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• • April 4, 2016 at 4:46 pm #83696
    Ari Singer

    Member

    Take a closer look at the recent InDesign Poll on the homepage. The question? “Besides InDesign, which two apps do you use most? (pick 2)”

    As of this writing, 632 people have voted.

    The obvious winner is Photoshop with roughly 38% of the vote. Next up is Illustrator with roughly 30%.

    And who’s the biggest loser?

    Well, if you asked me before I saw the results I would say ‘probably Muse, Google Docs or Bridge’. But boy was I wrong. The loser is actually InCopy! The application that is basically the sibling of InDesign. The application that should’ve stopped writers from using Microsoft Word or Google Docs to send files to a designer. The application that has powerful editing and tracking changes features. And how much votes did it get?

    1.

    Yes, that’s a number one. Out of 632 people only one person could say that this is an important app to him/her.

    But what’s even more troubling is the fact that Microsoft Word has more votes than Muse, Google Docs, InCopy and Bridge COMBINED! And InCopy should’ve replaced Microsoft Word a long while ago. It’s 2016 and we designers still have to struggle and clean up Word files on a daily basis. And forget about putting it on a server and tracking changes both ‘in’ and ‘out’ of InDesign.

    So what’s the solution? In my view, it’s very simple. Make InCopy FREE. Yes, free.

    InCopy cannot survive as a standalone application. It’s like Bridge. It’s an application that is needed for InDesign, but wouldn’t stand alone. Unless it’s free of course.

    I have quite a few periodicals that I design that has a very tight budget. And to ask that every contributor should fetch out $20 a month for InCopy is never gonna happen. So what happens? They stick with their lazy method of using Word, and I have to struggle with it. If InCopy were only free, my entire workflow would become much more efficient, and I would have reason to force myself and (politely) others to learn and use InCopy.

    I know that it takes a lot of chutzpah to suggest to a company to suddenly give away something for free. But what I’m basically asking of Adobe is to reexamine the entire purpose and place of InCopy and to realize that to add value to InDesign, InCopy has to be available for free so contributors can start creating in InCopy and not in (shudder) Microsoft Word.

    What do you say? Do I have a point, or did I miss the point entirely? Please share with me your thoughts and maybe Adobe will take notice.

  • April 5, 2016 at 6:43 am #83713
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    I think you have an EXCELLENT point!

    sigh …

    AM

  • April 5, 2016 at 10:36 am #83728
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    To be fair though, InDesign users (the people who come to this blog) don’t use InCopy. They use InDesign. Their *editors* and other subject matter experts use it, but not them. So the results of the poll aren’t that surprising.

    Another poll might ask “How do colleagues edit copy on your layout proofs?” Possible answers:
    – Manually mark up printouts
    – Use PDF commenting tools
    – Use InCopy
    – Use their own copy of InDesign

    AM

  • April 5, 2016 at 10:57 am #83729
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Good point: People who use InCopy tend to be more interested in https://incopysecrets.com

  • April 5, 2016 at 11:05 am #83731
    Ari Singer

    Member

    You both have a very good point, but that’s why I pointed out the fact that Microsoft Word has more votes than Muse, Google Docs, InCopy and Bridge combined!

    So the question is: Why do we use Word at all?!

    And the obvious answer is: because that’s what we get from contributors and we have no choice but to work with it. And once we’re at this point, the designer him/herself will fall back to use Word for their own projects because they have no incentive to get to know InCopy.

  • October 19, 2017 at 10:01 am #99098
    Marjorie Campolongo

    Member

    I think the problem is that InCopy gives Editors the ability to affect design and the designers to edit copy. There should be a way to limit a user’s access to certain functions.

  • March 8, 2019 at 2:38 pm #114713
    Julie Wilson

    Member

    I know this is an older post but I am in a nightmare client situation right now and was googling to see if InCopy is even still an option.

    I like the free idea, and restricting editors ability. I have to admit though, I haven’t used it in 15 years or so when I worked on a weekly newsletter. I just loved that all the contributors could edit their articles to fit the column space without too much back and forth. We had tight deadlines and it was such an easy workflow. For a few years I tried to push it on clients, but the was before subscriptions and they were not going to pay for software they have never heard of, especially when they only used Microsoft products. For some I did convince them to at least learn how to mark up PDFs, Acrobat is free. But the others, yes it is always an updated word file with tracked changes.

    The trend now though is for clients to want complete control because they don’t want to pay me to make routine changes to things like, compliance guides, or training manuals. They can updated their twitter or facebook instantly so they want the same for everything else.

    I am losing work because I have to take InDesign docs, some I have been updating for years, and now turn them into Word docs, and then step away. The Word docs never look as good as my original design, but they are willing to forgo that to have control over the content. In the end, they get a doc that gets messed up by everyone in their office, they are angry at me, and want me to clean it up and make it pretty again for free because somehow it is my fault that the “column breaks” kept getting deleted or they deleted a section break and now all the headers changed. I have even had to convert things to PPT, because the client didn’t know how to use Word. I feel defeated.

    I wish Adobe would release a free version. If it had been the same price as Acrobat, I may have been able to convert more. Now I am opening up Word instead of InDesign more and more. I don’t like it. I never used to update my Microsoft suite, now I have to pay for the subscription which is so annoying since the mac version rarely gets updated.

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