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.