Once again, as with CS 1, installing the plugins fro InDesign to use the Bridge/LiveEdit workflow is not the most intuitive thing. Much like installing them for CS 1, you need to have an InCopy CS 2 installation disc to make it work. As I found out from direct experience, copying the plugins only makes things look somewhat right. The functionality will not be there and everything will go belly up in a very ugly way if you try to use a setup like this.
With InDesign installed (and closed) on the machine, run the InCopy installer and enter your InCopy serial number. You should then get a window that gives you the option of a Complete installation which will install InCopy as well as the plugins (probably not what you want) or the option to just install the InDesign plugins. It is the second choice you want to choose. Let everything run, finish, close the installer, and then fire up InDesign. You should see the option to enter a User under the File menu, which you want to do. As with CS 1, this is completely arbitrary and can be any name you want. If everything else worked out, you should see an InCopy submenu in about the middle of the Edit menu and if you right click or Command+click on a story, you should see an InCopy menu there as well. Happy LiveEditing!
ONE
Building upon my Sample Workflow for CS1, let's outline a basic setup for CS 2.
First, start with a fully complete InDesign document which will probably have empty textframes for the content or filler text. The designer then needs to use the Export function from the InCopy contextual menu (right click on a textframe for Windows, Control+click for Apple) to export the story out in to the .incx format. This much is the same as CS 1, but there is one further step where this story needs to be added to an Assignment file. You can create the Assignment at the same time you export the story file or if you already have the Assignments set up, you Export that story directly to that Assignment option in the same InCopy submenu. If you just Export the stories, then you'll have to add them in to a particular Assignment in your Assignments window in InDesign by dragging them there from the Unassigned area.
From this point forward, the designer will need to use the Check In/Out options to edit the text that has been exported. If you're working in a small environment, then you don't need to worry about much else, unless you want to take advantage of the ability to Export graphics in to the .incx format as well, in which I'd recommend putting them in their own Assignment file, separate from the text-based files. If you have a lot of stories, you might want to break down your Assignments in to separate files, but I have yet to see that be required.
TWO
Once you have everything set up from the InDesign side of things including: the primary .indd Indesign file, single or multiple .inca Assignment files, and single or multiple .incx InCopy files, you're ready to proceed in to working within InCopy.
It's pretty simple really, you just open up the Assignment file in InCopy and start going about your Check In/Check Out business. If the designer makes a change to the file while an InCopy user is working on it, once the file gets saved, InCopy will ask the user to update their file to see the changes. Just be sure to use Check In/Check Out for changes. Using the Save won't save the file in the way you want it to and it's something of a shame that this function is still in there as it is very confusing to most InCopy users.
If upon opening an Assignment file, you get a warning screen about there being no Stories or Assignments and you only have the layout view to work with, then something is wrong with how everything is set up. You will want to check and make sure that all the required elements are in place and if all else fails, try to recreate the Assignment file from InDesign.
One last little nifty feature for InCopy users is to be able to Export a file from InCopy. This is something of an answer to the lack of generational edits for InCopy users because they can save out a copy of a story once they're done with it in to RTF or PDF format and be able to open that later and copy the text back in to the story. It is also useful in case they get last minute changes from a writer or need to converse with them because RTF will be a lot more portable format than a .incx file.
Overall, the Bridge Workflow (now called LiveEdit although many components are still called Bridge) is pretty much the same as the CS 1 products and you should take a look in that section to refresh prior to reading these articles.
The biggest changes come in the form of a new file called an Assignments file (.inca). This file appears to be something of a scaled-down version (wireframe if you will?) of an InDesign file (.indd) and works as a way to control all the comings and goings of the system. From some basic tests I've performed, you can still use the old system of opening the .indd file in InCopy to perform edits, but I don't recommend it and I view this change as a good one despite some additional work overhead for the InDesign folks because it pulls people away from the InDesign file to a degree where I've seen some workflow problems develop in CS 1.
The other major changes come on the InCopy side of things, where a file you open in InCopy is no longer a .incc file, it is a .incx file which stands for InCopy Interchange Document. These are slightly different than the old files because they can contain the textual, story elements of an InDesign document as well as graphical elements and they are all grouped in to the Assignment files which allow control over who gets what. You can still perform the workflow the same way as I outlined in my CS 1 articles, but these new features allow more control and hopefully more stability as time will show. Toss in the fact that InCopy users can export files to RTF and there is a good deal of new functionality that is worth the upgrade.
