[Theunis De Jong]

Let me get this forum started with a question:

What do you people use InCopy for?

I have checked the trial once, and it seems to me to be too complicated for 'anyone and his sister' to work with, as it appears to be InDesign-with-features-disabled. Am I seeing it wrong, and concentrating at the wrong things?

[Anonymous]

We bought about 30 licences for InCopy, and we installed it on our Authors computers, we then tried to send them incopy assignments so they could make alterations to their books. The books are tax technical, meaning that only the latest bill and acts were inserted/updated etc.

But I think about only a small amount of our authors liked InCopy, some didn't like it all, and some lost all their work due to network backups and other things, basically a lack of knowledge with computers.

So it didn't really work out for us, despite all the in-house training we gave to the authors, step-by-step instructions printed out, phone support, and going to their office to troubleshoot.

All in all it was a bit of a disaster and we've moved away from that workflow.

I think the most confusing thing for people was the terminology of “checking-in” and “checking-out” content.

We've gone back to supplying RTFs to authors and then they insert the updates per chapter and we insert it into indesign. Which seems to be working out a lot better than using InCopy.

But that's the only time I've ever used it, probably not what it's meant for, but we tried and it didn't work for us.

[Anne-Marie Concepcion]

Weird … I've taught hundreds of IC/ID users, and a few months down the line, after they've done a project or three, they're like, “you'll take my copy of InCopy out of my cold dead hands …” LOL. They can't imagine going back to paper markup or whatever.

Eugene, that's the first time I've heard of InCopy users really not getting check-in/check-out. I know you've moved on, but for lurkers, you should know that it's a trivial little task (that allows multiple users to edit the same file at the same time, so it's powerful feature!) You just do a Check Out All when opening the file, and then that's all you have to worry about. When you close the doc, InCopy checks all stories back in for you automatically.

Funny … David hatest check-in/check-out too. On the other hand, he doesn't believe in working off the server either. While very few of my publisher clients would allow users (editors especially) to work on files locally.

I should mention that if you don't need the ability for two or more people (designer and editor, or 2, or 5, etc.) to work on the same INDD file concurrently, you could just equip your InCopy users with Ctrl-Publishing's CtrlCross-Talk https://www.ctrlpublishing.com/…..  That lets IC users open INDD files and start editing, no check-out/check-in required.

AM

[Anonymous]

Definitely if there is a next time I'll recommend getting an InCopy trainer in to teach it properly. It was two years ago in fairness, and I was just as new to InCopy as everyone else. I have to stress that we taught ourselves and then passed on the workflow to the authors. Which was definitely the wrong way to do it.

There were some people who absolutely loved it though. But there were the people that struggled even with email and ms office and computers in general LOL.

I really hate working off servers too, on more than one occasion the server lost connection when saving. And on more than one occassion the IT staff decided it would be fun to reorgainse all the folders, so the links didn't work anymore. Which took ages to fix. So now I work locally, once a month I drag my work folder to the server for backup.

[Author]

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