By: Anne-Marie
August 10 2007 • 5:04 PM
InDesignSecrets Podcast 057
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InDesignSecrets-057.mp3 (13.8 MB, 29:00 minutes)
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- Summer 2007 InDesign Tips Extravaganza!
- Swatches, styles, editing and flowing text, and more
- Hot Button Post of the Week: Less is More for the Control Panel
- Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Isolate Blending
Links mentioned in the Podcast:
Miami InDesign Conference
Listener Comment Line: +1-206-202-6483
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Great podcast. Listened to it on my walk around the park this morning.
The official name for the cursor that you get when holding Opt/Alt-Shift is the “Fixed-page Autoflow Cursor.”
I mentioned that mode in my InDesign 2 book, but never gave the cursor a name.
In the CS book, I called it the “fixed-page autoflow” but can’t remember if I got that name from the Help file or I made it up. If I made it up, and then Adobe took the name from me, I would be thrilled.
David, what did you and Ole call the cursor back in the old days?
Just wanted to thank you guys for your latest podcast; great tips many of which are on my list of stuff folks should know but somehow don’t. Double thanks for mentioning the Apply Leading to Entire Paragraph tip, too. I’m with you when it comes to why this pref would be disabled by default. Don’t get it, although I think it has something to do with Adobe’s philosophy of leading being a character attribute instead of a paragraph attribute.
Oh, and David. Well to the Mighty Mouse Club. I too love this mouse and am constantly recommending it to students. My favorite thing about it is that, via System Prefs, I can program the scroll-pea to invoke the Application Switcher when pressing down on it. With this setting I can really fly through multiple open apps with a mere push of the pea.
Scott
P.S. A-M, I believe the Opt/Alt-Shift text flow option is called Single Page Auto Flow (or at least that’s what I call it!).
Personally, I would stay away from changing the default placeholder text to something that actually makes sense in terms of content. With the pseudo-latin, even people who have never heard of InDesign (which may well be the case with the people who proofread a document) see that something is wrong with that text right away. Chances that placeholder text accidentally goes into print are much higher if the words make some sort of sense.
One application for the placeholder text that I like a lot is to email it to someone who is to write a text that is supposed to fit into that frame. They can paste the placeholder text into their MS Word, read out how many lines it is, and then write a text that is exactly the same length. Now when I place that in InDesign, it does not require too much work to make it fit. It’s not perfect, it’s most certainly not as comfortable as having them use InCopy, but it’s a lot better than to say “You’ll have two pages in the final document for your article, minus the space for images and headings. Oh, and I’m emailing you the font we use, it’s a 9 pt size. If it’s too short, I’ll just make the images bigger”.
Peter, that’s an *excellent* use for the feature! Thank you so much. I’ll be using that tip in future ID classes.
Scott, I always called it “Limited Autoflow”
but Sandee’s got it right, it’s called Fixed Page Autoflow.
I stand corrected. “Fixed-page autoflow” is how the feature is labeled in ID’s Help file. Thanks, Sandee.
Peter, I agree about needing nonsense text, but I disagree about not changing what’s there.
Lorem ipsum is not English. It won’t be hyphenated if hyphenation is turned on.
It is too dense compared to a real language. The words are much too long. It doesn’t give the right color for your settings.
I myself actually loved Quark’s Jabberwocky but I made my own text that used a lot of computer terms since that’s what I write about the most.
I even once took the Jabbered text from Quark, exported it, and then used it as my ID placeholder text.
It is much better than Lorem Ipsum but not too close to something that makes sense.
I think Anne-Marie’s fables are probably closer to what people write today.
Thinking more about your tip about exporting placeholder text for your writers, Peter, wouldn’t it be just as useful to tell them the target word count? (After all the #of lines isn’t going to be honored in the Word doc, they’ll be looking at the word count anyway.) And in either case, I agree w/Sandee that the Lorem Ipsum text has too many long words … it’d throw off the count to some degree. (Too bad ID doesn’t have IC’s user-configurable word count settings feature.)
Sandee, ID does hyphenate the default placeholder text, even with US English (or any language) as the active language, even if the word’s not in its dictionary. So I think it’s got to be using some sort of generic hyphenation rules set in addition to the dictionary, no?
> ID does hyphenate the default placeholder text, even with US English (or any language) as the active language, even if the word’s not in its dictionary.
Fascinating. I don’t remember early versions of the program doing that.
Anne-Marie, I thinks it’s just a matter of taste, and most of the time I tend to use the word count myself.
However, since the word count is not affected by the length of the words in the text, I find the placeholder text method to be more accurate for short amounts of text (such as medium length image descriptions) since they are too short for the word lengths to cancel each other out on the average. This is also where the Lorem Ipsum’s paragraph length comes in handy since there are very few paragraph breaks that might affect the text length. But then again, neither method gives perfect results.
But then again, many Word users don’t know that there is a word count indicator in Word and end up counting words manually…
I’m just wondering — would it be legal to have a client install a trial version of InCopy and just email them the layout for their text as a CS3 assignment package? 30 days would more than suffice in most cases…
By the way, I think there is some kind of InDesign plugin that mimicks that Quark Jabberthing somewhere out there, I thinks it’s even free, but I don’t remember the link, though.
Another method to make sure that no placeholder text makes it into print I have seen some people use is to color any dummy text with a special temporary spot color swatch. If a pdf of just that spot color is exported with empty pages disabled, only things that have been missed show up. Or one could just search for that special color. The swatch is then deleted before the document goes into print.
We keep trying to get our writers/editors to get InCopy but so far, no go. Instead, I use the placeholder lorem ipsom, but I put in a few paragraph breaks and make it 100% magenta. I get a more accurate word count and since everyone here is allergic to pink, they always notice that it isnt the right text.
> I’m just wondering — would it be legal to have a client install a trial version of InCopy and just email them the layout for their text as a CS3 assignment package? 30 days would more than suffice in most cases…
Peter,
Are you saying that you have several clients whom you would want to have work with InCopy for a short period of time?
Why not buy your own copy of InCopy and then let them install it and activate for a while, and then de-activate after the job is done.
You could then let other clients use that copy. You could also charge them a small fee for the use of your copy of InCopy.
It wouldn’t take long for you to recoup your investment in the InCopy application.
And you wouldn’t have to worry about the legality of using the demo version. And you wouldn’t have to worry about the 30 day time limit.
Sandee, ingenious solution!
Regarding the tip about right-clicking a style or swatch instead of double-clicking it, I would remind that one can also use the “Command+Option+Shift+double-click” combination to edit a style or swatch without applying it.
Nice idea about the Placeholder text, but the problem I found using Gutenberg was that the text documents don’t flow. How did you get over this problem?