By: Anne-Marie
September 25 2006 • 1:42 PM
InDesignSecrets Podcast 032
Listen in your browser:
InDesignSecrets-032.mp3 (26.7 MB, 29:08 minutes)
or read the transcript of this podcast.
- InDesign Conference news (Stockholm, Seattle, Adobe Developer Conf.)
- Rotating text without rotating its frame, courtesy of Adobe’s Tim Cole
- Photocompositing in InDesign: Mike’s latest videocast is on one of our favorite techniques
- Guest guru Cari Jansen, top InDesign trainer/consultant from Australia, talks about the ID CS2 features that allowed her to complete a huge Australian Vineyard Directory project in 15 percent (not a typo!) of the time it took before CS2
- Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Adjust View Settings
Links mentioned in the podcast:
InDesign Conference: Master Class (Seattle, WA, Nov. 6–8, 2006)
Adobe’s Plug-in Developer Summit (Nov. 6–8, 2006; multiple locations)
Tim Cole’s Rotated Text tutorial (PDF, 930K)
Cari’s Wine Guide Notes (PDF, 4.5 MB) with behind-the-scenes project screen shots
Cari’s project tools: FormDesk.com, TextWrangler 2, FileMaker Pro
Listener Comment Line: +1-206-888-INDY (-4639)
Talk to us, baby: Leave a message!
Great episode, David and Anne-Marie…and Cari, of course. Not just because of the gushing plug for my last videocast (thanks!), but this was jam-packed with great information.
I’ve seen the same percentage work reductions for many projects as Cari mentioned in her wine guide project just with proper planning and the implementation of as many InDesign features as possible to automate workflow.
Her project may be a contender for a world record of “Most InDesign Features in a Single Project” if that ever becomes a Guinness category
and it is an ideal example of how exponentially more productive we can all become when multiple features — XML, Anchored Objects, Nested Styles, Align to Spine, and so on — are thought out in advance and built into the process.
With the set-up and planning that Cari had to do this time around now in place, it’ll be interesting if we can hear back from her on the next edition of this project to see how much quicker it gets done next year just re-using that process…and to see how, by then, CS3 could make it even easier.
One of my former major customer had to produce a wine guide. The team that had to do the guide was one supervisor and three DTP operator. For 6 weeks, they are copy/pasting from Word, texts to InDesign.
While I was training them to InDesign, I showed them how InDesign can, using a tabbed text from an Excel file they already have !, just DataMerge texts and pics ! With the text I made, 90% of the wine guide was done by just clicking once the mouse button. InDesign would have need 45 minutes to do the whole job instead of the 3 people for six weeks.
They refused to show my workflow proposal tothe Board, too much afraid that the board will fire 2 people… Today, they continue to cut and paste texts from Word to InDesign…
What’s with all these wine guide projects? You guys outside of the U.S. have all the fun … returning now to my current project for the City of Chicago, designing a restaurant inspection form for illegal serving of foie gras. Sigh…
Although I live in the middle of Wine Country (the Chianti) probably the most significant increase in productivity was for a pharmaceutical company (the natural kind). Nested styles, apply next style and anchored objects have speeded things up so much that the marketing guys could not believe that to the question: “can I add one item? I know that everything will reflow… sorry” the answer was “sure, no problem”.
This leads me to underline the fact that there is not only an increase in productivity but, maybe more importantly, an increase in the confidence that changes can “really” be made up to the last minute.
PS. The company did not fire anyone… they just give them more work
PS. The company did not fire anyone… they just give them more work
This is what I told them but sometimes people are stupid.
Talking about challenges, what about this ?
500 pages in 11 languages
-> XPress and 3 DTP operators : 6 weeks
-> InDesign and me alone (+ a few Dave’s scripts) : 3 days of programming and testing, 1 day of layout
I’m doing an annual wine guide (:P Anne-Marie). We have 300 little tables with similar data (brand, producer, region, analysis and tasting and total results, photo of the bottle and photo of a medal for the best wines). Before CS2, what I did was:
– create a model table with all correct styles in InDesign
– export as tagged text
– open in Word
– use data merge manager in Word to get all the data from an Excel table into the right place (ouch, my eyes! That tagged text is kind of confusing…)
– import it all into InDesign
– place all the the photo bottles one by one
– find the best wines and place the medal photo
Now with CS2, I use the merge function directly in InDesign. It’s much easier to find the place where everything goes (no more tagged text, thank god!) and, most important, all pictures are placed automatically along with the rest of the data! Hurrey!!!
Let me guess, Alexandra, you’re not in the U.S.?
I hate to interrupt this thread, but can anyone (Branislav?) tell me how I can get the real time reversed text effect PDF posted in podcast 20? The link is not working for me. Thanks much.
