By: Anne-Marie
August 16 2006 • 1:43 PM
InDesignSecrets Podcast 028
Listen in your browser:
InDesignSecrets-028.mp3 (14.4 MB, 27:58 minutes)
or read the transcript of this podcast.
With special guest star, Sandee Cohen!
• A “deep dive” into creating interactive PDF files, especially Buttons and States
• Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Flush Space
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And I thought Lollapaloza had a star studded cast! Well done, loads of good stuff in there.
You talk on the latest podcast about the aspect ratio to set up for presentations (1024 by 768) and I was wondering why InDesign Magazine doesn’t use those proportions for their pdfs. They seem to be wedded to the old vertical format — I suppose because people print sections (very handy) but it would be much easier to read in a screen format. The one thing I liked about Before and After “magazine” was the format. Just a suggestion.
Lynn, thank you for your feedback. I don’t want to make any announcements at this time regarding InDesign Magazine, but let’s just say that we all agree with you and everything takes longer than we hoped.
I was quite excited about the use of the flush space that you suggested on your podcast to separate columns. However, when I tried this out, it didn’t work.
I typed 1 fs 2 fs 3 fs 4. Only the 4 flushed to the far end and the first 3 flush spaces acted as regular spaces. Have I missed something?
Raphael, I can’t replicate your results. Are you sure you’re setting the paragraph alignment to Justify All Lines? Also I’m not sure if it makes a diff, but what version of ID are you using? I’m using CS2 with the latest patch (4.04).
I’m using CS2, but it’s the Middle Eastern version, which could be the problem.
Having wrassled with the interactive features a few times, I noticed a point that you might want to make clear. Setting up hyperlinks in InDesign is simple enough, and setting up buttons is, well, not so simple but still a hair this side of rocket science. Combine the two and you hit the really, really obscure feature: a hyperlink converted to a button doesn’t link. The hyperlink can be there, and sans button can work perfectly well. It will even test out okay from the Hyperlink palette — in InDesign. But it won’t work in the resulting PDF.
The only way to make a button hyperlink to its hyperventilating target is to add it to the (usually Up) button state by selecting Button Options from the flyout menu and adding Go To Anchor as a behavior. The anchor would be whatever you set up as a hyperlink destination inside the document.
As an aside: You might consider adding an “InDesign Drive-You-Crazy Feature of the Week” to the podcast. This one would be on my list, along with the “Everything on a data merge page except the data has to be on a master page” feature, which prevents even the sample label sheet that comes with InDesign from working. I still have brick-shaped marks on my head from both of those. (And, yes, it felt great when I stopped.)
I’m on a roll today. Sorry. A great extension to the interactive button theme would be Hide/Show fields, which I also beat my head against a wall over. (I can show you the marks, but they’re not pretty.) You can create terrific rollover effects with this. The trouble is, getting there is like hacking into Sleeping Beauty’s castle: you know it’ll be worth it in the end, but man (or is that “dude”, these days), it’s painful.
Great ideas, Alan. Thanks. I think what’s happening with the hyperlink/button problem is that you’re making a hyperlink in a text frame and then converting that to a button. The text frame is sitting “inside” the button object. You need to make a button object and then apply a hyperlink to that.
The data merge thing is definitely tricky. Rufus Deuchler wrote a good article on it for InDesign Magazine which was picked up by CreativePro.com.
As for the other interactive features, I can only suggest Sandee’s InDesign Visual QuickStart Guide, or “Real World InDesign CS2″ (by Olav Kvern and myself), which goes into a lot of details about these issues.
Yes, that’s exactly what happened, and it drove me nuts until I’d figured it out. Since then I’ve done a few similar projects so I have it fairly well grooved in. But getting there was a tortuous process.
Data merge is easy enough once you grasp the key limitation, but it’s not exactly spelled out in the manual, is it? I really hope this gets fixed in CS3 so it’s more functional. I happen use it frequently, so the really annoying bits (like not being able to set up a two-sided, two-up layout as one document) are in my face regularly.
Autor, Respect!
!!! It is class to itself
About flush space: where I use it: when you have text justified and you want to have a new line break, the last line will fill out which can give very large white spaces between the words. So there I use a flush space.
And, regarding this, I have a question:
The Flush space-thing applied before forced line break, works very well with Justified text, but only when I (have to) use the Single-Line composer. When I change it to Paragraph composer, I see some strange white space appear. It’s really annoying so if any one has a solution for this, please, let it go.
Thanks,
Jan
Jandeman, I’m not sure what you mean by “strange white space.” But why would you use a flush space before a forced line break (shift-return)? I agree that it is strange that ID adds a little space, but it is even more strange to put a flush space before a forced line break.
Well, suppose you have a very large textbox with justified text in Paragraph composer. In this text box, you have three lines of text before a forced line break, but the last line before this forced line break consist of only four or five words. The moment you type this forced line break, those first three lines get divided over the full column width which results in very large white space between the words (which can be very ugly).
In this case, I don’t want InDesign to fill out this third line, but there is no way, to my knowledge, to prevent this (while keeping justified text).
The only ‘bad’ solution, is to switch to Single line composer en to insert a flush space or tab before the forced line break.
Problem is that the rest of the paragraph is then also in single line composer.
I hope this explains more my question. (I’m from Belgium so my english could be somewhat ‘foreign’).