Podcast 021 Transcript

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 021 page.

[music]

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

Anne-Marie Concepción: Hi there.

David: Anne-Marie and I are the authors of InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs from Peachpit Press. I’m also the author of a bunch of stuff, including Real World InDesign with Olav Martin Kvern, and I’m the editorial director of the InDesign Conference and InDesign Magazine.

Anne-Marie is an Adobe software trainer, a design studio owner, and she is the author of the infamous DesignGeek e-zine.

Anne-Marie: That’s right, just call me “HerGeekness”, or “HerGee” for short.

[Laughter]

David: So today we’re going to be talking about all kinds of things. We’re going to be talking about an update to Branislav Milic’ new PDF about transparency tricks, we’re going to be discussing some upcoming conferences you might be interested in, and talk about the Ink Manager and also about lists, numbered list in InDesign, which are, well let’s just say they’re a little annoying. So…

[Laughter]

Anne-Marie: That’s right, and the obscure InDesign feature of the week is the Script Label palette.

David: Ah yes, the Script Label palette.

Anne-Marie: I will bet that 99.5 percent of people don’t even realize that they have the Script Label palette.

David: That’s true, it’s hiding.

Anne-Marie: Yup.

David: It’s hiding.

Anne-Marie: So what’s this new update with Branislav’s PDF thing?

David: Well Branislav Milic — who is a trainer in Europe based out of Belgium — has a nice overview of some of the cool transparency tricks that you can do, using some of the features in the transparency palette like isolate blending and, oh I’ve already spaced out on the name of them.

Isolate blending, so you know how often you use them. Isolate blending and knockout group. Isolate blending and knockout group are both really cool features but they are obscure to the extreme.

So he talks about what they are and how you can use them and he shows several examples of why you might want to use them for very interesting effects that he’s come up with, so we’re going to have a link to that PDF in the show notes, so go ahead and go to InDesignSecrets.com, look at the show notes in the podcast area and you can download his PDF.

But more interesting than those is he has achieved what I consider in some ways to be one of the great holy grails, there’s no single holy grail of…

Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.

David: …desktop publishing, but this is one of the holy grails of desktop publishing for me, it’s something I’ve tried to do for years and years and years with no success, which is, you’ve got some black text and you want it to overlap some area. Maybe a big black area, or a dark image let’s say. You want it to overlap that dark image, and just where it’s overlapping, because it’s just partially overlapping, just where it’s partially overlapping it turns to white, right?

Anne-Marie: Oh right.

David: We talked about this in the last episode.

Anne-Marie: Right and you said the PDF doesn’t work over black.

David: Exactly, exactly. So he figured out how to do it over black finally.

Anne-Marie: Wow.

David: He went to work and he figured it out. So it is a…

Anne-Marie: I think we must have challenged him.

David: I think so.

Anne-Marie: I think so.

David: He, like we, whenever we have a good challenge we just kind of have to gnaw at it until we figure it out. And so he figured out how to do it on top of a dark black background or an image. You can read about it in the PDF but the quick version of it is, the text you use a spot color black. You don’t use a regular CMYK black, you have to use a spot color black and that’s the trick. And you also put the text behind the image, or behind the black area, which is even more weird. So anyway, read about it in the PDF…

Anne-Marie: Very interesting.

David: He is a genius when it comes to these things.

Anne-Marie: Branislav that is fantastic. I have another challenge for Branislav. Branislav I would like all of my clients to pay me on time.

[Laughter]

Anne-Marie: Why won’t they pay me on time, I can’t figure it out.

David: You need to use a pantone color and you set your transparency palette to pay on time…

[Laughter]

David: That’s the trick.

Anne-Marie: I’m going to wait for the PDF in my email, Branislav!

[Laughter]

David: All right, so that’s that.

Anne-Marie: And so we have another upcoming conference on InDesign, close on the heels of the wildly successful one in Chicago.

David: Yes, and this month, end of this month or actually just in a few weeks is the InDesign conference in London. It’s going to be structured very differently than the one that we did in Chicago. It’s basically three one-day seminars to be honest, but there’s a bunch of great speakers including Branislav. Branislav will be there, and Rufus Deuchler from Italy will be there, and Nigel French who wrote that really great book. on InDesign typography recently.

Anne-Marie: Oh right that’s a fantastic book.

David: And I’ll be there, it’s going to be great. Anne-Marie couldn’t come this time.

Anne-Marie: [crying] I’m so sorry.

