If you’ve made it this far into a book about writing with a computer, we assume you know how to type. However, your writing might include ideas or quotes from another text file, word-processing document, or Web page. There are two Paste commands in the Edit menu that you need to know about:

You can also copy text from other sources such as Microsoft Word, a Web browser, or your email and paste it into an InCopy document. By default, InCopy pastes plain text (without formatting) from other applications. This is usually a good thing because it helps avoid situations in which you paste formatted text that doesn’t rely on InCopy’s Character and Paragraph styles. It also reduces the chances of inadvertently adding lots of RGB color swatches (see “Introducing the Swatches Palette” later in this chapter) to your InCopy document, which can happen when copying and pasting text from a Web browser.

If you have a good reason to change the default pasting behavior, choose InCopy > Preferences > Type on Mac or Edit > Preferences > Type on Windows. At the bottom of the dialog, change the setting from Text Only to All Information. Now when you paste text from other applications all the source formatting, for better or worse, is retained.

Copying and pasting text works just fine, but it has an ’80s retro feel when compared with the new drag and drop text features available in InCopy CS2 and InDesign CS2. Drag and drop is enabled by default in Galley and Story views (you can enable it in Layout View in the Type pane of the application preferences) and should be familiar to anybody who has used Microsoft Word before. Just select any text (letters, words, sentences, or paragraphs), move your cursor over the text until the cursor changes (), click and drag the selection to a new location, and release the mouse button. The selection is moved (cut and pasted).

If you hold down Option/Alt as you drag, the selection is copied and pasted, which is especially handy when you have multiple stories from one layout and you want to use the same text in more than one location. For example, say the spread you’re working on includes a story and several pullquote stories. You can Option/Alt-drag an interesting quote from the body of the story into the pullquote story and then edit it for copyfit.

You can also drag and drop text from other applications such as your Web browser, email application, or another text editor. You get the same results with copy and paste, but it’s sometimes easier to drag and drop. When you drag and drop text from other applications, InCopy respects the preferences for copy and paste from other applications as described earlier in this chapter.

The helpful “Adjust Spacing Automatically When Cutting and Pasting Words” feature (Figure 3.1) is enabled by default. When you are copying and pasting or dragging and dropping text, InCopy automatically adds or removes spaces before and after words as necessary. This makes things easier when you’re moving a text selection because you don’t have to worry about selecting the correct number of spaces before and after the edited text. The feature is even smart enough to know when you’re dragging and dropping text to the end of a sentence and it won’t add a space before the period, question mark, or exclamation mark.

Figure 3.1. Automatic spacing adjustment is enabled by default and affects copy and paste as well as drag and drop text editing.

Depending on your writing habits and your source notes, you might have to clean up the case of the letters in your writing. The Type > Change Case submenu has four commands that are pretty self explanatory:

Select the text you want to change, select one of the change case commands, and watch InCopy reformat your text for you in an instant. With text selected, these commands are also in the contextual menu (Control-click on Mac or right-click on Windows) for easy access. If you use these commands frequently, you should considered creating custom keyboard shortcuts for them (see Chapter 1).

Are you tired of trying to remember arcane keyboard shortcuts for obscure characters? Do you still ask your coworkers how to type trademark and copyright symbols? If so, you can throw away your secret decoder ring and start using the Type > Insert commands instead. The Type > Insert Special Character menu lets you add a wide variety of characters, including trademark and copyright symbols, dashes, and other punctuation (Figure 3.2). The Type > Insert White Space menu lets you insert more kinds of spaces than you even knew existed, including em spaces and en spaces. There’s also the Type > Insert Break Character menu that lets you insert every kind of break character you can imagine, including frame breaks and forced line breaks. If you ever need some lorem ipsum, just choose Type > Fill with Placeholder Text.

Figure 3.2. The Insert Special Character menu is full of shortcuts to useful special characters that might otherwise be hard to remember.

If you’re looking for other obscure characters or advanced typographic features such as ligatures, fractions, or dingbats, then the Glyphs palette is your friend. Choose Type > Glyphs, and the font for the active text is displayed by default (Figure 3.3). Use the pulldown menus at the bottom of the palette to change the font family and font face. If you want to see larger or smaller previews of the glyphs, click the large or small mountain icons in the bottom-right corner of the palette. These mountain icons let you zoom in and out between six different preview sizes.

