Podcast 015 Transcript Podcast 015 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 015 page.
[Intro music]
David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets, I’m David Blatner and I’m here along with my co-host Anne-Marie Concepción.
Anne-Marie Concepción: Hi there.
David: We’re the authors of “InDesign Breakthroughs” from Blatner Books and Peachpit Press. You can find links to our books and other cool InDesign and InCopy information at our website InDesignSecrets.com.
Anne-Marie: Yes, and also we want to let you know that finally our on demand e-seminars that we’ve talked about in previous podcasts are now available for downloading from Adobe’s website. So you can hear David do his e-seminar on Adobe InDesign. What was that specific topic that you did yours on?
David: I actually did two. One on InDesign typography tips and tricks and the other one was on InDesign for QuarkXPress users. You know, if you’re already an XPress user and you need to get up to speed with InDesign to add that to you’re toolbox, what do you need to know?
Anne-Marie: That’s right … people could send their friends who are still using other programs a link to that URL so they could see how to make the transition and why InDesign is so great.
David: It’s interesting, when you go to the Adobe site, Adobe presented all of these in Breeze, using the Breeze technology that they got from the Macromedia acquisition. So you have to sign up and you fill out a form and you give them all your contact information and so on. And then it will launch a window with the Breeze presentation that you can watch in there. It’s pretty nifty.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, it is nifty. I did two seminars. One was called “Your Creative Hub”, which was on integrating Bridge with InDesign and Illustrator and Photoshop, though I barely mentioned Photoshop actually because I think that InDesign and Illustrator often get ignored when people talk about Bridge.
And then the other one was on Adobe InCopy, “Moving to an InCopy and InDesign Workflow” and I covered it pretty thoroughly there. I think I went about an hour altogether.
So I think they’re great and we will have the URL, because it’s kind of weird at our website. But I suppose, if you really want to get there right now, we should probably say what it is. It is http://adobe.regservice.com/?site=1625. Got that? Because it’s going to be on the test at the end of this podcast.
[Both laugh]
David: And we hope they don’t change the URL on us suddenly.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, really.
David: But in theory that should take you to the right place.
Anne-Marie: Yep.
David: So that’s good. But check the InDesignSecrets website and that will give you the information too.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Hey also, this is the last week for the early bird discount price on the InDesign Conference and the Creative Suite Conference.
David: Yes indeed.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. People need to go to TheInDesignConference.com and sign up. There’s a link there also for the Creative Suite Conference. You remember this, May fifteenth through the twentieth, first the InDesign Conference, a couple days for that, and then the Creative Suite Conference.
David: Yeah, it’s going to be great. If you’re a fan of Terry White and all the stuff he does, he’s going to be there talking about managing images. And all the cool stuff that you can get on the Creative Suite disks that we don’t usually think about.
Anne-Marie is going to be doing, if you watch her InCopy thing and you get all excited about InCopy, you can go get an in-person training. She’s going to do an all day InCopy tutorial which is going to be great.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. There’s a pile of people already signed up they tell me.
David: Yeah, it’s going to be great. Olav Kvern, Olav Martin Kvern, is going to be talking about scripting. He is the guy for scripting in InDesign so that’s going to be great. And Claudia McCue is talking about PDF and Pariah Burke will be there and Jamie McKee and Sandee Cohen is going to be doing a bunch of sessions. It’s going to be great. I’ll be there doing lots of sessions on how the suite works together and tips and tricks. It’s going to be fun. We’re going to have a good time. In fact Anne-Marie and I are hoping to do a live podcast from there.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: We’ll see if we can pull that off. That should be fun.
Anne-Marie: I’ve been investigating how I can do like a roaming podcast. I have a Treo 600 and apparently there’s some software I can buy so I can turn it into a pretty good voice recorder.
David: Oh I see great, great. So you’re going to be anywhere in the world. It’s not enough that you have to be a thousand miles away from me now.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: You can be anywhere on the planet and we could be doing a podcast.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. What I plan on doing is going into the ladies’ room, into a stall, turning it on record and then recording what people are saying about the conference.
David: Oh great, great.
Anne-Marie: I’ll just hang this lavaliere behind one of the mirrors or something I guess.
David: I can’t wait.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: I can’t wait.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: You’ll hear it here first. Anyway, what are we talking about? About InDesign.
