By: Anne-Marie
April 5 2007 • 3:38 AM
InDesignSecrets Podcast 047
Listen in your browser:
InDesignSecrets-047.mp3 (12.3 MB, 25:46 minutes)
or read the transcript of this podcast.
- Upcoming conferences of interest
- InDesign CS2 4.05 Update
- Hot Button Post of the Week: CS3 Pricing
- Adjusting your Display Performance preference
- New in CS3: Export to XHTML
- Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: First Baseline Offset
Links mentioned in the podcast:
Vector Conference and Pixel Conference, back-to-back in Chicago, Illinois, May 1–3, 2007; and the InDesign Conference, New York City, NY, June 4–8, 2007. Enter coupon code ISDISBC07 for $100 off registration fee for any of these three conferences.
InDesign 4.05 Update ReadMe—click to download the PDF listing all the fixes (the ones fixed by 4.05 specifically are asterisked)
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Thought you may find some humor with this, unless you work for Adobe, I guess.
http://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/942.html
Very funny, James! Thank you. Oy…
You folks misrepresented the way that Display Preference settings work. They are not document settings; they work on Windows. Display Performance settings do not travel with the document, only your choice of setting does.
When you change the definition of a setting in your Preferences that applies immediately to all present and future windows that are using that setting.
In the top part of the Display Performance Preferences, you get to choose your default setting for any new Windows — not Documents. To change the setting for an existing Window, use the View menu.
Of course, those people who never realized that you could have more than one window open into a document might think I’m being pedantic, but I’ve guided enough lost souls on this in the U2U forum to know that this is one of the more mysterious preferences InDesign has.
To further muddy the water, in the Object menu, you can override the window setting and choose a display quality at the object level (provided you have checked Preserve Object-Level Display Settings in preference). Say you have a huge background image on a certain spread that really slows down your work if you have it at high quality, but you need high quality for all the other images; so set High Quality in the View menu but then select the big image and use the Object menu to make it Typical display quality.
Dave
CS3’s new feature that keeps paragraph rules within the text frame works only on rules above. The checkbox is disabled for rules below.
Dave
Dave … misrepresented? I listened again just to check, and I still don’t hear anything close to misleading in our discussion about Display Preferences.
Re “windows” vs. “documents” … while that distinction is crucial in some apps and situations, it’s not in this one. (And doesn’t apply, actually … open two windows for the same .indd file, then change the Display Prefs. Both windows change.) Even the relevant online help is titled “To change a document’s display performance.”
But I will agree that we could have mentioned that display performance settings are not saved with the document. That’s true for so many other Preferences settings that I’ve stopped pointing it out, thinking people know that already.
Feature request for CS4 would be for Preferences to have a little flag icon next to the prefs that *are* saved with the doc, like Baseline Grid Start. That would help clear things up a lot.
Sorry about “misrepresented” — I had a headache last evening and that was the only word that would present itself. I spent the rest of the evening thinking “Why did I use ‘misrepresented’?”
But the situation is very confusing. First: there are two parts to that Preferences panel. The top bit (Options) is where you choose your Default View setting for all new windows. For example:
1. With no document open, set it to Typical and open a document. Notice that the display for that Window is Typical (as the View menu indicates).
2. Go back to Preferences and change the Default View to High Quality and now open a new window to the same document.
While the first window remains Typical, the new one is High Quality.
The Adjust View Settings (much larger( part of the panel are installation definitions and do not travel with documents. And, they take effect immediately for all opened windows.
This whole thing would be a lot easier to understand if the Adjust View Settings part of that panel were a separate dialog box because what that part does is so different from the Options section. Indeed, many users think that by changing the Adjust View Settings drop-down they’re doing what Default View under Options actually does.
It’s all reminiscent of people who think that changing the Language drop down in the Dictionary part of the Preferences changes the default language for the document.
The only Display Performance related settings that do travel with a document are those that are attached to objects using the Object menu.
Dave
Dave, thanks for the clarification. Yes, we were trying to focus our comments on the Adust View Settings. If I said it was document-wide, then I was mistaken. Sorry!
Yes, this panel is very confusing. The important thing we were trying to get across is: Changing the Vector Graphics slider to High Resolution for the Typical view setting is a good idea much of the time.
The other setting in Typical that I usually change is the Greek Type Below value, which is set to 7 pts for some reason. That’s crazy. I change it to 2 or 3 points.