If you’re using an OpenType font with an advanced set of characters, you might have some options in the Show menu at the top of the Glyphs palette. The Show menu lets you browse just a subset of the selected font instead of forcing you to wade through every letter, number, fraction, dingbat, and punctuation. Double-click a glyph in the Glyphs palette to insert it in your active story at the current cursor location. In some cases you’ll notice a small black triangle next to a glyph in the Glyphs palette. Click and hold on any glyph with this flyout option and you can choose an alternate for the selected glyph.

Figure 3.3. Use the Glyphs palette to find and insert obscure characters and special typographical elements.

As you become comfortable with the Glyphs palette, you’ll probably use it more and more often. Glyph sets are an easy way to organize special glyphs that you use on a regular basis. To start a new glyph set, select a glyph in the Glyphs palette, choose New Glyph Set from the palette menu, and give the set a name. To add more glyphs to a glyph set, select the glyphs in the Glyphs palette and add them one at a time by choosing Add to Glyph Set > [Set name] in the palette menu (Figure 3.4). After you’ve created some useful custom glyph sets, you can easily access them by choosing View Glyph Set > [Set name] from the palette menu. If you need to organize your sets a little more effectively you can also edit and delete glyph sets with the corresponding palette menu commands in the Glyphs palette.

Figure 3.4. Create custom glyph sets for easy access to obscure characters, fractions, alternates, and dingbats.

The ability to see hidden characters such as spaces, tabs, and paragraph breaks can be a helpful editing and troubleshooting tool (Figure 3.5). You can toggle the visibility of hidden characters by choosing Type > Show/Hide Hidden Characters or clicking the Show/Hide Hidden Characters button in the Command Bar. Notice that hidden characters can be made visible in Galley, Story, and Layout views.

Figure 3.5. The same story with and without hidden characters visible.

The new auto-correction feature (see Chapter 4) should fix many of your common typing errors, but InCopy also has a Transpose feature to fix little mistakes. If you accidentally jumble two adjacent characters as you type, you can easily fix your mistake by inserting your cursor between the two characters and choosing Edit > Transpose. For example, if you type $136, you can insert the cursor between the “3” and the “6” and change the figure to $163 with one command.

For many years, people have used tabs to align text at the same horizontal point or create the look of a table. Because InCopy and InDesign can create tables (see Chapter 6) natively and can even place tables from Excel and Word documents, many of the old uses for tabs can be eliminated. That said, there are still situations where tabs can be helpful, and here we give a brief overview of how InCopy handles them. Start by choosing Type > Tabs to open the Tabs palette (Figure 3.6), switch your document to Layout view so you can see an accurate preview of the results, and insert your text cursor in the paragraph you want to format. Tabs are rendered in Galley and Story views, but they are all the same generic width and only function as placeholders.

Figure 3.6. Use the Tabs palette to create and edit tabs for a paragraph.

There are four styles of tabs you can create in InCopy, and each is represented by a unique icon in the top left corner of the Tabs palette.

To create a tab, click the button for the tab style you want and then click just above the tab ruler. To adjust the precise position (X value) of a tab after it’s created, click and drag it and watch the black vertical line that indicates the results on the text. You can also select the tab and enter an X value in the tab position field. Regardless of the unit of measurement you have selected in your application preferences under Units & Increments, you can enter any unit of measurement here. For example, if your application preferences are set to measure everything in points, and you know you want a tab stop at 0.5 inches, just type 0.5 in in the Position field, and InCopy does the unit conversion for you and positions the tab in the correct location.

To change the alignment of a tab, select it above the tab ruler and click a different tab style icon. You can also Option/Alt-click on an existing tab to cycle through the four different tab style options. To delete a tab, select it and drag it away from the tab ruler. If you’ve created lots of tabs and want to start over, use the Clear All command in the Tabs palette menu.

When you use tabs with the default options, the space between the tabbed text is just empty space. However, sometimes you want a tab leader, such as a string of periods, to fill the gap between the text and the next tab. Select the tab you want a leader for and insert a character (or up to eight characters) such as a period, dash, or bullet in the Leader field in the Tabs palette. Now your tab leader character will fill the gap between the text and the tab instead of empty white space. This can be especially helpful with financial data or a table of contents when tabs are set very wide.

