Podcast 016 Transcript

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 016 page.

[Intro music]

Anne-Marie Concepción: Welcome to InDesign Secrets. I’m Anne-Marie Concepción and I’m here along with my gorgeous co-host, David Blatner.

[laughter]

David Blatner: Well, hello there!

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: 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. And, we actually have some cool information that’s going up there with this podcast, something that was written expressly for InDesignSecrets by Adobe’s premier InDesign evangelist, Tim Cole. Can you tell us a little bit about that pdf?

David: Well, it’s a pdf tutorial all about frame-based grids the align-to-baseline grid feature that is built into InDesign. In CS2, they added a new feature which lets you create a baseline grid for a single frame, which very cool actually. It turns out there are lots of instances where you’d want to have a special baseline grid for a particular frame. And Tim goes into all the instances why you might want to do that, and how to do it, and how to set it up. And he’s got some clever tips in there. So that’s a great Tim Cole.pdf tutorial exclusive to InDesignSecrets.

Anne-Marie: Thank-you, Mr. Cole. And, I think the point is that you use preferences to set a baseline grid for the document, but what if you want two or more other frames to share a baseline grid but that’s different than the rest of the document. He goes over something like that, right?

David: Yeah. I mean the secret is, for those who want to explore without downloading the pdf immediately, it’s in the text-frame options dialog box and you can set up a baseline grid for that text frame in the options dialog box in CS2. Now this is for people who really like the align-to-baseline grid thing. And there are two kinds of people in the world, right? There are the people who like Align-to-Baseline grid, and there are people who don’t. [laughter]

Anne-Marie: That’s right. The people who like align-to-baseline grid, all their forks face the same way and they’re very careful about how they load the dishwasher, that kind of stuff.

David: I guess I don’t like align-to-baseline grid. I will…tell my bias here. There’s nothing wrong with it, per se, it’s actually really quite good, it’s just some people like using it and some people don’t. I prefer to set up my text, all my paragraph styles, precisely to begin with so that I don’t really need align-to-baseline grid. And, you know, place my frames on the page so that the leading aligns automatically. I think, for me, I just like thinking it through myself, and other people just like having that added bonus of knowing that their baselines really are going to align.

Anne-Marie: That’s true. You know, I don’t like any kind of baselines aligning anywhere. I would rather have them sort of mixed up. [laughter]

David: I see, so you take the anarchy approach?

Anne-Marie: That’s right. My baselines, they got to be free, man.

David: Just make sure that nothing aligns. [laughter]

Anne-Marie: If the client insists that they align, then I’ll do it, but I’ll never suggest it.

David: I see. All right, all right, I see.

Anne-Marie: It bugs me.

David: Just one comment there, for those people who want to work the non-align-to-baseline way, the way I typically work. The trick is, take your leading value, plus your space before, plus your space after, and make sure that you’re using integral multipliers of those. So let’s say you’ve got eleven on fifteen text. Leading is fifteen, and you want to set that up for a header, make sure your heading is also set to a fifteen point lead. And then if you want space before that, then add maybe fifteen points before it. So make sure that the total amount of space, leading plus space before, plus space after, in this case it would equal thirty, right? Fifteen points before, and fifteen points of lead. And that way you know that the baseline is always going to fall in the right place.

Anne-Marie: Right, otherwise you use the square route of pi, or [laughter] the KramaLama Integer, and that way everything’s perfect and perfectly aligned.

[laughter]

David: Exactly, just do whatever Anne-Marie says. Anyway, that was far more than probably many of you wanted to know, but just in case, I thought I would throw that in there. Anyway, let’s get back to… what are we supposed to be talking about today?

Anne-Marie: Believe me, the pdf is very cool. I took a good look through it. He’s got great screen shots, and I like how he set up the pdf that it’s oriented for the screen, you know it’s in landscape orientation? He’s great! He should get a job as a designer somewhere, I think.

David: I think so.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. And we thank you very much, Tim. And it’s the first of many new pieces of content that we’re planning on adding to our website in the next few months’ so stay tuned, and we’ll be announcing them as they get added to the site right here in the podcast.

David: The other thing that we wanted to mention is that once again, the InDesign conference is only a month away, and we are getting excited. It’s really great, there are lots of very cool seminars, the meat-and-potatoes of InDesign, plus all kinds of tips and tricks stuff that we’re going to be covering there. Robin Williams, the Robin Williams, who wrote the original…

Anne-Marie: He’s hysterical. I loved him in….

