Podcast 023 Transcript

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 023 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 CS/CS2 Breakthroughs. It’s a book of over 200 of your least favorite aggravations in InDesign, all these things that make you crazy, and then the solutions for those problems.

Anne-Marie: We were just going to list out all the aggravations, but we thought people might buy it more if we also put in the solutions to them.

David: Yeah, I don’t know why, but for some reason people want solutions. And that’s really what this podcast is all about as well, giving people solutions, and also the InDesignSecrets.com blog and downloads and all of that. It’s all about giving you solutions to the problems that you face in InDesign all the time. So that’s good. So you can find out more about us and all of that at InDesignSecrets.com.

Anne-Marie: And don’t forget, everybody, we now have our own comment line for the podcast, and we would love to hear your comments or questions, your praise, your requested topics that you want us to cover.

David: Praise, did you mention praise?

Anne-Marie: Praise. Yes, lots of praise, uh-huh. Call 206 — that’s, I guess, plus 1, ’cause it’s a U.S. call, 206-888-INDY, I-N-D-Y (or 4639), and just leave a message.

David: Coming up on our show today, we’re going to be covering the answer to last week’s puzzler, quizzler, whatever-you-want-to-call-it contest, and we’re also going to be talking about our new plug-in that came out — free plug-in! — called, surprisingly enough, InDesign Secrets, the InDesign Secrets plug-in. We’re going to discuss the LAB color issue, which we cut off in the middle of the last episode, LAB color for spot colors dealy-bopper. And also, there’s a very cool script you’re going to be able to download, a free script you can download and use — we’ll talk about that, and the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week is?

Anne-Marie: The Position Tool.

David: The Position Tool. Position Tool? What’s that.

Anne-Marie: Yes. Assume-the-Position Tool.

David: [laughs] Now, now! Now, now.

Anne-Marie: All right.

David: Okay, so.

Anne-Marie: Okay, so the contest: last episode we announced the first in a long series of InDesign Secrets contests, just a quiz question, and we said the first person to post the answer as a comment in the show notes at InDesignSecrets.com would win the prize. And so, the question was: Which three letters of the alphabet are NOT used as single-letter keyboard shortcuts for things in the Tools Palette? Right? Just about every letter in the American alphabet is used except for three. So we posted that, and of course, I think three hours later, Jean-Claude Tremblay from Canada posted the answer, and the answer is: Q, U, and Y.

David: Indeed.

Anne-Marie: So, congratulations, Jean-Claude, and that’s very good, and we had a nice little discussion about that later, so check out the comments to Podcast Episode 22 to see the discussion about the contest and the various answers. And for his trouble, and his intelligence, Jean-Claude gets a copy of “InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs, ” signed by both David and I, and that will be coming to you shortly, Jean-Claude. Thank you very much. Jean-Claude also posted some great comments in other blog entries, have you noticed?

David: Yes.

Anne-Marie: He’s all over that site.

David: He is. It’s great. Jean-Claude is very, very helpful. He was also an attendee at the Chicago InDesign Conference, and he’s just (an) all-around great guy.

Anne-Marie: Oh, you got to meet him?

David: I did, I did. It was great. So let’s see; the InDesign Tips plug-in, we should mention. There’s a new plug-in — the “New Plug-In In Town”! — called InDesign Secrets, and you can get that at InDesignSecrets.com. Just click on the “Plug-Ins and Scripts” area, and you can download it from there. There’s a Mac version and a Windows version. It’s free. And what does it give you? It gives you a free tip-of-the-day, every time you launch InDesign, you get a new tip that shows up and gives you a little bit more information about InDesign. So if you like the tips in the podcast, you’ll love the tips in the plug-in. So go ahead and get a copy of that. That was done in association with Extra Software, in Germany, so thank you, aextra Software, for doing that. They’ve got all sorts of other plug-ins, too, that they’re coming out with. That was fun. It’s basically a promo, you know, it’s free, but it’s sort of promo-ware; we call it promo-ware because it gives us a little promotion, and it gives aextra Software a little promotion, and so on.

Anne-Marie: Just a little.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: And isn’t there a tip for the tip?

David: Oh, you know, there is a tip. We’ll throw in a secret tip that only you podcast listeners will know. You know, when you’re, you can scroll through the tips. If you want more than one tip per day, you could click on one, and then there’s a little button that says “Next Tip, ” and it will give you the next tip, and you can scroll through a few of those. But if you scroll through one, you go to the next one and you want to go back, how do you get back to the previous one? Hold down the “Option” or the “Alt” key. The “Option” or “Alt” key turns the “Next Tip” button into the “Previous Tip” button, and then you can go backwards. So that’s good.

