By: Michael Murphy
May 20 2006 • 10:27 AM
Episode 21: Automated Jump Lines (VIDEO)
When you actually read the InDesign User Guide cover-to-cover — which I did to study for my recent Adobe certification exam — you actually find a lot of things you didn’t know InDesign could do. In this episode, I take a look at Automated Jump Lines — a feature that was new to me and that I immediately started using at work every day. It’s not one of InDesign’s sexier features, but it’s one of those smart and useful touches that are always such a treat to discover.
This episode is available in both the standard 672 x 450 format as well as an in an iPod-compatible format.
That
is awesome, I never realized InDesign could do that, I knew you could
specify “previous Page” and “next page” in the special characters but
didnt realize it would make larger jumps when touching a text frame.
Too Cool. Thanks Michael.
Brilliant. Had no idea! Keep ‘em coming; your videocasts are superb.
Gotta say, I find it interesting that jump lines, jump line text frames that need to touch story frames, and the next/previous page special character are new to people!
I know QuarkXPress had this feature since version immemorial and in fact I still remember their keyboard shortcuts. I thought it was weird that ID didn’t have shortcuts for their Previous/Next page numbers and so I created them in my custom keyboard shortcut set about a week into my first ID project.
Still I have never seen the feature demo’d and explained so well, Michael, as in your video. Par for your course.
I’m almost positive that PageMaker had/has this same feature, btw.
Auto Page Number (meaning, “current page”), Previous and Next page numbers can also be used in the text flow; that is, part of the text, not in a separate text frame. They work the same: Auto Page number is the page number containing the frame where that special character is (that is, the “current” text frame), Next Page number is the page # that has the next frame in the thread, and Previous Page number is the page # with the previous frame in the thread. Embedding the special characters right in the text flow comes in handy sometimes.
And Michael, are you saying that before you discovered the feature you were manually adding the jump line page numbers? ach!
Yes, Anne-Marie. I am freely admitting that.
I’ve been in this business nearly 20 years, and for all the time I spent in XPress, I was only aware of the Auto Page Number feature. I had no idea XPress had next/previous page characters.
So it’s not all that surprising to me that so few people are aware of or using these features. I’m still learning myself.