Opening InCopy Stories

A faster way to edit the text of a layout is to open the InCopy stories (.incx) instead of the InDesign layout (.indd). This way you're opening relatively small text files instead of typically larger layout documents. This is definitely faster, but the big trade-off is that when you open just an InCopy document you can't see the page layout in InCopy and you can't calculate copyfit statistics.

If you're working on a publication where exact page count and copyfit information don't matter very much, then opening just the InCopy stories might be a good solution. In fact, that's how we've written most of this book. However, in most cases, the lack of page visualization and copyfit calculations is a real show stopper. Opening InDesign documents gives you more than you need but is slower, and opening InCopy files doesn't give you everything you need but is faster. The good news is that there's a healthy compromise: assignments.