Podcast 025 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 025 page.
[Intro music]
Male Caller: Yeah, hello InDesign Secrets, I want to talk to that babe, what’s her name Anne-Marie, she’s a spitfire that baby she’s hot she’s hot hot in my opinion… ooh and she’s so brainy too, I love that in a woman. Hey listen love the show, fabulous, fabulous show. Hey why the heck with that align business why the heck don’t those InDesign folks do it like they do in Illustrator. You know you select two things, you click on the thing you want to see you hit the align. Boom it’s there. How come they don’t do that, crazy ahh. ok got to go, keep up the good work. I think you guys are fabulous, love ya.
David Blatner: [laugh] that’s pretty funny, that’s great.
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Thank you.
David: Welcome to InDesign Secrets. I’m David Blatner and I’m here along with my co-host the spitfire Anne-Marie Concepcion.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Welcome, hello everybody.
David: So that’s great, if you want to leave a voicemail we don’t have to play your voicemail on the air. Just let us know whether you want to do that, but if you want to leave a voicemail call 206-888-INDY, I-N-D-Y.
Anne-Marie: That’s right, and just like our caller you can call just to complain about how come InDesign doesn’t work like Illustrator does if you want.
David: That’s right right, and the quick answer for that of course is … because.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, that’s right.
David: There you go. So, coming up on today’s show it’s the mailbag episode. All the topics today are going to be questions that listeners emailed us, and of course our solutions or answers for those sorts of things. Were going to talk about changing the thickness of underlines, looking for user groups in Canada, making dot leaders do you bidding. Also why you might get a disk error when you try and create a custom keyboard shortcut. And the obscure InDesign feature of the week, which actually was not a mailbag issue.
Anne-Marie: No.
David: This is just our own obscure InDesign feature of the week, the View Threshold feature.
Anne-Marie: That’s right, all right so first up is DJ. He emailed us and said he or she was wondering if there’s any way to adjust the thickness of an underline, an underline text in InDesign CS. And yes. In InDesign CS and CS2 you have something called underline options. So you write some text and you make it underlined with the keyboard shortcut, or by clicking the little t with the underscore in the control palette or the character palette. And then you go to the control palette menu when it’s in character mode and choose underline options. And I believe that’s available in the character palette as well. When you, you have to remember to have your cursor blinking in the underlined text or have some of that underlined text selected, otherwise underline options is not going to tell you much.
When you open it up you’ll see that there’s a check box next to underline on and it’s telling you the current weight. Which is in parenthesis, meaning this is an automatic thing that’s happening. And I love how InDesign not just, doesn’t just put up auto like some other programs might, but also tells you what is the current amount that auto is applying. And under the weight you can just, just a regular editable field, type in the weight that you want or use the drop down menu to choose a weight. There’s a handy little preview button that is as usual not turned on by default that you have to turn it on to see the affect of your changes.
David: Yeah, once again why can’t why can they not have a preference of turn on all my preview check boxes.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: This is, this is a long standing soap box issue with me.
Anne-Marie: What is wrong with them.
[Both laugh]
David: Yeah, just turn on all the preview check boxes. Anyway so that’s. Sorry I got excited, I had to throw that in there.
Anne-Marie: All right, so that’s how you adjust it. And don’t forget you can always select that text and make a character style out of it so that you can just apply that character style. And all it would do would be to change the underline weight of the selected text, which is very handy. All right, so that’s the answer to that question. She says also in her PS.
David: Oh, and here’s one other thing there.
Anne-Marie: all right, all right.
David: And maybe you said it quickly and I spaced out.
Anne-Marie: No I didn’t.
David: But the…Another way to get to the underline options, did you talk about the alternate way of getting to there?
Anne-Marie: No I did not.
David: Alt, Alternate, alt, oh alt and option. If you hold down alt or option when you click on the underline icon in the control palette that takes you right to the underline options dialog box. So that’s.
Anne-Marie: Thank you for reminding me.
David: much better than having to pull stuff out of file menus and so on.
Anne-Marie: That’s true. All right, DJ goes on to ask if, he’s also wondering if there are any InDesign resources like user groups in Manitoba, Canada. Can’t find anything. And actually, interestingly, a new one, the latest InDesign user group was just formed in Toronto, Canada. So I’m not sure how far way Manitoba is from Toronto. I have a sneaking feeling it’s quite far, maybe like the other side of the hemisphere.
