Adobe InCopy is a pretty amazing word-processing tool, allowing people to edit text from an InDesign layout, or even start a new formatted text document from scratch. But what if it went away?*
I’ve been thinking recently about how these desktop client word processors are such a hassle. Instead, I’m getting quite fond of Adobe Buzzword, which is a word processor based on Flash. You can import and export RTF files, suitable for InDesign. It currently has a fatal flaw (it has no paragraph or character styles), but Buzzword is officially just still in beta, and Adobe has promised to add styles before too long.
But I just saw something even more interesting: the Flash 10-based TextLayout engine at Adobe Labs. This is a huge leap forward for Flash Text, but even more interesting, they claim to have “print-quality typography for the web.” Whatever that means, it does seem to support a great deal of InDesign’s text engine, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Adobe could even build InDesign’s text composition rules into it. Check out this demo.
So what if Buzzword got the Text Layout Framework, styles, and then… a link to InDesign. That link could come in all kinds of flavors, but one option might be a way to export a story to Buzzword and share it with others. They could then edit it and check it back in. You could then update the link and it would pull the buzzword story back into InDesign. No more InCopy. Just InDesign and Web browsers.
Or, since the Text Layout Framework is supported by AIR, we could just as easily have a standalone Buzzword AIR app (I call it InBuzzCopy) that connects to the cloud when it can, but (after downloading a file) doesn’t require being online to function.
Of course, then you hook that up to IDML (the XML-based indesign markup language), and the potential is endless. For example, what if we could hand off an IDML to InBuzzCopy, which could parse it, pull out all the relevant stories, let a translator convert them to French or whatever, and put them all back in a new IDML file, ready for you to open in InDesign.
Now I need to be clear: I haven’t heard anyone at Adobe even suggest that they’re doing any of this stuff. But I think it’d be cool if they did. I think InCopy is nifty, but doing this via The Cloud is the more elegant solution… as long as the Web tools support InDesign and its rich feature set well enough.
*(Anne-Marie, the Queen of InCopy, is going to freak when she reads this. I can only hope that she takes a picture of herself reacting. ;) )
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on November 24, 2008
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