Using InCopy in InDesign

InCopy does more than install on a user 's system. It changes how InDesign works, adding a new menu and pane, both called Notes, and several new menu options in the File and Edit menus .

Working with notes

The Notes feature inserts comments into text. To use it, click the Text tool inside a text box. You can now choose New Note to add a note, which will be indicated in the file with a green dual-triangle character called a note anchor (see Figure F-1). (The Notes menu duplicates options in the Notes pane's palette menu, shown in Figure F-1.)

Figure F-1: The Notes pane, its palette menu, and (at upper left) the note anchor icon indicating a note in text.

Caution ‚  

If you select a string of text, InDesign won't display the New Note menu option; instead, it will display the Convert to Note option to make that text into a note. That's great if someone typed a note directly into text, but it can be dangerous if you're trying to highlight an entire word, as you would do when adding notes in Adobe Acrobat. You can convert a note back to text by choosing Convert to Text from the palette menu or from the Notes menu.

You can use the Notes pane's palette menu or the Notes menu in InDesign to navigate through notes (choose Previous Note or Next Note), control notes' display (Expand Notes in Story and Collapse Notes in Story), remove notes (choose Delete Note, Remove Notes from Story, or Remove All Notes), move to the note's anchor (choose Go to Note Anchor), or split a note into multiple notes (choose Split Note).

The InCopy plug-in also adds a Notes pane to the Preferences dialog box (choose InDesign ‚ Preferences on the Mac or Edit ‚ Preferences in Windows, or press z +K or Ctrl+K). Figure F-2 shows the pane. In addition to changing the note anchor's color, you can also tell InDesign whether to spell-check notes, search notes in find/change operations, and display a user color behind notes in text. (Each user who edits a file gets assigned a unique color for easy identification, ƒ   la Microsoft Word's Track Changes feature.)

Figure F-2: The Notes preferences pane.

Working with other users

Before an InCopy user can work on a layout, an InDesign user has to InCopy-enable that layout. That means exporting the layout's stories to InCopy format (InCopy files have a filename extension of .incd), which you do by choosing Edit ‚ InCopy Stories ‚ Export Story; this exports the currently selected story. (A story is all text in a text frame or path and any frames and/or paths linked to it.) You could also choose Export Layer Stories to export all stories on the current layer or Export All Stories to export all stories in the document.

After navigating to the folder that you want to store the InCopy file to, click Export. As Figure F-3 shows, you'll be asked to select what is exported; you generally want all attributes to export. Then click OK.

Figure F-3: The three dialog boxes that appear after you choose the folder in which to place an exported story for use by others in InCopy. The User dialog box only displays the first time you export, and not at all if you choose File ‚ User before exporting that first time.

If you have not done so already, you'll be asked to provide a user name, which InCopy uses to track the author of every change. Enter a name, then click OK. (You can set up your user name in InDesign by choosing File ‚ User.)

Creating an InCopy file also makes the stories unavailable in the InDesign layout for further work. But you can keep working on the layout, such as resizing frames, adding graphics, and even changing text's color. If you want to work on the text, you need to check out the story, making it available to you but to no one else. To do so, click on the frame containing the story you want to edit, then choose Edit ‚ InCopy Stories ‚ Check Out Story. When done, choose either Check In Story or Check In All to return the stories to use by others. (Or choose Cancel Check to undo all your changes and leave the story unchanged.)

If someone else is working on a story, you can have InDesign apply the current changes to the layout on your screen by choosing Edit ‚ InCopy Stories ‚ Update Story.

Tip ‚  

If you're making textual changes, you'd normally have an editor do so in InCopy. But because InCopy doesn't show the text as actually laid out, editors can't use InCopy to write or edit headlines to fit or do fine-level copy fitting such as getting rid of widows. In those cases, they'll need to use a copy of InDesign and check out the story as described earlier.

Caution ‚  

When you choose Export All Stories, InDesign will export every story it finds. And by story, InDesign means any text in any text frame. So, if your headlines are in separate frames and not linked to their body copy frames, the headlines will each be a separate story. Ditto for any captions, or text in figures. This can create dozens of files in your project folder. So it's usually better not to choose Export All Stories and instead individually export each story that you want to be editable.