By: Michael Murphy
April 10 2006 • 1:07 AM
Episode 17: A Place for Your Stuff (VIDEO)
As designers, we have a lot of stuff we need to have at our disposal quickly. But finding a place for that stuff and knowing what stuff you need is a challenge. This episode covers a great place in InDesign for your stuff: Libraries. What are they? What are they for? How do you use them? Learn how having a place for your stuff can help you get more stuff done.
This episode is available in the standard 672 x 450 format as well as an iPod-compatible version.
the
download file is not correctly uploaded.?r?nI tried to download it
with a download manager and with the browser, i only end up with a
367 kb file when i save it through the browser, and i get the file
not found on the server with the download manager.?r?n?r?nIs there
anybody else having problems with getting the latest podcast?
Oops. My mistake. The link in the
blog posting had a typo in the filename. You may need to refresh the
page, but the link should be working now. Let me know if you have any
additional problem, and thanks for bringing the error to my attention
so quickly.
You
mention that paragraph styles and character styles can be added to a
library. How? I tried dragging them from the styles palette(s) to the
library but just get a no-can-do icon.
You can’t actually add the styles
from the palette into a library directly. You first need to apply the
styles to some text in a document. It could be any placeholder text,
as long as it has all of the styles you want to include in your
library applied to it. Then you drag that text frame into your
library.?r?n?r?nWhen you want to bring those styles into a new
document, just drag that text frame out of the library. The styles
will be added to the new document and you can just delete the text
frame from it. The styles will remain with the new
document.?r?n?r?nThe standard method of doing this is to go to
the styles palette and select Load Styles from the palette menu, then
navigate to the document from which you want to load Paragraph and/or
Character styles.?r?n?r?nIn my podcast example…I streamlined this
considerably by bringing in one object that already had Swatches,
Object Styles, Paragraph Styles and Character Styles applied to it.
This would have been three separate “Load…” operations from three
separate palettes if I did it the standard way. By
“preloading” a library element, I saved myself all of those steps.
Thanks Michael. Really love your podcasts. I have been a user of
Indesign for several years (dumping Pagemaker and Quark) but never
realized how much I DID’NT know. Thanks again.?r?nBill
The libraries video won’t open on my machine. It sounds great but I can’t watch it
(continued) If I click on the “this episode” link nothing happens. Any ideas on what might be wrong? Many thanks
Tim — I’ve tested out the link and the episode file itself, and it’s working perfectly. The video should open in a new browser window. Is it possible that’s somehow being hidden behind your current browser window?