Anne-Marie: Today, we are going to discuss Unicode characters. Those crazy characters and how to type them without using the Glyphs palette and all kinds of interesting secrets about Unicode.
And we’ll be talking about one of our favorite topics which is applying paragraph styles to placed text without wiping out the bolds and italics and other local formatting. Something that drives every layout user crazy since page layout programs began.
We’ll explore differences between how XPress and InDesign handle transparent text frames.
And our obscure feature of the week is ‘Purchase this Image.’
[Laughs]
David: Buy this book.
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.
David: Listen to this podcast.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Capital ‘T’ this image.
David: That’s right, purchase this image.
So let’s get into the Unicode stuff. Unicode, we’re not going to get into it in too much depth, but suffice it to say that Unicode is a way to describe very large character sets. Traditional fonts only have up to 256 characters in them and that’s just not very much. It seems like a lot but it’s just not very much when you look at all the different kinds of characters you might want to have in a font.
So with Unicode, we can now have fonts that have thousands and thousand and thousands of characters in them. So fonts today often have maybe some Greek in them, they often will have small caps in them, they’ll have all kinds of special ornaments and cool characters in them.
But how do you get to those characters? Where are they? If you don’t know how to type… Some of these characters you can’t actually type on the keyboard at all. You have to find them other ways. Now Anne-Marie mentioned the Glyphs palette.
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.
David: And the Glyphs palette, which you get to under the Type menu, is probably the best way to access those characters. The Glyphs palette lets you see every character in a font whether or not it’s… It doesn’t have to be any sort of special font. This works for true type fonts and type one fonts and open type fonts.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: There are all kinds of characters in there. In fact, there are characters in there that you may not have even known for fonts that you already have. You may not even know that they have some characters. For example on the Macintosh, the Glyphs palette will quickly display characters like the one-half and one-quarter fraction in old postscript and true type fonts, that we’d never be able to type on the Macintosh.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: because there’s no keyboard structure for typing the one-quarter fraction on the Macintosh. On Windows there’s a keyboard shortcut for doing it relatively easily, but on the Macintosh there isn’t. But you can still get to that character on the Mac by going to the Glyphs palette and just scrolling down the font.
I have fonts from 1989 that have those characters there. I have no idea why the font designer put those characters there on the Macintosh because we couldn’t type them, couldn’t get to them anyway until now.
Anne-Marie: Just to tease you.
David: Exactly it’s just all a tease.
Anne-Marie: Right. You could always take a screenshot of it.
David: There you go.
[Both laugh]
Thank you Anne-Marie.
Anne-Marie: Alright.
David: So the Glyphs palette is great for getting to all those characters.
Anne-Marie: Yes, but the Glyphs palette is a tease. It’s a tease because when you hover your cursor over one of those glyphs, it tells you “Unicode” with a four digit or four character code after it like you’re supposed to be able to do something with that. But you can’t. Or can you?
David: Well you sort of can, you sort of can’t. There’s actually typically, depending on the font, but it some fonts you’ll get two different numbers when you hover over a character. You’ll get the GID, which is the glyph ID.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: And also the Unicode ID. And it’s always four numbers and letters. It’s a hexadecimal code. You can just double click on one of those characters in the glyphs palette and it will type the character, which is nice.
By the way, random Glyph palette tip, don’t strain your eyes by trying to squint at those little tiny characters. In the lower right corner of the Glyphs palette there are two little icons. They look sort of like a close-up mountain and a far-away mountain.
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.
David: And if you click on those it zooms in or zooms out. So definitely zoom in so you can actually see those characters before you make a decision about them.
Anne-Marie: There’s only one place I’ve ever seen those icons before, those big mountains and little mountains. That’s Filemaker Pro.
David: Really?
Anne-Marie: Filemaker Pro has those so you can zoom in and zoom out. So I think it’s a retired Filemaker person. Somebody who got booted out of Claris was put on the Glyphs team “yeah ok, I’ll do zoom in, I’ll just use this mountains thing that I got out of my old PC.”
David: That’s where it came from. There you guy.
Anne-Marie: It’s kind of strange don’t you think? Why isn’t it a little Zoom icon?
David: Because Filemaker Pro… Maybe it’s a mountain kind of thing. Many of the code names for InDesign are traditionally based on mountains.
