Comments on: Drawing a Good Callout Line for Illustrations

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 03:12:50 +0000

@Kelly: NICE! Basically, the idea is to do a stripe down the middle, with paper-colored gap color… so the gap is on the outside. Then set the stroke to round endcap. The result is just right:

By: Kelly Vaughn

Kelly Vaughn — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 02:17:08 +0000

I came up with a solution to get the rounded cap to be white as well. It involves reversing the striped Stroke Style, and then adding a capped end. Details can be found here: http://www.documentgeek.com/blog/PointerLinesSolution.pdf

By: Eugene

Eugene — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:36:10 +0000

Not sure if it was mentioned? But you can create and Object Style for this. And in CS3 onwards you can find and replace objects appearances and replace them with an Object Style.

That way you can change all the objects with this style in a few clicks.

By: Jennie

Jennie — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:20:38 +0000

Great tip! I wish I had read it an hour ago…I’m going right back into that job and change the callout lines.

BTW, I had a designer and printshop manager in my office the other day (investigating a platesetter) and the first thing that I showed the designer was this site. I have no doubt that she checked it out as soon as she got back to her office. IDS is wonderful! Thank you one and all!

By: Eugene

Eugene — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 11:42:21 +0000

Don’t forget you can also use the Effects panel on top of the posted tip!

You can change the Stroke and Object effects to get your japanese/neon/whatever effect you want to call it to add in at least 2 more stroke options ;P

I suppose you could do a drop shadow with a 0 offset, and an inner shadow and other things too.

But can’t get better than the original. Remember when you use the Effects panel it adds transparency to the page. So you may not want that. The original way posted avoids that.

http://tinyurl.com/d8zpu6

By: Gerald Singelmann

Gerald Singelmann — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 08:38:54 +0000

You can easily extend that technique to get this (http://indesign-faq.de/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/callout-17.jpg)

By: lowJackson

lowJackson — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 08:18:17 +0000

Great Application! I usually use this technique for making roads on my maps, I never thought to use it like this.

By: Trond Thorsen

Trond Thorsen — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 07:59:28 +0000

Cool tip, David!
I’ve had my years in the newspaper business drawing lots of lines on images and illustrations.

My habbit is to make a single black line, and then apply an Outer Glow Effect (somethimes with a bit of blur), and save this as an Object Style. Using that technique I’m able to get a white (or whatever color) band around arrow heads.

By: Fritz

Fritz — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:19:17 +0000

Thanks for the great tip, I plan on using this quite a bit.

By the way, I used the mac application preview all the time for simple photo edits like cropping or resizing.