New Free Tip of the Day Plug-in from Blatner and DTP Tools
Many of you have been asking, “When will we get a new Tip of the Day plug-in that works with CS3?” Well, the answer is: Today!
I’ve been working with plug-in developer DTP Tools to create a new, free plug-in called David Blatner’s InDesign Tips. This plug-in displays an InDesign tip each time you launch InDesign. And the good news is that this plug-in now works with InDesign CS, CS2, and CS3. (The developer that did the previous version never updated it.)
Even better, they’ve added a number of other cool features, such as a button to send the current tip to a friend as an email. You can also see new tips by choosing David Blatner’s Tips from the Help menu. Plus, as new tips are published, the plug-in can load them across your internet connection.
This is the second collaboration we’ve done with DTP Tools. The first was the free Keyboard Shortcuts plug-in.
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Niiiiice! I use ‘the purple one’ at home and ‘the butterfly’ version at work.
I’m teaching Id at work and tips are always welcome..
thanx David!
Thanks for a plug-in. I from Russia. My English is poor. Sometimes it would be desirable to copy tips and to translate it in a translation program. But tips is not copied. Whether It is impossible to correct it in the future?
David, it’s terrific — thanks!
David, I especially like the sagacious edification proffered us all in Tip #944. (If others find this posting a bit moosterious, that’s because I’m a fan of Elkie Brooks . . . )
Thank you Klaus and others! No fair jumping ahead to find the moose reference. ;) By the way there’s a moose in the keyboard shortcuts plug-in, too.
Boris, you can’t copy the tips out, but you can click Share This Tip to email a copy of the tip. You could copy it that way.
It would be even more cool if we had someone to translate all these tips into Russian or other languages. Wouldn’t be hard.
Forget the Moose, David, we need more cow bell!
This is great David, many thanks for sharing your wonderful software.
Thanks for the tips, helps me out bunches on things I never knew I can do in ID. Keep up the great work! LOVE the Podcasts.
Eugene, did they recently rerun that ep of SNL? I’ve heard “more cow bell” from several different sources in the last week or so.
I don’t know, I just love that sketch and the Moose reminded me that we need more cow bell.
Hi, David! In a plug-in is an option of automatic updating through the Internet. Whether following tips from the Internet will be to be loaded, or the constructive part will vary only?
Boris, new tips get loaded over the internet when available. Also, if there is a new version of the plug-in, I think it will check for that, also.
Tip #91: “You can make type appear reversed out of a dark background by assigning a thick Rule Above to the paragraph (Ctrl Alt J). For instance, on a paragraph of 18-point type, you can add a Rule Above 22 points thick, with a vertical offset of -6 points. Finally, set the text to White to make it reverse out of the rule. The exact values always depend, of course.”
And this, folks, is exactly why we need to be able, hopefully in CS4, to use the *em* as an enterable unit. That way, we could do stuff like the above, and easily scale our text up & down just by changing the text size. The *em* units of the Rule Above’s thickness and its Offset would then make it scale perfectly. Now, we have to fiddle with those two absolute values every time we tweak the text size. This is one more area where InDesign could take a tip from CSS — all types of units can be used everywhere, like the splendid *em*. (As of now, the only place — AFAIK — where *em* exists in InDesign is in the tracking values, which are 1/000 of an *em*. A good start, but not enough.)
Addendum: to be precise, the *em* is used in both tracking and kerning values — though that’s really the same, conceptually.
“Tip #12: “The problem with underscores (underlines) is that they cross right over the descenders in characters like p and y. You can make the underscore break at descenders by applying a 1-point white stroke to those characters. Use Find/Change to search for the letter p with an underscore and apply a stroke to it. Now repeat for y, and so on. (I suggest making a character style to apply this quickly and accurately.)”
Well, *I* suggest that the InDesign engineers give us a “don’t underline descenders” underscore option in CS4! It’s really too dumb we humans should have to spend our brainpower and time on such an obvious computer-automatizable function.
Klaus, I appreciate your comments and suggestions for Adobe, but please let InDesign users read the tips using the plug-in (that’s what it’s there for). Also, your suggestions are good ones, so please send them to the people who can make a difference.
OK, David, point taken. But I gave your web visitors two great examples of your splendid tips — consider it free advertising! :-)
I just tried your Adobe suggestion link — “site down.”
Thanks, Klaus!
The Adobe feedback site appears to be back up this morning.
David, Thanks for the updated, upgraded, new and improved tip of the day plug-in. I’ve been missing that with CS3. The tip is a great way to start the morning with a WOW!