Anne-Marie: Ah.
David: There’s sort of an underlying mountain theme because InDesign being developed in Seattle. Seattle is a sort of mountainous region.
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.
David: That’s what I figure it was.
Anne-Marie: That’s pretty wild. That’s a wild theory there.
David: [laughs] that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] All right.
David: So, the Glyphs Palette. You can double click on a glyph, on a character in the glyphs palette and it will type it. It will insert it into wherever the cursor is. But what if you want to actually search for all of some character and replace it with a special character. You can do that in the Find/Change dialogue box by putting the Unicode character inside angle brackets which are also know as the less -than and greater-than as Anne-Marie likes to point out.
Anne-Marie: Thank you, thank you, we all appreciate it in America’s heartland.
David: That’s right. The less-than and greater-than. If you put a character, let’s say 20AC, that’s one of my favorite ones, in angle brackets, so <20AC>. If you put that in either the Find field of the Find/Change or the Change To field, then it will find or change to the Euro symbol. How else are you going to type a Euro symbol? Well there are ways to type it but it’s a hassle. Any character that you find in the Glyphs palette, you can ‘Find’ with or ‘Replace’ with by putting inside the angle brackets.
Anne-Marie: Very cool.
David: That’s all I wanted to say.
Anne-Marie: I was just following along while you were explaining that.
David: The other thing that I wanted to point out about Unicode is that there’s another way to find those Unicode characters. If you already have a character on you desktop, don’t forget the Info palette. The Info palette will actually show you the Unicode character.
Anne-Marie: Ah.
David: Simply select any character in a text frame and Info palette says “Unicode character is…” It usually says 0X and then 20AC or whatever the four digits are.
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.
David: Ignore the 0X part. It’s just the 20AC is the four digits for the Euro character.
Anne-Marie: Yes. There is a trick that I don’t way to get into here because it’s kind of involved. But there is a way on the Macintosh to actually enter the Unicode code while you’re typing and the Unicode character will appear.
David: Ooh.
Anne-Marie: Yes that’s correct. That’s correct.
David: We may have to do that next time.
Anne-Marie: I’ve not been able to figure out how to do it on a PC, but I can do it on a Macintosh. It’s something I never really bother with. It thinks that Glyph’s palette’s a lot easier.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: It’s true. Ok.
Anne-Marie: So next thing is… The common problem that I was talking about before was about working with imported text files, like from Microsoft Word and other programs.
You bring in the Word file and you want to do a search and replace to quickly apply paragraph formatting. So you say “find every paragraph that starts with a subhead”, because a lot of editors will put in quasi-codes before an actual subhead. They’ll just type in all-caps surrounded by angle brackets, . And then you want to apply your subhead paragraph style. I know a lot of people use that workflow.
So what they do is they’ll go to Find/Change and in the top section they’ll type in SUBHEAD, the code word. And in the ‘Change To’, they leave it empty. Which in InDesign speak means “don’t delete the word, don’t change it to something else, just apply the formatting, ” as long as you actually specify something in formatting. So find what is filled in, “change to” is left empty, then go to find “format”, which you open, which you access by clicking on “more options” in Find/Change. Leave Find Format alone, but click the Change Format button, where you can say, whenever you find this text, I want you to apply this character style or paragraph style or basically anything else.
So you’re choosing paragraph style here and you choose subhead, and when you click “ok” and then, you know, “change all” or “find next and change”, what happens is it finds every instance of that word and changes it to that paragraph style. Which of course applies to that entire paragraph, right. Well, the problem is that when you apply paragraph formatting in that way or permutations of that way from Find/Change, that that wipes out local formatting. It wipes out any of the bold, or italic, or bold italic stuff that the Word user might have included.
Anne-Marie: It shouldn’t.
David: It shouldn’t because that’s not how it works manually. If you just click inside of a paragraph, it has local formatting, and you click on “subhead” in the paragraph style’s palette, it changes the subhead but it retains the local formatting.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Right, but when you use Find/Change to do it, ehhh. Then you’re up a creek.
Anne-Marie: It’s probably a bug. I don’t know. It’s really strange.
