It doesn't matter if what they send back to me is a bit of a mess visually, I'll just be extracting and using their editted text The layout at this stage doesn't need to be exact on their end, but they need to be able to get an idea of it.I'm thinking of cases like infographics and diagrams with detailed labels where the text, imagery and layout go hand-in-hand, rather than cases like books or magazine layouts where we'd just say 'give the designer between XXX and YYY words and trust them'. The copy editing is somewhat dependant on the layout: the writers need to be able to see the flow of the page to see how each chunk fits in, and how much space they have for each chunk.(In my case, these people are writers and research experts, there are loads of them, and copy writing and editing for designs is a small portion of what they do) Assume they have MS Office, and that maybe one person in the office has Acrobat but they can't access it easily. These writers don't have design software and never will: buying it in isn't an option.

I'm making a text-and-images layout, and I need to send early drafts to writers for copy editing.Many designers encounter it and have a way of dealing with it: I'm interested in what our collective design experience can come up with for the best way to deal with it. Here's a common design workflow problem, probably most relevant to in-house designers, but also to agencies who have a lot of non-design writing or research staff, or freelancers who work with in-house writers.

Lay text down adobe illustrator