WordsFlow vs. InCopy
(We just added this section to the WordsFlow product page, and thought it was worth sharing here.)
InCopy is a great solution if you need your authors and editors to work with exactly what’s going to be seen in the final InDesign document.
However, working with WordsFlow does have some serious advantages:
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If your authors/editors have used Word all their lives, there’s no need to change their work habits or learn something new, using WordsFlow. They can stay productive in their long- and hard-earned knowledge of Word, with all its editorial power. InCopy is basically “baby InDesign,” and is a completely foreign world to Word users.
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In fact, your Word users don’t even have to know you’re using WordsFlow–it’s entirely invisible to them. It just makes you, the production user or team, look a lot faster, smarter, and more accurate. (No more botched manual merges.)
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WordsFlow enables InDesign production to proceed in parallel with editing in Word. InCopy stops all other work on a story while it’s checked out.
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ICML (the InCopy native document format) can really only be used to feed InDesign. WordsFlow allows you to link document formats that can be used for other purposes.
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WordsFlow is more production proof in that you can control the formatting on the InDesign side and review changes made by the editors before accepting. When an InCopy story is checked in, that’s it.
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With WordsFlow, your authors and editors don’t need to be burdened with all the styling and other layout details in the InDesign story. It’s a well-known trope that dealing with the details of text formatting while writing is a huge distraction from the real job at hand. And your InDesign production folks will be glad your authors and editors don’t get to meddle with those details.
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Cost! Each of your authors and editors needs an InCopy license, while only your production (InDesign) users need a WordsFlow license.