David: Well, something like that. Something having to do with how Find/Change needs to do that stuff. But there is a workaround for that. And the workaround is that though Find/Change will obliterate local formatting when you apply a paragraph style and change format. It won’t obliterate character styles. Right? So, you need to take a little bit of time, and do a Find/Change for it. You just leave “find what” and “change to” blank, and then in the “find format” you say, find me anything that’s styled with “Times Italic” for example, and in “change format” you say, apply the character style that I created called “Italic”.
So first you have to create the character styles for “Italic” and “Bold”, whatever kind of local formatting that you’re afraid that it’s going to wipe out. And that can be done actually much quicker than you can explain it.
So now everything that the Word person made italic is now in a character style called “Italic”. So after you’ve made your passes throughout the document with “change all” you can go ahead and search for subhead and apply the subhead paragraph-style, search for body and apply the body paragraph-style, and it’s going to maintain that italic and bold and bold-italic character style in there. You can just leave it alone, or you can wipe it out later. You can just delete those three styles if you want and it will retain the same formatting.
Anne-Marie: It’s really slick, and that’s a great workaround for a problem which is just very very frustrating in design, the way that it wipes out local formatting. In general though, it really is a good idea to use character styles for your italic and bold and you know, any kind of local formatting like that that you’re going to use throughout your document, it’s a great idea to try and create those with character styles.
InDesign also has the ability to, when you are applying a paragraph style, it gives you the ability to wipe out all your local formatting by option, or alt-clicking on a paragraph style, that will wipe out all local formatting when applying the style just like it does in QuarkXPress. But the difference is, when you alt- or option-click on your paragraph style, it will wipe out all local formatting but it leaves your character style. So again, if you use the character styles for just the formatting that you want, that you really care about, it’s really a nice safe way. If you want to wipe out all your local formatting including overwriting the character styles, go ahead and alt-shift-click or option-shift-click on the character style and it will wipe out everything, including the character styles.
David: In that paragraph.
Anne-Marie: That’s right, in that paragraph. But the Find/Change thing is, is great. Because oftentimes you have 200 pages of text and need to apply your styles quickly, Find/Change is a great way to apply those styles. But make those character styles first.
David: Ok. So, one listener wrote in, “How can I make my text frames opaque, so that column lines from underlying text boxes aren’t visible?” This person used the phrase “text boxes” in the email so we know that at one point they were using QuarkXPress. The other clue is that in QuarkXPress any time that you’re editing a text box in QuarkXPress it typically by default made it opaque so that you couldn’t see what was behind it.
Anne-Marie: That was a feature, not a bug.
David: A lot of people really liked that. They added the ability to get it either way. I think there’s a preference in Xpress, it’s been so long since I used it though, that you can either make the text box opaque or transparent as you’re editing the text in there, but you have that preference. But you don’t have that preference in InDesign. In InDesign, if it’s a transparent text frame, that is to say if it has a fill of none, it will always be transparent as you’re editing it, you’ll always see what’s behind it while you’re editing it, and a lot of people find that really really annoying. The solution is, set the fill to something other than “none”. Make it, let’s say, a paper. Set the fill to paper and it will be opaque and you won’t see through it anymore. That’s really the only good solution in InDesign.
The other thing that can happen when it comes to guides, guides being in front of text frames or behind text frames, a lot of people don’t realize that that is a preference in InDesign. If you go to the preferences dialogue box and you choose the guides and pasteboard panel, there is a preference there called Guides in Back. By default the guides are on top of all your options, which is usually what you want, but sometimes if you don’t want that, if you want the guides to be hidden behind your objects, go ahead and turn on Guides in Back and then they’ll go behind those objects, behind all the opaque objects.
Anne-Marie: Right, it’s really hard to tell the difference when you’re dealing with transparent items, but when you have a text frame filled with white, or sorry paper I guess I should say… gosh, I hope nobody heard that… [Laughs] And you have guides in back, you’ll see that they do hide in back. If you’re working with a transparent text frame and you put guides in back, it’s like “I don’t see a difference” so you have to actually be working with opaque objects.
But you know David when we got this guy’s email I thought he was talking about Picture Boxes. Because I read it too fast, I didn’t realize he had the word text in there, I thought he just said boxes. I thought he was thinking about, there’s a difference in the way that by default Quark creates Picture boxes and InDesign creates Image Frames. In Quark when you drag out a Picture box which you always have to do before you import a picture, it’s filled with white. But in InDesign, an Image Frame is transparent by default. So if you’re placing a vector graphic from Illustrator, or it’s not square-cut and you can see through the frame or the box, you have to go an extra step in QuarkXPress to make that happen, you have to actually change the fill. But that’s how it works by default in InDesign. I thought that was what he was talking about.
