Chris continued,

I’ve talked to both plugin companies about this. One thinks this is a bug issue on Adobe’s end, the other is trying to work out something to stop this from happening.

He’s doing the right thing. If your InDesign workflow relies on third-party plug-ins, you definitely need to check with the plug-in developers to see if they have an InCopy version, or at least if they know if using InCopy will harm the plug-in’s functionality as stories are edited in IC. There are many ID plug-ins that work perfectly fine with IC… unfortunately it sounds like these two, AutoPrice and Sonar Bookends IndexPro, don’t fall into that category.

But, there might be hope. Here’s what I suggested to Chris: Find the InDesign plug-ins folder (it’s inside the InDesign program folder on your hard drive), and look inside it for the subfolder containing the third-party plug-in in question. Copy that subfolder to the Clipboard, and then paste it into InCopy’s plug-ins folder, which is inside the InCopy application folder. (Of course this will only work if both programs are on the same platform, Mac to Mac or Windows to Windows.) Then restart InCopy and see what happens.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised on more than a couple occasions that it solved the problem! Often, InDesign plug-in and script developers don’t even think about InCopy–it’s not on their radar–and so don’t bother testing it during development. But if the plug-in relies on the code that’s shared between the two programs, it can’t tell which program it’s running in.

If you find it works, or almost works, be sure to let the developer know! First, of course, because you’ll need buy licenses for your InCopy machines, and second, it’s always good news to hear your product works in other applications, or just needs a little tweak to open up a whole new market for them. Tell them to trumpet the news on their home page, add it as a line item in their online store, and so on.

Of course if it doesn’t work, by all means contact the developer anyway, as Chris is doing. The more inquiries they get from potential customers, the better the chances they’ll spend some serious development time on an InCopy-compatible version.

However, some of the letter/diacritic pairs they needed to occasionally insert in their stories weren’t available in their body typeface. I showed them how they could enter the letter first, then the diacritic alone, then kern them in tightly so the cedilla or caron or macron was centered over/under the letter. They appreciated the workaround but it wasn’t ideal.

When I returned home I did some investigating, and found the perfect free script for them. “Compose.jsx” is a biplatform Javascript that works in both InDesign and InCopy. Developer Peter Kahrel created a clever little interface that allows the user to enter easily-remembered mnemonics for any letter/diacritic combination. If the glyph exists in the font, the script inserts it automatically (no need to hunt for it in the Glyphs panel). If it doesn’t exist, the script automatically does the kerning workaround, perfectly. It’s phenomenal!

I sent my client a link to the script, and wrote about the script itself (with screen shots) on my other blog, InDesignSecrets.com.

Rather than reprise the whole article, let me just urge you to read it for yourself. A link to download the InDesign or InCopy version of the script appears at the end of the story:

Easy Diacritics and Other Tough Glyphs