Mark, sorry about that. You can find all PDF tutorials here by clicking on Tutorials in the Resources section of our TOC. Thanks!
Not in the US, no! I’m in Portugal, the Banana Republic!
Tim Cole’s Rotate Text, not the Frame….
…but the bonding box text frame is still rotated.
If I want the bonding box text frame not rotated, I make a copy of the box, merge (Add) the rotated text to it ( as Tim said), cut the result and Paste Into the original box (you will need to adjust the inside with the outside). Useful if you have Type on a Path around the shape or for positionning.
I love you all for the greatest informations about InDesign in the world.
I will master the beast.
Full le Fun.
Cari Jensen’s use of automation to reduce workload was truly impressive. It is, however, a Mac-based solution. On the Windows side of the equation, I have done something similar, if considerably more modest.
One of my main projects is laying out two or three convention programs a year for a nonprofit corporation. The bulk of the convention program book consists of listings for on-site events. The listings are small but numerous, each with a description paragraph that can vary in size from a few words to a several sentences. All listings share a common set of elements. The number of event listings typically hovers around 300.
For years, the event listing file, a lengthy Word file, was placed, set and formatted by hand, page after page, entry by entry. This was the situation when I took over layout duties, and how I did it at first. I found the process tedious and error-prone, so I came up with a workaround using Excel, Word and InDesign in concert.
I now get the event data in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, rather than a Word file. Each data element of a listing has its own column, and each row is a complete listing record. Word has a fairly powerful data merge function hidden in the Mail Merge menu. Using the so-called Mail Merge function in a “directory” mode you can import the Excel data into a specially created data merge template.
In Word, I create a template placing each data element where I wanted. I applied paragraph formatting styles to the template. Excel does the sorting; putting the event records into the order they need to appear in the book. Word to merges the listings into a single text file with all formatting and styles applied. I do not need to create delimited data files; Word’s merge function deals directly with the native Excel file.
When I place the Word file into the InDesign document, the paragraph styles import with the text. If I need to make formatting changes, I make the changes on the InDesign styles palette and they are applied throughout the document. In fact, as long as the Word style names and the InDesign style names are the same, it doesn’t matter what formatting I originally use in Word.
The merge saves a significant amount of time and effort by automatically formatting over half the book upon import into InDesign. It offers flexibility because all elements of an event listing can be re-formatted through the InDesign styles palette.
Michael, you are spot in… It is all about being able to review workflows and having the ability to maximise InDesign’s feature usage to minimise the work efforts
Great to see there are so many other comparable examples out there… plus lots of wine guides.
I’m with Anne-Marie in waiting on the US (California?) WineGuide story
Had the pleasure of visiting Napa Valley at some years ago and it has similarities with Western Australia (the other WA, that David confuses with the OTHER WA…)
Yep, my tools were Mac based, mainly because the legacy of the work was done on Mac. However the project could have been done on PC.
Formdesk is platform independent. FileMaker Pro will run on Mac and PC. Apparently an equivalent for TextWrangler on PC would be the “HTML Kit -929″ — according to reviews I found on http://www.versiontracker.com. Others might have found a more similar PC based text editing tool?
Each episode is always a good collection of practical tips, tricks and bellylaughs BUT this one episode goes above and beyond the call of duty! Please think about doing a few “Master Class” type episodes that can dig into hard issues like XML and JDF
I am slowly catching up with all of the podcasts right back to number one so I am a bit behind.
But I couldn’t help but comment when I hear someone explaining a perfect example for our product ‘infoBANK’ and in Australia too (we’re in Sydney)! Forget all that preparation in Excel and search/replace - infoBANK completely automates the output to a finished formatted InDesign file.
Hello everybody. (I’m from Germany, so please excuse my flawed english.)
I listen to this podcast today (late, I admit), and i wonder about the “rotating text in frames” topic. I had my one way to do this for years (i think since InDesign 1.5), and it works without the Pathfinder. For me, it is more intuitive, but it is harder to do, if the frame has more anchorpoints. This is the way:
Draw a frame and fill it with text.
Rotate the frame to the angel, the text should have (e.g. 20°).
Select all anchorpoints (!) of the frame with the direct selection tool (holding the shift key down).
Rotate the frame (without the text) back, to its original angel (by rotation e.g. -20°)
That’s it.
Thanks for the brilliant Podcast. I have much fun listen to it, even the older episodes.
Martin, this is brilliant! Actually, selecting all the anchor points isn’t so hard because you can option/alt-click on the path to select all of them at the same time. Thanks for sharing this with us!
Hello David!
Option-click! This one is new for me. So my trick is even better then I believed. Thank you, for the feed-back. Greetings from Germany.