Recently in InCopy Category

If you're not familiar with Teacup Software, they put out some great plug-ins for InDesign and they also do custom plug-in development. Among their various plug-ins is a sweet little gem called TypeFitter which makes it easy to tweak word spacing, letter spacing, and glyph spacing to stretch or shrink a story to fit. I'm sure there are purists who will say we shouldn't be doing this, but why not accept the reality AND make it easier?

The plug-in isn't new, but what is new is that the fine folks at Teacup are now giving away the InCopy version for free! It supports the Mac and Windows versions of CS1 and CS2. If you want the plug-in for InDesign it'll cost you $59US, and I'd say it's worth the price if only for it's ability to instantly find all widows and overset text!

It's been a long time coming, but we've finally posted an InCopy ACE Exam. Now all of the InCopy trainers and consultants out there can get certified and "prove" your proficiency. I realize you've been getting along just fine without the exam, but at the same time we all know some clients want a bit of reassurance the first time they hire you. Now how do you go about adding this cool new badge to your Adobe Scout uniform?

1. Normally, you'd see the exam listed on Adobe.com, but the page hasn't been updated yet.
2. To be an InCopy CS2 Certified Expert you also need to be an InDesign CS2 Certified Expert. You should be able to take the two exams in any order you like, but if you're still reading this post, you probably already have your InDesign CS2 ACE.
3. Go directly to http://ibt.prometric.com/adobe and take the exam online.

The exam costs $50US and you have a whole two hours to take it. There are only about 40 questions, so I doubt you'll need all that time. The cut score (ACE exams are multiple-choice, pass/fail) is 73%, so study up and let us know who it goes!

Hey all you InCopy fans, there's a new free InCopy CS2 tutorial posted in the Adobe Design Center. For an experienced InDesign user, this will probably be pretty basic information about text formatting, but it might help you get some of your InCopy users up to speed. If you like what you see in this tutorial, there's more where that came from. Check out the book that Mike Richman and I co-authored: The Adobe InCopy CS2 Book.

In the meantime, what other InCopy tutorials wold folks like to see. What do you want to learn about?

There have been a variety of workarounds until now, but our friends at Insider Software have released a new auto-activation plug-in for InCopy CS2 with the release of FontAgent Pro 3.3. This means writers and editors using InCopy can now enjoy the blissful ease of auto-activation just like their InDesign-using co-workers. FontAgent Pro is a Mac-only solution, but I'm pretty sure it's the only font management solution that offers auto-activation for InCopy users.

After you install the software look for the disc image called "FontAgent Pro Plug Ins.dmg" in the FontAgent Pro application folder. That disk image includes all the auto-activation plug-ins and easy-to-read instructions. Enjoy!

The Adobe Design Center has doled out another free excerpt from our book "The Adobe InCopy CS2 Book."

This sample is admittedly pretty similar to the first excerpt, but it covers "Working with .rtf and .txt files in Adobe InCopy CS2." We hope you appreciate the material and there's more where this came from throughout the rest of the book. Enjoy!

I'm very excited to announce that Total Training for Adobe InCopy CS2 is now shipping! It took a lot of hard work, a week of recording, and a great team of partners over at Total Training to make it happen and I'm very pleased with the final product.

It's six hours of training that covers the features of InCopy for writers and editors, what InDesign users need to understand about InCopy, and then how to marry them together in a publishing workflow. All the video and sample files come on one DVD-ROM that works on both Mac and Windows computers.

This training resource will normally costs $99US, but Total Training is offer a special summer discount of 20% which knocks the price down to $79US. You can check out a course outline (HTML, PDF) to see if you think it will be a helpful resource for your team. There are even a few sample clips you can check it out and kick the tires.

The responses that Mike Richman and I have received on our InCopy book have been really positive and we hope the user community is benefitting from this new resource. We've posted a free excerpt that covers a bit about working with Microsoft Word documents in InCopy.

If you like what you see, consider getting a few copies of The Adobe InCopy CS2 Book for your staff. In the spirit of full disclosure, I co-authored this book. While it would make me very happy if you bought a copy (or a case), I receive no royalties or other compensation from sales of the book.