Practically all software is immorally priced - otherwise Gates wouldn’t be the worlds richest person, with some of his cronies right up there in the gazillionaire cadre. And they wonder why there are pirates!
Is there any option to convert color images to grayscale in export or print dialog box in cs3?
Regarding ID CS3’s new Export to XHTML feature that we talked about in this episode, Ted Padova was as unimpressed with it as he was with Acrobat’s own Save as HTML performance. In his blog post he recommends a third-party Windows-only utility, Smart PDF Converter, instead.
For $39 it looks impressive, but I’d like to see the code that thing produces…and how much control you have over the code it creates. (e.g. from Ted’s screen shots, it looks like it may embed deprecated/old-fashioned “font face=” sort of markup.) But if you’re looking for something that can turn a PDF (created from ID) into HTML that looks like the original ID file, and don’t care about integrating it into the design or CSS of an existing site, it may be worth trying out.
>Practically all software is immorally priced - otherwise Gates wouldn’t be the worlds richest person, with some of his cronies right up there in the gazillionaire cadre. And they wonder why there are pirates!
I don’t want to get into a political debate here, but you price something for the most people are willing to pay or it. There is nothing immoral about that.
The only thing immoral is the pirating/stealing that some do because the price is too high.
People are more readily able to forgive someone who wins the lottery than someone who worked for their money.
Having said that pricing something in one part of the world differently than another is not smart business this day and age where the distance between China and Brazil is one click away.
Fred, I agree: I have seen far too many arguments about what is moral and what isn’t. I don’t want to have that kind of flame war here.
Morals aside, what IS clear is that you are absolutely right about people’s awareness of global pricing. Companies listen to their customers (the good companies, at least) and if enough people respond to Adobe, Adobe will respond in kind.
Anne-Marie, regarding Ted Padova’s blog post: I’m sorry, but he’s missing the point entirely. He is trying to convert the layout to HTML, including number of columns, position of graphics, and so on. If you want that, use QuarkXPress 7. InDesign’s XHTML export isn’t about trying to maintain page geometry or layout; it’s about getting the content out so that it can be repurposed with an HTML editing program.
No need to apologize DB
I agree with you on all counts.
I guess what I’m saying — the reason I brought it up — is that while I seldom want the markup to force the HTML to look exactly like the original ID file; other people might. And here’s a possible solution. Without having to use QXP 7.
Yes I agree that Ted is missing the point here… or maybe he doesn’t care about the point; he wants the end result he describes. But it would’ve been better if had said something about why ID exports the way it does.
I would have liked to see InDesign CS3 make html pages from the document, maintaining the layout. It would have been nice. I have 30 books to publish this year and they’re all going online, each layed out differently. It’s going to be nightmareish to sort this out. PDF is not an option for our online as members complained about PDF’s before, through ignorance more than anything. It’s a long story. I want a button that says, export to Web, like there is for Export to PDF. Is the packaging anybetter I wonder, to Dreamweaver??? I liked the go live one but it didn’t do a great job on it and clean up was a little difficult on a mass scale.
Quark tried the “do HTML in the page-layout program” technique and it was a failure for many reasons. I’ve tried to get Adobe to do true HTML layout in InDesign for years, but they finally convinced me that I should use a Web-authoring tool instead. That said, I’m never going to be a Dreamweaver user, so I’m hoping that the next version of GoLive will be easy enough for even someone like me to use. Adobe keeps saying that they’re revising GoLive, but I wonder when they’ll go public about its features?
Just wanted to add a slight addendum to your OFOTW piece on the First Baseline Offset feature. From time to time students complain to me about not being able to get true vertical justification of text in a frame even though they’ve set Vertical Justification to Center. This situation is particularly evident when the text is all caps. The reason for the problem goes back to how the First Baseline Offset defaults to Ascent. As David pointed out, in most fonts the ascenders are taller than the caps. So when vertical justification is set to to center, InDesign automatically centers your text based on the tallest glyphs, or the ascenders. To fix this discrepancy, simply change the First Baseline Offset to Cap Height and your problem is solved.
Thank you, Scott! What a great fix for that long-standing problem.
Thanks to David and Ann Marie for pointing out the problems in my article on exporting XTHML from InDesign and adding some worthwhile considerations in your discussion.
—ted