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Having been to training on InCopy (editing and layout software that seems to be a scaled-down version of Adobe InDesign), I've spent a bunch of today playing around with it. It has been a somewhat annoying experience.
I'm annoyed because of how much it's scaled down. For example, a big part of what the class covered was working with multiple "stories" in a document. The metaphor is newspaper stories. In our context, the introduction to a lesson might be one story; each example would be another; and the lesson review questions would be a third. Repeat 27 times, plus additional "stories" for the chapter reviews, the table of contents, the introduction, the glossary, and probably some things I'm not thinking of. I wanted to play with how they interact.
It turns out that the only way to get a multi-story document is to create it in InDesign and then import it. We will have access to some such documents to play with, but probably not for a week or two. Similarly, the styles we'll be working with (which say exciting things like "this is how the first review question in every lesson should appear" and "this is an ordinary text paragraph" have to be imported from InDesign, and may not have been created yet. That last isn't unreasonable, given that the company is in the process of moving to this software, but it leaves me less to play with.
Also, the "grep" part of the search function seems to be extremely limited, compared to, say, System V. Most of what I could find in quick googling was "I can't make InCopy grep do thus-and-such, what am I missing?" and answers ranging from "you can't" to "here's a kludge." The Adobe site doesn't seem to explain this feature at all--searching on either "search" or "grep" is useless. Ah, well, they said it wasn't going to be covered in our one-day training class because we wouldn't need it, which means I won't be expected to know it.
Things are extremely quiet at the office this week (which is why I have time to not only be playing with the new software before I need to use it, but to be writing this); that they just sent me for training is reassuring in terms of "yes, we want to keep you"--although the temp agency paid for the class--as is the fact that I haven't been told not to come in tomorrow.
I'm annoyed because of how much it's scaled down. For example, a big part of what the class covered was working with multiple "stories" in a document. The metaphor is newspaper stories. In our context, the introduction to a lesson might be one story; each example would be another; and the lesson review questions would be a third. Repeat 27 times, plus additional "stories" for the chapter reviews, the table of contents, the introduction, the glossary, and probably some things I'm not thinking of. I wanted to play with how they interact.
It turns out that the only way to get a multi-story document is to create it in InDesign and then import it. We will have access to some such documents to play with, but probably not for a week or two. Similarly, the styles we'll be working with (which say exciting things like "this is how the first review question in every lesson should appear" and "this is an ordinary text paragraph" have to be imported from InDesign, and may not have been created yet. That last isn't unreasonable, given that the company is in the process of moving to this software, but it leaves me less to play with.
Also, the "grep" part of the search function seems to be extremely limited, compared to, say, System V. Most of what I could find in quick googling was "I can't make InCopy grep do thus-and-such, what am I missing?" and answers ranging from "you can't" to "here's a kludge." The Adobe site doesn't seem to explain this feature at all--searching on either "search" or "grep" is useless. Ah, well, they said it wasn't going to be covered in our one-day training class because we wouldn't need it, which means I won't be expected to know it.
Things are extremely quiet at the office this week (which is why I have time to not only be playing with the new software before I need to use it, but to be writing this); that they just sent me for training is reassuring in terms of "yes, we want to keep you"--although the temp agency paid for the class--as is the fact that I haven't been told not to come in tomorrow.