September 8 2009 • 8:07 AM
InDesignSecrets Podcast 109
Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.
The transcript of this podcast will be posted soon.
- Happy 10th Birthday to InDesign!
- Placing Word files: Essential Tips, Part 1
- Deleting Word styles while retaining local bolds and italics
- When you might want to export to RTF and re-import
- Fastest way to remove hyperlinks (but leave the link text)
- Maggy-ing the Word file
- Upcoming seminars and webinars — all recordings now available!
- Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Select All Unused
News and special offers from our sponsors:
>> UK-based Certitec, an Adobe Authorized Training Center, is giving away one free 2-day InDesign class to a lucky InDesignSecrets.com listener. Classes will be held in Cardiff or London, U.K. To enter the drawing for the free class, go to http://www.certitec.com/indesignsecrets.html and fill out the form. Quick! You only have 14 days from the date of this podcast to enter the drawing. If you don’t win, you can always register for any 2009 class at Certitec for 10% off if you mention “InDesignSecrets” when registering.
>> In-Tools has a special deal for InDesignSecrets fans: $20 off the price for either one of their InDesign plug-in bundles, InBook or InSefer, if you purchase from this special page on their site. The InBook Plug-in Pack is a suite of plug-ins that turn InDesign into an advanced automated pagination system for laying out books.The InSefer suite of plug-ins does the same for Hebrew publications. We talked about a few of the InBook plug-ins in the podcast, but the full list is here.
–
Links mentioned in this podcast:
> Happy Birthday to ID post
> Post about stripping out hyperlinks from Word files
> PaperSpecs reprinted Anne-Marie’s “Clean Up Word Files” article
> David insists we include a map showing Where Milwaukee Is
> All InDesignSecrets webinars (including recorded eSeminars)
“our robots will be using it”
Awesome.
I feel that I really should be defending Milwaukee, since it is where I live.
Milwaukee is home to the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team. Of course we have Miller beer, but don’t forget Pabst, Schlitz, and countless other microbrews. We are also the home of Harley-Davidson, Johnson Controls, Northwestern-Mutual Insurance and countless other corporations. While we may not be as large as Chicago or NY, at least our traffic isn’t that bad.
PS – The tags & trap presets panels also have select all unused in their respective panel menus.
Fritz, you are absolutely right. I truly meant no disrespect to the great city of Milwaukee. If we were doing a seminar in Ouagadougou or Guangzhou or Minsk, I think we would also have to explain to many of our listeners where it was.
(I’d love to speak in all those places, by the way.)
Is the city of Milwaukee really as obscure to people as Ougadougou?
Excellent stuff about all the MS Word importing. Re-exporting text to RTF from InDesign is a real time-saver.
I’ve never heard of “maggy-ing the file” that sounds really cool and I will have to try it out myself. What an odd but interesting find in Word files.
One script I use all the time is “preservelocalformatting.jsx” which makes styles for all the bold, italic, bold italic, superscript, subscript, etc. Which is handy. One thing to do after doing this is to go to Type>Find Font and make sure that the correct version is being used. One font I have is “MetaPlusNormal” but no Bold in the font, I have to change that to “MeatPlusBold” and Normal.
If you are using a script to make your character styles it’s well worth your while to check the Find Font and make sure that font has the Bold, Italic, Bold Italic, etc. in it’s family.
So how about turning off that visible rectangle when importing MS Word hyperlinks? Still stumped on that one. It’s really annoying when making an interactive pdf, every hyperlink I have to manually edit and remove the setting?
Great podcast, thanks.
@Anne-Marie: It is to our readers and listeners in Abuja!
@Eugene: Good points. When I want to get rid of the visible rectangle, I just select a bunch of the links in the Hyperlinks panel (click on one, Shift-click on the last) and edit them all at the same time. I want to know who actually likes the visible rectangle style?! I’ve never seen anyone use it. So I agree that it’s frustrating that it’s the default.
@David:
Yes it looks absolutely terrible in an interactive pdf to have visible rectangles, they obscure the text and everything. Perhaps it should be an option when making the PDF, choose Interactive, another option to have Visible Rectangles for Hyperlinks. Do we need any more options in a making PDFs though? It could be a setting in the document preferences, Visible, Invisible or Manual. Anyway that’s for CSS 10 (Creative Suite Space 10)
I was convinced that wasn’t possible, I had tried many times. So I opened up the project and low and behold it worked first time. Hmmm… I mustn’t have been clicking hard enough or something.
Thanks
Anne-Marie I LOVE the idea of the eyes that keep looking to the fly out menus! Clearly you SHOULD be in charge of ID icons!
Thanks for the tip on how to delete those ANNOYING hyperlinks that come in with Word files, the boxes around them drive me insane, usually I end of retyping them or pasting them into a blank file and re pasting them back into my ID file. Lots of busywork. Great tip.
Next episode: Jimmying the Lock file…
I am surprised that, in talking about InDesign’s 10th birthday, you went on so much about Quark but never a mention of PageMaker, the loins from which InDesign sprang.
Just this week I have persuaded a colleague who was still using PageMaker (he is retired and so doesn’t need to work cooperatively with anyone else and has limited funds to spend on software) that it really was time to upgrade to InDesign. He was amazed at how easy it was to do so and is now happily exploring all the additional features that InDesign gives him.
I never used Quark Xpress but used PageMaker for many years and, at the time, regarded it as a pretty useful program. It looks and feels so clunky now!
@Furry: You are absolutely right. But we were mostly talking about our own experiences, not necessarily the industry as a whole. I started with PM 1.0 back in the mid-80s, but found it frustrating and found QX 1.0 much more to my tastes. But around here (Seattle area), it was an Aldus town (then later an Adobe town) until very late in the game.
I don’t know, I still miss the “single pasteboard/many pages” concept in PageMaker. I got used to living without it in Quark.
GREAT MS Word Tips. Especially “Magg-ing” the file! I’ve been creating new Word templates for my company’s reports and I’ve lost years of my life and have less hair b/c of that final !?#%#(! paragraph return (and many other annoying Word habits). Thanks! I’m sending a link of this podcast to everyone i know.
Thank C David! So you have used the Maggying technique and it helped? (I’ve used it and can attest, but always good to get corroboration…)
David: You talk in this episode about supplying writers with a Word file that contains all your INDD style sheets, then when the writing returns his writing assignment you can place the file and since the style sheets from Word match the INDD styles, all the text correctly styles automatically. I’ve been doing this in CS3 for about a year and it has worked beautifully. However, I just discovered in CS4 that when I bring in one of my writer’s Word files, not all of the INDD style sheet attributes get applied to the text. For example: The style sheet “head_1″ in my Word file is set to Times 12pt, black. In my INDD CS4 file it is set to Minion Bold, 24pt, White. In this case, the color did change to white, but the font remained in Times as did the pt. size. Is this a known bug in CS4? What’s happening is that the style sheet in INDD has a plus sign beside it. If I option click it, all the attributes come through. But in CS3 I didn’t have to do this. It’s going to cost our production folks a lot of time to go through hundreds of pages and option click each style sheet.
Related to my previous post, I have found that if I create new writer templates by exporting styled text from CS4, modify those styles in Word (making text all Times, color black), then place the new Word file, all text comes in correctly.
@Judy: I haven’t noticed any change in that behavior in CS4. I could be wrong, but my guess is that something changed with the Word file… local formatting was somehow added to it. Here’s some info on removing overrides.