Podcast 018 Transcript

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 018 page.

[Intro music]

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

David: Why, good morning.

Anne-Marie: Besides having co-authored InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs for Peachpit Press, I’m the author of the DesignGeek e-zine. And David’s the author of a bunch of books about InDesign and he’s the editorial director for the InDesign conference. Which is coming up in a few weeks here in Chicago. It’s going to be fantastic.

David: It’s going to be lots and lots of fun.

Anne-Marie: You can find links to all of the stuff at our website, InDesignSecrets.com.

David: Here’s what we’ve got going for you today. We’re going to quickly answer some questions posed to us by listeners. Including how to overcome InDesign’s tendency to turn everything into a text frame. Also, how to unthread a single text frame from the other ones. Somebody wrote in asking about paragraph styles that are completely out of order when she opens documents. And we also want to mention an important keyboard shortcut, how to change your screen magnification without using your menus all the time. Also, finally the Obscure Feature of the Week … the magnet.

Anne-Marie: The magnet … I like those kind of things [David laughs], we’ve had gravity, and now the magnet.

David: That’s right. There’s a theme here.

Anne-Marie: All right, so first up is frame frenzy. We had a listener write in, her name is Sandra Rodriguez. A self-described Adobe baby since the very beginning. And also an InDesign fan. And she explained a series of actions that is driving her crazy. She creates a border on her document. She drags out a border. And then she places a text file. And then when she goes to click inside the text frame of the text file, the cursor appears on the upper left hand corner of the document page right inside the border. That drives her crazy. So what’s all that about?

Well that’s because InDesign really, really loves to turn any kind of empty kind of frame you create into a text frame. So even though she might have used one of the shape tools or image frame tool to create that border, when she clicks on it, it thought, oh look, she must want to turn me into a frame. And you can always tell when it’s about to do that, because the type cursor will gain these little parentheses around it. meaning, hey I know there’s a frame here that’s not currently a text frame but if you click I’ll go ahead and do that for you. And if you’re in a rush or your eyes aren’t focused completely on that cursor, you might miss it.

David: Yeah, you really want to pay attention to the cursors in InDesign. There are I don’t know how many cursors and they keep changing all over the place and they give you a lot of information.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: And this is one of the more important ones. When the text is going to go into a frame as opposed to creating a new frame.

Anne-Marie: That’s right, when you have overlapping text frames, or sometimes I’ve found a workaround of holding down the command key or the control key on the PC and to click on the frame you actually want to work on. And that sort of wakes it up and as soon as you release the command key, you can click and you will be editing inside of that frame.

So that, I’ve found that works about 80% of the time. But sometimes you just can’t get to the frame that you want to work on — or you just want to prevent yourself from ever turning something that should not be a text frame into a text frame.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: And the answer there is to put those suckers on a locked layer. I mean create a new layer and move that border to that new layer just by dragging its little layer proxy icon in the Layers palette to it, and then click in the second column next to the eyeball, that will put a little pencil icon with a red slash through it. Meaning you can not edit this layer. You can still see it, but try as you might to click on anything belonging on that locked layer and you will not be able to access it. Which is exactly what you want in this kind of case. And that border can be five levels above in the stacking order of the text frame you want to work on but as it’s locked you’re never going to be able to select it, which is exactly what you want.

David: Which is great. But you can’t … I always thought that you could lock the object itself, it seemed obvious that you should be able to lock the object and not be able to select it or change the content in it. But that’s not how InDesign works.

Anne-Marie: No.

David: When you lock an object in InDesign it locks the position of the object not the content so you can still edit the content. So, as Anne-Marie said if you don’t want to be able to touch it, or don’t want to be able to change it into a text frame or whatever, you basically want to click right through it, put it on a locked layer.

Anne-Marie: Oh yeah, I use it all the time. Even if just temporarily. Like sometimes I have a text frame and behind it I have some sort of colored art work that the text is lying on top of the colored artwork and I want to move the colored artwork elsewhere, I’ll quickly put that text frame on a locked layer so I can drag the colored artwork behind it willy-nilly without having to worry about dragging the text frame itself. So. Locked layers are your friend.