David: No, no, no! Not that Robin Williams, the other Robin Williams! Robin Williams who wrote “The Little Mac Book” and “The Mac is Not a Typerwriter, ” and about fifteen other books… has a wonderful history in this… did a lot of work with PageMaker. Robin Williams is going to be there doing stuff on long documents and fundamentals of great typography with InDesign. Olav Kvern is doing a whole thing on scripting which is going to be just fabulous.

Anne-Marie: He’s doing a whole half-day session, I believe.

David: A half-day tutorial, it’s true. It’s going to be good. Sandee Cohen is doing a thing on interactive pdfs. And we’ve got… oh, jeez, all kinds of stuff. Chris Murphy who’s one of the co-authors of “Real World Color Management, ” it was a great book, he’s doing a color management session. It’s going to be very good.

Anne-Marie: We have stuff on XML design, which about ten thousand of my clients keep asking about, but I don’t have my head around quite yet. But we’re doing a half-day session on using XML in InDesign.

David: Right… and then of course there’s the Creative Suite conference which is going to be Ben Wilmore, Claudia McCue, Mordy Golding, Ted Alspach, it’s really an all-star cast. So anyway, we hope we will see you there, that’s going to be lots of fun.

Anne-Marie: Yeah! Okay. All right, so today, on the topic for today, first of all we’re going to talk about vertical justification. When it works, and when it doesn’t work, so you can stop tearing your hair out trying to make it work when it just won’t work, I’m sorry. Also, a little game that I made up called Fifty Ways to Use the Direct Selection tool.’ You know, [singing] Fifty Ways to Use the Direct Selection tool… just click on the Image, Jack…da da da…’ ok, no… never mind….

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: And today’s obscure feature of the week is the Vertical Depth Charge, I mean the Vertical Depth Ruler, not the Vertical Depth Charge.

David: Ok, we’ll look into that. So there was recent discussion on the InDesign ListServ, which is the Blue World mail list all about InDesign. And it went on for a little bit about how to get threaded or multi-column text frames to vertically justify. You know, there’s a feature, the Vertical Justification feature in InDesign, so if you have a column of text, and you want to make the top line be at the top of the frame, and the last line be at the bottom of the frame, you can go to Text Frame Options, underneath the Object menu, and you can turn on Vertical Justification. And the Justification method will basically add space between every line in that text frame so that it bottoms out so that you’ve got it fully justified vertically.

Anne-Marie: The top line starts at the top, the bottom line ends at the bottom, and everything else is evenly spaced.

David: It’s a cool feature, it’s very helpful, but it doesn’t always work. For example, if you have a non-rectangular text frame. Or if you have a rectangular text frame but you add corner effects like rounded corners, well, it fails at that point. It just turns itself off.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: Another instance is when you have some sort of text wrap interfering with the text in that frame, so for example if you have a frame that has text-wrap on it, and it overlaps the text frame even a little bit, the vertical justification will simply turn off. In fact, I just noticed it won’t even let you do vertical justification, it’s completely grayed out. If you’re in that situation, if there’s any frame that’s sitting on top of your text frame that’s causing text wrap. That’s kind of cool.

Anne-Marie: Or also, the original question on the InDesign ListServ was, like you said, David, the person had a three-column text frame, and the third column was only halfway filled with text, so she selected the frame, turned on Vertically Justified, and only the last column feathered out to be vertically justified. The first two had their original leading so she’s like, “Why isn’t this working?”

And, you know, the ugly truth is that you can’t get it to work. InDesign will always fill up every frame up to the last frame with the existing setting for leading, and the last frame that’s partially filled, it’ll feather that out. I’ve tried to force it by inserting frame break characters, and I’ve done all sorts of stuff, and it doesn’t work either. And if you think that you can take three separate frames and thread them together, as opposed to one single frame that’s multi-columned, it doesn’t work with three separate frames either. The only work-around that I know of is just to do it manually, leave it aligned at the top, and then select all the text, and use your keyboard to increase the leading or to increase the paragraph space above or after.

David: Right, in fact we should point out the paragraph spacing limit. In the Vertical Justification section of Text-Frame options, the paragraph spacing limit, it’s kind of… that’s kind of an obscure feature all by itself, but what that does is lets you tell InDesign how much space to allow between paragraphs. So for example, if you do a vertical justification, and it completely blows out your leading. You’ve got this huge amount of leading between each line, if you increase the paragraph spacing limit, it will add space between the paragraphs, instead of between the individual lines of the paragraph. So you should definitely always use the paragraph spacing limit when you’re using vertical justification. And that is one way to get around that.

Another way to get around what you were talking about is to just make the text frame smaller. You know, kind of manually reach up and drag the text frame so it’s not quite as tall, and that can even out three columns within a text frame. Or add inset spacing, you know, go to the bottom inset spacing in the Text Frame options dialogue box, and just turn on the preview check box, and increase the bottom inset for that multi-column frame. And just increase it until all three or four, however many columns you have, bottom out properly. So those are various ways that you could get around it. But there’s no automatic way, which is annoying but there you go.

Anne-Marie: Ok, let’s go on to the next thing. So this is my little game. I like to keep things spicy here, so it’s “Fifty Ways to Use the Direct Select tool.” And I was just thinking about this today because I just came across an old issue of a magazine. There was a magazine in Chicago called Mac Chicago that was a wonderful mag, and they used to have a quiz every month, and one of them was, “How many ways can you empty the trash in the Mac OS Finder,” which I believe was system seven or eight back then. But, “How many ways can you empty the trash?,” and I came up with 27 ways in addition to “Choose Empty Trash.” All sorts of this from re-name a folder with the same name, and blah-de-blah-de-blah. So I won a font of my choice from Adobe Font Library for my winning thing.

So this one is, “How many ways can you use the Direct Selection tool.” I was doing training this week, and I like to call the Direct Selection tool the “Selection tool’s weird Cousin Vinny” because it’s the tool that you usually don’t use hardly at all, but when you need to use it, it’s the only tool that will do the trick. New users are always confused with, “Which tool should I be using? The hollow arrow or the solid arrow?” And the answer is always the solid arrow unless you know that you can only use the Direct Selection tool.

David: Vinny? Vinny the Arrow.

Anne-Marie: Yes. Crazy cousin Vinny.

David: I like that. Great.

Anne-Marie: So obviously there’s one way, which is to move the image around in the frame, right? So what I’m thinking, David, is that I’ll start. I’ll name one way, and you’ll name another way that you can think of what’s another reason to use the Direct Selection tool. And then I’ll name one, and then you name one until we run out.

David: Yeah, but look. I’m dealing with somebody here who figured out twenty-seven ways to empty the trash. So I mean, what chance do I have?

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: Not that I was studying all day before we started recording or anything like that!

David: What chance do I have in this game? I don’t know. Let’s see. So how about the Direct Select tool? You could move a point on a frame. So on a frame or a line you can move that single point because every point is a Bezier point, and every frame is a Bezier curve.

Anne-Marie: That’s good. So we did move picture and move a single point, ok. You can also scale a graphic without scaling the frame.

David: Yup, that’s the way you would actually scale a graphic inside of a frame. Good.

Anne-Marie: You just click on it and drag on the bounding box with the Direct Selection too.

David: Great. You could colorize a tiff. A gray-scale tiff or a black and white tiff inside an image. Right?

Anne-Marie: Good one! I didn’t think of that one!

David: That’s how you would colorize an image inside. And, in fact, I have a follow up one, but go ahead.

Anne-Marie: You can move a straight path segment. Right? If you start dragging up the Direct Selection took on straight line instead of a point, it moves that segment.

David: Great. You can set the overprint for an object that’s nested inside. So once you’ve colorized that gray-scale tiff, if you wanted to overprint the background color to make kind of a duotone effect, you would make the frame one color, you’d use the Direct Select tool to select the picture inside, make that a different color, and then while that was selected with the Direct Select tool, you could turn on Overprint Fill in the Attributes palette, and that would overprint the image on top of it’s own frame.

Anne-Marie: That’s right! So these are things, remember people, that you can only do with the Direct Selection tool. So that’s great. So you can also…well, basically, you can select a nested frame or group. Right? With the Direct Selection tool. It sort of comes a little bit before what you were talking about, right? But if you have a nested frame, or a group that’s grouped with another group….

David: That’s true! Yes, but you can do that with the Selection tool as well. In fact, I prefer to do that with the Selection tool, and then I use the Select Container and the Select Content buttons on the Control palette because those buttons let you go in and select the nested items or the nested groups individually without having to use the Direct Select tool.

Anne-Marie: But what if you were on a desert island and you didn’t have those commands? And you had to do it with a tool.

[laughter]

David: You’re absolutely right, Anne-Marie. You’re right.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. How bout this one? You can change the starting and ending shape of a line. For example, if you have an arrow going to the right, and you want it to go to the left, you select it with the Direct Selection tool, and choose, Object, Reverse Path.

David: Very good. That Reverse Path thing is really obscure. When you’re trying to change the direction of a path, it only shows up when you select the object with the Direct Select tool, which is just bizarre. I have no idea why it does it that way, but you’re right, that’s good. I’m already running out. Do another one.

Anne-Marie: Let’s see, you can copy and paste a path segment. You know, I took a text frame and I used the Direct Selection tool and clicked on a path segment, just a side of it, and chose Copy and then Paste, and you know what it pasted? It pasted a single vertical line, the line that I had copied, with an in overset marker. The most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen, I think it wasn’t supposed to do that.

David: That’s weird, that’s very weird.

Anne-Marie: But you can copy and paste path segments. If you have the perfect curve that you want to use somewhere else, I suppose, you could copy and paste half of it.

David: I’m just running into, all the things I’m thinking of are things that you could also do with Selection tool, for example Option or Alt-double click on an image and it will launch Edit Original. But that’ll work with Selection, but those don’t count.

Anne-Marie: Those don’t count, no. How bout this one, you can make a compound shape by putting one shape on top of another and you choose Make Compound, where it overlaps, it makes a whole, but if you have a complex compound shape, some internal closed paths are either holes or filled, it depends on the direction of the points. And you, again, if you wanted something that was filled to be a hole, to be see-through, you would select it with the Direct Selection tool and choose Object, Reverse Path.

David: That’s true. But that’s the repeat of what you did earlier with Reverse Path.

Anne-Marie: No. One is for compound shapes, and one is for arrows.

David: I see, I see. That’s pushing it in my book. I agree with you, you could use that for that, and in fact there was something else about compound paths that I wanted to point out. Ooh! How to select! One minor note, I find a lot people don’t know how to select all the points. For example, you take the letter O and you convert it to an outline. You really have two paths there. It’s a compound path, as Anne-Marie pointed out, right? You’ve got the outside path and you’ve got the inside path. And if you use the Direct Select tool to click on one of the points on the inside path, it will only select that one point. But you can Option- or Alt-click on that and it will select all the points within that sub-path of the compound group. And then you could do something with that.

Anne-Marie: I think it’s called the Group Selection tool or it gets a new name, or something.

David: Really? That’s interesting.

Anne-Marie: Something else I discovered while I was rehearsing for this is that, say you have just a regular shape with a whole bunch of points on it, and you’re using the Direct Selection tool to select a lot of those points, but not all of them, to quickly select all the points in the shape with the Direct Selection tool, so that you can Shift-Click the ones that you don’t want, you just click once on the center point with the Direct Selection tool.

David: Yeah, that’s right. That’s good. I’m going to do one more, and then we better move on.

Anne-Marie: Wait! I’m not done! I just have a couple more.

David: [laughter] I know you’re not done. Here’s a good one. Olav Kvern would be proud of this one. This is one he likes using at various events. Because the Direct Select tool lets you select independent objects, independent points on a complex path, you could for example make a starburst with large insets and select just the inside points. Right? You could kind of drag around just the inside points, select all of those, and then use the various tools like the Rotate tool, or the Scale tool, or the Sheer tool, and you can come up with amazing effects by using the transformation tools just on individual points within a larger object.

Anne-Marie: That’s right, though that specific example wasn’t one I came up with. I did think it was kind of interesting that you select just a few points on a shape and all the transforming tools work on them. Like Rotate two points … what does that exactly mean? But it does. It scales all sorts of stuff. You can make a frame transparent while you keep the image 100% opaque.

David: Really?

Anne-Marie: Yes, you can.

David: [laughter] I’m going to have to try that.

Anne-Marie: It doesn’t work the other way, you can’t make the image transparent while keeping the frame opaque. But you can select just the frame. I Option-clicked on one of the points in the frame, it had like a thick frame on an image, and then in Transparency lowered it down, and the image stayed 100% opaque, but the frame became transparent.

David: That doesn’t work for me. I just tried it, it didn’t work for me. So I think that might be a Chicago thing. That might only work for you.

Anne-Marie: All right, maybe, I don’t know. Maybe I was working on a drunk copy of InDesign while I did it. But I know I did it, and I’ll try it again and let you know. [laughter] But I think that’s enough… I think we came up with sixteen there.

David: That’s a lot! Who knew? Who knew the Direct Select tool was so useful. Vinny. Vinny the Tool.

Anne-Marie: Oh, oh, one more. You can select the image and measure the offset of the image from the upper left-hand corner of the frame.

David: Good one. That’s right!

Anne-Marie: The only way to figure out an image’s offset. You have to turn on that option.

David: There’s an obscure option of the week #58, here [laughter], Show Content Offset. So if you select an image inside of a frame, you can figure out, in the control palette, how far it is from the upper left corner of the frame to the upper left corner of the image by turning on Show Content Offset. As opposed to show the literal position of that image on the page regardless of the frame. So yeah, that’s a good one.

Anne-Marie: If anybody can come up with other ones, we haven’t thought of, please email them to us, we’ll give you the address at the end of the podcast.

David: That sounds great. All right, we better quickly do the obscure feature of the week. The…what are we doing?

Anne-Marie: We’re doing Vertical Depth Ruler.

David: Vertical Depth Ruler! That’s it! Which is a feature inside the Story Editor.

Anne-Marie: Yup, and you might have come across the command for the Vertical Depth Ruler even without opening up the Story Editor if you are a curious sort and you were in the View menu and toward the bottom, under Grids and Guides, there is a pop-out menu for Story Editor, and one of the choices, which is grayed out unless its active, is Hide Depth Ruler or Show Depth Ruler.

David: So the Depth Ruler sits in the left column inside the Story Editor. If you don’t use the Story Editor, by the way, you’re completely missing out. It’s one of the great secrets of InDesign efficiency is using the Story Editor whenever you’re dealing with small text or multi-paged text, or whatever; I just love the Story Editor. It’s an old feature from PageMaker that they made much, much better, and built into InDesign. So the Story Editor, in CS2, has this Vertical Depth Ruler running along the left column. And you see these numbers, you know, 3.6, 8.4, 13.2, what are those things? What are those weird numbers?

Anne-Marie: The numbers are measures in your existing vertical measurement units, so if your vertical ruler is set to Picas, you’re seeing Picas and points of Picas. If it’s set to inches, you’re seeing inches and decimal amounts of inches. And it’s referring to the column depth. So if you have a regular text frame that’s just one column, and it’s six inches tall, then the vertical depth ruler will tell where you every five lines, how far down in that six inches does that line of type fall.

David: It’s kind of obscure, right? So if, on the fifth line down of the Story Editor, the Story Editor window can be any with at all, so it does not refer to the width of the Story Editor window, it’s the width on the actual page within InDesign.

Anne-Marie: In Layout View.

David: And it’s the last word on that line, so for example, the fifth line in the Story Editor, let’s say it ends with the word ‘the.’ That’s literally the last word in the Story Editor line, and that line is listed as 13.2. Well, that 13.2 means that the word ‘the’ because it’s specific to the last word on the line in the Story Editor, the word ‘the’ is 13.2 picas down from the top of the text frame.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. And not the top of the page, the top of the text frame. So that’s key to understanding what that’s for. And the other thing that’s interesting is that if you have a multiple column text frame, and, lets say the multiple column text frame is six inches deep, and it’s three columns, then you’ll see the vertical depth ruler go from 6 to 18 inches, because it’s talking about every individual column. Follow me? Six inches times three columns.

David: Yes. That’s right, that’s right. It’s the actual height of the galley of each column, it’s not just from the top of the text frame. By the way, random point about that, it does appear that InDesign assumes that the first baseline in the text frame is aligned based on the leading. That is, in the Text Frame Options dialogue box, there are a bunch of baseline options, and you can say where you want the first baseline to start from. And it’s typically set to ascent. Which means that the ascender of the first line is basically going to be pressed against the top of the text frame, or the top inset.

Well, the Vertical Depth Ruler, I believe assumes that the first baseline offset is actually changed, that you’ve actually gone in there and changed it to leading, which is typically what you’d want. I mean most sane people are going to want to use the leading first baseline offset, not the ascender first baseline offset because who knows how big that is? But if you use the leading first baseline offset in a text frame, then you always know exactly how far down that first baseline is in your text frame. And that is what the Vertical Depth Ruler is basing its measurement off of.

Anne-Marie: I guess it would be mostly useful for people who have to write to a certain number of column inches. Like newspapers…or maybe some magazines, they need twenty column inches and if you’re dealing with a multiple column frame, or if you’re dealing with a threaded frame in a single story, you can use the Story Editor to figure out how many column inches you’re at.

David: Yup, yup, absolutely.

Anne-Marie: Story Editor is very cool, but it’s too deep for obscure feature of the week at this point. We should talk about it in-depth later.

David: We’ll go into even more depth. But we better finish this up today. That it is it, it, it. I must be able to speak to good today. [laughter] That is it for our show today. If you have any questions or comments or suggestions for us, do let us know. Visit InDesignSecrets.com or email us at info@indesignsecrets.com. Until we meet again, this David Blatner.

Anne-Marie: And Anne-Marie Concepción 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 016 page.