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.