David: They are your friend. Sandra also brought up another question, something that a lot of InDesigners have asked about. How to unthread a frame from a series of threaded frames? You know, when you have a story that goes from one frame to another frame to another frame, how do you pull the story out of a single frame?

Now, we’re not talking about deleting the frame, it’s easy to delete a frame, and if you delete a frame, the text just reflows to not include that missing frame. But this is talking about how to remove the frame from the thread, from the linked frames — leave the frame there, but just make the text skip past it. And there’s actually various ways you can do this and this came up in a, I wrote about this in an InDesign tip of the week that I do for InDesign Magazine. If you’re not currently mailing list, you can get that free tip of the week, you can go to InDesignMag.com, and hopefully you’re already a subscriber to InDesign Magazine, but InDesignMag.com also has a link for a free tip of the week that I write. And you can get those mailed to you. So I wrote one of these about this very topic.

And I talked about how you can unlink the first frame and you unlink the last frame and you do this and that. And somebody wrote in and said, you know David, sometimes you just do things the hard way. [Both laugh]. And that’s true. But I don’t mean to but sometimes I don’t completely think through a problem. So that’s why we all rely on each other to pass these tips around.

So in this case, a much easier way to do it, let’s say you have frame A linking to frame B linking to frame C and you want to take frame B out of that chain. So the easy way to do it is simply select frame B and cut it, command or control X. And that cuts it right out. It doesn’t change your text at all, the text just sort of flows past it, from A to C now. But now I need to get frame B back in the same place, so I use the paste in place command. Control-Alt-Shift-V or Command-Option-Shift-V or just choose paste in place from the edit menu. And that places that frame back in exactly the same place it was originally. And the text that was in there is actually still in there. Which is kind of wacky. So if you don’t want that text in there, then just double click on it to switch to the Text tool, and command A or control A to select all the text then delete it. And now you have an empty frame in that location and it’s not part of the thread any more.

And there’s another way as well that I’ll throw out just because I think it’s informative. And that is to unlink from…You unlink the link to A to B. A lot of people I find don’t know how to unlink text frames once you make them. You just double click on the port, there’s a little out port on the lower right corner of the text frame. And if you double click on that it unlinks from that frame to the next frame.

Anne-Marie: You have to be very steady though I find, you have to double click without moving a micron between the two clicks.

David: That’s right. And you’re double clicking with the selection tool, not the type tool. That’s another thing that really throws a lot of new InDesign users. They want to link and unlink with the type tool. But you can’t do that, you need the selection tool when you’re doing your linking. So I select the selection tool and I double click on the outport and that unlinks from A to B and now I can simply link from A to C by clicking once on the outport and once on the frame C and now I’ve reestablished my link from A to C. So we’re moving frame B from the middle. Does that make any sense? Too many A, B, C’s?

Anne-Marie: I think…Is this going to be on the test?

David: [laughs] You must use a number two pencil [both laugh] … and you must write in complete sentences.

Anne-Marie: All right, well that’s pretty clean. Did you mention in your tip of the week there about the break frame script that I believe comes with InDesign CS2?

David: I didn’t but I believe that’s very important to bring up.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, well you get free scripts with InDesign and CS and CS2 and I think it’s only in the CS2 one that the break frame script is there. But they don’t get installed by default and I think we’ve talked about this before so I won’t go into detail. So find them on your installation CD and copy and paste them into your scripts folder and your applications folder. Yeah?

David: Yeah, except a lot of people can’t find their installation discs any more.

Anne-Marie: Ah.

David: I know that it takes me 20 minutes to find where they are. And I know Adobe has posted them on their website. There’s an xml and scripting website they’ve put up. And we’ll add links to InDesignSecrets.com, we’ll add a link to that site and you can download them fresh from there. They’re always going to be there so you don’t have to worry about finding your disc. But that break link script is great because it’ll break all of the frames in a chain. You know, you have 48 different frames all linked together and you have different text in each one and you want to break them apart but you want to leave the text in them.