Anne-Marie: Oooh. Very cool.

David: Now, the other cool thing about the InDesign Secrets plug-in is that it has an infinite number of tips. [laughs] That is to say, it starts off with just a few tips, but it downloads new tips off the Internet. So, every so often it will check, and it will download new tips, and so you’ll keep getting more and more tips as time goes on.

Anne-Marie: Just, like, random tips, from anybody’s website?

David: No, no. It takes it from the database that we have, that, we’ve written up a bunch of tips and it just pulls those down.

Anne-Marie: Oh, I see. I thought maybe it just ripped off everybody’s InDesign tips.

David: No. No, no.

Anne-Marie: Next plug-in.

David: That’s right.

Anne-Marie: [laughs]

David: All right.

Anne-Marie: All right.

David: So that’s that one. What else should we talk about? Oh! Lab color!

Anne-Marie: We’re going — yes, let’s continue talking, and finish up our talk about LAB color. Last episode, LAB color — Luminance A/B Channel — was the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week, and we were discussing about how, when you create a new color swatch, you have the choice of creating it as CMYK, RGB, or LAB, and why would anybody ever use LAB? And so we went back and forth on various reasons why LAB might be useful; but there was one feature that we didn’t quite get to, and that was the issue of Pantone colors and LAB colors, and you’ll run into that when you look at the Ink Manager, and you can get to the Ink Manager in various places in InDesign, like the Swatches Palette menu.

If you choose Ink Manager, there’s two buttons at the bottom of the dialogue box. One of them is “All Spots to Process” and the second one is “Use Standard LAB Values For Spots”. So what does that mean? Well, InDesign normally uses, you know, CMYK lookup table for the spot colors, I believe supplied to them by Pantone or somebody like that. But in Photoshop, when you spec a spot color plate in Photoshop, it uses LAB colors to define how those spot colors are translated. When you convert spot colors to process from Photoshop — like if you spec a spot color, then you printed it out from Photoshop, or you print it to a composite printer that can’t do spot color plates, obviously, it’s going to convert to CMYK, Photoshop will use the LAB values to define what the CMYK values of that spot color will be; but InDesign doesn’t. InDesign uses a different lookup table.

And so you might have an InDesign document in which you’ve placed a Photoshop file with a spot color plate, and you’re using that same spot color, created in InDesign, elsewhere, and when you print it out to CMYK, the two spots will convert to CMYK differently, so they look different. So you would turn on “Use Standard Lab Values For Spots” if you want your spot colors to match the ones coming from Photoshop when you are converting to CMYK. So that’s about it.

David: And this is, and the key here is that this only applies when the spot color is being converted to process colors or to.

Anne-Marie: That’s right.

David: So if you’re printing to, like, a color laser printer, there’s no spot color ink in a color laser printer, of course, and so that laser printer has to convert it into CMYK, right? So, in that case, you may be printing even with a spot color out of InDesign, but the printer needs to know, “Well, how do you want me to, what do you want me to do with this spot color? I need to do something with it.”

Anne-Marie: Right. That’s true.

David: So, in general, if you’re going to be converting Pantone colors to process colors, either in InDesign, using the Ink Manager, or on a printer — let’s say, a color laser printer — then you can tell it how to do that conversion — do you want the CMYK or use LAB values? And you really get different values, either one, whether that check box is turned on or off. And you can test it.

Anne-Marie: You can test it for yourself.

David: Yeah. Just turn on “Separations Preview” and convert the Pantone to process, and turn that check box on or off, and you’ll actually see, in “Separations Preview, ” you’ll see the difference.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: They’re typically not huge differences, but they are significant, so you do need to pay attention to that.

Anne-Marie: Okay.

David: Okay. Oh, so this script! Should we mention the script?

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: The script, this is an ongoing issue with InDesign, an ongoing frustration of mine, certainly, and of many people. When you’re typing in — well, let’s compare it to QuarkXpress. When you’re in QuarkXpress and you’ve got a page, and you’re typing in QuarkXpress, or you’re editing text, and the frame you’re in — the text box you’re in, in QuarkXpress — there’s too much text to fit into it, you can set it up so it’ll automatically add a new page, and then link it to that page, and then you keep typing. Right? That’s the whole automatic typing [Anne-Marie Concepción interrupts]

Anne-Marie: Right, because in QuarkXpress you’re almost always using a master page text frame.

