Podcast 017 Transcript

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 017 page.

[Intro music]

David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets, I’m David Blatner, 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, and you can find links to our books and other cool InDesign and copy information at our website, Indesignsecrets.com.

Anne-Marie: That’s right, and here’s what we’ve got for you today. First we are going to reveal how to wake up InDesign font menus when they decide to take a little nap. And in response to a great suggestion from a listener, we’re going to explain how to combine InDesign documents, and our obscure feature of the week is, Align first line to baseline grid.

David: We’re still on baseline grids. [laughter]

Anne-Marie: Yeah, we just can’t let it go, we’re like a dog with a bone.

David: Exactly.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: All right, wait, before we jump in, I want to mention that another very helpful listener wrote in after she heard me flail with a tip in the last one where I was talking about setting different levels of transparency for a picture versus its stroke, and I was saying that you could set one and not set the other. But I got it backwards, so I was suffering a little bit of dyslexia I guess. But she wrote in, or he wrote in sorry, Franz — I guess it’s a guy — Vandergeist, wrote in and said that I got it the wrong way round, which I believe is exactly right.

The correct information is that if you have an image in a frame and you have a thick border you can select the image with the direct selection tool, remember weird Cousin Vinny, the hollow arrow, and set a transparency level just for the picture, and the frame itself, the stroke, remains solid at 100%. So I think I had said you could do it the other way around, said make the stroke transparent but keep the picture solid and you can’t do that.

David: Right. The basic idea there is, you can apply transparency to a frame, but if you do so, it always applies it to everything that’s nested inside the frame, so any image that’s inside the frame would have the same transparency as the frame does, but if you adjust the image it has nothing to do with the frame.

Anne-Marie: That’s right, yeah. Anyway.

David: Yeah, that’s right.

Anne-Marie: Well, David you discovered something very interesting about fonts.

David: I did, I did, this was you know something that’s really frustrated me for a long time is that sometimes I will open a InDesign document and the fonts won’t be activated, so I’ll go to my font management tool and turn them on, go back to InDesign, and it will still not be activated, the fonts will still appear to be missing, and someone, I know someone’s going to write in and say, ‘Well why don’t you use that automatic activation software from Extensis or FontAgent Pro’, you know and I just have a quick answer, and that’s I don’t know, I probably should use one of those plugins, but…

This actually, this case, this particular case that happened to me a couple days ago, I was not activating fonts, using any of the font management software. I personally use FontAgent Pro from Insider Software, I just think it’s great, but I was not using that to activate a font. I was using a little backdoor that InDesign has inside the InDesign application folder, there’s a folder called Fonts, and you can put Fonts in there to activate them temporarily so somebody sent me a document with some fonts that they wanted me to open, I didn’t want to load their fonts into my fonts management software because that would have copied it onto my hard drive, etc.

So I just made an alias, like a shortcut on Windows or an alias on Mac, from their font folder into the font folder in InDesign. So I didn’t even have to copy the fonts themselves. I just made an alias into the fonts folder, in the InDesign folder, and then brought up InDesign, opened their document and it didn’t work. And it should work, but it didn’t, and so I starting thinking, ‘Why does this not work sometimes? Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.’ and the answer is as Anne-Marie pointed out, sometimes the font menus just fall asleep, they just don’t update properly. So I thought, maybe there’s a shortcut in there, maybe there’s something I can to kind of give InDesign a little goose to wake up and, you know..

Anne-Marie: Like Redraw font menus or something.

David: Yeah, exactly. And in fact there is! The way I found it I think might be interesting to some people. I went to the Edit keyboard shortcuts. Go to Edit menu, choose keyboard shortcuts, and then I clicked on the Show Set button, and a Show Set button writes out a list of every keyboard shortcut, whether it’s been assigned a shortcut or not. Every feature, every item that can have a short cut to your hard drive, and then it opens it in a text editor. We’ve talked about that in previous podcasts I think and then I just did a search. I just did..it opened it in Notebook, Notepad, on Windows I was using, and I just did a search to look for the word Font, and it went down and lo and behold there was an item called Update the Font Menu list, and…

Anne-Marie: Oh my gosh!

