It's amazing what walking away from the computer can do. Rather than work on my day off, I revisted some favorite short stories, went outside and played a bit of bocce with the kid and enjoyed the sun. Nothing like recharging.

Anyway, got a response to some questions I posted on Adobe's Incopy forum and it's not great news. Incopy is quite limited by design and assumes writers and editors are complete idiots when it comes to layout. Basically, the assignments from Indesign are handed out via the production people and the writers have a little flexibility with transforming graphics, but not much. The whole point of Incopy, I thought, was to give writers a more visual idea of how their stories will fit. Yet when creating a new document, you automatically get a .5 margin around your text area. Why? Who has that space in newspaper/magazine environment? Also, you can't easily specify the depth of your stories in oh say, INCHES or another other such physical measurement, it's all based on words, lines, columns or pages. Nice idea, but not practical for less than ideal environments.

And the huge glaring point in all this is that Indesign users can't work on the same document at once. Yes, the writers and designer can work on the same document, or more than 1 writer and single designer can, but never more than one designer. And should the production department be assigning writers their stories? Isn't that more and Editor in chief job? Yeah, the designer is probably getting the space or specs from a chief, but why keep the chief outta the loop?

The Live-edit work-flow sounds great, but it needs work. Quark 7 is supposed to have composition zones which can be worked on by anyone, so hopefully Adobe will crib from that idea.