Yes, in the attempt to ease our deadline crush, I’m now running InCopy so that (in theory) I can sub stuff without having to make Sim to every single alt on the mag…

The trouble is, Sim has the .icma assigment on his Mac dropbox. I’m opening the file, but it’s taking literally 15 minutes to open the document. Once the document open it seems to be fine and works perfectly. Docs with fewer images load quicker. This makes me think one of two things:

1. My InCopy is loading the high-res images over the network, taking ages. In which case – can we do it without the ghosted images? Or use lower res previews?

2. Our network (or computers – both new-ish iMacs) are stupid slow.

Or there’s always 3. We’re doing it wrong…

All help welcome!

Hmmm… No direct experience with InCopy…

However, there are a couple of clues in your query. I believe there is a way of viewing low-res images, rather than the full, high quality image. Having to load high-res, full quality images over the network will be really very slow and tedious!

Running iMacs won’t be helping too much either. Our print department runs a mixture of Mac Pros and iMacs. The difference between them is very significant.

Is your server Mac or Windows? This also seems to make a big difference in this sort of scenario. We ran a full suite of Apple Xserves and Xsan for file serving and storage and the Apple workstations loved it, but the PCs didn’t, taking much longer to open files than the Macs. Now we are running Windows based servers and SAN and the PCs love it and the Macs take longer to open, and save stuff now…

Go figure…

Hope this is of some help…

Cheers,

Si

I’ve never used incopy myself either but I’ll chip in.

You can use Indesign to view low res previews, but that’ll not make any difference to the final file size, as it’s just an internal thing for making docs faster on slower computers. It’ll make no difference to the final size of the saved Indesign file.

Sounds to me like file size and network speed is your issue, which leads me to ask how are you accessing the drop box? Across a network, or across the interenet? As I’ve never had any problems accessing files on a Mac whether from a Mac or pc share(provided it’s set up correctly, contact your IT about that, we do have some pc shares that are horrible slow, but that’s just their setup for other things.)

But I know I do have issues connecting to the network across the internet when working from home, it’s horribly slow(15 minute loading times like yourself), then I’ll just download the files I need and then work on them locally, and batch upload again when I’m finished. It’s unworkable otherwise, but works similar to what you describe, ie. long opening times, works fine once open to work on, then long save times.

It’s the same with any file type, indesign, illustrator, quark, photoshop. A speed issue with our externally accessible network rather than anything to do with a file type.

Anyway no idea if that’ll help you, but thought I’d mention as it sounds fairly similar.