The last feature you should know about in the Tabs palette is the ability to create tabs that align on a special character such as a decimal point, dollar sign, or hyphen. Create a decimal tab and enter a character in the Align On field while the tab is still selected. Now the alignment character in the text aligns to the tab marker, which can be especially helpful when formatting financial or scientific data (Figure 3.7).

Figure 3.7. Here’s an example of a paragraph that uses all four tab styles, a tab leader, and a custom alignment character (decimal).

Let’s start with the building blocks of writing by opening the Character palette (Figure 3.8). Choose Customize in the palette menu and make sure all four options are enabled. This way you can be certain all the possible options are available and your screen will look like the figures in this book. The Character palette can affect any range of selected text, all the way down to a single character. You can select and format text in any of the three view modes (Galley, Story, or Layout), but it usually makes sense to apply formatting in Layout view so you can see a real-time preview of all the changes you’re making.

When you select a font in the Character palette or the Type menu, you’ll see sample text that shows exactly how the font will be rendered in the layout. This makes it much easier to choose fonts because it eliminates much of the guesswork. You’ll also notice a small icon next to each font, indicating whether the font is PostScript , TrueType , or OpenType .

One thing that might surprise you when you format text is that you can’t just click a button to make selected text bold and italic like you can in Microsoft Word. This might seem like a missing feature, but it’s not. InCopy intentionally requires you to use a bold or italic typeface in order to apply bold or italic attributes. This way, InCopy and InDesign make sure you only use font attributes that can print reliably on professional printing equipment. If your active font does include bold and italic faces, you can use keyboard shortcuts to make selected text bold (Shift-Command/Control-B) and italic (Shift-Command/Control-I) or use the options in the Character palette to apply a bold or italic font face to your selection.

Figure 3.8. Select text and apply any of these character formatting options.

Most of the character formatting options available in the Character palette are pretty self-explanatory for anybody who understands the basics of typography, but there are some more advanced options available in the Character palette menu (Figure 3.9). The most notable options here are found in the extra flyout menu of OpenType options. The OpenType options are only available when using OpenType fonts (see “Understanding OpenType” later in this chapter), and even then you’ll have different options for different fonts depending on the completeness of the font design. The other advanced options are beyond the scope of this book, but they are explained in the Adobe Help Center.

Figure 3.9. Several advanced character formatting options, including OpenType features, are included in the palette menu.

To change the color of selected text, open the Swatches palette and click a color swatch (Figure 3.10). Before you get too excited about applying colors to your text, make sure you discuss the implications with your designer counterparts. In most cases, decisions about text color are made by the design staff, not the editorial staff. See Chapter 8 for a complete discussion of the decision-making process and the implications for the rest of the InCopy/InDesign workflow. Even if the writers and editors using InCopy have the freedom to apply colors to text, it’s probably best to do that by using character and paragraph styles, which are discussed later in this chapter.

Figure 3.10. You can apply color to selected text with the Swatches palette, but you should stick to using character styles and paragraph styles whenever possible.

If the design and editorial departments agree that it’s okay for InCopy contributors to create their own color swatches, you create them in the Swatches palette, but only in standalone documents. Open the Swatches palette from the Window menu and choose New Color Swatch from the palette menu (Figure 3.11). The only type of swatch you can create with InCopy is a process color (using the standard four colors of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black), which means you can’t create spot colors such as Pantone colors. InCopy also doesn’t have a Color or Gradient palette, which means you cannot create gradient swatches or apply random colors to your text. As a writer, this might seem limiting, but in the overall workflow this constraint is a very good thing. Remember that the production artists using InDesign are usually responsible for getting the files ready to print, and if an InCopy user created a spot or gradient swatch and the designer didn’t catch those special swatches, the publisher could be stuck with very expensive printing errors.

Figure 3.11. Mix and name new process swatches in the New Color Swatch dialog box.

You can create color swatches using the Lab or RGB color modes, but stick with CMYK unless you receive specific instructions otherwise. Use the color sliders or the ink percentage fields to mix the colors until you get the combination you need. By default, InCopy uses the same CMYK mix values as the swatch name, but you can uncheck the “Name with Color Value” option and give the swatch a custom name, such as “Headers” or “Captions.” When you’re done mixing and naming your new swatch, click OK, and the swatch is added to the bottom of the Swatches palette. If you have several new swatches to create, click the Add button after mixing each swatch and then click OK when you’re done mixing all the new swatches you need.

