Indesign Secrets

Nick from the UK asked,

I’m often working with several InDesign documents open …. How can I quickly and easily shuttle between them without having them each tiled on my screen?

I have a feeling you are going to say it’s a customised keyboard shortcut, but having printed out the list as you advised in an early podcast, I just can’t seem to see it.

There’s an OS keyboard command for flipping through open docs in any current program … not an InDesign-specific one.

One of the most common complaints of designers or print service providers when previewing and printing transparency from InDesign is that a transparency effect like a drop shadow doesn’t display or print correctly. Instead, a white box appears behind the transparency effect.
When you probe into how the transparency effect was created, there is usually one […]

I have in my hands a copy of Real World Print Production, by Claudia McCue, hot off the press from Peachpit Press. (Well, okay, it’s not in my hands; I’m typing. The book is on my desk, next to some coffee that has gotten cold because I got caught up in reading the book.) The book is exactly what I had hoped it would be: A great combination of Claudia’s wit and wisdom on a topic she knows far-too-well: How to get great print output. […]

At first, it appears that the only way to make a new master page is to choose New Master from the Pages palette flyout menu. But there are faster ways! For example, Command/Ctrl-click on the New Page icon at the bottom of the Pages palette to add a new blank, default-named master. Want to customize the […]

So I just got finished listening to the latest InDesignSecrets podcast. And all that talk about applying arrowheads to paths (part of this week’s contest) got me looking at the arrowheads closer than I normally do.
Imagine my surprise when I noticed there has been a change in how the arrowheads are aligned to the path. […]

Hi,
I’m the newest member of the InDesign Secrets team. Thanks to David and Anne-Marie for giving me a chance to add my two cents worth here. I co-authored Real World Adobe Creative Suite with Sandee Cohen so I’ll also be writing about ways to work effectively in InDesign, as well as how InDesign fits into […]

You can download the PatternMaker plug-in for InDesign free from TeacupSoftware.com! The plug-in (both Mac OS and Windows) lets you create an infinite number of fully-customizable patterns based on three core pattern templates: Crosses, Lines, and Scallops.
Here’s how it works: After you download and install the PatternMaker plug-in into your InDesign > Plug-ins Folder, you […]

Listen in your browser:
InDesignSecrets-026.mp3 (13.4 MB, 25:32 minutes)
(the transcript of this episode will be posted in a few days)

• The Pleasures of CS2’s Spine Alignment (Align to/Away from Spine) feature
• InDesign Quiz Contest #2! (See note below)
• Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Convert to Profile/Assign Profile

Ron wrote:
I am developing an InDesign template for [this book series] so that we can improve on its process. The TOC for this series is complex but I have been able to successfully make it fully automated except for one issue: One of the tags being brought into the TOC is the chapter intro, which is a 1-paragraph block of text. The full paragraph is also used in the TOC to give readers a decent description of the chapter in addition to the contents. There seems to be a 255 character maximum that the auto-generated TOC will actually bring in per tagged paragraph. I need it to pull in the whole paragraph regardless of character length. Do you know of any way to change the maximum number of characters allowed?

Ron, while I know of no way to change the number of characters the Table of Contents feature will capture, I’m sure someone could write a script to grab all those paragraphs for you. But until someone does, here’s an alternate solution you might consider: Make the first paragraph of the chapter an anchored text frame in its own paragraph. […]

A subscriber who watched Episode 23 (Practicing Safe Output) was trying to follow my advice by moving objects with transparency to lower layers to avoid rasterization issues. But he was experiencing unwanted text wrap changes. He e-mailed me saying:
Moving text to another layer above the Default layer overrides the text wrap applied to the […]