David: Oh my gosh, there it was! And it has a keyboard shortcut which is basically hold down everything. You know Control, Shift, Alt, and then press the slash key which is on most keyboards, next to the … on the same key as the question mark. So Command Option Shift, or Control Alt Shift Slash simply updates the missing font list, and all of a sudden, boom, the fonts were updated in my file, so it was very good, I was very happy!

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: It’s amazing.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: I don’t think that’s documented anywhere. I mean, what section of the keyboard shortcuts was that in again?

David: I don’t know, do I care? …

Anne-Marie: Well other people listening…

David: … you know I found it once. Oh oh, I know, when you want to find it, its in the text and tables product area. So you go to, you know create a new set, go to the product area called text and tables and it’s the very last item in text and tables. Update missing font list.

Anne-Marie: Hah.

David: That’s where it’s hiding. So that was nice, and it’s very convenient, and so maybe that will help you on those few times when InDesign just doesn’t seem to update the list.

Anne-Marie: That’s right.

David: And maybe that’ll help you too, that little fonts folder trick.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, cause the very, very interesting little secret you let out of the bag there too, you know I didn’t even realize there was a fonts folder in there, I just checked mine out it just has you know one of those weird Adobe database things in there.

David: Yeah…

Anne-Marie: Cause I knew that there’s the fonts folder and like application support somewhere up in the nether regions of the system.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: But I don’t use a font management program here, we go Commando, so I don’t even use font book, I just drag fonts in and out of my user library fonts folder.

David: Oof.

Anne-Marie: What’s wrong with that?

David: I don’t, It gives me the willies. I just don’t like it one bit…

Anne-Marie: It’s how we’ve been doing it for years, it’s perfectly fine and I never have to worry about font management conflicts or activation or anything.

David: Well, this..

Anne-Marie: Go ahead.

David: Well, this fonts folder thing inside the Adobe InDesign folder. This is especially useful for like output providers who have to open other peoples files all day long. Cause you don’t want to constantly open up their fonts if they give you the fonts. You just drag; again you do an alias into their font folder, drag an alias of their font folder into your fonts folder, inside the InDesign folder. Open their document and when it’s done, just delete the alias, and you’re done. You don’t have to copy folders back and forth.

Anne-Marie: I have a multitudinous number of questions about this, but I think maybe we should save it for a different podcast.

David: We should. Let’s do that.

Anne-Marie: Yes. But that’s very, very interesting and a great tip and I’m going to try that feature next time that I have that problem, thank you.

David: OK.

Anne-Marie: All right, so …

David: How to concatenate InDesign files, I just had to throw in the word concatenate.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: I wanted to use it first! You won.

David: Oh I’m sorry, I love that word.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: I’ll have to think of another four bit word.

David: OK.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: Mike Classin, a loyal InDesign listener wrote in and said, I hope you can cover this in a future podcast, he said that he and his staff were trying to combine multiple InDesign documents into one, and usually how they do this is they make them into a book, using the book feature, and then they output them to PDF, but they wanted to get one single InDesign document, so they actually needed to merge multiple InDesign documents. He said that they just couldn’t figure out how to do it, and they went to Online Help, and could not find it anywhere in the documentation, and that it must be possible to do.

So how do you do that? And so I took a look at Online Help which I usually keep open all day, you know and in my 10 minutes worth of searching I couldn’t find it either. So if it’s in there, let us know where it is. But I emailed them back and told them how to do it, and we thought that’s an excellent idea for a podcast so, for a podcast topic, so here’s what you do.

First of all you decide on one document out of the two or more InDesign documents that you’re going to use as kind of like the master, the one that you’re going to bring all the other documents into, and you open up that document.

