InDesignSecrets Podcast 022
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InDesignSecrets-022.mp3 (14.8M, 28:47 minutes)
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• Announcement of new enhancements to the podcast: Transcripts and our Listener Comment Line
• Anne-Marie’s InDesign seminars (open to the public) for the Chicago Book Clinic is on June 22, 2006
• David’s full day of InDesign secrets (also open to the public) for Evolve is on July 12, 2006
• Maintaining text formatting when copying/pasting text between Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign
• We bust a few myths about spot colors and transparency in InDesign
• Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Lab color mode
And we also announced the first InDesignSecrets Podcast Contest! Listen to the show, write down the contest question, and post your answer as a comment below (first correct one wins)
Listener Comment Line: +1-206-888-INDY (-4639)
Your name or voice mail may be included in a future podcast!
Congrats for another cool episode… I’m hooked, I love it.
My answer to Podcast Contest: QUY
Doh! should have woke up an hour earlier.
But what about D - or is that CS2 ?
Jean-Claude is right!
D is for Default Fill/Stroke. Pause over the little icon to the bottom left of the Fill/Stroke buttons on the toolbox.
If you need a way to remember the three key not use…
Indesign = [Q]uark [U]seless for [Y}ou
D is for Duh! I knew that!
I just blanked it out, and couldn’t tell because I opened it up with default.
DUH!
Dang! That was fast! Well as far as I know, Jean-Claude, that’s the correct answer … but I guess we should wait for David to log in and confirm before declaring you the winner of this one!
I’m thinking maybe for the next contest we should put comments on hold for like 24 hours or something, give everyone a fighting chance to listen to the dang thing first. And/or make the quiz question much harder! (David had one prepared that I thought was too convulted … maybe we’ll use that one next time.)
Scott … like Steve said, D resets fill/stroke to the defaults for the selected tool. If it’s already on the defaults, you won’t see anything happen on screen.
Where are you located, Jean-Claude? I’m curious if you were just up all night or if you’re in a time zone where 11:30 p.m. (when I posted the podcast) is 9:00 a.m. or something for you.
The prize is a copy of InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs, signed by both David and myself, the co-authors. Getting it signed by both of us is a rare thing and like we said in the podcast, should add some value to the thing on eBay one day.
Hang on till David confirms you’re the official winner … and send your mailing address to info [at] indesignsecrets.com.
A provisional congratulations, Jean-Claude!
Congratulations, Jean-Claude! You are the winner of the first InDesign Secrets Puzzler!
Here’s a good follow-up question for everyone: If Adobe were to assign Q, U, and Y to features, what should they be? (This is not for a prize… just for fun.)
Jean-Claude is in Montreal, and is always up early in the Eastern time zone (I’m an early riser in the Pacific time zone).
I’d suggest that you have the answers sent to an email address, and do a drawing among those who get it correct if they respond within a couple days of the original podcast posting time.
Thanks, Steve. Well, this was our first time with a “puzzler,” so we’ll get better at it.
Also: Send Us Your Puzzler Ideas (to info (at) indesignsecrets.com! If we use your quiz idea, we’ll send you a gift.
Thanks for a great podcast.
So with all these great keyboard shortcuts you have mentioned, do you know of anyone who has made a comprehensive keyboard layout with all shortcuts. Like the ones found here:
http://keyguides-3.home.mindspring.com/Pages/kg_graph.html
Keep up the great work.
I know that Pariah S. Burke made a great shortcut chart and gave it out at The InDesign Conference last month. It’s just a formtted list (not a keyboard guide, like the ones you mentioned), but I’ll ask him if we can post it here.
Hi Guys,
Thanks again for another informative and fun podcast. The answer to your question of the week is: The three letters not used as keyboard shortcut letter in the tools palette are: Q U & Y.
Thanks again!
Ok, enough about the quizzler, puzzler, quiz puzzler, … let’s talk about transparency, spot colors and text. I was one of those who thought you could not use spot colors and had to keep your text on top.
I do see how the colors separate correctly in the separations preview, but separations don’t mean much to someone who prints to laser and inkjet printers all day.
I use a CREO SPIRE RIP v2.1 on a Xerox 3535 laser and a HP5000 (internal RIP) and both give me fits when I try to use transparency over a spot color.