In addition to creating process swatches, you can also create tint swatches which are a shade of an existing swatch. To create a tint swatch, select an existing swatch ([None] and [Paper] won’t work) and choose New Tint Swatch from the palette menu. The New Tint Swatch dialog opens, and the only editable field is the tint slider at the bottom (Figure 3.12). Choose a shade of the original swatch and click OK. Now the original swatch and the tint swatch are tied together. For example, if the tint swatch is set to 50% and you change the original swatch from brown to red, the tint swatch will change from tan to pink.

Figure 3.12. Tint swatches remember their relationship to the original swatch.

If the list of swatches in the Swatches palette is full of colors you never use, you might want to tidy things up. Choose Select All Unused from the Swatches palette menu to select all unused swatches in the document. Now click the Derete Swatch button at the bottom of the palette. If you try to delete a swatch that is used by the document in any text or that is referenced in a text style, InCopy prompts you to remap the deleted swatch to another swatch (Figure 3.13). This remapping process helps you avoid situations where your story can include lots of stray color usage without having defined color swatches. That might not sound like a big deal to you, but undefined color swatches can be a nightmare for the design department.

Figure 3.13. If you delete a used swatch, InCopy helps you remap that color to another swatch.

Open the Paragraph palette from the Type menu and use the Customize command in the palette menu to make sure all the options are enabled. The Paragraph palette contains options that apply to an entire paragraph, such as alignment, justification, indents, and drop caps (Figure 3.14). Just like the Character palette, there are several advanced options to choose from in the palette menu. For a complete explanation of all paragraph formatting options, please consult Real World Adobe InDesign CS2 by Olav Martin Kvern and David Blatner (Peachpit Press, 2006) or the InCopy Help files (Help > InCopy Help).

Figure 3.14. The Paragraph palette affects entire paragraphs, whereas the Character palette only affects text selections as small as a single character.

The simple little Story palette may be a one-trick pony, but it can accomplish in one click what used to take designers hours of tedious work. Open the Story palette from the Type menu and enable the Optical Margin Alignment option to create hanging punctuation for all text frames in a story. Now, anytime punctuation such as quotes, hyphens, and dashes are at the edge of a text frame, they will hang outside the frame edge just slightly and improve the readability of the text (Figure 3.15). To control the amount of overhang, enter a size in the text entry field that matches the size of the text. As usual, any major decisions about typography should probably be a joint decision between design and editorial.

Figure 3.15. The Story palette makes the tedious process of creating hanging punctuation an easy one-click option.

Two powerful options for paragraph styles you should know about are Next Style and Nested Styles. The Next Style option, set in the General section of the Paragraph Style Options (Figure 3.17) dialog, chooses which paragraph style to apply to the following paragraph. For example, you can create a paragraph style called Headline that has a Next Style option set to another paragraph style called Byline. Now, when you type a paragraph with the Headline style and press Return/Enter, the next paragraph is automatically formatted with the Byline paragraph style. You can string multiple styles together with the Next Style option, such as setting the Next Style for Byline to Body.

This is great if you type all your text in InCopy, and if you always plan ahead, but we realize that’s not how the process always works. In cases where you import text from other sources or wait to apply styles until after the text has already been typed, there’s a great trick for applying Next Styles you need to know about. First, select all the related paragraphs that need a sequence of next styles. Then Control/right-click on the name of the first paragraph style in the Paragraph Styles palette and choose Apply [Style Name] then Next Style. This instantly applies the first paragraph style and any other Next Style definitions and saves you a lot of time.

Another powerful paragraph style option is the Nested Style feature, which strings together multiple character styles into one intelligent paragraph style. We’re not going to explain all the details of creating Nested Styles, but we want to make sure you’re aware of the feature and are not surprised when you see one for the first time. For example, a nested paragraph style could use a bold character style through the first comma, an italicized character style through the first colon, and then plain text until the end of the paragraph (Figure 3.18). This is a very efficient way to style repetitive text such as a photo caption without having to apply each character style individually.

Figure 3.18. Nested styles eliminate repetitive character formatting by combining multiple character styles into an intelligent paragraph style.

