July 28 2008 • 9:23 PM
InDesignSecrets Podcast 083
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* Gotchas! We blaze through a pile of InDesign traps that will mess you up if you overlook one tiny little checkbox or button
* Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Deactivate
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Wahey, it’s the second bar mitzvah!
Another gotcha/checkbox/tip and this is the scenario.
I want to update a document, but last years logo was for a special 40 year edition of the logo, and we’ve reverted back to the logo with the “Celebrating 40 Years” bit on it.
So I have my document and I can click the image and File>Place, it will do it one by one.
But instead of File>Place
You can replace all the links for that image.
In the links panel, in the contextual menu choose
Relink
There’s a little option down the bottom of the dialog box there is a check box
“Relink all instances”
Which is awesome.
The only other Gotcha! I can think of is that when you have a file that has spot colours in it and you place it into InDesign, the spot colours show up and it’s fine.
You then choose in the Ink Manager to Convert All Spot Colours to CMYK.
You then open up your original file and change the spot colour.
InDesign now has not got that swatch checked to Convert to CMYK, you have to redo that step, because it’s a new swatch.
I think InDesign should somehow link the swatch to the file, or at least give a warning saying that the Ink Manager needs to be updated.
Great show, and I’ve been a victim of a lot of those Gotchas in the past!
Oh yeah, I know the damn “just-dare-to-change-your-hardware-a-little-and-you’re-activation-screwed” all too well. Two weeks ago I swapped in a new drive and more RAM — and then CS3 hysterically screamed about activation, whereas WinXP silently and sensibly accepted its fate. The Adobe activation stuff is a cruel farce: we legal, paying customers suffer and have to jump through various hoops to prove we’re not criminals — whereas the pirating criminals just google for some $3 keygen and off they go.
An excerpt from Wikipedia…
Eighty-three is
the sum of three consecutive primes
(23 + 29 + 31)
as well as
the sum of five consecutive primes
(11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23)
Yes, 83 is prime. And InDesign is primo!
Casey, That is so cool! I love that kind of thing.
David and AM, I really like the “quickie” format of this podcast. Highly informative, fun, and friendly…just as usual. I think that this may be like the 100 calorie snack packs version of the usual podcast!
Great info as always. Please keep it up.
Related to the table Gotcha! If you manually adjust the column width with the Column Width setting in the Control Panel, there’s no way to keep it from adjusting the overall width of the table (like when you press Shift while dragging the cell edge).
It’s been a major pain for me in the past, forcing me to bust out my algebra to figure out how wide I need each column (alternating skinny and wide columns) to have the table maintain the proper width.
I’ll try the hardware Gotcha! soon, our home machine crashed and we had to reinstall the operating system on a new drive. No idea what’s going to happen with my activation allowance since I wasn’t able to deactivate the crashed version.
Making new paragraph style gotcha
This has gotten me plenty of times but playing around I learned that:
CMD + clicking on the Create New Style icon in the paragraph styles panel applies the style to the selection.
Alternatively:
OPT + clicking opens up dialog box where you can rename the style and the “Apply Style to Selection” box is already checked.
Is there any way that you would be able to provide you podcast intro music as a downloadable ringtone? I’ve never had a custom ringtone for my cell phone, but as an ID junkie, I would for sure find a way to install your music on my phone if it was available. You guys rock!
Four days ago I had a hdd crash. All data since June were lost. Also my activation for my CS3 design standard. Now I just have one left.
I wrote to adobe asking what to do. If I get an answer I will tell it to you.
By the way: I must register again and became a present (free font or 30 day linda-training). Am I allowed to use this offer again? I took the font the first time i registered…
Best regards from Austria!
Martin
The Hold-down-shift-while-dragging-a-table-cell-divider-tipp/trick was great. This one I missed for sooooooo long.
Thanks a lot!
Kelly, what a great idea! LOL … we will definitely investigate it!
Kelly & Anne-Marie: Here’s a link to an mp3 file of the InDesign Secrets lead-in music, in case you want it as a ringtone on your computer.
I don’t know how you can make that a ringtone for your phone. I’ve been trying to do this for months, but I have an iPhone and it won’t accept anything except Apple’s pay-for-it ringtones. But these comments made me go find iToner from Ambrosia. It’s Mac-0nly, but it seems to work! Whenever Anne-Marie calls me now, I’ll think our podcast is playing.
I heard your podcast for the first time today and liked it a lot!
It would be so cool if you could tell us about how to use InDesign together with XML and XSL. Could that be a topic for a podcast?
The XSL stylesheets gives a great flexibility in controlling how to extract data from the XML file into InDesign.
But, if you are working with tables in InDesign and you want to import data from XML using XSL, it is hard to find good and instructive information about the secrets of how to create the XSL code that works with the InDesign tables.
Playing catch-up with episodes… Here’s a gotcha that has driven more than one unsuspecting ID user to the brink of indesignicide: the Case of the Phantom Character Style.
It goes like this: you activate the text tool, select a character style, then click inside a text frame and start typing. Maybe you modify this to make a new character style, maybe not. You switch out of the character style and continue.
Later, maybe a few minutes but possibly hours or even days later, you go back to that document, activate the text tool again and draw out a new text frame. You select a paragraph style and start typing, but the wrong font shows up. There’s no “+” in the paragraph style, no override shows up, but nothing you can do will make the right font show up. Eventually, you find there’s a character style selected, so you select the text and click “None” to continue, but the next frame you draw has the same problem. Every new text frame has this problem until you activate the text tool without making any text frame active and change the now-maddeningly-default character style to “None.”
The activation for windows work by picking up serial numbers from components in your computer then generating a number from them and then making the activation code.
Some of the numbers it may pick up are the processor , chip set, HD, bios, and or ram.
Back on the ringtone idea: Here is a great post for how to turn any music into a ringtone (using GarageBand on the Mac) without any thirdparty software.