Adobe InCopy CS 2 is Adobe’s editing application for editing workflows that combine with InDesign CS 2. InCopy and InDesign are increasingly often being used together as a publishing solution at magazine publishers, newspapers, ad firms, etc.

The advantage of having two separate applications like InCopy and InDesign is that you can split up the workflow of the layout department and the editing department. This has been the reason why Adobe has attracted quite a large number of specialised system integrators such as SoftCare and WoodWing. These vendors develop systems around the InDesign/InCopy tandem so that large environments can use the InDesign/InCopy publishing system.

All of these solutions are really plug-ins to both programs, but that is exactly what makes the Adobe solution so wonderfully efficient. Adobe offering an open technology to third-party developers in the sense that plug-ins are possible to connect InCopy to InDesign in a tight integration scheme, is one of the main reasons why Adobe has been steadily penetrating publishing markets where Quark’s QPS reigned before.
InCopy CS 2 novelties

However, that is not the only reason why InCopy CS 2 is almost a must-have, even for individual writers/editors. Imagine being able to write to copyfit, not just based on a pre-defined layout, but based on a number of words, columns, characters, or whatever else rules in the publishing industry.

InCopy CS 2 offers such flexibility. It’s one of the reasons why I personally have stopped using Microsoft Word or Apple Pages in favour of InCopy CS 2. Word is nice, and it is the standard for delivering copy to magazines, but InCopy CS 2 allows me to export my document to RTF, and that seems to be good enough for all of my editors. The fact that I can instantaneously see in the status bar whether I have written to copyfit is a wonderfully efficient addition to me, in my workflow as an individual freelance.

I don’t have to lose time by going to the Word count either in Word or in Pages. InCopy just shows me with a green bar when I’ve written the exact number of words that I was allowed to write in the first place. The bar turns red when I write to many words. It might sound like a detail, but this alone is worth the license fee.

But of course, there’s much more to InCopy CS 2 than there was to CS. For example, there’s the new ability to drag and drop text between applications. This is one of those features that I seldom use myself, but that I do find should have been included in InCopy earlier—it’s basic functionality.

Dynamic spelling is another novelty. You like it or you don’t. Whatever you may feel about it, it’s better implemented than the Auto-Correct feature of Word, where you often run into the experience that Word stubbornly insists to correct a mistake you haven’t made in the first place. InCopy luckily is less of a know-all. Dictionaries can be shared across workgroups and you can create and link to multiple dictionaries.

A feature many users will like is that you can turn off anti-aliased text. I like anti-aliased text, so I don’t use this feature, but many writers hate the fuzziness of the default anti-aliasing, and they can now turn it off.

Editorial notes are possible, with bookends right in the text, in a different colour so they-re easily identified. Exactly what editors tend to like the most. Footnotes are supported, no matter whether they come from a Word document or an RTF file, or self-created. Numbering and styling can be customized.

In fact, styles have been enhanced considerably in InCopy CS 2, with automatic conversion from Word, but also many more options when creating your own styles. For example, you can now assign a next style in InCopy, just as you could and can in InDesign.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P20/Web_Development/InCopy_CS2_v4_0.html