Adobe InCopy CS2 - How to Use the Drag and Drop Text Feature

If you made it this far in the retraining video about how to use InCopy for writing and editing, we assume you already know how to type. So we are not going to deliver that point. But what we do want to show you are some tips and tricks related to editing your copy once it is inside of the InCopy.

Now before we actually show some of these features, the first thing we want to do is just look at our interface. We have open the museum.incx file which is in the lesson three folder inside part one and you maybe seeing a slightly different design or different layout here.

First of all, let us make sure that we are all using the story view. You can select the story view using the middle tab in the top left corner of the document window and the other thing that you might be seeing is that your text is layout differently. For example my screen is green text on a black background. Maybe you have a similar setup. You might be confused why your colors have changed.

So under the InCopy preferences galley and story display settings, these are under edit preferences on the Windows version. We will open up this galley and story display settings and make sure that our theme is set to ink on paper. You can really customize this however you would like but if you want your screen to match what you see on my screen, set your theme to ink on paper and click okay.

Now, we should all be seeing the same settings. Now about this new editing features and InCopy CS2, one of the great new features is the ability to drag and drop text. Drag and drop text was not possible in previous versions of InCopy, but folks who are use to other work processing applications like Microsoft Word definitely expected it. So it is finally been added and let us just take a look on how this works.

So for example, if I want to type a few carriage returns there and take this bit of text here that has all of my admission information for this museum and I just click and drag that up higher in the story, I can do that. Now by default the drag and drop text features are enabled inside of your galley and story view.

Let us switch to layout view, look at my select to text and you will notice that my cursor does not change that is because by default, the drag and drop text features are disabled in a layout view. So if you want to enable those, open up the application preferences by pressing command K or ctrl K on windows and then select type category. When you select the type category of preferences on the left hand side you will see this drag and drop text editing section here in the middle.

As I mentioned, it is automatically enable for galley and story view. If you also want to enable in layout view, just click there and click ‘okay’. And now you have the same thing editing capability in the layout view as well.