David: We’ll have her at another show. But it’s going to be fun, so if you can join us in London, if you’re anywhere in Europe, come on over to the InDesign Conference in London. That’s the June 27, 28, 29. Also Monday the 26th Branislav and Sandee Cohen are going to be doing a special creative suite day with all kinds of creative suite stuff.

Anne-Marie: I took a look at all the seminars on in London. They do look very interesting and like you said, quite different from all the ones in Chicago. And also people can pay for certain days right?

David: That’s right.

Anne-Marie: So they’re like stand alone mini-conferences.

David: Exactly, each day is like it’s own little mini-conference. So people can go to one two or three days, or four days if you come to the CS day. You can find out more information about that at theInDesignConference.com. We’ll also have a link from our site, so that’s easy. Also, Stockholm the beginning of October, October third and fourth in Stockholm we’re going to be having a great show there which is going to be half English half Swedish so that’ll be interesting.

Anne-Marie: Yah, yah yah, thee text boxes are gut…

[Laughter]

David: Exactly, it’ll be great. And then the end of October or maybe the beginning of November will be in Seattle, that’ll be the show. Each of these shows is different, they’re all slightly different so in some ways you get more information the more you come to these shows.

Anne-Marie: So when we’re in Seattle, if we go to the Seattle show do we have to dress like we’re all in a grunge band or something?

David: Oh yeah, yeah, and you’ve got to drink a lot of coffee.

Anne-Marie: That’s required right?

David: Required. And you have to eat gooey duck while you’re here.

Anne-Marie: What?

David: Do you know about gooey duck?

Anne-Marie: No.

David: Gooey duck is a regional favorite…

Anne-Marie: Graphical User Interface duck?

[Laughter]

David: That’s right, that right, the gooey…

[Laughter]

David:…The GUI graphical user interface was invented here because of the gooey duck.

Anne-Marie: Ah.

David: Well, we’ll have to have a link in our show notes about gooey duck as well. O.K..

Anne-Marie: I think I went out with him.

[Laughter]

David: Mr. Gooey Duck. It’s like a giant clam, a huge giant clam.

Anne-Marie: I did, I did go out with him in College, yeah.

David: Oh right…?

Anne-Marie: Giant clam guy!

[Laughter]

David: We need to talk about InDesign now! InDesign!

Anne-Marie: Alright…

David: Let’s focus, focus here!

Anne-Marie: Alright, here’s the thing: We got this email from a loyal listener, David Fickelstein, who says that he’s having an issue with the auto-numbering in InDesign.

David: Yeah?

Anne-Marie: He makes a list that needs to be auto-numbered, he selects the auto-numbering icon in the control palette, which you see when it’s in paragraph mode, or you can choose it from the paragraph palette menu. And it numbers them fine but then let’s say it’s a list from one to six, and after point number four he needs to add another paragraph with more information about point number four.

Of course, InDesign will helpfully re-number that paragraph five and re-number the following ones. He doesn’t want that paragraph numbered so he turns off auto-numbering for that paragraph and the ones following it start over at one.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: So he said why? This is driving me crazy. So we replied, well you just click in the second part of the list that mistakenly starts at one and say go to the options for auto-numbering and say start at number four, or number five in this case.

David: and you go to the numbering options either in the flyout menu, you can choose bullets and numbering, but the really fast way to do it is option or alt click on the numbered list icon in the control palette.

Anne-Marie: Yes.

David: You know, lots of those icons in the control palette, if you option or alt click on them they give you more options so in that case it brings up the bullets and numbering options dialog box so…

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: And in there you can say what number you want it to start at.

Anne-Marie: And the problem though is that he said for many of his numbered paragraphs he wants to have sub paragraphs that aren’t numbered underneath, so he would have to select, he would have to restart the list every time he wants a number to appear with a manual number, and if he ever had the audacity to want to add another number earlier in the list, he’d have to start all over again.

_David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: Right? To re-number everything in increments of one or more, and this can’t be how it really works.

David: It can’t be, I mean how could it possibly be this crazy?

Anne-Marie: Right, right. Because we know that Word can handle this fairly well and so you would think that InDesign can handle it even better but…

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: what is the horrible truth David?

[Laughter]

David: The horrible truth is that this feature, really… I wouldn’t go so far as to say it sucks, but it is rudimentary, this is a really immature version, I would say this is numbering 1.0 as it were. And so the unfortunate truth is yes, this is how it works, there is no special secret other than, I’m sorry you’re in for a lot of work if you want to do it in InDesign.