David: That’s right.

Anne-Marie: So as you get to the end of a page, using the master page text frame, and you need to write more, it just creates another page. Like in Microsoft Word, for example. You know, you get to the end of a page and type more, it adds another page. But InDesign doesn’t do that.

David: It doesn’t, and that’s crazy-making for a lot of people who use InDesign as their main text-entry tool, which, there’s a surprising number of us. So what do you do? Well, there’s a couple of plug-ins out there that let you add pages automatically, one from Em Software, one from — was it 65-Bit that does.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, it’s 65-Bit.

David: …that does a plug-in.

Anne-Marie: It’s called EasyFlow. EasyFlow CS, I think it’s called.

David: But there’s another option, and that’s to use a script. And Peter Kahrel did this script, and he is going to let us just upload it for free. So it’s on our site, by the time you read this, go to our site and in the show notes and you’ll see a link to the Plug-Ins page, and you can just download this little script — it’s a tiny little script. It’s a Javascript, so it works on both Mac and Windows, and there’s instructions on the site if you need to know how to install scripts.

Anne-Marie: But what exactly does it do, though?

David: But this script, literally, simply adds a new page, puts a text frame on that page, and links it to the text frame that you’re currently in. So it’s very convenient.

Anne-Marie: Cooool.

David: It’s very cool. So you’re typing away in your frame, and you type too much, you just double-click on the script and it adds a new page, puts a frame there, links it to it, and you can just keep typing.

Anne-Marie: Continue on your merry way.

David: Easy. It’s very nice.

Anne-Marie: And since you can assign a keyboard shortcut to scripts … right? From Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts?

David: That’s right.

Anne-Marie: Assign keyboard shortcuts to scripts. So I’m typing, and I’m at the end of the page, instead of getting it overset I would just press my keyboard shortcut and continue typing on the new page.

David: Yeah, it’s nice. And it’s not just for if you’re typing. I mean, maybe just laying out; you know, if you have a long document, and you import the Word document, and you only import onto one page, but now you want to import the next page of it, you could do the same thing. Normally the workflow is: you switch to the selection tool, you click on the outport of the frame, you create a new page, you click on the new page — so it’s basically three or four steps, right, just to add that new page.

Anne-Marie: Right. Yeah.

David: With this, you simply place the cursor in the text frame, run the script, and it does all that for you. So it’s very convenient.

Anne-Marie: Very cool.

David: I like it. It’s cute, it’s small. So anyway, that’s up there, and you’ll see it work fine.

Anne-Marie: It’s a very useful script, and that’s one of the best reasons to work with scripts, is to fix those little annoyances and … nice and easy, nice and smooth.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: I liked it. Thank you very much, Peter — is that his name?

David: Yes. Great, thank you.

Anne-Marie: All right. Our Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week-eek-eek is the Position Tool. The Position Tool — where is the Position Tool? If you’ll notice, fellow InDesign-ers, under the Direct Selection Tool — that’s the hollow arrow tool (that’s what pessimists call it).

David: The hollow arrow tool. [laughs]

Anne-Marie: Yeah. Optimists call it the “white arrow tool”.

David: [laughs] I like that.

Anne-Marie: Underneath the Direct Selection Tool there is a little right-pointing triangle, indicating there’s another tool hiding here, so if you press and hold you’ll see it appear. It’s the Position Tool, and it was added in CS2. The keyboard shortcut …

David: Basically, it came, originally, from the PageMaker plug-in pack.

Anne-Marie: That’s right.

David: That package that they did. They figured, “Well, we already have a tool from that plug-in package, why not just sneak it into CS2?”

Anne-Marie: Right. “So we’ll just stick it all in there.” Right. The Position Tool keyboard shortcut is Shift-A (the Direct Selection is A). So when you choose it, you see a little icon of a hand — which I call Mr. Spanky — [David laughs] on top of, like, a little cropping thing; and it’s essentially the same as the cropping tool in PageMaker. I, personally, never used the cropping tool in PageMaker, so I didn’t know what that means.

But what it means is, it’s a combination of the Direct Selection Tool and the Selection Tool that you can use with images. So it is pretty convenient. If you’ve ever been working with an image, and you are fiddling around with scaling just the image, and then cropping just the frame, and then maybe rescaling just the image, you’re constantly having to switch back and forth between the Selection Tool and the Direct Selection Tool. Instead, if you choose the Position Tool, when your cursor is on top of the picture, it looks like the hand tool, like the Direct Selection Tool would look, and so you can move the image around within the frame, you see the ghosted back portion of the image, you can scale it by dragging on a corner of the bounding box for the image. But when your cursor is over the frame of that image, it turns into, it looks like, the cursor looks like the Selection Tool. And you can click to select the frame, and then drag the handles of the frame to crop it. So it’s two tools in one.

