By: Anne-Marie
January 18 2006 • 12:12 PM
InDesignSecrets-005
Listen in your browser:
InDesignSecrets-005.mp3 (11M, 21:37 minutes)
• InDesign Recovery Data
• Scaling Text Attributes Craziness
• Curling Straight Quotes en masse
• Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Hyphenation Slider
Links mentioned in the podcast:
• David and Ole Kvern’s Real World InDesign CS2 (finally!) on Amazon or your favorite bookstore
I recently came upon your wonderful podcast and have only listened to the first 16 shows, so far. So, if you have covered this in later podcasts, I apologoze. If I wait until I have listened to all the episodes, I’ll probably forget what I’m about to share.
In one of your first episodes, you covered Gravity as the Obscure Feature of the Week. A few episodes later, you passed on some comments from a listener that helped people understand the gravity feature a bit better. Here’s an explanation that may help people understand it even better:
The gravity feature pulls text toward the centerpoint of the path on which the text is on. Why’s this important to know? Because, by moving the location of the centerpoint allows you to control how the text looks. For instance, you can use gravity to give the text perspective to match a graphic or photo.
First, you need to determine (or decide) where your vanishing point is. Use a horizontal and a vertical guide to mark this point. Option (or Alt) click with the pen tool on one of the end points of the path and then click somewhere else to extend a straight line to the path. Using the Direct-Select tool, select the new end point and move it so that the center point moves to your vanishing point. When you click, pause before moving the point so that the center point is visible when you move it. Remember, you aren’t moving the end point to the location of the vanishing point, but are moving it to change the bounding box of the path so that the center point moves to the vanishing point.
Disclaimer: I saw this tip demonstrated on a video podcast recently. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the name of the podcast, so I can’t give proper credit.
Gary, thanks! It’s a great trick, and it was performed for The InDesign Conference podcast at idusers.com by Rufus Deuchler. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to work in CS3… I think something with Gravity is broken in CS3.