Indesign Secrets

If you know any QuarkXPress users who are trying to learn InDesign, you might point them to a new video that I made with Lynda.com. It’s free and about an hour long. While Adobe’s description says it’s for people who are considering InDesign, it’s really more like an “introduction to InDesign, plus some of my favorite tips & tricks.” The whole thing is designed to be used in conjuction with Adobe’s InDesign CS3 Conversion Guide, which you can also download from that page. (It’s good, but no, I didn’t write that.) I hope you like it!

Q: Our office periodically needs to create a grayscale PDF for one of our clients, even though their jobs are done in CMYK plus spot plates. There’s no place to choose “grayscale” in the Export to PDF dialog box. We tried printing to the Adobe PDF printer instead, since the Print dialog box does offer Composite Gray as an Output choice, but some of the graphics didn’t convert — they stayed in color. We really don’t want to have to re-create these files in grayscale, as some are over 200 pages long!

A: InDesign can convert colors to grayscale during the process you describe only if it can “get” to them. It does fine with any color created in InDesign itself (CMYK, RGB or Lab; process or spot), as well as placed color TIFFs and PSD files, even if the PSD has a spot color channel. However, InDesign won’t change placed color EPS and PDF images into grayscale.

The good news is, through a simple hack, you can force InDesign to convert those recalcitrant images too…

Bryan wrote: I work on a Mac and they work on a pc. I ran into a problem when I gave my clients my packaged InDesign files on dvd for their archives and to pull from for new publications. I had named some of the linked images with the “/” character, like when I was calling out a date, 09/26/07. But they are unable to copy these links to their harddrive because pc’s don’t recognize them!

Yes, unfortunately this has been a major problem since the 1980s, when people started moving pages from Mac to PC. DOS (and subsequently Windows) prohibits a number of special characters in file naming, including the slash. One Web page that explains the differences…

Robbi wrote,

I was wondering if there is a way to have a group of objects in one document mirror in another document. For example, I have a layout that needs to print across a horizontal binding (calendar style), and it’s 8hx10w. Because i can’t have “facing pages” sit on top of one another, I lay it out in one document that is double-height (16hx10w), with images splitting across the middle. Then I copy all the images/text/etc from the top half of the page over into another document that is set up as single pages, 8×10, and then do the same with the bottom half onto the next page.

The problem comes when I have to change something - then I have to recopy all the changes into the new document again. I thought that snippets might be useful but can’t figure out how to edit them (and if I could, would the changes apply to all the snippets I’ve already placed, or would they only apply to future placments?). If you have any ideas on how to solve this problem, I would really appreciate it.

Until Adobe adds a Vertical Spread option, there is a workaround that solves this problem. (Snippets wouldn’t work, they’re like library items … placed instances aren’t linked to the source.) Let me summarize the workaround first, then I’ll show you some screen shots of a sample calendar project.

One of the coolest features in InDesign CS3 is the ability to place more than one object at a time. For example, if you
select four images and three text files in Bridge or in the Finder (or Windows Explorer) and drag and drop them into InDesign, the Place cursor gets “loaded up” with all those […]

This is the last installment in the back-to-basics-and-on-to-advanced “Tab Leaders” series. If you’ve been following the series, we began by inserting tabs and dot leaders in columnar text (Part 1); moved on to formatting tab leaders differently than the text they separate (Part 2); created in-line, fill-in-the-blank-style tab spaces (Part 3); used the automated formatting […]

Quite a few people ask me if there is some way to make fillable text fields in InDesign. Sadly, the answer is no.
While ID can easily create interactive buttons, there is no way to make fillable text fields, in, for instance, a direct response coupon.
The best answer is to create the document in InDesign and […]

Many people don’t realize that InDesign has a Change Case feature in the Type menu (or the Context menu). For example, you can select some text that someone TYPED IN ALL CAPS and change it to lowercase, Title Case (all words are capitalized), or Sentence case (only the first letter in each sentence is capitalized). […]

Listen in your browser:
InDesignSecrets-060.mp3 (13.1 MB, 28:19 minutes)
(the transcript of this podcast will be posted soon)

• Newsbits: Tokyo Conference recap; PDF2ID plug-in; more
• “What is That?” Definitions of XML, GREP, Tagged Text and more
• Major bug with CS3 indexes, and workarounds
• Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: the Erase Tool

MD wrote:
I’ve just been hired to turn my online newspaper into print so I’m learning InDesign, but when I cut and paste anything into InDesign from NVU or Outlook Express, I lose all formatting and end up having to reformat everything. Any way around this?

By default, InDesign strips out all the formatting from incoming text when you copy and paste it from any another application. By contrast, if you copy and paste from one InDesign document into another, it maintains the formatting… unless you use Edit > Paste without Formatting. That’s a great feature when you need to strip away unwanted styles.

Fortunately, there’s also a way to maintain formatting when you paste it from some other applications. Open the Preferences dialog box (Command/Ctrl-K) and look for the When Pasting Text… option.