Indesign Secrets

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 […]

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. […]

Why do so many people want their all the text in their documents converted to outlines? Don’t answer that; I’ve heard the reasons, and they all make me sad. Nevertheless, some people do want all the text converted, and they find themselves up a creek because Type > Create Outlines doesn’t always give them what they want. Specifically, paragraph rules (rule above/below) disappear. Bullets and numbering disappear. Underlines and strikethroughs disappear. All kinds of stuff disappears, and that’s not good.

Fortunately, there is a better way to convert text to outlines…

It’s late Wednesday night as I type, and I’m just buzzing with excitement about The InDesign Conference in Toronto this week. We had a great two-day event, with over 200 attendees coming from around Canada and the United States. (And elsewhere! I had a lovely chat with a woman who few here from Qatar.) Speakers […]

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 […]

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 […]

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…