Indesign Secrets

A frequent topic of conversation in these blogs and elsewhere is how to view previews of InDesign files. One solution has been to view files in Adobe Bridge. But I don’t always have Bridge open, and I’m usually wanting to view a file while I’m working (in the Mac Finder, or when in an application […]

As Pariah mentioned a while back, the ASE (adobe swatch exchange) system is great for moving color swatches back and forth among the Suite programs. But some swatches won’t come along for the ride… notably gradients. This is too bad, because Adobe Illustrator ships with some really cool gradients.

Now, I’m now Illustrator expert, but I know that I can find great gradient swatches in Illustrator’s Swatches panel flyout menu….

Elizabeth wrote: We recently printed a piece that used a metallic silver spot on uncoated stock (specifically, PMS 877U). When building the mechanical, we realized there is no Metallic Uncoated Pantone library accessible via the swatches palette in InDesign. Why is this?

While InDesign (CS2 or CS3) does ship with a whole mess o’ libraries, including Pantone Metallic Coated, it does not come with metallic uncoated. But you know what? You can always just make your own. This is an important aspect of spot colors: You can always build your own, and as long as you give it the right name, it’ll work….

While some of us believe that InDesign is the only friend we’ll ever need, and we talk incessantly to our computer screens, waiting for the day that it starts talking back, other people apparently believe that the only way to have meaningful relationships is with humans. Strange, no? Well, if you’re looking for other humans […]

Artiom wrote: In QuarkXPress we change the page size from the top left corner of the document. In InDesign it is made from the center of the page. Is it possible to change the page size from the top left corner of the page in InDesign too?

Sometimes my favorite answers to mailbag questions are those to which I can simply reply “no.” Saying “no” is so elegant, so simple. Unfortunately, just before I type that little word, my brain kicks in and starts saying, “ummm… well, you could… maybe….”

So, the quick answer is: No. The real answer is: There is always a workaround. Typically when you resize a page with File > Document Setup, the objects on the page all appear to move…

Hey, with the help of Peter Kahrel’s GREP in InDesign CS3 book, I was able to figure out how to do something in InDesign that I’ve always said was possible to do with GREP, but didn’t really know how. Not only is it a handy Find/Change action, but it’s very easy to modify for different situations that designers are often confronted with.

The action is this: Find [some text] that’s in between [whatever], and then apply formatting to just the text, not what’s surrounding it. One example would be formatting parenthetical text without formatting the parentheses themselves: turn (this) into (this) and (that other thing) into (that other thing) all at once, throughout the story or document, with a simple click.

Colin wrote: I’ve created several character styles, but now I want them to be paragraph styles instead. Is it possible to do a conversion or do I have to build new paragraph styles? Or… is possible to create paragraph styles based on character styles?

I wish we could base paragraph styles on character styles, but alas, you cannot… at least, not directly. And you cannot really convert a character style into a paragraph style. But there are two tricks you should know about that will help you.

First, you can create a new paragraph style based on a character style by placing the text cursor in…

If you’re trying to figure out how to use CS3’s new Find/Change with GREP feature, and have found the online help a bit, um, unhelpful, you’re going to love this.

Peter Kahrel’s GREP in InDesign CS3 ($9.99 US) just came out from O’Reilly. You can purchase and download the 48-page PDF directly from O’Reilly’s web site by following the link. That’s what I did a couple days ago, and now that I finally understand what a “Look Behind” is, I’ve already saved at least four hours of tedious hunting and pecking production work on a project I’m working on this weekend.

I would like to give thanks to the good folks at Adobe who have worked hard to give us excellent software. Even with little competition, they continue to engineer new and exciting features in their products.
I give thanks to the InDesign community of designers and graphic production managers who keep pushing for even better features […]

Delia wrote: I recently worked on an internal design for a book, using black plus a spot (PMS) colour, but in the end I couldn’t delete the unused PMS colours from the Swatch palette. I would choose ’select all unused’ in the swatch palette and the colour would be highlighted, but when I tried to delete it by dragging to the trash, the trash icon would be ghosted.

You are not alone in this problem, Delia. This has plagued many InDesign usrs. Invincible color swatches (ones that cannot be deleted) usually occur when the spot colour has been used in a graphic (usually EPS, PDF, or PSD). Sometimes you don’t even realize the color is in the graphic, and there, and it’s not easy to figure out (though here’s one method). Unless you change or delete that graphic, you won’t be able to remove the color swatch.

However, occassionally, the color is really stuck, usually due…