Here is the way I suggest setting up a workflow in this system. This may not be the absolute, end-all be-all of systems, but after trying several methods, this is what I've found to work best:
- Have the designers work on their layouts with empty textframes for the future copy. If they establish style sheets, then these should be transferred to the editing machines and set as the default.
- Once the editors have finalized their edits with the writers, they should take what will probably be a Word document and import it in to InCopy. They will then need to go through an apply any stylistic attributes that may have gotten lost in the process and make sure to delete the default Word styles that get imported (usually called "Normal" hah!)
- At this point, the editor should hand off the InCopy file to the designer who then links it in to the InDesign layout. From this point forward, the editor will need to open the InDesign file in InCopy in order to make changes and see how the copy fits. Otherwise, they can also open the InCopy file directly in InCopy, but will be without the benefit of the layout.
And that's pretty much it. There are some variations on this, but generally, having editors give the designers Word files has always been an extremely bad way of doing things.