David: Right. Well, that’s interesting, that’s a good point. Quark and InDesign do have a very different way of setting its defaults, default meaning what are you going to get when you first make a frame in InDesign. Whether it’s a text frame or a picture frame with an X’ through it or whatever, are you going to get a background of none, or a background of paper or something else.
InDesign CS2 makes it very easy to set that, because all you do is go to the “object styles” palette, and you change the object style for basic text frame or basic graphics frame. And there’s two different things, one’s for text frame and one’s for graphics of course. And you can set the text frames to be transparent, which they are by default, or you can set them to be 20% yellow, or make them paper-filled, by changing the object style of the basic text frame or the basic graphics frame you have a lot of control over what you are going to get.
The other way to do it, and this works sort of in InDesign CS, if no objects are selected on your page, go ahead and set the filler or stroke. If you set the fill or stroke when no objects are selected it sort of overrides everything and sets the default for those objects. That’s another way you could do it in CS. CS2 is a little more elegant, but in CS it works.
Anne-Marie: Well, we cleared that up. And now, it is time for, we have to get a drum roll sound effect, it’s time for the obscure InDesign feature of the week. And this week it is, “purchase this image”.
Where is “purchase this image”? It is hiding in the links palette in InDesign, in the links palette menu to be exact, and it’s probably always greyed out for most of you because it only applies when you have selected a link in the link palette that is a link to a downloaded stock photograph from Adobe stock photography.
What’s that all about? Well you remember I’m a bridge freak right? So you can search from many stock photography houses from within Bridge, and we did cover that during my Bridge solo podcast and it’s also in the Bridge seminar that you can download from Adobe’s website, that we’ll put a link up to. But basically in Bridge if you go to favorites there’s an entry for Adobe stock photos, you select it, you get a keyword box where you can type in your search term, and as long as you’re online it will come up with all the matches to your search term across all these different stock photo agencies. These are available as comps, you can select those hits that it finds and say save these as comps, and a comp is a low res 72 ppi image without a watermark, that’s the good thing about using Adobe stock photography as opposed to going to a regular stock photography website. Thing is that you don’t get a big fat logo on the image. So you can use those comps in any of your projects.
When you use them in InDesign, it adds a little icon next to the name of that filename in your links palette indicating that this is a stock photograph or downloaded comp. And you’ll see the same thing in Illustrator, by the way, if you place it in Illustrator. You can go ahead and print or export to PDF, when you run the pre-flight it will come up in a little warning that you have a comp in here, but it doesn’t prevent you from printing, it doesn’t prevent you from exporting to PDF. But you’re supposed to buy these things even if you want to use the comp as final, because these comps are pretty good, they’re 72ppi, they’re 5×7, so if you shrink them down to 2×3 then you have a good hi-res file that you want to use. Or perhaps you’re downloading low-res for your website to GoLive.
But you’re supposed to buy them. So how do you buy them? You don’t have to go back to Bridge and rummage through all your files and find that comp and find the shopping cart. You can do it right from within InDesign. You just select the image in the links palette, choose, “purchase this image”, and it jumps you to Bridge, it opens Bridge if it’s not already there, jumps you to the stock photography section and adds it to your shopping cart. That’s all it does. And then go back to InDesign and continue working if you want, but if you want to go ahead and purchase the image then you click check out and you go ahead and purchase it. And they’re not cheap, even the comp images are like around 25 or 50 bucks, and the hi-res ones are, I’ve seen them $300, 400, 500. But the thing is they’re royalty free, so it doesn’t matter if you’re using them for a national magazine, you don’t have to pay a graduated price based on how you use it. So it’s a pretty good deal.
David: That’s great. So, ok, that’s it for our show today. If you have any questions or comments or suggestions for us, please do let us know. Visit InDesignsecrets.com, or email us at info@indesignsecrets.com. Until we meet again, this is David Blatner.
Anne-Marie: And Anne-Marie Conception for InDesign Secrets.
[closing music]
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 015 page.