Perhaps the best aspect of Nested Styles is that once the style is applied to the paragraph, the nested character formatting is applied automatically at the pre-determined break points. If one of the break points, such as the comma or colon in the preceding example, is moved or deleted, the Nested Style updates automatically, and no new formatting is required.

Character and paragraph styles save you time, ensure consistency, and make future updates much easier, but the traditional method of applying styles by selecting text and clicking on the style name in the Style palettes can be tedious. Some documents may have as many as 150 or more styles, which makes the situation even more unwieldy. Enabling the Small Rows option in the palette menu for the Character Styles and Paragraph Styles palettes lets you squeeze more styles into the same space (Figure 3.19), but scrolling through that many styles to find the correct one can still be a drag.

Figure 3.19. The Small Palette Rows option can squeeze more styles into the Styles palettes, but the new Quick Apply feature makes the whole process of styling text more efficient.

Applying styles while you type can interrupt your typing and therefore your thought process. It’s also a hassle to be forced to take your hands of the keyboard, grab the mouse, scroll, apply the style, put your hands back on the keyboard, and start typing again. What if you could skip all those steps and apply character and paragraph styles with just a few taps on the keyboard? This is where the new Quick Apply feature saves the day.

Select text you want to style and press Command-Return (Mac) or Control-Enter (Windows) to open the Quick Apply window in the top-right corner of the screen (Figure 3.20). Next, start typing letters and numbers that you know are part of the style name you want to apply. For example, if you type the letter “f” the list of styles in the Quick Apply list narrows to show only styles with the letter “f” in them. You don’t need to type complete text strings, or even type them in order, so typing the letters “f” and “r” would quickly narrow the long list of styles to “Proofreading” as well as “Folio Right.” If you narrow the list of styles to a short list, you can start navigating the list with the up and down arrow keys. When you highlight the style you’re looking for, press Return/Enter to apply the style to the selected text and return the focus of the cursor back to the text you’re editing.

Figure 3.20. Quick Apply makes it easy to apply character and paragraph styles quickly and without taking your hands off the keyboard.

Because we’ve written this entire book using InCopy, we’ve really fallen in love with this new Quick Apply feature. It’s saved us a lot of annoying mousing around because we’ve been able to apply all the styles with the keyboard. We’re also grateful for the extra screen real estate we have because we don’t have to have any palettes open in order to apply the styles.

Sometimes when you apply paragraph styles to text you’ll notice a plus mark (+) next to the style name in the Paragraph Styles palette. This plus mark indicates there’s a manaul override on the selected text that you might want to eliminate. When you apply a paragraph style to text that already has custom formatting, the custom formatting is retained as an override to the applied paragraph style. Option/Alt-click on the style name in the Paragraph Styles palette to eliminate the override. This resets the selected text to the active style definition, and the plus mark (+) goes away.

When there’s a character or paragraph style in one InCopy file that you want to use in another file, you have two options. You could try to recreate the style from scratch in your InCopy file, but that process is tedious and prone to mistakes. The point of sharing styles is to ensure they are identical, so instead of recreating text styles, you should import styles directly from one InCopy document into another by following these steps:

Figure 3.21. Select styles to load from one document into another.

In some cases, you’ll notice styles with a floppy disk icon next to them in the Character and Paragraph Styles palettes. The floppy disk icon indicates the style was introduced to the InCopy document by placing a Word document that contained the style. Also note that if you place a Word document with styles into an InCopy document, the text styles from the Word document retain the floppy disk icon when those styles are loaded into another InCopy document.

If you find that your InCopy stories include lots of text styles you never use, consider paring down your styles. To find all the unused styles in a document, open the Character Styles and Paragraph Styles palettes from the Window menu and choose Select All Unused from the palette menu. Now you can delete the unused styles by clicking the trash can icon at the bottom of the palette. You’ll have to do this once in the Character Styles palette and once in the Paragraph Styles palette to clean up everything. If you try to delete a style that’s used in the document, InCopy forces you to remap the style you’re deleting to another style in the document (Figure 3.22). You can only remap paragraph styles to paragraph styles and character styles to character styles. If deleting a used style was an accident, just click Cancel instead of remapping and deleting the style.

Figure 3.22. You must remap a used style before it can be deleted.

You’ve learned how to edit, format, and style your text, but that’s only part of the equation. In the next chapter we explore many other features that help you automate your writing workflow with powerful tools such as dynamic spelling, auto-correction, and text macros.