Indesign Secrets

Adobe informed its trainers today that people who are InDesign CS2 Adobe Certified Experts (ACEs) have until May 31, 2008 to take and pass the InDesign CS3 re-certification exam and thus remain current with their ACE status. (Otherwise they lose their certification and have to “start over” with the the full exam, which is more expensive, longer, and can only be taken at a proctored location.) The new date is a full month past the original deadline of April 30, 2008.

We’ve received two emails this week regarding leading — or, more specifically, InDesign apparently ignoring or changing the leading values of paragraphs.
For example, G. wrote:
…The problem arises when we copy and then paste a text frame into a new document — some of the text blocks (not all) change their leading. But this is the […]

Le Roi est mort. Can software that was never the market leader be considered “the king”? Perhaps only in our hearts. GoLive had long been our personal favorite, when it came to HTML development, and we were deeply saddened when Adobe dropped it from the Creative Suite. We got a tad bit excited when Adobe […]

Listen in your browser:
InDesignSecrets-076.mp3 (10.8 MB, 23.4 minutes)
(the transcript of this podcast will be posted soon)

• Fun News: MTV (post), Poster discounts, InCopySecrets debuts
• Binary EPS files (post), Weak Preflighting (post)
• Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Altitude
• Quizzler! With a neat new prize for the lucky winner

When you rotate an object that has a drop shadow (or an other kind of directional effect), the drop shadow doesn’t rotate! It stays in place. Similarly, if you scale an object that has a drop shadow, the shadow doesn’t scale.
Technically, InDesign is correct: It shouldn’t rotate or scale the drop shadow. Imagine a virtual […]

Photoshop is the program you see all the time on television, especially detective shows. “Can you zoom in on the license plate?” they ask the electronics geek, who obligingly drags the Zoom tool around around a cloudy blob and runs the CSI Filter, snapping the numbers into crisp focus.

But when do you ever see Illustrator (”Can you live trace that license plate?”) or Acrobat (”Can you OCR that license plate?”) or InDesign (”Can you wrap some text around that license plate?”) — never! is what I would have said, until last week, when I spied a tell-tale overset text frame right there on channel 245.

Colette wrote to us wondering about that alarming message that sometimes appears when you print from InDesign:
This document may contain binary EPS files, which can cause the print job to fail. If the printer produces output, then the binary did not interfere with printing. Do you want to print this document?
This message has freaked out […]

O.G. wrote: You can move an anchored object vertically by clicking on it with the Selection tool and dragging it up or down, but nothing indicates by how many points it’s been moved from the baseline. Is that info shown somewhere? And is there a way to cancel the move later, i.e. to bring the object back to its original position on the baseline, without having to reimport it?

This problem has affected InDesign users for decades! (Well, maybe not that long.) Fortunately, you can see and adjust the value of an inline object’s vertical offset (how far up or down it’s been moved). You need to open Object > Anchored Objects > Options.

Here’s a text frame with an inline object…

Tom e-mailed this question:

In Quark one had access to the control bar with a keyboard shortcut (command-option-M). Is there a shortcut in InDesign to get into the first field of the control palette?

Yes, the one you’re looking for is Command-6 (Control-6 on Windows). That highlights the first field in the Control panel regardless of which mode it’s in. Use the Tab key to move the focus to the next field(s), Shift-Tab to move back.

Other ones I find useful for the Control panel:

Have you ever needed to break the news to a kid that there is no Santa Claus? Seen the tears well up in their big brown eyes? You can relive that unique experience with new InDesign users. Just ask them to select some text, and then go to the Language menu (in the Control or Character panel) and click.