Opening articles using Studio for InCopy – Help Center

With Studio for InCopy, articles can be opened in different ways, according to your needs:

Opening an article for editing
Opening an article for editing without design information
Opening a placed article while bringing its components to the front
Opening an article template for editing
Opening an article as read-only

Opening an article for editing (check-out)

Use one of the following methods:

In the Studio panel or the Dossier panel, double-click an article or right-click an article and choose Open.

Open a layout on which the article is placed, place the cursor anywhere in the article and choose WoodWing Studio > Check Out Article. (See Opening layouts in Studio for InCopy.)

In Layout view, use the Text Selection tool to place the text cursor somewhere in the article. Right-click the article and from the menu that appears, choose Check Out Article. (Requires Studio for InDesign and InCopy 18.0.2 for Adobe 2023, or any higher version of version 18, or Studio for InDesign and InCopy for any higher version of Adobe InCopy.)

About opening placed articles in InCopy

Depending on the way Studio for InCopy is configured, you will see one of the following happen when opening an article that is placed on a layout:

Only the latest saved version of the layout and that of the article is loaded. This is the default behavior and keeps the loading time to a minimum.

Example: Article A and B are placed on a layout and a version of the layout is saved.

Article A is opened in InCopy, edited and checked-in.
Article B is opened in InCopy. The changes that were made in article A cannot be seen in the layout view because the layout has not been updated yet.

The latest stored version of all content that is placed on the layout is loaded. To make this work, the system needs to be have been configured.

Example: Article A and B are placed on a layout and a version of the layout is saved.

Article A is opened in InCopy, edited and checked-in.
Article B is opened in InCopy. The changes that were made in article A can now be seen in the layout view.

Opening an article for editing without design information

When opening an article that is placed on a layout, this layout is displayed in the Layout tab so that the way the article is used in the designed page can be determined.

The downside of this process is that this can cause longer wait times because extra information needs to be processed.

As an alternative, articles can also be opened without loading the layout information. The layout tab will then only show the formatted text.

Example of opening an article with and without design information

Figure: An example of opening an article with and without design information. On the left the Layout tab of an article opened with design information (zoomed out): the layout tab shows the formatted article (here shown undimmed) as it is placed on the layout. On the right the Layout tab of the same article but now opened without design information: each article component is now displayed on a separate page.

To open an article without design information, do the following:

Right-click the article in the Studio panel or the Dossier panel and choose Open without Design.

Note: When opening an article without design information, write-to-fit information is not available.

Opening a placed article while bringing its components to the front

When an article is placed on a layout, it could be that other objects on that layout are partially or fully placed over it.

This could be because these objects are placed on a higher layer than the layer that the article is placed on, or because the objects are in the same layer as the article but arranged on a higher level.

When viewing the article in Layout view, article components can therefore be partially or fully obscured from view. As a result, any changes made to the article content may not visible in Layout view or the article component could potentially not be accessible from Layout view, for example to open it for editing.

To resolve this, all components of the article that is opened can be brought to the front in Layout view. This makes the content of the article fully visible and each article component accessible for editing.

Bringing the article components to the front in Layout view is done at the time when the article is opened and requires the following preference to be enabled:

WoodWing Studio > Options > Bring InCopy Articles to Front in Layout View

The preference for bringing InCopy articles to the front

Figure: The 'Bring InCopy Articles to Front in Layout View' preference.

Notes:

This option only applies to articles that are placed on a layout.
When this option is set, the layout could potentially look different than how it will be printed.

Opening an article template for editing

To open an article template for editing, do the following:

While holding down the Option key (macOS) or Alt key (Windows), double-click the article template in the Studio panel.

Note: You can tell that the article template is opened by the file name that is displayed in the tab. When the article template is opened as an instance of a new article — by double-clicking the article — the name in the tab is 'Untitled'.

Opening an article as read-only

Use this method to view the content of the article without checking-out the article, thereby making it possible for other users to open it for editing.

To perform this action, do the following:

Right-click the article in the Studio panel or the Dossier panel and choose Open Read-Only.

Articles that are opened as read-only can be distinguished from regularly opened articles by the phrase [Read-Only] in the tab or title bar.

An InCopy article opened as read-only

Figure: [Read-Only] displayed in the tab of an opened article.