InCopy articles (assets) and managing revisions

[karenCWD]

I have a basic question regarding the flow of revisions for an InCopy article that has been placed in an InDesign document. We are a retail cataloger and are considering using InCopy to create a copy database of product copy that can be placed in InDesign layouts allowing a designer to work on changes to the layout at the same time a writer is working on changes to the product copy.

There are two problems we see with this scenario - 1) if we place that same InCopy article in multiple InDesign layouts, but change the formatting in only one of the layout - does that formatting change affect all occurrences of that InCopy article? and, 2) if we make changes to that copy article within the InDesign layout, does that change get pushed out to the InCopy article or do we need to make the change in the InCopy article and push it out to the InDesign layout? Is the flow unidirectional or bidirectional?

Sorry for the poor sentence structure - I'm a Production person, not a copy person. Is anyone else out there using InCopy for such a purpose?

Thanks in advance!

Karen

[BobLevine · Accepted solution]

1. Depends on how you change the formatting. If you use styles it should be fine as long as the same style name is used but different definitions in each document.

2. It doesn’t matter where you change InCopy content. It’s linked to wherever it’s used.

I’m not sure InCopy is really the proper workflow for what you’re trying to do but without knowing a lot more about the workflow it’s hard to say.