July 20 2007 • 8:34 PM
InDesignSecrets Podcast 055
Listen in your browser:
InDesignSecrets-055.mp3 (5.9 MB, 24:42 minutes)
or read the transcript.
- News: Upcoming Seminars for David and Anne-Marie
- InDesign CS3 Live Docs
- The Joys of Highlighting Composition Violations
- The Revenge of the Quizzler!
- Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Balance Ragged Lines
Quizzler Instructions: If you know the answer to this episode’s Quizzler, e-mail it (don’t post it here!) to info@indesignsecrets.com before midnight on Friday, July 27. Please put the word “Quizzler” in your Subject line. The winner will be chosen randomly from all correct responses received, and announced in the next podcast, along with the answer.
Links mentioned in the Podcast:
David’s ID seminar: Refine Design Conference
Anne-Marie’s ID seminar: Mastering Prepress Essentials Conf. (1.2MB PDF)
Example ID CS3 Help/Live Doc page w/a comment
David’s ID CS3 Essentials DVD
Listener Comment Line: +1-206-202-6483
Talk to us, baby: Leave a message!
Nice job Anne-Marie. Hardly missed David at all. But I’m afraid you blew it on substituted glyphs and ligatures. They are highlighted when you switch this option on and it works for any kind of font, so that’s why the feature isn’t called Alternate glyphs.
Dave
Anne-Marie, your obscure feature of the week has an even more obscure aspect known only to scripters. In the UI, this attribute of text has just two values, On and Off. But scripts have four choices: Off, Vee-shaped, Fully-balanced, Pyramid-shaped.
If you want to try these out, I’ve just uploaded three CS3-only scripts to: http://pdsassoc.com/downloads/BalancingActs.zip
Just move the scripts to your Scripts Panel folder and try them out.
There! Wasn’t that disappointing? Well, Pyramid vs. V generally makes a difference, but fully-balanced usually ends up looking like one of the other two.
The good news is that you can capture these options in a paragraph style by running one of the scripts and then redefining the style. The style summary in the Paragraph Style options dialog tells you which you’re using.
By the way, using the On/Off control in the UI gives you the Vee-shaped setting.
Dave
Dave, cool scripts! Thanks!
You’re right about the automatic ligatures (turning on highlighting for Substituted Glyphs does highlight those). I realized my error, of course, right after I published the podcast. LOL … I was wondering who’d be the first to correct me via a comment.
Guess when I was testing, I was flipping on and off so many settings I must’ve missed it.
It’s not easy talking for 25 minutes straight in one take, I’m looking forward to David jumping back in.
Anne-Marie,
I have a quizzler for you or anyone else who reads this.
What does the yellow highlight in a table mean?
You can have ALL the composition highlights turned off, and the yellow highlight in a table may still appear.
Finally, I kinda missed David. Next time you need a recording of his laugh to insert after all your great jokes.
Oooh, here’s another commented help file in Live Docs (from Dave Saunders). And he even rated an apology of sorts, and an explanation, from the unnamed tech writer!
Transform Objects
As usual, you need to scroll down to the bottom of the live docs web page to see the comments.
Sandee, good one. I should have mentioned it in the podcast so that it’d be the complete source of all highlighting.
BTW the answer is already in this blog … And you wrote it! heh …
I just did a search of the Help system for “Dreaded Pinkness” and it turned up nothing. Shame!
More seriously, it is a pity that “Trash Preferences” also turns up nothing.
I discovered last evening that the quality of the search engine in the LiveDocs is far greater than that of the one in the Help application. For example, searching for “restore preferences” in help gets you nowhere but the same search on LiveDocs takes you right where you need to be, i.e., here:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/InDesign/5.0/help.html?content=WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-6d1e.html
Dave