David: It is, and actually, it’s not just for PageMaker users.

Anne-Marie: Right. Of course not.

David: This is almost identical to the way the Content Tool works in QuarkXpress.

Anne-Marie: That’s true.

David: So if you have a picture inside a box in Xpress, you click on the middle part to move the picture, and on the frame itself to move the frame, to crop it differently. So it works exactly the same as that, pretty much. So that’s the Position Tool, Shift-A.

Anne-Marie: Right. But, you know, what’s interesting also is that you get something if you double-click on it. If you double-click the Position Tool you get a little dialogue box that lets you set what happens with the masked portion of the image. You know when you drag an image around in a frame and some of it is cropped out? With the Direct Selection Tool, if you press and hold for a second, you’ll see like a ghosted back version of the image, the part that’s being cropped out, to help you decide exactly how to crop or position the image?

David: Mm-hmm.

Anne-Marie: If you double-click on the Position Tool, you’ll see that, it’s going to show you the masked portion of the image after a short delay; and that’s a drop-down menu, you can change it to standard delay, long delay, never, or no delay, which I thought was kind of interesting.

David: Oh, it’s very cool, because oftentimes you want to see that ghost. A lot of people want to see that ghosted image all the time — that was actually an option in QuarkXpress, where this came from. In QuarkXpress you could set it.

Anne-Marie: In QuarkXpress?!

David: Well yeah. Originally they had this in QuarkXpress,

Anne-Marie: I didn’t know that!

David: … where you could actually control the masked-out area — I don’t know what they call it, “live something-or-other”.

Anne-Marie: Wait a minute! You can see a preview of the image that’s outside the crop area in Quark?

David: Well, actually, yes you — well, no, not outside the crop area, it’s sort of inside the crop area. All right, so it’s a little bit different than the one that’s in QuarkXpress.

Anne-Marie: Okay.

[Laughter]

David: But it’s similar to the — in QuarkXpress there was a Preference, and it was, by default it was three-quarters of a second or something, and you could set it to two seconds, or.1 seconds or whatever. This basically gives you the same sort of functionality, but instead of giving you, you know, how many decimal point-seconds you have, [Laughter] it just sort of gives you, you know, after a short delay or no delay — no delay is typically what I like using because I almost always want to see the whole image, all of it, takes off a little calculation time.

Anne-Marie: I wish they’d have that option if you just double-clicked on the Direct Selection Tool, though. I mean, if you double-click on the Direct Selection tool it just, you know, gives you the “Move” dialogue box.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: Anyway, that’s the Position Tool. Kind of useful; even if you’ve never used PageMaker you should give it a shot, especially if you’re spending a long time manipulating the images in a layout.

David: Yeah. It’s obscure even though it’s right in front of your face. It’s hiding under that hollow, pale… [laughs]

Anne-Marie: The Pessimistic Selection Tool.

David: … That Pale Selection Tool.

[Laughter]

Anne-Marie: Yes.

David: Okay, so that’s it for our show today, but before we sign off we want to urge you to sign up for the InDesign Secrets mail list. It’s easy: just go to InDesignSecrets.com and click the “Our Mail List” link on the site, and just fill out the, you know, basically give us the email address, your email address, and that adds you to our official Announcements page, Announcements email. Also, sometimes in those emails we’re going to be sending you some extra tips and tricks and things that don’t necessarily show up in the podcast or on the blog. So there’s little extras that show up there, oftentimes time-sensitive information, etc. So go ahead and sign up for our mail list there and, you know, we’re not going to give your email address to anybody else. The emails will only come from us.

Anne-Marie: Yup.

David: Just to be clear about that — it’s just for our mail list.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. It’s very useful.

David: It’s very useful.

Anne-Marie: Okay, so that’s it. Now, our show is actually moving to an end for today.

David: [laughs] Finally.

Anne-Marie: All right. If you have any questions or comments or suggestions for us, let us know. Leave your voice mail comment on our listener comment line, open 24/7. That’s 1-206-888-4639 (or INDY), or visit InDesignSecrets.com, or email us at info@indesignsecrets.com. And until we meet again, this is Anne-Marie Concepción and.

David: David Blatner, 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 023 page.