December 9 2008 • 7:56 AM
InDesignSecrets Podcast 092
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- News: “Black Wednesday” for Publishers and Adobe
- Hot Post of the Week: Stripping Styles and Masters
- Moving formatted text from InDesign to Illustrator
- Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Custom Text
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Links mentioned in this podcast:
Details about “Black Wednesday” for publishers and Adobe
David’s post about Stripping heh heh
MergeText script for Adobe Illustrator CS1–CS4
Selection to PDF script for Adobe InDesign CS3
PDF2ID plug-in for Adobe InDesign CS2–CS4
Details about “Black Wednesday” for publishers and Adobe
David’s post about Stripping heh heh
MergeText script for Adobe Illustrator CS1–CS4
Selection to PDF script for Adobe InDesign CS3
PDF2ID plug-in for Adobe InDesign CS2–CS4
There may not be any filter for Copy and Pasting rtf files, but I can drag and drop a rtf with styles and it populates the page, and the styles comes in just fine.
So I then tried, File>Place and found a rtf and it worked.
So it seems that you just have to export your text out of indesign as .rtf by either highlighting a selection, or just have the cursor in the text with nothing selected, then drag and drop the text file onto your Illustrator artboard, or File>Place and find the .rtf file.
It works for me.
Or is that you can’t copy and paste from illustrator to indesign and retain styles? Because I certainly can’t do that.
Hmmm… that custom text is fantastic. But it doesn’t spell check or conform to any sort of spell check. So just be wary to type things in correctly when using Custom Text in variables.
Not only that, but when you have no documents open and you create custom text, it is available for all documents. But the Custom Text is for every new document, but if you change the Custom Text to something else with no documents open it won’t update it in the other documents. That is, each new document uses it’s own instance of the Variable you’ve set and they aren’t linked across documents.
Forgot to mention what a great show you guys did again, covered a lot of topics and the Black Wednesday is a sure sign that the current economic climate is certainly affecting everywhere on the globe and it’s knock on effects are sending ripples to every industry. Hard-times.
OUCH! That’s painful (on our part). You are totally right, Eugene: You can use RTF. Proving once again that sometimes the most obvious solution is right in front of our faces.
My point about Illustrator not supporting RTF is not entirely incorrect… just largely incorrect. It does support RTF with Place. But apparently not with Paste. And that, dear listeners, is what we need to get fixed.
Sigh. Double-sigh. With a cherry on top.
I thought something was askew, it’s not that the point was missed, but it was just that I thought I misheard or misinterpreted what was being said. In saying all that, you’re technically correct, because you can’t get the text back out of Illustrator while retaining the styles, and in essence that’s what you want, as rtf should be working both ways, import and export.
I have to agree that the Illustrator team needs a shake and a reminder that RTF really needs to be supported, as it’s a true way to share text while retaining styles between different apps.
I have to say I searched for ways to export the text back into a rtf, and even copying and pasting the text frame to InDesign didn’t help, and styles weren’t carried over.
It definitely needs work, and it’s well pointed out in the podcast that transporting the text between different apps needs to be refined at the very least.
I’m not sure what workflow is best, RTF or PDF, at least with PDF you will get
the page layout,
but broken text and
no styles,
the rtf you get
flowing text,
with no layout,
but you get the styles.
you can’t get the text back out with the styles intact though.
Still waiting for all those Custom Text use cases!
You were seeking comments about when to use Custom Text variables. I use this facility to update my magazine page headers with the current month.
In the master page I have a defined variable, which I simply define each month as the current month e.g. Jan 09 and my pages reflect the current month.
I don’t use find & replace as I may have Dec 08 somewhere in my text that I don’t want updated to Jan 09. This way is easy and only targets changes where I want them.
Hi Anne-Marie, here’s another example of using Custom Text in a text variable:
The User Guides and other technical documentation that I write needs to be reviewed by the software developers. During the production process of the documentation, I add text variables to the page folio showing status info, the date the document was last updated, and the software build that the document is based on. For the latter, I use custom text (client build: xx).
When a new software build is available, I update the text variable and update all documents (one for each chapter) by adding them to a book and using the Synchronize option. Very handy!
Hi, I use Custom Text variables in the same way as Doug, except that I split Year, Month and Issue Number apart.
They are superior to Find/Replace when put on locked layers where text could be Found but not Replaced, and because you can change multiple documents in one go.
Another advantage is having a place where you can quickly check all variables.
I use custom text in much the same way as do Doug and Emmanuel. I have a template for a quarterly magazine with the custom text variables for season, volume number and issue number appearing in various places and numerous styles in the layout.
Before Variables I did use Find/Replace and confined each search via styles, but it still caught the wrong text at times, and it required several passes. Custom text is easier, quicker and pretty much foolproof, as I can target exactly what text I want changed.
As Emmanuel said, it’s also handy to be presented with a comprehensive list of all the items to be updated.
I use custom variables to produce a custom SLUG at the bottom of my documents. Pretty useful really, as it updates when you move it around. I have to manually update some spec but on the whole it’s a nice simple solution if needed.
One bug I thought may be worth mentioning in regards to the smart object talk, is that if you have saved out a PDF file from illustrator that has printers marks added to it in the PDF dialog; when you later come to edit a smart object they inherit these last used settings when you edit a vector based smart object and save the file back to Photoshop. Resulting in crop marks when you get back to PS, my worst fear that I have not had the time to investigate is that if you saved out a low res PDF from illustrator, and then started editing smart objects from indd that had a raster based component you could inadvertently reduce the resolution of the said smart object. Probably clear as mud but try it out and you will see what I mean.
Thanks for the great show!
I write boat manuals. I would use (once we switch from Frame to ID) custom text variables for the Hull Number of the boat we’re working on. Since there are multiple writers working on each book, multiple documents are open (by the other writer) and I can’t access them to do a find/change. But by using a variable for the hull number, I can simply update the variable and then later on, when the other writer is done, I can just synchronize the book and include text variable as one of the things to update. That way. I don’t have to keep asking the other writer to close his files, nor am I left wondering if I did a find-change for the hull number on his chapters.