I get a the dreaded box effect around all objects that use transparency. I checked the RIP settings and every option is checked for overprint. I even click on simulate overprint from InDesign and I still get the same issue. The only way to see it correctly on the printed page is to convert all spots to process in the ink manager, which defeats the purpose of using a spot color… doesn’t it? I take it the problem is really in RIP?
Thanks for the great shows!
Chad
By the way,what is the secret for getting type under a transparent object to print correctly (no thicker strokes)? You hinted a solution on your last epidsode but never disucussed it fully.
Hi Chad, how’s it hanging?
Sorry couldn’t resist.
We were speaking (or at least I was speaking) of offset printing in particular. For digital color … where you send composite info to a toner-based printer … you’re right, it is the RIP that can’t quite get the overprinting right.
I checked with the guru of all things printing-related, my good friend Claudia McCue about your question. She said with a digital color printing workflow as you describe, the only way to get transparency printing over spot colors is to convert them to process as you describe. Even then, she said, some RIPs still show an artifact where the transparency interacts with the converted colors. In that case, she says the following will solve most problems:
1. From IDCS2, export to PDFX/1-a, and in the Ink Manager there, turn on Convert Spots to Process.
2. Open the PDF in Acrobat, choose Print, click the Advanced button and turn on “Print as Image”.
She says in this way, you’re using Acrobat as the RIP.
Claudia’s book, Real World Print Production, should be coming out soon. It’s sorely needed by anyone in our industry, can’t wait for my copy to arrive!
Re text and transparency … there is no secret per se. What some pre-press people know though is that while the type may look weird in proofs … that is, the type affected by transparency looks bolder than the rest … on press, it comes out fine. Something to do with the limitations of digital proofing. I believe the secret, if there is one, is that the printers are flattening at a resolution that matches their imagesetter … 2400 for example. But until the proofs are accurate to the final product in this regard, what designer will take that chance? That’s my question.
Chad, when you print to your composite printer, check the Simulate Overprint option above the Ink Manager button.
Thanks Anne-Marie and Jean-Claude for your excellent advice… and the joke.
I kinda figured I was stuck. It’s a good thing I don’t use spot colors very often and in the composite world they really aren’t necessary.
I’ll check out Claudia’s book when it comes out.
Now I off on vacation for four days.
Thanks again…. love the show
Chad and Jean-Claude,
On my beloved Xerox Phaser 8400, I find that even converting to process and checking “Simulate Overprint” won’t eliminate the discoloration around a shadow. So far, using the “Print as Image” option out of Acrobat is the only way I’ve found to get clean output. Works on some other printers, as well. Of course, on an imagesetter or platesetter, you’d have to enable PostScript overprint to get correct output of the spot color content, but this should give you satisfactory desktop comps. It can result in slow printing, depending on content. But it’s better than misleading output.
NOTE: The “Print as Image” option is sticky: it will stay selected. So turn it off after the job so it doesn’t slow things down for you next time.
And thanks to Anne-Marie for such a splendid resource!
–Claudia
Ultimately, however, if you’re printing finaly artwork on a laser or inkjet printer, the whole concept of a spot color simply doesn’t mean anything anyway, so converting to process is perfectly reasonable. There is, however, the question of using Lab colors instead of the CMYK colors… we’ll talk about that in Podcast 23.
[...] Within hours of posting the long-overdue Episode 23, I finally started catching up on other things — including the rest of the lastest episode of David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion’s InDesign Secrets podcast, which I had only heard the very beginning of. To my extreme embarrassment, I discovered that for the first time since both of our podcasts started in November, we actually had overlapping topics. Oops! But the more I listened, the less horrified I felt. My latest episode discusses “safe” practices for output, covering the basic principles that will be your bullet-proof method for avoiding unexpected transparency-related problems on the printed page. David and Anne-Marie took that conversation to the next level, talking about newer, more sophisticated output devices and methods, spot color issues, and the Output Preview and Separations Preview features. So the credit goes to them for getting there first. If my latest video episode raises a lot of questions about these other features, definitely give < “http://indesignsecrets.com/indesignsecrets-podcast-022.php” TARGET=”_blank”>Episode 22 of InDesign Secrets a listen for more great information on this topic. Cat: [...]
[...] Within hours of posting the long-overdue Episode 23, I finally started catching up on other things — including the second half of the latest episode of David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion’s InDesign Secrets podcast, which I had only heard the beginning of. [...]