Indesign Secrets

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.

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…

When you print a page that is smaller than the paper on which you’re printing, InDesign gives you very little to indicate the page boundary. You could turn on crop marks in the Marks and Bleed pane of the Print dialog box, but that still won’t provide a clear edge from corner to corner. Many […]

I wrote an article about how to create calendars in InDesign Magazine, Issue #21 (December 2007/January 2008). For those of you who haven’t been subscribing, I encourage you to do so; or you can buy that one back issue if you want. The article mentioned templates you could use, but focused primarily on a script by Scott Selberg called CalendarWizard.

There is an old and crusty version on the Adobe Exchange, but I wanted to point out that you can also download the script from this page at indesignmag.com.

InDesign’s Paste Into feature lets you nest one object (or a group of objects, which acts like a single object) inside a frame. It’s essential that you master the concept of pasting into. For example, if you want to move a picture from one graphic frame to another, you should select the image with the […]

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…

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:…

Nina wrote: I have grouped several objects together and then pasted them into a shape / frame. HELP! I do not seem to be able to release the objects from the frame.

Don’t panic, Nina. I know what you mean: After you use Paste Into, it seems like you cannot select those objects again (especially a group). But you can. You just need a trick or two. And you need to understand the difference between two terms: Content and Container. The Container is any frame that holds an image, another frame, or a group of frames. The Content is whatever is inside the frame.

Here are three ways to select Content (objects inside other objects)…

A recent post on CreativeTechs reminded me that we hadn’t talked about guides in InDesign for a while. In it, Craig points out how useful it is to hold down the Shift key when you drag out a guide from one of the document rulers. The Shift key tells InDesign to snap the guide to […]