Podcast 019 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 019 page.
[Intro music]
David Blatner: Welcome to InDesignSecrets. I’m David Blatner and I’m here along with my co-host Anne-Marie Concepcion.
Anne-Marie Concepción: Hi there.
David: Anne-Marie and I are the authors of the InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs book from Peachpit Press. If you like our Podcast you’re going to love our book! Anne-Marie is an Adobe software trainer and also a design studio owner. And she’s the author of the popular DesignGeek e-zine which is very cool, chockful of good information about all kinds of publishing secrets, and I’m the author of lots of books including the huge giant Real World InDesign with….
Anne-Marie: that’s right.
David:…with Ole Kvern, that’s sort of the everything you ever wanted to know about InDesign, the big 800-page thing. And I’m also the editorial director of the InDesign Conference which is coming up next week in Chicago. I’m very excited about that in fact we’re going to be doing our next Podcast behind the scenes at the show so you’re going to hear next week about, you’re going to hear from not just us but also other InDesign presenters at the show. Should be fun.
Anne-Marie: It’s going to be fun, we can walk around doing like roving man in the street reports or something like that, it’s going to be a blast actually. I’m really looking forward to this show especially since I just have to hop on the El to get there I don’t have to take a plane or anything like that so….
David: I have to take a plane. And we’re also, we’re also involved with the game shows coming up. InDesign game show Tuesday night at the conference. It’s going to be lots of fun, we’ll tell you all about that. Lots of InDesign trivia, and secrets, and good stuff like that. That’s going to be sponsored by InDesign Secrets, this Podcast, our web site. So that’s kind of exciting.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. It’s our first sponsorship.
David: So Anne-Marie, what are you going to be doing at this show. You’re doing a thing on Version Cue at this, at the Creative Suite show.
Anne-Marie: That’s right, that’s right, yes. And I’ve been boning up on it. I’m doing, well I’m doing two things at the InDesign conference and two things at the Creative Suite conference which follows right on the heels of the InDesign conference, and I think they share a day. But before the show starts on the Monday before the show starts, the InDesign conference I’m doing an all day thing on InDesign and InCopy which is going to be a lot of fun, and then on that Tuesday just a short, a regular session on InCopy for InDesigners. So it’s a way to you know, I’m going to talk to the designers about how to convince their editors that they need to use InCopy instead of Word. That way the designers don’t have to keep making all of the corrections from those ten thousand printouts themselves; the editors do it.
David: That’s a good thing.
Anne-Marie: What else. Yes it’s a very good thing. And then for the Creative Suite conference I’m doing a session on all the cool kinds of the web-related stuff you can do in the Creative Suite because usually it’s so print-centric. There’s a lot of interesting web stuff you can do that has nothing to do with GoLive by the way so, all the cool web features in Illustrator and in Photoshop and Acrobat, and unfortunately not too much there on InDesign but I’ll be talking about that too. And then finally I think I’m, well I’m doing a session on Version Cue. Which everybody has, it’s installed for free. And it’s pretty neat even if you’re the, if you’re a one-person shop that can save you a bunch of hassles. But there’s also some gotchas which I will be talking about in depth.
David: I’m looking forward to that.
Anne-Marie: What about you, what are you doing?
David: I’m doing a bunch of stuff. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: Really? I thought you’re just like sitting around sort of with a cigar and you know, overseeing your domain.
David: I’m doing my favorite. I’m doing tips and tricks, I’m doing lots of tips and tricks sessions and sort of in-depth. And then also sessions that have to do with how all these applications work together, Photoshop to Illustrator to InDesign and stuff like that. That’s going to be lots of fun. And the, one of the things that at the Creative Suite show I’m looking forward to is, you’re talking about the web features. I’m looking forward to, we’ve got a couple of sessions on creating Flash content with the Adobe Creative Suite apps.
Anne-Marie: Oh right.
David: And getting like, getting Flash out of Photoshop which is [chuckles] you know most people hear that, they’re like “you cant get Flash out of Photoshop”. But Michael Nynnis is going to be doing a very cool thing on that so I’m looking forward to that. Anyway it’s going to be a good show and we hope that we’ll be seeing you there. If you are coming, point yourself out to us. You know, wear a big InDesign Secrets sign, we love InDesign Secrets t-shirt or something like that.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. And you can recognize us because our pictures are on our web site.
David: That’s right.
Anne-Marie: Right?
David: InDesignsecrets.com. ok so what are we supposed to be talking about today?
Anne-Marie: All right well here’s what we got for you today. We’ve recently uploaded a new version of Tim Cole’s secrets of Frame-based grids. That pdf that we talked about I think last episode or two, two of them ago. We’ve got a new version, David’s going to be telling you about that on our web site.
David: Just when you’d thought you had downloaded the final version, they come back with a new edition.
Anne-Marie: [chuckles] We’ve got some interesting tips about using the fitting commands with text frames. Most people use it with images but there’s some very useful features with text frames. Also beyond the magnifying glass, a quick and dirty rundown of all the other ways to zoom in and zoom out in your InDesign documents. We’re going to mention a freebie from InDesign magazine that expires in just a few days on May 15th. And finally our obscure feature of the week is “Appearance of Black”.
David: Very cool, all kinds of good stuff. So what is it about this new pdf, this thing that Tim Cole put together? Basically added a tip, it’s all the same as far as I can tell. But he added a tip at the end. And this tip was something that he learned from our good friend and colleague Rufus Deuschler in Italy and Rufus came up with this great tip which completely blew my mind when I read it. It was like wow so obvious and yet very very cool. So I encourage everybody to go look at that.
Basically it has to do with… Let’s say you’re doing a book layout and you want the first, the first chapter to start, maybe the text to start halfway down. You know exactly where you want the first baseline of that first chapter to begin. But the first, the chapter name, and maybe the chapter subtitle can vary. Sometimes the chapter name is two lines, sometimes it’s one line, sometimes the subhead is three lines. You just don’t know how long that stuff is but you always know that you want that first line of the chapter to end up on the at the same place on the page. And he came up with a great solution which is something that is very difficult to do manually but is a snap to do with the frame based baseline grids.
And so I was very pleased, I was really tickled when I saw that so thank you Rufus, thank you Tim. And so you can go get that pdf again, we will put that link to the pdf on our web site. You have to go to InDesignsecrets.com and then click on the Podcast link. And then you’ll see there, there’s a little link in this episode on how to download that pdf from the web site.
Anne-Marie: Right, it’s in our show notes I think that’s pretty typical for Podcasts. You know whenever we talk about a link or URL or a script, we’ll always include that in our show notes which is on the Podcast html page of our web site. So check that out.
David: There we go. Ok.
Anne-Marie: All right so we got an email last week from a loyal listener who asked this question about getting text frames to kiss-fit the text. He said “is there a quick way of making a letter or letters fit the box with no spacing anywhere around it”? He’s always wanted to do this but he says whenever you type something you always get the leading and etcetera. He says he often has just a letter or a word that he wants to make as a logo or simple title and he wants it to fit exactly in the box that he creates. You know, a fast way to do that rather than actually dragging with the mouse, and yes there is a very fast way to do that.
Just select the text frame with your, either of the selection tools, go to Object > Fitting and choose “Fit Frame to Content”. Or you could press “Option Command C” on the Mac or “Alt Control C” on the PC. Or you can also right-click right on the text frame and access the fitting commands from there. That’s what I usually do. Anyway when you do that the frame snaps to fit the letters exactly baseline to cap height. If you do have the first-line indent though it’s not going to, you know, overwrite that indent so if you, you know, wanted to actually kiss-fit the letters you might want to make sure that you have no indents or other kind of spacing commands in there.
David: Yeah, I love that feature, the “Command Option C” to fit the frame to the content because a lot of us have been using that for awhile with pictures.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: But we’re not used to using that with text and it turns out to be very useful with text. But there are some hidden things in there, there’s also some gotchas that you need to know about. First of all it does not work on linked text frames. So if you got text that’s linked from one text frame to a next, won’t work there. It won’t work if you have a two-column text frame, you know, multi-column text frame, that doesn’t work at all. If you have more than one line, if you only have one line of text in a frame then it adjusts both the width and the height of the frame. But if you have two or more lines of text in the frame, then it only adjusts the height of the frame, it won’t adjust the width at all, it leaves it alone. So.
Anne-Marie: You usually don’t want it to rewrap. You know, you don’t want it to rewrap the lines normally.
David: Not usually, you’re right. It’s the way sort of you’d expect but it’s good to know that it’s going to do that.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. Right.
David: One of the cool things, actually you mentioned that you have to select it with the selection tool. You actually do that while you’re typing as well. So you can, so even with the text cursor in there, just do the “Command Option C” for fit or use the menu item and it’ll fit right as you’re typing. And one of the cool things here is, sometimes I’m typing in a column of text and I just have one more sentence that I want to type but the frame isn’t big enough. So I type quickly, because I can type it without even seeing the text and then I’ll hit the keyboard shortcut and it expands the frame.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: It doesn’t just shrink the frame.
Anne-Marie: That’s right I forgot about that.
David: It also expands the frame to fit the text. So that’s very cool as well, I like that feature a lot. The other thing you should know about though is that InDesign can shrink a frame so tight that it shrinks it right up to the baseline, not the descenders. The descenders will actually fit outside of the frame. So.
Anne-Marie: Also like the bottoms of commas and things like that.
David: That’s right. Anything that fits below the baseline will actually stick outside of the frame. If you need it to be in the inside of the frame then you should use the text frame options. Under the Object menus choose text frame options or just do Command or Control B. And add a little bit of bottom inset —
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: — to that and then it should work just fine.
Anne-Marie: Right, then it’ll shove them right up there.
David: Yeah so that’s kind of nice.
Anne-Marie: Okay and you know it’s also useful if you want to, I use it a lot for resizing headlines. You know like I get the frame to fit exactly around a headline and then I could just press “Command Shift” and then drag on the frame corner and it resizes to fit.
David: Yeah that’s very cool.
Anne-Marie: Resizes as you drag.
David: Yeah so you just —
Anne-Marie: It’s almost like dragging it in Illustrator or something like that.
David: — so you get exactly, yeah, I use that a lot as well, that’s great. OK zoom options, we mentioned that, I think it was the last Podcast that we talked about the “Control Alt 5″ keyboard shortcut, or maybe it was a couple of episodes ago where that’ll jump down to the magnification view in the lower left corners so you can type in if you want seventy-five percent you can just type in seventy-five, enter, and it goes to seventy-five. And we realize we should throw in some of the other keyboard shortcuts too for zooming in and out. They’re simple, they’re easy, they’re the kinds of things you should use all the time. Just so, but just in case you don’t know about them, let’s throw out a couple of those like the Control + or or Command + or – on the Mac, zooms in and out.
Anne-Marie: Yes that’s right, I mean that all, they say that under the view menu but I think it’s a little weird whenever you see it, it says Command or Control =. But I guess you know, to make it a + symbol you’d have to add the Shift key as well.
David: Oh that’s true.
Anne-Marie: Because the, you know it says = so you’d always have to remember just press Command. Think of it as “Command +” and disregard what the view menu says.
David: Yeah that’s a good point. It’s not Command, it’s not =.
Anne-Marie: It is, it is technically “Command =”.
David: It is, yeah technically.
Anne-Marie: That makes more sense to just memorize it as “Command +” zooms in right, plus gets bigger. Minus zooms out, and it’s actually not a minus, right, it’s a hyphen.
David: [chuckles]
Anne-Marie: Let’s not split hairs here. And then you have those like actual size — Command 1 or Control 1 it says in the view menu but for some reason they didn’t put it in the other ones. There’s a whole bunch of other ones like that, what are those?
David: Like “Command 2″ for two hundred percent, “Command 0″ for fit in window.
Anne-Marie: That one’s in there.
David: Is that in? Ok “Command Option 0″ for fit the spread in the window.
Anne-Marie: Yes that’s in there too.
David: That’s an important one because, wonderful things about that about those by the way is if you go to fit in window or fit spread in window, and then you resize your window, your page automatically updates. That was one of the things that really annoyed me about QuarkXpress is you go to fit page in window and then you change the window size and you’d have to do the “Command 0″ again, but.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: But, in InDesign it just always automatically updates so the page will fit in the window.
Anne-Marie: I got so used to that I thought that’s how it always worked, and I was doing a project in QuarkXPress last week and I kept choosing that, I’m like, why isn’t this working? And I rebuilt my preferences and everything. And like, oh yeah that’s right.
[laughter]
David: Yeah, yeah I’ve actually had the same experiences. I’ve been playing with the beta of QuarkXPress 7 and it’s like, wow, there’s so much thing that you kind of expect, you got used to working a certain way and then you go back and like, wow how could they not have included that in QuarkXPress 7. Anyway, “Control 5″ goes to fifty percent view, “Control 4″ is the one I use all the time, cause it goes to four hundred percent view and remember that when you zoom in or out, it always centers the current selection on your screen if it can.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: So if you want a particular thing selected or if you want a particular place in your text selected, just place the cursor there and then zoom in, and it’ll then go right into that space.
Anne-Marie: Yeah it’s like a smart zoom in and zoom out, so I do appreciate that.
David: I like that.
Anne-Marie: And “Command 2″ is two hundred percent.
David: Yeah I did that, and the four and five, I think that’s all the ones, oh the “Control Spacebar” zoom in tools.
Anne-Marie: Right. That’s right. That’s for a PC, “Command Spacebar” on a Mac.
David: And “Command Option Spacebar”
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: To zoom out. Anyway I think that’s all of them, if we missed any, let us know and we’ll do a special zooming Podcast, some other day.
Anne-Marie: Yes, but a little tip on that and the zoom tool shortcut is that, to hold down the Command or Control key first before the Spacebar if you’re trying to zoom in on a text frame and you have the type tool selected.
David: Yeah that’s right.
Anne-Marie: Cause otherwise you’re going to enter a space, so, always press the Command or Control key first and then add the Spacebar.
David: That’s right. That sounds great. ok so what else? Oh the magazine.
Anne-Marie: Oh yeah. That’s right. So InDesign magazine usually comes out as a pdf, right, and when the new issue is distributed they email you your username and password to download it from their web site, and you can of course print it out if you want. But they did this special print edition, actual ink on paper, which is you know, wow so retro. And with sort of like the best of InDesign magazine isn’t it?
David: Yeah it’s sort of a sampler,
Anne-Marie: Sort of a compilation.
David: Sampler is a compilation, yep.
Anne-Marie: And they are distributing it free, you can just go over there, no obligation, you don’t have to sign up for a subscription or anything, all you do is fill in your information on a form and we’ll give the URL in our show notes, on the Podcast page. And fill it in and then they will mail you with US Postal mail the actual printed issue. So you can have something to hold in your hands, and bring in the bathroom to read, things like that.
[laughter]
David: There’s some really good tips, there’s a bunch of tips from the special tips and tricks issue from last year, very good stuff. So, yeah it’s actually, technically Adobe is mailing these out for the magazine which was very nice of them to do. It is however limited.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: They’ve been burning through them like hotcakes or some kind of cakes, and you can, so the deal is only good for a few more days so if you’re listening to this, you know, sometime in the future in June or August or whatever, too late, forget about it.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, forget about it.
David: Maybe we’ll do another one someday,
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: But if you’re listening right on the cutting edge of as we’re doing this, for the next five days it’s still good, up until May 15th.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: Of whatever year it happens to be.
Anne-Marie: May 15th, 2006.
David: And so you go to the web site that we’re going to again we’ll put up the link on our InDesignsecrets.com page, go to that link, fill it in and hopefully they still have a few left and they’ll mail you one, so that’s kind of a cool thing.
Anne-Marie: Ok. Thank you Adobe.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: The obscure feature of the week…
David: And InDesign. Thank you, InDesign magazine…
Anne-Marie: Oh yes thank you InDesign magazine.
David: Hey if you don’t get the print version, by the way if you don’t get the print version, you can actually download the whole thing, if you’re not into print, or if they’ve run out, you can get the whole thing as a pdf.
Anne-Marie: Oh.
David: It’s exactly the same thing as the print version, maybe I shouldn’t tell people that, I don’t know. But it’s the same thing as the print version…
Anne-Marie: [laughter] It’s too late now, we never edit these Podcasts.
David: That’s right, but in the, if you go to inDesignmag.com, just InDesignmag, well we’ll do the link on the web on our site. Go there and download their free trial issue, it’s the same thing that’s printed.
Anne-Marie: Ah.
David: But some people don’t like the, I mean a lot of people like the pdf. But some people really want to have paper in their hands.
Anne-Marie: That’s right, well I have a copy of the printed issue cause I think they send it out to all the subscribers and that’s pretty nice, I like it.
David: It’s, there’s good stuff. So so the obscure feature of the week -week -week [echo]
Anne-Marie: Is “Appearance of Black -ack -ack” [echo]
David: Where is “Appearance of Black”? It’s a preference, it’s in preferences, Command or Control K to get to preferences and then you can just click on “Appearance of Black” on the preferences dialog box, it’s one of the panels on the left side. By the way for those who don’t realize you can also do Command or Control Down arrow or Command or Control Up arrow to move through all those different preferences panels. So you could do Command or Control Down arrow to get down to there. So what is “Appearance of Black”?
Well it’s a CS2 thing, here’s what happened in the old days, black was just black right? You know, you had something black a hundred percent black ink and it showed up as black black black, the blackest black you could get on your screen. Well the problem is that a hundred percent black ink is not actually very black, it’s sort of a dark charcoal color. Right? It’s sort of dark dark gray. And if you really want to print a very dark black in CMYK you should print black plus some other colors, what they call a rich black, typically that’s maybe a hundred percent black and twenty percent cyan, yellow and magenta mixed together. That rich black will give you a really dense black when you print in CMYK.
Well Adobe wanted to give some indication, of, on-screen indication of the difference between a hundred percent black and rich black, something that was really really black, so they offered this option that to give you. They offered an option of “do you want to see the difference between plain old a hundred percent black and rich black”, and that option is in this preference, the “Appearance of Black” preference.
Now, something that you have to be really clear about here is that, this is only for RGB and grayscale devices, that is this is only for when you’re printing to a grayscale printer, or when you’re displaying it on-screen, or you’re printing to an RGB, you know like a non postscript inkjet printer. So this is only a matter of you know, “do I want to see the difference between a hundred percent black and rich black typically on-screen or on my inkjet printer”, and so there’s actually two preferences there “Appearance of Black on screen” and “Appearance of Black printing or exporting”. But again printing or exporting is only non- postscript printers.
Anne-Marie: So this has nothing to do with the occasional problem of exporting to pdf and the blacks there are rich black?
David: No, good question, this is not, especially in CS2 that could happen, it happened a lot in,
Anne-Marie: In CS1.
David: I’m sorry in CS1 that happened a lot, where people would export to pdf and all of a sudden all of their black text got turned to forecolor black.
Anne-Marie: Boo.
David: This has nothing to do with that, yeah that was bad. That’s a color management issue that we should probably cover in another session.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: But this, that had to do with CS1, they, the color management stuff that.
Anne-Marie: Oh right right.
David: You knew that couldn’t happen but did happen. In CS2 they fixed it with the new preserve numbers or preserve CMYK numbers feature.
Anne-Marie: Right, and you see that in the “Export to pdf” for the print dialog box.
David: That’s right, exactly, that appears there. But the “Appearance of Black” had nothing to do with that, “Appearance of Black”
Anne-Marie: ok.
David: Only has to do with how it appears on screen. So if you, by default, if you look at those two colors, everything will look rich black. which means that everything will map to the darkest black you can display on your screen in RGB values you know, 000 RGB.
Anne-Marie: And that’s how it worked in CS1 right?
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: I’m pretty sure that’s how it worked right.
David: I think so.
Anne-Marie: So the new feature is showing an accurate black.
David: Yeah it’s right so you can change it for example I change it typically on screen, I want the “Appearance of Black” to display all blacks accurately, then when I change that in preferences, click OK, now my hundred percent black looks like a dark charcoal gray, and rich black really looks like solid black, so that’s a good thing.
Anne-Marie: So you switched it to display all blacks accurately for both,
David: For on screen.
Anne-Marie: On for screen and printing exports?
David: Well I do it for on-screen actually, I don’t print to RGB devices like that out of InDesign, so that’s not a factor.
Anne-Marie: You just want to see which things are black, and which things are rich black without having to select them and seeing which swatch gets selected in the swatches palette.
David: That’s right, exactly.
Anne-Marie: Ah. Got it.
David: That’s what that’s about. OK.
Anne-Marie: All right well that’s wonderful, thank you. That’s one less obscure feature, and now it’s a well known feature, we are making good headway I think.
David: [laughter] I think so.
Anne-Marie: Pretty soon we’re going to have to say obvious feature of the week, and we’ll try and say something new about it that nobody’s ever said before. All right so that’s it for our show today, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for InDesign secrets just let us know. Visit InDesignsecrets.com or email us at info@InDesignsecrets.com. Until we meet again, this is Anne Marie Concepcion and.
David: David Blatner for InDesign secrets.
[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.