Adobe to Sell InCopy Directly to Small Pubs

By: Jim Rosenberg While Adobe Systems and Quark vie to make their writing-editing and design-pagination programs the preference of systems developers and publishers, Adobe is also preparing to sell its new InCopy CS directly to end-users as an editorial front end that integrates with its InDesign and other Creative Suite applications. Available by year's end as a CD and as a download from Adobe, InCopy CS will not be packaged for retail.

Acknowledging that relying on others to service customers and promote its products does lower Adobe's cost, Senior Product Marketing Manger Ian Manasco said Adobe will not abandon its integration partners -- more than a dozen of whose systems optionally or exclusively relied on InCopy and InDesign.

Direct sale of InCopy CS with "Bridge Workflow" plug-ins allowing it to work with InDesign CS gives Adobe access to smaller vertical markets, according to the software firm's managers. At this level, users will have file-based operations. Anyone needing a database would look to third-party InCopy-InDesign solutions.

A one-person newsletter might rely on InDesign's story editor alone for text entry and editing, and many or most periodical publishers would go to third parties for systems -- but Adobe sees a niche in publications of modest size that appear no more than weekly, have staffs of fewer than 10 persons, and require no production database, customization or substantial support.

Newspaper prospects may range from schools to the many stand-alone weeklies that don't have a group's centralization or network opportunities. Senior Product Manager Chad Siegel said that small weeklies wanting system benefits but lacking tens of thousands of dollars can use "Bridge" technology to establish a basic level of workflow management among writers, editors and designers. The arrangement, he said, "provides base-level file locking -- check-in/out" -- that communicates a story's current ownership and status.

Manasco outlined three objectives for the software: maintaining copy integrity by keeping copyfitting in the hands of journalists and permitting "changes all the way up to the last minute"; customizing editorial tools to create "a comfortable environment to turn functionality on and off"; and streamlining production by moving from strictly linear to collaborative work flows.

The first is achieved because, unlike the uncertain line breaks and overall copyfit of mixed software environments, InCopy and InDesign's shared code base and tight integration ensure that writers, editors, and designers all see the same hyphenation and justification. And all editorial statistics are shown, including a copyfit progress bar.

Reporters can work in story view (without line endings), galley view, and layout view. Bridge Workflow requires only the page make-up staffer to run InDesign, which can send several specified stories simultaneously to InCopy, where the then-linked files can be checked out for work and the Story List used to view and track them.

For the other objectives, Siegel said journalists get "completely configurable [user interface] settings," including customizable keyboard shortcuts and quickly reloadable settings for shared workstations. File-locking, identical H&J, inline notes, and change tracking foster collaboration. InCopy CS also sports typographic controls, table creation, spell check, and find/change options.

"It could help," Lynne Melanson said, a day after last week's InCopy CS announcement. For now, said the production chief for Le Courrier de la Nouvelle-Ecosse, "no one can go into an InDesign document" she creates to make up the 2,000-circulation weekly, where two Yarmouth-based reporters and numerous correspondents cover Nova Scotia. Courrier content is prepared in Word, Photoshop and Illustrator.

Among features she thought may be useful: fast keyboard shortcuts; more-accurate space budgeting using the copy depth indicator; freedom to experiment with edits using multiple undo and redo; on-demand or dynamic spell-checking; fast, consistent text formatting with character and paragraph styles loaded from an InDesign file or defined directly in InCopy; and check-in/out, enabling "designers and editors to work simultaneously on the same content without overwriting each other's changes."

Unlike the Courrier, however, many smaller weeklies run Adobe PageMaker or QuarkXPress. For them, change means buying both InDesign and InCopy. In Sweet Home, Ore., The New Era uses both -- XPress only for special needs, while PageMaker "just seems to work very well for us" after 17 years, said Editor/Publisher Alex Paul. "I can't see a reason to change."

Besides the latest versions of Adobe software, including Acrobat Professional and GoLive (Web publishing), Creative Suite comes with Version Cue to track files. InDesign now has context-sensitive controls, running headers and footers, preview palettes to check output, nested text-formatting styles, XML validation for layout automation and repurposing, faster navigation, and enhanced Photoshop support.