Anne-Marie: Exactly, and the other thing that people always bring up about this feature — that they’re positive that they’re doing something wrong but actually unfortunately that is the way it works — is that they cannot get the ones and the 10’s and the 100’s in their numbered list to line up…

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: …correctly. Like usually, if you’re doing something from one to 20 you want numbers one through nine to be indented a little bit to the right so that they line up with the one from eleven and so on.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: Did you follow what I just said?

David: More or less.

[Laughter]

Anne-Marie: I think you know what I’m talking about, so they figure where is the place where you, you know, do the indent, or where is the checkbox where I say line up, you know, indent these numbers properly? And it’s just not there. All the numbers come in flush left.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: Regardless of how many digits are in the number.

David: That’s right, it’s very annoying.

Anne-Marie: What you can do is select that text with your type tool after it’s been auto-numbered and also this is true about auto-bullets, and then if you right click on the text selection you get a choice, convert numbering to text.

David: That’s right.

Anne-Marie: So when you choose that then the numbers are still there but now you can select them, you can indent them and you can add tabs, all the kinds of things you can’t really do when they’re auto-numbered or auto-bulleted.

David: Yeah, I think that convert bullets to text or convert numbers to text is a very nice feature and it really gets you out of a lot of messes.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, another one I’ve used it for is when they’re wrapping around, text wrap. Sometimes the auto bullets and auto-numbers don’t wrap correctly and you have to convert them to text to get that to work.

David: Yes, that’s definitely true, because again it’s rudimentary. The numbering and bullets features that are in CS2 that were in previously in the PageMaker plug-in kit/pack that Adobe did, they’re just rudimentary, they really need a lot of work. So you know I think Adobe will get there, but it’s just not as powerful as Microsoft Word, and in fact that’s again one of those things that if you have to do a lot of bullets and numbering and so on, let’s say you’re doing number one, two, three, four and after number two you want a list of four bulleted paragraphs, so you’re nesting bulleted or nesting ABC’s under 123’s and so one, just do it in word. Number those things in word and then bring them back in…

Anne-Marie: Yeah, right.

David: …import them in and then all of those numbers come in. They don’t come in as auto-numbers, they come in and they get converted to regular text. But you know in this case, that’s a good thing.

Anne-Marie: And also that tip about you know converting to text, that is only available as far as I know — maybe you know differently David — by right clicking on the text, or with control clicking if you only have a one button mouse on the Mac. It’s not available from any menu. And I don’t even think you can make a keyboard shortcut out of it.

David: Really? No you must be able to do a keyboard shortcut at least.

[Laughter]

Anne-Marie: Where would you find it then? I mean there’s no product area in edit keyboard shortcut that says contextual menu.

David: Wow, we’re going to have to look for that.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: Maybe there isn’t.

Anne-Marie: Well if somebody knows where it is, if we’re overlooking it, please go to our indesignsecrets.com podcast category and add a comment and let us know.

David: Yes. You do that.

Anne-Marie: That would be good.

David: Let’s do that. O.K., let’s move on, talk about the Ink Manager.

Anne-Marie: Yes. The Ink Manager. Take it away, David!

[Laughter]

David: Wait, wait wait — Me?

[Laughter]

David: The Ink Manager is ah, what about the Ink Manager? The Ink Manager is interesting. I was still looking up in the keyboard shortcuts when you were saying take it away.

[Laughter]

David: I was trying to find the keyboard shortcut for that. So the Ink Manager. The Ink Manager shows up in four places. There’s four different places that this feature shows up. The swatches palette, the print dialog box, the export as PDF, the PDF options dialog, and do you remember the fourth one?

Anne-Marie: Ah, wasn’t it the export to EPS?

David: You’re right…

Anne-Marie: There we go.

David: The export to EPS advanced panel of export to EPS. And if you make changes to the Ink Manager in any one of those places, it is reflected in all of them, they all go to the same ink, manager. So they’re not four different Ink Managers.

And the Ink Manager is interesting because this is where you get to tell InDesign about your inks, what inks you’re using, what inks you want to output. Typically if you’re doing a CMYK job, a four color job you’re going to have four colors in there, but what happens if you add a spot color? Well a spot color is a different ink right? So it’ll show up in the Ink Manager list. The Ink Manager lists out all of the different inks, and it also lets you convert those spot colors to process.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: And there’s two different ways of converting spot colors to process. One is if you want to convert all the spots to process there is just a check box in there that’s called all spots to process and that’s easy- turn all spots to process on and it just does it. But if you only want to convert one or two of your spot colors to process, you simply click in the column to the left of the name of the pantone color, the spot color. Just click in that and the icon changes from a spot color icon to a process color icon. This does not…

Anne-Marie: You know what, I did not know that.

