InCopy InDesign Managed Workflows: the KickSTART guide that gets you up and running FAST Paperback – February 6, 2016

When I studied Journalism many decades ago, reporters typed their stories on typewriters. Typography-related things were limited to italics and occasionally, boldface, indicated by underlining the text with a pencil. The editors worried about how the story fit into the design of the printed page.I really liked this division of labor, as the reporter could concentrating of crafting the best possible story, without being distracted by the layout, while the editor could concentrate on graphic layout, without being distracted by wordsmithing.This all changed with the advent of desktop publishing, or even pseudo-desktop publishing, like Microsoft Word or LibreOffice. Now, while you are in the middle of composing something, you can get distracted by "Hmmm...I wonder if this would look better in a san-serif font." For this reason, I have always been intrigued by InCopy, which brings back this separation of duties, while adding some nice features, like seeing if your story will fit in the allotted space. It used to be that if it was overset, the editor would mangle it to make it fit. Most writers would prefer to fix it themselves.This book is excellent if you want to try using InCopy along with InDesign. It talks about which things you'd best get right the first time, like defining file structures for your projects, and gives you tips about doing so. Whenever there are alternative ways to do things, it explains them, along with the pros and cons of each one. The book is divided into short sections with clear headers, so if you are in the middle of doing something and you say "OMG, I forgot the command to do this," you can easily find it table of contents, or even by thumbing through the book watching the large headings.The book is easy to read, and makes it easy to set up an InCopy-InDesign workflow, even if you just want to play with it and see how you like it. (One thing that kept me from trying InCopy for a long time was that I was afraid the setup would be a lot of work, which would be wasted if I didn't like it.)I highly recommend this book.