Top Three New Features in InCopy CS4
With all the hoopla about the second coming the announcement of Adobe Creative Suite 4, you may be wondering … hey, what about InCopy? Where’s the press release? Where’s the live webcast? It’s part of the Creative Suite, isn’t it?
Well, yes and no. It’s called “InCopy CS3″ (or whatever version you have) because it’s designed […]
How Many Letters in a Word?
A production manager at a book publisher e-mailed me this question a couple weeks ago:
How long of a word did Adobe use to determine the number of words in selected text frames?
Here’s a straightforward answer for you: They didn’t. Each word, regardless of length, is counted as one word. (You can change this in InCopy, […]
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 […]
Add Any Diacritic Easily
Last month I was in New Mexico, teaching the InCopy/InDesign workflow to about 30 newspaper editors and designers, all on PCs. They were thrilled with the Glyphs panel (Text > Glyphs) because it’s such a pain in Windows to enter special characters, especially funky letter/diacritic combinations.
However, some of the letter/diacritic pairs they needed to occasionally […]
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 — […]
Styles That Apply Themselves
Ideally, we could have the computer figure out which styles go where and have InCopy apply them on its own. We could just say “Computer, format text” (maybe speaking into the mouse as though it were a microphone, like Scotty did in that Star Trek movie) and go on to the next task. Wouldn’t that […]
Fastest Way(s) to Apply Styles
I was watching an editor format a story in InCopy the other day. While I was happy to see he was using the Paragraph Styles his designers included in the layout (as opposed to manually formatting text with commands in the Character and Paragraph panels), it was painful to see how much mousing and clicking […]
View More Font Styles in Story/Galley View
I just received an e-mail from an InCopy user (an ME for a publication in Iowa) asking a common question:
“We’re using fonts that don’t have their own built-in bold, italic, bold-ital. We’re using Franklin Gothic Demi for boldface. In Story view, this font doesn’t display as bold – which is very annoying to […]
Speccing Type
An editor responded to my article about working with paragraph styles in InCopy (”Dueling Styles: InCopy vs. InDesign“) detailing some of his frustrations with the feature.
In his publication’s editorial-driven workflow, editors are primarily responsible for creating styles and applying them correctly to their stories in standalone InCopy documents, which are later placed into InDesign layouts. […]
Dueling Styles: InCopy vs. InDesign
Recently I’ve received a number of e-mails from InCopy users with questions about creating paragraph and character styles (such as, “Why can’t I” and “How do I”). It was a surprise to me, since I thought editors didn’t want to have to bother with formatting text, only writing it and correcting it. At least that’s […]