Now a couple words of caution, first of all when you, this will only work if you have InDesign documents that are the same size, the same trim size, if you try to combine two differently sized InDesign documents it will work but some of your items might end up off the paste board and you’ll get a warning about that but I thought it was interesting that it would work anyway. Also they all have, both documents have to be either landscaped or portrait OK. So you can’t mix em up so the laws of physics still apply. Anyway, but it doesn’t make any difference by the way if one is facing pages and the other one’s not.

So, you have your target document, that’s what we’ll call the parent document open, and then you open up one of the source documents, one of the second documents that you’re going to bring pages over. Now if you were a QuarkXPress user you might remember that you would put the two documents in tiled windows side by side. Put both in thumbnail view, and drag and drop thumbnails from one to the other.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: Right? Right. So I remember when I started using InDesign that I could not find the thumbnails view, and there is none. I mean you can make it look like thumbnails but they’re perfectly, you know they’re just really zoomed out to 5%-10%. And the secret is that you drag from the Pages palette, you drag those page icons from the source document, and you drop those page icons onto any part of the window of the target document that you can see.

David: It’s really obscure, but it makes sense, once you do it once or twice it makes total sense, but you know dragging from the pages palette, onto a document but it works.

Anne-Marie: That’s right, it reminds me, isn’t there a Photoshop thing that you do the same way when you want to bring layers from one Photoshop document to the other?

David: That’s true.

Anne-Marie:… the layers palette and you drop it onto the Photoshopped image.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: Right?

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: So it’s the same kind of concept, and there’s a couple things, first of all the pages that you drag over will always be added to the end of the target document. You can’t specify a location like these should be added in between pages seven and eight or anything like that. So keep that in mind and you might want to drag them over in order.

The second thing is that if you have two documents and each one starts with the right facing page, the second document if you drag that over that right facing page is going to become a left facing page. You know what I mean, you can’t delete the single page, it exists in your target document. It always has to have at least one page so if you, you know, whether the page is right facing or left facing makes a difference to you, you might want to make it a section start on an odd or even page to sort of hammer that home. Couple other things to keep in mind is that if the two documents share the same name of a master page or style sheet, or color, the target document specifications trump the incoming ones.

David: Yeah, that’s the one that keeps catching me off guard.

Anne-Marie: That’s the one that gets you.

David: Yeah, you drag something across and all of a sudden what you think had a master page A, in the first document, or master page A in a second document, but they look different all of a sudden you know, the incoming pages just look totally weird.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: That’s right, so you might want to rename those master pages in your source documents, you know the multiple documents that you’re going to be dragging over into the parent one. Rename those first before you drag them over.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: Usually the style sheets or the colors, they aren’t that big of a deal, it’s kind of like the same thing that’s going to happen in a book feature when you’re going to synchronize the styles and colors … it’s usually what you want to do. But you know if you have one document style as a body, paragraph style, and the other one document also is a body paragraph style and they look different, you should rename that before you bring it over.

You don’t get the opportunity like you do with load styles to view conflicts and tell InDesign what to do. When you drag and drop it’s kind of like a one way road so. Anyway that’s how you combine multiple InDesign documents into one document, and there you go, thanks for the idea for the topic.

David: Yeah, I think, like I said, it’s really obscure but it’s very powerful, very helpful. On the other hand, it doesn’t always gets it right. I’ve had a number of instances where I drag and drop one document into another, all the pages from one pages palette into another and it just completely screws up the pages, I mean the formatting’s wrong, everything just goes haywire, lot of items end up on the paste board, it’s just I don’t know what’s happening but it’s not happy. In those instances if that happens to you my suggestion is to give up.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: Or send the files to me, I’ve never had a problem doing this. Seriously, I do this a lot.

David: It usually works for relatively simple pages, it seems to work, but every now and again, it just freaks out, I think it’s, my sense is that the reason it’s not in the documentation is because Adobe, it’s one of those features that’s … it kind of works but it’s not fully supported and fully tested, that’s my personal feeling about it. You know, again like you said, you can’t … you don’t get the option to rename things when it’s coming in. I don’t get the sense that Adobe has really thought this through fully yet.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: Moving pages from one end to the other. You don’t get the option as you said, what I mostly want to do, I want to move pages from one document to another and say where they should end up…

Anne-Marie: That’s true.

