Indesign Secrets

We’d like to pass on a short and wonderful little article written by our friend and colleague Dave Saunders. He wrote:

One of InDesign’s long-standing problems has been the way it handles text wraps around circular objects. As Figure 1 shows, the text droops below the circular wrap in an ungainly fashion. When working with left-aligned/ragged-right text, there is the further issue that the circle also is too far to the right, but this latter is hardly InDesign’s fault…

A friend of mine who manages a printing company’s prepress department told me that his company strongly discourages their InDesign clients from using either the Detect Edges or the Alpha Channel options in the Text Wrap panel:

That was the first time I’ve heard of the warning. The reason, he said, was that if anyone in […]

About a year ago, we discussed several options for importing multi-page PDF files into InDesign. Then, last autumn, I created a free video tutorial for MOGO Media that shows how you can import or export multi-page PDF files. In that video, I showed Scott Zanelli’s free Page Exporter Utility script for exporting PDF files as individual pages. [In that movie, I said I didn’t know where you could find the script. Fortunately, Scott updated the script and we’ve posted it here.]

In that movie, I also showed a script that let you place multi-page PDF files into InDesign, one page a time…

Eddie wrote: I create a lot of sales literature that includes the same office phone number footer. We keep adding offices and changing the numbers. Short of opening every InDesign document and doing a find/change on the phone number, is there a better way to update? Like linking somehow to a single file? Can you link to text or snippets like an image, so every time the doc is re-opened, it updates?

This is a common request, and the answer is (as it so often is): yes and no. InDesign won’t let you link to snippets, but it will let you link to a text file. We discussed linking to text files in podcast Episode 38, but I don’t think we got into the details of how to link to a little chunk of text that changes periodically. Here’s what you can do…

A client of mine sent me a problem child InDesign file — a legacy file in which she needed to move threaded text frames around and modify them — and this question:

I managed to lay out the text in a chapter the way I wanted but when I got to the end I started having trouble with the questions and problems text. The subhead “Problems” and all the text following it seems to have disappeared completely. I tried looking at the text threads but still can’t seem to find the text, although I know it’s there.

An update to Adobe InDesign 5.0.2 and Adobe InCopy 5.0.2 has been posted today on the Adobe website. As of this writing, the update is not yet available from Adobe Updater. Sadly, it does not fix the Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) problems with InDesign (see below).
Here is the link for the Mac and for […]

John wrote: I use a mighty mouse for zipping up and around a page, but I miss greatly the ability to hold down a key to get the hand feature, like in QuarkXPress.

I just searched up and down, left and right, throughout this site and I can’t find any post that describes the keyboard shortcut for getting the Grabber Hand tool. Well, it’s time to right that wrong. Many InDesign users are already familiar with this, but clearly many people don’t know the rules…

A mask covers your face so you can’t see it, right? And masking tape covers something so that when you paint over it, the thing under the tape (usually a wall or a window) doesn’t get painted. Digital masking tape is the same: It covers or masks something so you don’t see it.
Last year I […]

Just a quick note to let you know about a new book that recently hit the bookshelves: Professional Design Techniques, by Scott Citron (2008 Peachpit Press) is a must-have book for anyone who needs to be a designer. Notice that I didn’t say, “anyone who is a designer” — but rather those of us who are often required to do design, but who aren’t classically trained. Using the Creative Suite tools (mostly InDesign), he shows how you can turn…

There are two different commands in InDesign that can turn lowercase text into UPPERCASE, but they have different end results that can confound the unwary designer.

The first one is in the Type menu: Type > Change Case > Uppercase. The second is the All Caps button in the Control panel (or its equivalent keyboard shortcut, Command/Ctrl-Shift-K), here: