Podcast 020 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 020 page.
[Intro music]
Anne-Marie Concepción: Welcome to InDesign Secrets. I’m Anne-Marie Concepcion, and I’m here along with my cohost, David Blatner.
David Blatner: Well, hello there.
Anne-Marie: We just got back from the InDesign Conference last week, and boy, was it a blast!
David: It was great!
Anne-Marie: It was fantastic, and one of the best parts is that David got his hands on this great MP3 recorder with a good mic, and went around to people at the show and got some great clips, so we’re going to play a few for you today. David, what’s the first one up?
David: We’re going to hear from Pam Pfiffner, noted journalist of the industry and now an editor at Peachpit, and she said… I think she sums up our feelings about the conference better than anything we could say.
Pam Pfiffner: I’ve been really excited about this conference because there’s been so many great people here who have so much information that they’re imparting to a growing community, the InDesign and Creative Suite users. So I really enjoyed listening to the tips, some of the really in-depth strategies that these people bring to the conference that I just wouldn’t learn anywhere else. And even though I know a lot of those people and know a lot of the information, just being in this community has just been fantastic.
David: Okay.
Anne-Marie: All right, that was great. Thank you, Pam. And well, I don’t know about you, David, but I thought it was the best InDesign and Creative Suite conference I’ve ever been to. I’ve been to a few of them so far, but this one… just the vibe was incredible.
David: The vibe was good, there were a lot of people. We had 400 people come from around the world as far as Qatar and Jordan and Hong Kong and just all over the place. It was great.
Anne-Marie: I know. And there were so many tracks. I found it hard to choose which people I wanted to go listen to. I wanted to hear everything, but another thing I thought was really good was that most of the speakers — I think all of them — had some very good handouts, so if I wasn’t able to go hear, like, Jim Lavelle’s XML one, which I heard was great. He had almost the entire seminar written up, and with step-by-steps and images in the handout.
David: Yeah, that is a great bonus for going to the conference. And for those people who weren’t able to make it to the conference this time, I do want to point out that we are going to have another InDesign conference. It’ll be a little bit different than last week’s, but we’re going to be doing another one in Seattle, October 25th through 27th. That’s going to be great. We’re going to have a good time there.
Anne-Marie: You know, I think… I like the way that Barry’s doing this. Barry’s the organizer of these. We have one… we have it like, in my city and then your city. And then in my city and then in your city.
David: [laughs] You noticed that, eh?
Anne-Marie: I appreciate that. I’m going to send him a thank you card.
David: That was good. That was really good. It was great being in Chicago. I hadn’t been there for years. That was lots of fun. So, also, the other big news, other than the conference — we’ll hear more from the conference people little bit later on — but the other big news is the InDesign Secrets website has been completely been revamped, and is now posted live.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. If you guys have been to our website since the beginning — since when was it, like early winter of last year — we just had kind of a FPO site up there, something that we just put together. I think it was based on a template from GoLive, just enough to list our podcast basically, because when you do a podcast, you also have to have a website to host them. But we never wanted that to be the permanent one and finally we found a great developer, who helped up come up with a rocking design and it’s based on a WordPress blog engine, so you get two writers who have a blog, and it’s kind of like… I don’t know about you, David; it’s been hard for me to tear myself away from post-a-blog. Post something, post something! I keep wanting to go back there and add more content, so I’m sure that wears off after a while.
David: [laughs] Well, there’s us posting, but what I’ve been most interested in is the community who are posting comments back to our post. Because you’ll post something, and sometimes 15 minutes later someone reads it, and says, “Oh, but did you know such-and-such?” So the back-and-forth tips is really quite good, and that’s exactly what we wanted to do: create a community around InDesign, and have all of us sort of playing and talking and sharing.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: That’s the fun stuff.
Anne-Marie: I’m looking forward to the comments on the podcast, too, because before, and even now, you know you can always write to us at info [at] indesignsecrets.com, but sometimes they would build up. And then we get five or six or ten emails and we would sift through them and say, okay, which ones are we going to read, are we going to respond to on the next podcast, which ones will make good topics? And we would reply to everybody. Sometimes they just remain private, but now, after we publish a podcast, people can go right to the podcast page on our website and click, add a comment, and you can talk back to us right then right after it goes live.
David: That’s great.
Anne-Marie: And read other peoples’ comments, too.
David: Absolutely. So check out indesignsecrets.com. That will be growing by leaps and bounds in the next few months, and lots and lots of good information and tutorials, and a lot of people have been asking us about videos. Yes, we’re looking at doing some videos as well as separate things, so that would all be on indesignsecrets.com. The other thing that’s going to be on indesignsecrets.com pretty soon — not yet, I was hoping to have this live by today, but — the InDesign Tip of the Day plug-in. Some people have complained…
Anne-Marie: InDesign Secrets Tip of the Day plug-in!
David: The InDesign Secrets Tip of the Day…
Anne-Marie: There you go!
David:…plug-in! I did a Tip of the Day plug-in with ALAP a couple of years ago, and then ALAP got bought by Quark, and one of the first things Quark did was of course kill all the plug-ins, so there went my InDesign Tip of the Day plug-in.
Anne-Marie: Aww.
David: Yeah, that was kind of sad. So we found a new developer to do this, it’s from aextra Software in Europe, in Germany, and they are really helpful. They pulled together this InDesign Secrets plug-in and we will post that. We’ll give you the information probably the next podcast. We think it’s going to go live probably next week. There’s a few little tweaks we need to do.
Anne-Marie: It’s only $79.99 [laughs] is that correct?
David: 79.99 microcents! No, it’s free! It’s just a free plug-in that you can download, give them to your friends, give them to your dogs, and they’ll love them. So each time you launch InDesign, you get a new tip. So that’s kind of fun.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. And hey, it’s going to be just the first in a long line of ultra-cool plug-ins from InDesign Secrets!
David: I think so. I hope so. There’s going to be all sorts of other cool stuff that we’re going to be doing. So listen, let’s play another interview. This is from Sandee Cohen at the conference because she offered some tips as I was walking around with… well, Anne-Marie’s generously said it was a good microphone; it’s actually a pretty crummy little voice recorder [laughs] but [talking over each other] Anyway, I captured a few other speakers there. That was fun. Sandee Cohen had a great tip that we want to pass on.
Sandee Cohen: Hi, my name is Sandee Cohen and I’m here at InDesign Conference in Chicago, and I thought I’d share with you one of the tips that I actually had one guy tell me was worth the entire conference fee. Here was the tip. If you have set text in Photoshop, as text, you want to bring it into InDesign, don’t save the file as a PSD, a native Photoshop file. Save it as a PDF. The text will remain as PostScript, crisp text. And I’d like to thank you all for listening to InDesign Secrets.
Anne-Marie: That is a great tip. Being able to keep your vectors sharp, even when you export the PDF right from InDesign, that’s the only way to do it, is to save those files in Photoshop as Photoshop PDFs.
David: You can do it with an EPS, but I just don’t recommend EPS anymore, especially when going into InDesign.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Better just to do PDF.
Anne-Marie: EPS’s. Boo. Hiss.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And you know, one of my favorite speakers ever that I’ve ever seen in InDesign conference is Branislav Milic from Europe. And he came in for the InDesign/Creative Suite Conference. He did a session on Bridge, I think, plus he was kind of like a staff photographer. He went around and took a lot of photos. And one of my favorite things about this show in particular was that we had a lot of evening events. And I think two or three nights we had like, you know, the tip extraordinaire extravaganza kind of thing where a lot of the speakers will get up on stage and try to top each other with their favorite tip.
And Branislav really came up with a fantastic tip about doing what he called it the “Real-Time Reversed Text” tip. So you can drag text that is partially overlapping another color, and where it overlaps, it knocks out to white, and as you drag the text around, the part that’s overlapping the color is always white. It’s like real-time reverse text. It’s amazing.
David: It is amazing. Like you have text on top of an object that’s half-white and half-not and you want to knock out only where it’s overlapped, and so he figured out how to do that using a transparency blend mode. And even better, he wrote it up as a one-page PDF and we’re posting it at indesignsecrets.com. You’ll be able to go to… if you go to indesignsecrets.com, click on this podcast, and we’ll have a link there for where you can download that PDF to your drive and read it over. It’s very cool. It’s not the end-all, be-all solution, because, for example, if you have text that goes on top of black, it doesn’t work. It only works when you have it on top of color — on top of a colored background — not black background. So I’m still trying to find out… figure out how to do it when you put text on top of black background. That to me is the holy grail.
Anne-Marie: Well, if I ever wanted that effect, I would probably redesign the cover of the annual report in order to use that tip because it’s so much easier than converting to outlines, and snipping and pasting and trying to get the type to be white here and black there, and it’s a big pain in the butt.
David: I totally agree.
Anne-Marie: Anyway, thank you so much, Brannie.
David: Yeah, [laughs] great fun, Branislav. So listen, let’s do another tip from the conference:
[David's voice:] I’m sitting here with Kacey Crouch, who runs the Q and A table at InDesign Conference. It’s kind of our help desk that people can come and get their questions answered. Very, very helpful. Throughout the show, this table has been open and people can show up and ask questions and get answers and solutions and so on. And one of the questions that came up, that is a very important question because it shows up so often, is why in InDesign sometimes you select text, and in text field in the control palette, the text size shows up in parentheses, and what is that about? It’s crazy-making.”Kacey Crouch: Well, it can happen number of reasons. But most often, it’s happening because you have that text grouped with another object and then you scaled it. Because you wanted the object to be smaller or bigger and what’s happening is the object is scaled, and so that number in the field when you see the text field with the font size and another number in parentheses, it’s telling you what the scaling factor actually is. But most often, we don’t care what the scaling factor is; we just want to know what the actual font size is. So here’s the fix.
First of all, we have to get that object out of the group. So if indeed it is part of a group, ungroup first. Then we’re going to go back to the text object with your selection tool. And after you’ve grabbed it with a selection tool, let’s go up to the control palette, and you’re going to see an option in the control palette that’s not usually there. It only shows up when it’s needed. And the option is called “scale text attributes”. After you select that, your text field goes back to normal and everything is happy once again.
David: So that’s in the control palette? Or control palette menu?
Kacey: In the control pallet menu, in the little fly-out menu, in the control palette, that’s right.
David: Now, but in an example I saw, there was only one text box. That one text frame. it wasn’t even grouped with something and we were still seeing that parenthesis.
Kacey: At one point, it could’ve been part of a group that you don’t really know, it could’ve possibly the scale tool might have been used on it and that can cause it as well.
David: So even if it was a part of a group and then you delete the other frames, it might still show up, even though it might be the only object left?
Kacey: Yes, because at one point, it was scaled. And so you’re still seeing that scaling factor.
David: Wow.
Anne-Marie: She has a lovely voice, now, doesn’t she?
David: She does. It’s true, it’s true.
Anne-Marie: Yes. Kacey should be on radio, or, perhaps, in a podcast.
David: [laughs] Pretty good.
Anne-Marie: I had a great time with her, I worked — I had a couple of shifts there — at her Creative Suite Clinic, and it was so neat because she dressed up in a little Creative Suite lab coat, and she had a stethoscope hanging around her neck. I said that she should put up her stethoscope up to people’s monitors to, you know, diagnose problems.
David: “This InDesign document has problems.” [laughs]
Anne-Marie: That’s right. “I hear a typography murmur.”
David: [laughs] Exactly.
Anne-Marie: Ask it to cough. Yeah, it’s a good thing I wasn’t in a lab coat, let’s put it that way, because I would’ve still be doing my schtick there, a week later.
David: [laughs] I’ll go by the hotel, and see Anne-Marie in a lab coat.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. [laughs] Good thing I’m not a doctor for a Macintosh.
David: All right. We better do the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week [mock echo effect] week, week, week.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] For this week, eek, eek, eek, eek the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week is Browse.
David: Browse! Where do you see browse?
Anne-Marie: You see browse, and you probably have seen it 10,000 times but never even noticed it was there, because it’s under the file menu, right underneath the open command. So we’re so used to going to file: new, file: open, file: close — if not using keyboard shortcuts for that — so how many times do people actually open the file menu? But right underneath open is browse. And the keyboard shortcut for it on Macintosh is option-command-O. On a PC, alt-control-O. And choosing browse or using that keyboard shortcut just jumps you to Bridge.
David: I don’t know why it doesn’t say “Open Bridge.”
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Yeah, exactly! Just say “Open Bridge!”
David: It does the same thing basically as that little icon in the control palette. It looks kind of like a folder, with a magnifying glass on it.
Anne-Marie: And a seashell.
David: It’s supposed to be a seashell. I think it just looks like a squiggle. But… or scroll. Something. I don’t know what that is.
Anne-Marie: Something like that.
David: It’s some… it’s pretty obscure. It’s definitely an Obscure Icon of the Week.
Anne-Marie: That’s correct. People should realize that same browse command is also available in Photoshop and Illustrator.
David: There you go.
Anne-Marie: In the same location, and I believe the same shortcut. So that is the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week, the little command that nobody notices: browse.
David: Browse. Okay. So that’s it for our show today. If you have any questions, or comments, or suggestions, go ahead and email us at info@indesignsecrets.com.
Anne-Marie: Or even better, just go to the website and add a comment to the podcast.
David: You’re right! Even better, go to the website, add a comment there, and then we’ll see it immediately. Until we meet again, this is David Blatner…
Anne-Marie:…and Anne-Marie Concepcion, for InDesign Secrets.
[Outro music]
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 020 page.