David: And you can’t as you said, they always end up at the end. So they’re working on it, maybe they’ll get it better in the next version.

Anne-Marie: What would be nice would be to have a pages palette menu item that says, ‘Load pages’.

David: Yes.

Anne-Marie: Load masters, how about that?

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, that would be really cool.

David: You know QuarkXPress had that? In like XPress 2.

Anne-Marie: Really?

David: They had a load pages feature and then it disappeared in later versions of QuarkXPress, could load pages from one document to another. Oh! Those were the days! Way back in the early, late 80’s.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: That’s right, way back then.

David: OK, so we’d better go on to the obscure feature of the week, Align First Line to Baseline Grid.

Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.

David: And yes, it’s true once again we’re back on baseline grids.

Anne-Marie: That’s right.

David: We got some flack from various people, especially our friend Tim Cole about how we didn’t like baseline grid very much.

Anne-Marie: Yes, he called me a Nihilist, is that how you pronounce that word?

David: [laugh] Yes.

Anne-Marie: Nihilist, because I completely hate to use them at all.

David: That’s right, well…

Anne-Marie: Thank you, I’ve never been called that before.

David: [laugh] Look, using baseline grids. Let me just get this off my chest here, using baseline grids is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, it can save you a huge amount of time, and it makes things more accurate, and it’s great in all ways it’s great. I personally, it’s just that I personally don’t use it, you know, you don’t have to work, you out there in podcast land don’t have to work the way I do. You can be efficient, you can be, you don’t have to do it the hard way.

Anne-Marie: The mathematical way.

David: The mathematical way, exactly. You could use the baseline grids, and if you do use a baseline grid, you should know about an obscure feature which few people know about called Align First Line to Baseline Grid, this is really kind of funky because what this does, is that it says, forget the whole paragraph align to the first baseline grid, we just want the first line of the paragraph to align, and then let the rest of the paragraph fall where it may. And the way you do this is you assign align to baseline grid to one paragraph, right?

You make a paragraph then you turn on the align to baseline grid in the paragraph section of the control palette there’s the align to baseline grid button, it looks like there’s two columns, and one of them is kind of staggered off, and the other button it’s perfectly even. That’s the align to baseline grid button, so you can click on that for a paragraph and it aligns it to baseline grid and then only after you have turned that on you choose from the fly out menu in the control palette, or the paragraph palette in the fly out menu choose only align first line to grid, and you’ll see that all the other lines pop off the baseline grid but the first line will still be snapped right to it. So,..

Anne-Marie: That’s right.

David: That’s what that’s all about.

Anne-Marie: And that will satisfy all the readers who will then take your magazine, they have it open on the kitchen table, they have their ruler out and they’re making sure that all the baselines align across the entire page spread [David laughs], and they will be very happy and resubscribe once they see that the first lines of the captions also line up with the baseline grid.

David: Well, you laugh about this Anne-Marie, but I have had a number of comments from readers of InDesign magazine, Real World InDesign who do, they care a lot about that sort of thing, I care about it too, I really do like having the baselines aligned as much as possible, I’m not the anarchist or the nihilist as Anne-Marie is [laughter], I do like having them aligned I just like doing hard work to get there, so I can feel like I’ve accomplished something.

Anne-Marie: I see, I have to defend myself, I also like having things aligned, and I do pay attention to things aligning but, baselines are usually not what I’m looking at. I’m looking at graphics and more often like caps aligning or something like that, I’m not, really don’t care that much about baselines grids, so.

David: Well, there you go, it takes all kinds.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. [Laughs]

David: So, that’s it for today, if you have any questions or comments or you really really care about baseline grids, and you want to tell us about it go ahead and visit InDesignSecrets.com or email us at Info@InDesignSecrets.com, until we meet again, this is David Blatner..

Anne-Marie: And Anne-Marie Concepción. At… David…

David: InDesignSecrets. [laughter] Take care.

Anne-Marie: Bye.

[music]

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 019 page.