This is an odd little item that throws people for a loop sometimes because by default, InDesign doesn't come enabled to do the Bridge Workflow. You have to install the plugins from an InCopy disc to get this to work and dragging and dropping the plugins won't work. I tried that a couple of times and it seems like something actually needs to be installed for it all to hum along nicely.
So, on a machine that has InDesign installed (with the application closed), stick in the InCopy disc. Go through the normal steps of installation for InCopy, but right after you input the serial number, you should come to a screen that has the type of installation you want to perform in the upper lefthand corner as a dropdown menu. You want to choose the last option which installs just the plugins for InDesign and doesn't install InCopy. Once you've selected that, start the installation and watch it go. It should be very fast and once it's done, you can start up InDesign, go in and set the User under the File menu. This can be anything you want, as it's just for the check in/check out process and not related to anything license oriented.
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.
The InDesign/InCopy workflow that was introduced in the the first version of Adobe Creative Suite isn't the most intuitive system to wrap your head around. Once you do though, it makes a lot of sense and for some people out there, they may wonder how they produced without it.
Basically, in CS 1, there a system called the "Bridge Workflow". This is not to be confused with the "Adobe Bridge" in CS 2 which is something much, much different. Bridge Workflow (BW) is a system wherein is separates out the software used for design with the software used for editing in to two products: InDesign (ID) and InCopy (IC). At first this separation may seem strange until you realize what it gives the designers and editors.
For designers, it gives them the ability to truly lock down their designs. Design elements can't be moved as I've seen happen in a workflow that was based solely around Quark where an editor would nudge something a designer had done in order to make their copy fit. Yes, not a cool thing, but it happened and BW takes away that ability. It also makes it so that the copy in a layout is just another element along the lines of an image. I'll get back to that later as it seems to be the hardest thing for designers new to the process to understand.
For editors, IC strips down ID in to a system that is most beneficial to editors. IC also lets editors import Microsoft Word files, apply style sheets to the copy and then hand that file off to the designer to link in to the larger ID document. Above and beyond all of these features, IC allows multiple editors to work on the same document at the same time. I've seen it be a huge savior when a crunch comes down the line.
So, back to the idea of how everything fits together.
Essentially, in this system, there are .indd (InDesign files) and .incd (InCopy files.) In addition to these, there are your standard TIFF, PSD, JPEG, EPS, PDF and a multitude of other file formats that are used in the construction of layouts. But here is the biggest trick in understanding how all of this works because if a designer thinks of an IC file as another file like an image file, then they'll understand how all of this works.
IC files are separate files from ID files which link in to the ID file. They can be edited separately and those updates will show up in the final ID layout. It does get confusing for people because you can edit an IC file directly in IC or you can edit it through ID by checking it out to work on. The later is bound to be the preferred method of editing because it is the only way for an editor to see the copy fit in to the layout. If it is edited just in IC directly then they'll only see the text with applied style sheets.
A strange thing for designers to get used to is that if they need to make changes to the text of an IC file, then they need to check it out just like an editor would. When you think about the whole workflow, it makes sense because in order for copy to be worked on, someone must check it out to work on it and thus it locks that piece of text, making sure that people won't step on each other's feet.
It's through the check in and check out process that problems can arise sometimes. When a file is checked out, a lock file is created in the same directory as the IC story file. There are times (and this was much more prevalent prior to the release of the third software update) where a lock file would get written and then not get removed once the file was checked back in. This in effect locks the file to everyone, including the person who created it in the first place. The only way around this is to go on the server and delete the file manually. Also, making sure that users close out of documents and don't leave them open helps as well because any disturbance in a network will cause general weirdness.
Another general suggestion is to make sure that designers are linking low res images in to their documents for production work. ID/IC has a bad way of opening a lot of connections to the server (one for every file that a document links to) and I've seen several instances where things move very slow when people are working on something like a 40 page document with a lot of images or are using full resolution images to mock up a layout.
One last item to address before laying out a sample workflow is that one of the bad things about this system is the amount of files created. For every textframe in ID there has to be a corresponding IC story for it if editors are to be able to edit this. I've found that creating a good hierarchy for story files on the server will pay off big time. And lastly, I've never found a good way to save a draft in IC in order to come back to it later. You can only save versions in ID, but that won't touch to IC story files. Just something to keep in mind.