David: Oh yeah, that’s a good one.

Anne-Marie: Ooh a new one for Anne-Marie.

David: Hooray! So that’s the way you can change just one or two individual spot colors, if you don’t want to change all of them. And click on it again and it’ll go back to a spot color of course. So that’s handy. And that does not change…

Anne-Marie: I’m testing it because I don’t believe you.

David: O.K., you go right ahead. If you change that it does not actually change your color definition in the swatches palette. It doesn’t go in and change your color. The changes you make to Ink Manager only change your output, so only when you print or make an EPS or PDF. Basically when you’re outputting the colors it changes them. It changes…

[Laughter]

Anne-Marie: Very good David.

David:…It changes them. So there you go.

Anne-Marie: All right, I can’t get it to work, I’m sorry.

David: You can or cannot?

Anne-Marie: Can you re-explain it? I cannot.

David: Oh. So you’ve got a pantone color, a spot color in the Ink Manager dialog box?

Anne-Marie: No I have them in the swatches palette.

David: Oh, no — let’s go to Ink Manager. Open Ink Manager. In the fly out menu for the swatches palette, you choose Ink Manager.

Anne-Marie: Yes, got that.

David: And open Ink Manager…

Anne-Marie: Oh I see, got it.

David: Then to the left…

[Laughter]

David:… then to the left of the name in the Ink Manager, you click on that little icon and it changes from spot to process.

Anne-Marie: Oh, I thought you said swatches palette.

David: I may have said swatches palette, if I did I apologize profusely. We’re supposed to be talking about the Ink Manager…

Anne-Marie: Sorry.

David: Not the swatches palette. No I’m sorry.

Anne-Marie: I’ll go back to my coffee. All right.

David: O.K… So, let’s see…

[Laughter]

David:… What else does the Ink Manager do? Do you want to talk about ink aliasing for a moment?

Anne-Marie: Yes, ink aliasing is fantastic. I was working on a job where I had all the Illustrator graphics that my freelancer sent me and they were colored with a certain Pantone color, but she had forgotten to change some of the elements in these from the old Pantone to the new one that we had decided on.

So, instead of having to open up each individual Illustrator document and change them manually I just used the Ink Manager alias command. And so I said wherever it says 286 I want you to alias it to 285, because Pantone 285 is our new spot color. And so when you print out separations you see that everything that was on the 286 plate, the mistaken ones, that ink gets put on the 285 plate.

It’s also great for if you just want to temporarily hide an ink, for example you can alias it to a white spot color that you create and when you alias it the ink sort of drops out. And I’ve used this before with teacher editions for text books, so you can hide the teacher comments when you do output to PDF for printing.

David: The ink aliasing is brilliant, the idea that you can alias one spot color to another is just amazing. In fact you can even alias to a process color, you can say alias a Pantone color, just make it show up on the pantone plate.

But what’s really amazing to me about ink aliasing is that it’s just not colors that you specify in InDesign, it’s colors that are in imported EPS and PDF images as well. So you can import an EPS or PDF lets say from Illustrator that has a particular spot color and you say, oh you know I know I told them to use that spot color but now we’re using that other spot color as Anne-Marie was saying, you alias it in the Ink Manager and then the trick is once you’ve done that then in order to see it, remember when I said the Ink Manager only applies to when you’re exporting or printing, well you can actually preview the effect in InDesign by turning on Overprint Preview.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: And when you turn on overprint preview it will go through and you may also need to turn on high quality display in certain situations, and it will actually show you the aliasing from one color to another so you get a true preview on screen.

Anne-Marie: Yeah I think you would be nice if you have aliased an ink in your document that InDesign would automatically turn on overprint preview. Because it’s quite confusing, you think it doesn’t work, because you’ve aliased a spot green to a spot red and you say O.K., I’m done, you close the Ink Manager dialog box, and nothing has changed in your document, and you can still see all the greens. It’s like, didn’t it work? And you go back and open up the Ink Manager, yes, how come it’s not working? You have to remember to manually go to the viewing menu and turn on overprint preview and then you’d see all those greens turn to reds.

David: Well, I guess that’s true but my feeling is whenever you really want to see what your document is really like you turn on the preview mode and you turn on overprint preview. The overprint preview really shouldn’t be called overprint preview, it should be called make it look like it’s really going to look when I print. That’s what that feature is. And so I guess it doesn’t bother me.

Anne-Marie: I don’t know, I think when you’re in preview it should turn that on automatically, because doesn’t preview mean let me preview it?

