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This article is from December 20, 2017, and is no longer current.
Let the InCopy Team Know What You Think!
Hey everyone! The Adobe InCopy team has opened up a survey asking InCopy users such as yourself, how you use the product, what your pain points are, and what feature requests you might have about the product. This is your opportunity to share your feelings and ideas to make InCopy an even better product! So what are you waiting for? Head over to https://t.co/c0X8ne8RoI and fill out the survey. Who knows, your great ideas could end up improving InCopy for everyone!
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Create a free version of InCopy for my internal and external clients to make edits in that does not require an Adobe Creative Suite license: like Acrobat Reader does for the .pdf proofing process.
I would like to see the ability to manually format text in InCopy disabled at the InDesign user’s option. InCopy users cannot create new para/char styles in existing ID documents, but they can manually format test. That leads to bad habits and bad documents.
Terre,
Although they don’t have a free version of InCopy, you can subscribe to only for only $4.99/month. That’s almost as good as free ;-) Check out this InCopySecrets post for more info https://incopysecrets.com/adobe-incopy-cc-price-drop.php
I agree David! This would be an amazing feature if you could only allow users to apply styles within an InDesign layout/Assignment.
Chad,
I have hundreds of clients (about 200 firms and an average of six persons within each firm); and the projects that we work on are product-specific—meaning that when we move onto another product, the changes are good that some parties in the mix will change as the product managers change with the products. There is no way that these small-to-medium-sized companies are going to go in for subscriptions.
The reason that I want InCopy Reviewer (my name for an imaginary product) is that clients are opening the .pdfs I send them, exporting them to MS Word format with changes and I have to go character-by-character to find the bloody changes in my InDesign docs.
I STILL want a free version. As it stands, InCopy is pretty useless to me. I am the only one who can use it. :(
Sounds like DocsFlow or WordsFlow would be a better solution in that situation. This would allow you to share Word or Google docs to other people and then update the linked content from those documents in InDesign. It’s a trade-off. DocsFlow/WordsFlow doesn’t give you the same formatting and editing control as InCopy, but maybe you don’t need it. That being said, one of the items on my wish list is the ability to store InCopy stories in the cloud and have them be editable via a web browser!
Unfortunately, these are both quite structured and “formatted” documents. I have tried both DocsFlow and WordsFlow—and they work wonderfully for other projects, just not the main documents that we produce.
Still wanting a free version for clients to use. InCopy COULD be very useful…
I wish Adobe could standardize a way to present mathematical equations so that InCopy and InDesign could support it natively, without using third party add-on. With this standard, Adobe could import Word documents with mathematical equations into InDesign easily and accurately. Equations should be encoded using xml in latest docx file format.
I would like to see a sharp, pointed stick to come out of the monitor and poke the user in the eye each time they double space after a period or use a run of spaces to align text.
I used to work for ATEX Publishing Systems. The grand daddy of inCopy.
One of the features that reporters and editors really liked about ATEX was something we called “Formats.”
A format was like a paragraph style for the entire story.
The format was created to have the headline in one style, the subhead in another, the by-line in another, first paragraph, second, last, etc.
The reporter just started typing and the whole story fell in line.
There was a very robust scripting language that allowed users to create formats.
You could designate that the first sentence of the fist paragraph started with a drop cap and then the rest of the line was in all caps and so on. Even if you added a word and the line broke it retained it’s style.
Another valuable feature that many of ATEX customers complained about not having after switching to desktop publishing was something called “Return to Mark.” This allowed the user to create a set of tabs. When typing at one of the tab positions you could hit “RTM” and it would return to the start of that tab on another line. There was no need for a table. You could just keep typing and hit “Return to mark” and you had a multi-line entry at that tab position. When you tabbed to the next position you were back on the first line. When you hit a carriage return at the end of the line it knew how my lines down to move to allow the multi-line entries for the line above.
Another great feature was the edit and approval chain. As each person in the chain made an edit, everything stayed – nothing was ever deleted. Each writer and editor’s text appeared in a different color or style. You could easily tell who had made what edit. After the story reached a certain point in the process it could not go backwards. The user could see the story with all the markup or without by clicking a button.
These systems were called “Publishing Systems.” Much more complex by necessity. I haven’t worked in the publishing industry for years but I’d love to see how it’s done today.
I don’t know if we can get Adobe to add the poky stick feature, but I like the idea ;-) Regarding Formats, we actually do have that in InCopy today. We can set up multiple styles that will format the text using a different style whenever a user hits the return key. It’s not bullet-proof in that you can only define one “next” style so if you have a story that requires multiple paragraphs of body text, that’s where it will fail. Still quite useful in many workflows.
Once a document is “published” in Indesign, will it still work with Incopy? Also, can a “book” in Indesign work with the “Publish” feature in Indesign?