Indesign Secrets

A client e-mailed me recently:

I found myself frustrated with IDCS3 last night as I was working on a freelance project. This came from being convinced I have seen a better way to do something and not remembering how. It has to do with showing the name of the image in the cursor preview.

I have about 30 images loaded and some are similar. I recall there being some option or modifier that would show the name of the image in the cursor with the preview.

I hope you have an answer for this. It’s driving me crazy.

Leopard has arrived. The Macintosh OS X 10.5 operating system (known to its friends as Leopard) was released to the waiting public on the evening of Friday, October 26. About the same time, Adobe released its official statement on Adobe Creative Suite 3 compatibility, the “Support for Mac OS X Leopard FAQ.” (PDF, 128K)
According to […]

Listen in your browser:
InDesignSecrets-063.mp3 (12 MB, 26:15 minutes)
(the transcript of this podcast will be posted soon)

• News: Recap of the Creative Suite Conference in Chicago
• David’s favorite new tech toy
• Creating calendar layouts in InDesign
• Hot Button Post of the Week: Adobe CS3 Support for Leopard
• Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Reset to Base
  

Sandy wrote: I am attending a conference and one of the speakers mentioned he once attended a conference at which you spoke and you covered 3 or 4 steps to scanning and digitizing line art that would be suitable for reproduction for in a newspaper. I would very much appreciate a review about how to effectively and efficiently do that.

Scanning line art (artwork made of only one color, usually black on white paper) is nowhere near as straightforward as many people think, especially for high-resolution printing. Fortunately, it’s not difficult if you follow these steps. (Much of this is also covered in both Real World Photoshop and Real World Scanning & Halftones.)….

I’m a huge fan of Adobe Bridge, the free “digital asset management” program that comes with every Creative Suite program. One of its best features is that it shows previews of InDesign layouts (the first page only) and InDesign templates (every page). That’s very handy when the filenames don’t tell you much about the file’s contents.

But what about outside of Bridge? I wish I could see previews of every file — including InDesign layouts — instead of just images and PDFs in the Finder/Windows Explorer or Open/Save dialog boxes. In InDesign’s Save/Save As dialog box, the “Always Save Preview” check box is a tease:

It’s that little feature we all take for granted, but InDesign’s Text Wrap is a vast improvement over that other page layout application’s Runaround feature. This episode takes an in-depth look at all of InDesign’s Text Wrap options, reveals a few peculiarities to watch out for, and demonstrates the additional options added in CS3.
Download it […]

ZD wrote: Can I open an InDesign lock file? How?

This is a great idea for one of our podcast’s obscure feature of the weeek-eek-eek, but I’m just going to dive in and answer it here for all our readers. Whenever you open an InDesign file, the program creates a “lock” file — with an “.idlk” file name extension — in the same folder…

There are so many new features in InDesign CS3 that it’s easy to lose track of some of them. One I’d like to draw your attention to is the new discretionary line break.
Like a discretionary hyphen, the discretionary line break (”DLB” from here on out) finesses where and how InDesign breaks a line of text […]

It wasn’t bad, but suddenly in the middle of my all-day tutorial at the Creative Suite Conference, the previews for my Adobe Swatch Exchange files changed from file icons into swatch previews.
For instance, this is an ASE icon I have from earlier that day.

This is an ASE icon I have from earlier in the week:

But […]

Ben wrote: I was just wanting to know the best way to have characters hang. I’m designing a business card and i want the T (telephone) and F (fax) to hang away from the numbers.

Hanging text means making the first line of text stick out to the left slightly, beyond the normal margin. There are three basic ways to hang text.

First, you can give a paragraph a positive Left Indent and a negative First Line Indent…