InCopy 2015 is here!

Chad Chelius

Last week, Adobe announced the next major release of Creative Cloud, referred to as Creative Cloud 2015. With this update comes new versions of all of the major Creative Cloud applications including InCopy. The 2015 release of InCopy marks the eleventh version of InCopy and provides some new features to take advantage of.

Updating to InCopy 2015

Updating to the new version is as simple as clicking the update button from the Creative Cloud application.

Be forewarned that the default behavior during updating is to remove previous versions of InCopy. Yikes! Fortunately since CC 2015 was initially released, Adobe has added a notification window prior to installation letting you know that this is the case and provides a check box in the advanced options section that allows you to keep the previously installed versions of InCopy intact. This applies to the other CC 2015 applications as well. So if you don’t want to remove the previous versions of InCopy when you install InCopy 2015, uncheck this check box (recommended).

What’s New?

The InDesign/InCopy workflow hasn’t received much love with the 2015 release. All of the new features are additions to make InCopy CC 2015 compatible with InDesign CC 2015. That’s not to say that these features aren’t valuable, but if you visit the InCopy CC product page, you’ll notice that only one new feature is listed. Let’s take a closer look at what new features you’ll find in InCopy CC 2015.

Paragraph Shading

Paragraph shading is a feature that we’ve been requesting for several versions now. This feature allows you to apply shading behind the text in an entire paragraph of text. Prior to this feature, our only choice was to use paragraph rules to apply shading behind text. The problem with this approach is that your settings were based on a specific number of lines of text. This would often require the creation of several styles for the specific number of lines of text. With paragraph shading, the shading applies at the paragraph level making it extremely flexible for a variety of different text applications. Paragraph shading can be applied in InCopy via the Paragraph panel or via a paragraph style. In the figure below, you can see the new area of the Paragraph panel for applying shading to text. Option/Alt + click on the icon to show additional options. This feature will surely make a lot of people happy and save a considerable amount of time and frustration.

Graphic Table Cells

We’ve always been able to insert an image into a table cell, but in the past it was inserted as an inline graphic within a text cell. Not to confuse anyone because prior to this version, every cell was a text cell. Now when you place an image into a table cell, the cell is treated as a graphic cell. What this means is that the entire cell contains the graphic allowing you to apply fitting options to the cell alleviating the painful process of fitting a graphic frame into a text cell that was required in previous versions of InDesign.

Miscellaneous Updates

There are several additional updates that were added to InDesign that you can review on the InDesign New Features Summary page. Aside from the new features outlined above, none of the other features made it into InCopy because they really don’t affect the interoperability between the two applications. One feature that I feel has been overlooked is the ability to adjust the viewing options in an exported PDF file. I feel like this could benefit InCopy users just as much as InDesign users, but alas it was not to be in this version. Hopefully we’ll see it added in an future update.

Should You Upgrade?

As has always been the case, you should match InDesign and InCopy versions to ensure compatibility between the two applications. We’ve seen problems with mismatched versions in the past and obviously new features used in the latest version of either program will not be available in older versions of InDesign or InCopy.

Summary

There are tons of other features that I would have liked to see added to InCopy as well as InDesign for that matter, but I am happy to see some additions that could really benefit users in an everyday workflow. We’d like to know what you think about this new version of InCopy, so let us know by using the comments section at the bottom of the page.