Indesign Secrets

In a perfect world every asset we need to create an InDesign publication would be in one folder, but we don’t live in a perfect world and so we find ourselves hitting the browse button to go back and forth between two or even more folders. At the very least it’s a pain. But there […]

Just a quick note to say Welcome to our two new contributors at InDesignSecrets.com: Bob Levine and Ted LoCascio!

Bob is probably already well-known to anyone who also frequents the Adobe forums or the InDesign mail list. He’s an…

JB wrote: Is there a way to adjust the size of the pasteboard (horizontally)?

Before I answer that, I have to throw out one keyboard shortcut tip: Did you know that Command-Option-Shift-0 (zero) or Ctrl-Alt-Shift-0 fits the entire pasteboard in the document window? Isn’t that cool? Okay, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, let’s tackle the problem.

First of all, you know you can change the height of the pasteboard…

Listen in your browser:
InDesignSecrets-077.mp3 (13.5 MB, 29.3 minutes)
(the transcript of this podcast will be posted soon)

• News: Toronto ID Conference recap; ID CS3 Re-cert exam; Secret 50% poster discount
• Quizzler winner (Where else is “Altitude?”) and answer
• Tips from the live InDesignSecrets Podcast at the Toronto, Canada conference:
• Reverse Index Entries (secret keyboard shortcut)
• Quick Apply for buried menu commands
• Guide tips extravaganza
• “How big is an agate?” answer and winner
• Alt-click and Double-click fun
• Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Download PPD Fonts

David wrote up a great post the other day about how to use Nested Styles with a non-OpenType font so that any numbers in the text use a different typeface automatically — an expert set of Small Caps that’s part of the same typeface family. Toward the end of the post he said, “Now, I would be remiss in my duty if I didn’t also add that it may just be time to upgrade your fonts to OpenType versions, which may have expert or SC fonts built in. That’s so much easier to deal with!”

So true; but it reminded me that for some unlucky people, OpenType Small Caps can turn nasty, at the most inopportune times.

I posed a question to Thomas Phinney at Adobe recently (master of all things font-related) regarding the priority that InDesign considers fonts. That is, if you have four versions of Arial or Times or some other font on your computer, which one is InDesign really going to use? In some cases, the answer is “All […]

As I mentioned (but didn’t go into great detail about) in my May 2008 column for CreativePro.com, one of my favorite InDesign techniques is to lift interesting silhouettes from photographs to use as InDesign text, image or unassigned frames that I fill with a color or something.

For example, you can convert these three images (all from the Photoshop Samples folder, inside the Photoshop application folder):

Nathan wrote:
We use a font that has a SC (small caps) version and in our Body copy (which is regular) we would like all the numbers to be SC. Is there a way to use nested styles to change all the numbers to a different font or different character style inside a paragraph?
Nested styles are […]

I was having terrible troubles with Data Merge last week because I was getting this message about “the data source file you selected either has no records or is not a supported file format” every time I tried to choose the tab-delimited file that contained my data:

This was just a simple file exported from Excel! I opened the file back up…

My co-host here, Anne-Marie Concepción, is so modest and humble that she’s not going to stand up here and shout about the other work she’s been doing, so I figger I’d better do it for ‘er. Here’s the deal: If you haven’t been reading her new column at CreativePro.com (titled “HerGeekness Says”, you’re missing out. […]