David: You know what, Anne-Marie: You and I are not going to make the decision for Adobe on how this feature works, but granted I agree that there is something weird here, and it is going to confuse a lot of people but that’s why we’re telling you.

Anne-Marie: I had heard that overprint preview can slow down the imaging of a document on your monitor…

David: Oh yeah.

Anne-Marie: and that’s why it’s not on by default, is that true?

David: Yes exactly. It does slow things down. If you have a complex document and you’re running on a 286 machine or something. So if you’re running on a slower machine, it will slow you down. If you’ve got a dual processor G5, just turn on overprint preview and leave it on. O.K., we better go on to the Obscure Feature of the Week.

Anne-Marie: All right. So the obscure feature of the week is the Script Label palette. Where is the Script Label palette? You go to your window menu, go down to automation, and choose Script Label which automatically opens up along with scripts. And if you chose scripts you’d see Script Label appear there too, they’re a palette group.

And this by the way is in CS2. Script Label and scripts are also in CS but I don’t think that they’re in an automation flyout, I don’t recall. But you’ll find it. What is the Script Label palette for? Well there are some scripts — and we’ve talked about scripts here and we also talk about them in our blog — that only work if you select an item in your layout and add a Script Label to it, because the Script Label itself is looking for things in your layout based on the label that they have.

For example there is this great script that we’re going to be posting on our blog later for people who use InCopy, so if a designer wants to export all of the frames in their document so the editors can work on it in InCopy, if they choose export all, would export every last dang frame including every folio, every master page item. So there’s this script around that you can use to go to the master page, select the frames you don’t want exported and give them a label of no export for example.

All you do is select any frame and that Script Label is actually a text field. You can do it even if you want to play with it. Select something, click inside the Script Label field and start typing, and you’ll see a label appear. Then when you run the script it again looks to see if there are any frames that need to be labeled and it uses those frames to do whatever that script is supposed to do.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: So David you know of some other ones right?

David: Yeah there’s a number of scripts or plug-ins that make use of this. The Script Label palette basically gives it a name. All it’s doing is giving a name to an object in InDesign.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: And the name as you said you could give any name to any object in InDesign but it’s not going to do anything unless you have a plug-in or a script that’s actually looking for that name.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: So there’s a plug-in developer in New Zealand called Rorohiko and they’ve got a cool, I think it’s a free plug-in called history that basically just tracks who last edited an InDesign document. So you put a frame out on your pasteboard probably and every time somebody opens the document and saves it, it puts a little note in there saying so and so edited it, so it’s really cute.

But the way it knows which frame to write that text into is you put your frame out onto the pasteboard or wherever you want to put it and you use the Script Label palette to give it the name history. You just have to type the name history into it, and then it knows - oh this is the history box and so it knows where to type it in. That’s what it does. It’s just a nice way to give it a name, like you could give it the name Joe. Joe the box, Joe the frame…

[Laughter]

David: and if something is looking for Joe the frame then it knows where to find it.

Anne-Marie: And it’s important to note that you don’t see the label on the text frame or the image frame.

David: That’s right.

Anne-Marie: You only see the label if you select the frame with the selection tool and have the Script Label palette open and then you see the name. You can also select more than one frame at a time and then click once in the Script Label palette, type in your name, and then all those frames get that label.

David: The Script Label palette also has one other item of distinction. It is one of the few palettes in InDesign that has no flyout menu.

Anne-Marie: Hmm.

David: Maybe next week’s obscure feature of the week will talk about all the different palettes that have no flyout menu.

[Laughter]

David: That’s pretty obscure.

Anne-Marie: Good quiz question, you know, InDesign quiz. Which palettes have no flyout menus?

David: Yes.

Anne-Marie: O.K., I’m compiling a list of quiz questions because at some time I’m going to do an InDesign quiz for our website.

David: That’s a good idea.

Anne-Marie: I have another one. What are the two letters of the alphabet that are not single letter shortcuts for stuff from the tools palette?

David: Holy mackerel.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, I know, that’s a good one.

David: That’s a good one.

Anne-Marie: Maybe we’ll have some sort of contest or something.

David: Oh, let’s do a contest. Tune in next time for our contest. We’ll figure out what it is and what we’re going to give people.

Anne-Marie: Yeah yeah.

David: O.K.

Anne-Marie: O.K. Well, that’s it for our show today. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions for InDesign secrets let us know: Visit InDesignSecrets.com at our new blog, where you can type in your comments directly, or you can email us at info@InDesignSecrets.com.

Until we meet again, this is Anne-Marie Concepción 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 021 page.