Anne-Marie: But you know what …

David: … And that’s what that script is for.

Anne-Marie: I think that … no, no, no. You’re thinking about split story.

David: Oh, oh …

Anne-Marie: There’s two of them, there’s one that’s called split story that will take you know, 50 page threaded document and break them all up into stand alone frames with all the existing text intact on each page. Which really saved the butt of a bunch of my book publishing clients. Who need to convert from Quark to InDesign or even with an existing InDesign document when they need to move pages around.

David: Mmm-hmm.

Anne-Marie: Sort of like if they need to reconfigure a text book that they haven’t worked on in three years, it’s a lot easier to break up the frames first. Assuming they already exist as distinct sections. But that’s what split story is for.

But the one called break frame, I believe does exactly what you just said except the part where you said to delete the text. If you have, say, three freaded frames …

[both laugh]

… Three. Threaded. Frames … [laughs] in a row and you want to break the middle one out of it, you select the second frame and double click break_frame jsx or whatever it says in your scripts palette. What it does is make that second frame stand alone. The text is still in there but the first and third frames are still threaded together.

David: So basically it does the same thing that I’ve just described. It probably works the same way too, it cuts the frame and then does a paste in place.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: So instead of using the script, which you have to go into the script bin, I’m all for scripting but in this case it sounds like it does exactly the same thing as you select the frame and do command x and command-alt-shift-B.

Anne-Marie: It does not, no. Are you listening to me? It does not do the same thing.

David: All right, then how is it different?

Anne-Marie: In your thing, when you cut the frame, the text reflows, right? From the first to the third frame. But with the script, the text does not reflow, you’re actually extracting the text as well as the frame.

David: Ooohhhh, okay.

Annd-Marie: So the frame is just sitting there, it’s not linked to anything, but it has the same text as before. And that text does not appear in the other two frames. So I’m not sure when you’d ever want to use it, but if you did, I guess it’d be a life saver.

David: [laughs] There you go. So there’s all kinds of scripts available and there’s all kind of shortcuts available. And one way or another you’ll figure it out.

Anne-Marie: I’m really happy to hear they’ve posted those scripts. We’re definitely going to have that link on our podcast page on the website. So even if you can’t find your installation cd, a lot of times the IT department has it in a vault in a basement and you’re not allowed to remove the installation CDs or you have to put through a request that takes six weeks and needs the approval of the CEO and it’s kind of insane what they do. So all right, the next thing that we want to talk about is, ummm … what was the next thing?

David: Paragraph styles.

Anne-Marie: Right. So the listener wrote in and said she was working on a document and wanted to know how come the style sheets in her paragraph styles palette weren’t in alphabetical order. She said she had just moved from InDesign 2 to CS2 and she discovered that if she made a single change, in her case, she’d add a new style to the palette by clicking the new style icon at the bottom of the palette. And then that just undid it and it’d force them into alphabetical order. So what is that bug?

David: Well she didn’t even need to tell us that she switched from InDesign two to CS2 because this is a classic bug and almost anyone switching from InDesign two to CS2 finds this bug. The styles are just in the wrong order. And it’s also a great email because she asked the question and answered it all by herself. [laughter] Which is all you have to do is edit a style or create a new style and InDesign reworks, re-alphabetizes all your styles. That’s the bug, and that’s the fix. And that’s it.

Anne-Marie: And thank you very much, yes.

[laughter]

David: So the view percentage thing — I think we may have mentioned in a previous podcast. But we’ve a lot of these podcasts now and we’re getting a little blurry here. So if we had not mentioned this, then we better. How to change the view percentage that you’re seeing on screen, you know from 100%. Obviously you could do a command or control one for 100% or a command or control two for 200% and so on. But what if you want to do 78.3% then it’s command-option-5 or control-alt-5.

Anne-Marie: I can’t believe they made a keyboard shortcut just for 78.3%.

