One great reason to use InDesign is that you can’t choose Zapf Dingbats italic, or Symbol bold. Those fonts don’t really exist (at least not in the files on my computer), so I can’t select them. Well, sometimes you just neeeed to make it a little more bold, or a bit more oblique (skewed). Please […]
read moreChristopher wrote: Do you know how to sort data in a table? From time to time, we need to change around the data in our tables. I always end up manually re-alphabetizing. But I wish I could find a way to sort it like you can in Excel.
Pariah Burke wrote a really good article in the last issue of InDesign Magazine in which he talked about this very thing. I would encourage you to get that article and read it through. But the quick answer is: There’s really no good way to do this, but there are two mediocre ways…
read moreMany of you know that I’m also involved with MOGO media (I’m the editorial director, so I help organize content and speakers for the various MOGO events, including The InDesign Conference). But I’m also helping them with a series of podcasts, including videocasts on InDesign.
For example, I posted a tip based on a technique for […]
Anne-Marie has presented a session on “The Zen of InDesign Repair” at the last couple of InDesign conferences, and it’s always well-attended. After all, anyone who has been using InDesign for a while knows that sometimes (fortunately not frequently, but sometimes…) files get corrupted, or weird stuff starts happening in the program.
She talked about this […]
Ellis H. wrote: What we need is a way to place a stroke on only the corner(s) of the graphic box.
When I read this, I immediately thought of our good friend Rufus Deuchler in Italy, who came up with the solution to corner-strokes a couple of years ago before he was nabbed by Adobe to be an evangelist. I was dumbfounded when he showed me this because it’s incredibly simple and yet achieves something that I didn’t realize was possible in InDesign…
Klaus (yes, that Klaus, a frequent commenter here) wrote us:
How can I clear all Overrides globally, throughout a whole document, for all ParaStyles — and not just on an individual spread basis?
You can do this, albeit somewhat tediously, by taking advantage of what most people consider to be a bug in InDesign:
read moreListen in your browser:
InDesignSecrets-073.mp3 (14.2 MB, 31:05 minutes)
(the transcript of this podcast will be posted soon)
John wrote: Has anyone see a way to add more stroke size presets in InDesign? I have a huge project that uses .75 pt and 1.5 pt strokes like a zillion times. I don’t want to use a style sheet, I want to get into the “guts” of ID and add the 1.5 preset.
Well, up until the last line, the answer would have been “use an object style.” After all, that’s just what object styles are for, and it sounds like it would be perfecct for you. I’m not sure why you don’t want to use an object style, but I’ll just go with it and tell you the secret:…
read moreOur friend Carlie wrote us with a problem that was so perplexing (and the solution so vexing and unpleasant) that I must share it with you. She wondered why a placed PDF file — a CMYK image created in Illustrator — was changing its CMYK values upon output. After all, she was using Preserve Numbers […]
read moreS.W. wrote: Is there a way to convert all instances of font/dingbat to outlines in a document? I was using the square shaped dingbat from Wingdings as placeholder for a Check Box in a form I was designing in InDesign. To my surprise the Acrobat form recognition function wouldn’t recognize boxes in the PDF I exported, unless I converted them to outlines. So is there a quick way to do this for the entire document?
Interesting problem! While you cannot convert a single character to outlines everywhere throughout a document, you can convert it once, then use Find/Change to replace it…
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