David: (laughter)No, this just jumps down to the lower right, lower left corner of the window and then you type in whatever you want and you hit enter and it takes you to that percentage. And it’s the same thing as in QuarkXPress, in that it was control-V, but they had to use something completely obscure like control-alt-5 just to keep you on your toes I guess. [Anne-Marie laughs] And as I’ve said before you can edit it, change it to whatever keyboard shortcut you want. But by default, it’s control-alt-5.

Anne-Marie: One of those, I just love the keyboard shortcuts dialogue box has so many treasures buried in there it’s amazing. Like you were saying from last week. The one from last week was finding the font. You did a search for font in the text file that Show Set created, and somebody emailed us and said, wow that’s a fantastic tip! And I replied yeah, you know, actually after I heard David say that, I clicked Show Set and I searched for “Pot of gold” and I couldn’t find anything.

David: Yeah, [laughs] unfortunately pot of gold isn’t in there, maybe in CS3.

Anne-Marie: I did search for “secret of the universe” and it landed on a keyboard shortcut that was 42.

David: Yeah, you just type 42 and that’s the answer. [laughter]

Anne-Marie: That’s correct. All right, let’s go on to the obscure InDesign feature of the week. And you know as much as I think we’re going to run out of these one day, we get emails that say, What is that thing? And I say oh yeah, I guess it is an obscure feature. And this is an email that somebody wrote on behalf of his department saying: “None of us can figure out what that magnet is in the tabs palette?”. What is that thing for?

David: Well, a lot of people don’t even realize that it’s a magnet. It’s an upside-down U or a little weird icon.

Anne-Marie: Well for the first year that I used InDesign, I thought it was a horseshoe … [David laughs] … and I thought it meant “good luck in setting a tab, sucker”.

David: (laughter) That’s what it is. It’s the upside down horseshoe hanging over your tabs palette.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, “we dare you.” But if you’re coming from PageMaker, it’s really familiar. People coming from QuarkXPress are like what the heck is this? But it is like a little magical thing. If you create a text frame and you open up the tab palette, as long as there is room between the top of your text frame and your horizontal ruler, you’ll probably see the tab palette fit itself perfectly to the top of the text frame.

And if you happen to enlarge the size of the window or move the window around with your scroll bars or your hand tool and the tabs palette is no longer aligned with the text frame containing the tab, you can click on that magnet tool and it will magnetize itself back to the top of that text frame. Assuming you have enough room for it to fit. So if you are in the middle of a text frame and the top of it is running off the top of your window, nothing will happen if you click on the magnet. There has to be room for that little half inch deep palette to fit at the top of your text frame and below your ruler.

David: Right so if you’re zoomed in to 3000% or something and you’re editing something and you bring up the tabs palette, then it’s very unlikely that magnet is going do anything at all. Although sometimes I have noticed sometimes it does. Sometimes it fills the entire screen and sometimes it goes beyond the entire screen and it becomes humongous for no reason whatsoever. Especially if you double click on it.

Anne-Marie: Hmm! I haven’t seen that.

David: Yeah, it’s not one of the all time best thought out tools. But it can be very helpful if you want the tabs palette to align to the top of the text frame. But the thing is I usually don’t care where the tabs palette is because of that incredibly wonderful feature they put in there …

Anne-Marie: That’s right.

David: … If you start dragging inside of the text palette, you get that vertical line that shows up in the text frame itself that shows exactly where it is in the text frame. So you really don’t need the tabs palette aligned to the top of the frame most of the time.

Anne-Marie: That’s so useful, I know, I love that feature. So, now it’s no longer obscure, it is a magnet, it’s not a horseshoe, it’s not an upside-down U [David laughs]. It’s not a Slinky, I’ve heard it called a Slinky, it’s not that either.

David: You’re right. It does look like a Slinky.

Anne-Marie: Doesn’t it? Maybe we should call it the Slinky tool.

David: If you thought of any other things that that icon might be, [Anne-Marie laughs] please do let us know, along with any other questions or comments or suggestions. Just go to InDesignSecrets.com or email us at info@InDesignSecrets.com. And until we meet again, this is 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 018 page.