David: Yeah actually. I just checked actually if you drive, it looks like to get from Manitoba to Toronto you have to drive through Chicago so they can find you. The shortest distance appears to be, it’s about 22 hour 15 minute drive.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: 2200 kilometers from Manitoba to Toronto, but that’s you know, that’s just one option is to go to Toronto for a user group. Another option would be to check out sort of the virtual user group which is called indesignsecrets.com, and indesignsecrets is the online user group where you can get lots of information about InDesign, and post your questions, and get answers, and all kinds of stuff like that.
Anne-Marie: And even better than that is that one of our posts in indesignsecrets.com that I wrote I think last week is all about the web site called indesignusergroup.com.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: There is an independent designer named Chris Converse, who has a sweet, sweet client by the name of Adobe. And they have hired Chris to design and maintain a web site that conglomerates all off the InDesign user group meetings from around the word into one site. So its got a very usable, clickable map with little butterfly’s showing where all the user groups are. So far there’s over 20, I think it’s like up to 22 now, in the US of course, in Canada, in Australia, and Europe. And you click on your little butterfly and you will be brought to the home page of that InDesign user group within indesignusergroup.com. You can see what they’re meeting about, you can see pictures from the last meeting, and Chris has got a ton of other resources available on that site.
David: Even games, even InDesign games.
Anne-Marie: right.
David: There’s all kind of fun stuff up there. That is absolutely right. That is another great, great resource that I highly recommend that everybody check out, whether you are a member of the a user group or whether you are in Manitoba.
Anne-Marie: right.
David: check out the indesignusergroup.com. Let’s see. We better talk about dot leaders.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: More underline type things, but in this case Vanessa from Australia emailed us and said you know what do I do about dotted underlines. Like I have a name, address, a company name is one. I want to follow each one of those with a dotted underline that goes all the way to the right edge of the box. How do I do that?
The answer is tab leaders. Probably tab, actually there’s all kinds of ways to do this. There’s about five different ways you can do this. One is tab leaders, and so let me talk about that first. You could simply place a tab where you want it, and set a tab stop using the tabs palette. When you click on the tab stop in the tabs palette you can assign a tab leader to that. So you can, you just click on the ruler somewhere in the tabs palette and then type something into the leader field in the tabs palette. That could be a space, or a period, or a period space or whatever you want it to be. Any character really it will work with.
What I usually do there is I do a period and then I select that little stop character, that period character. You can’t format it in the tabs palette, but after you assign it to a tab you can choose that tab character in the paragraph and then you can format it in the paragraph itself. I’ll usually add a bunch of tracking to that one character. Even though it’s one character you can assign its tracking and it’ll change the amount of space between each one of those little dots. I’ll bump it up to you know 300 or 400 tracking and that places more space between them. That way it doesn’t look like a bunch of periods all in a row. That’s what I would do.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. You can just assign a character style to that and then embed that as a nested style.
David: Yes absolutely. That would be a great way to do that. Another way to do this would be to use not a regular tab, but rather a right indent tab. The right indent tab is shift-tab, and shift-tab will actually tab all the way to the right margin, wherever the right margin is. It’ll always go to the right margin, by default it is all the way to the right edge of the frame. You don’t have to set a tab stop there, it’ll always go to that right margin.
The problem with doing that it’s hard to figure out how to get a leader in there because there’s no tab stop. So how do you assign a leader character like all those little dots or whatever character you want to use. How would you assign a leader? Well in CS the answer is you can’t. In CS there’s unfortunately there’s no good way to do that. In CS2 they snuck in a little feature where the right indent tab, the shift tab, will pick up the dot leader, or pick up the leader character from the last tab stop you have in the tab palette. Even if you have no tabs, if your only using the shift-tab, the right indent tab, just throw in a tab stop somewhere in the paragraph and set a leader to that. Then the right indent tab will pick up the leader from that and use that character instead. It’s sort of a sneaky, back door way of adding a leader to a right indent tab.
Anne-Marie: that’s right. Well thank you very much.
David: Can I throw out one other way to do this?
Anne-Marie: No.
David: No, Dang.
Anne-Marie: all right go ahead.
David: One, another way to do this is instead of using the leader character is you can simply select the character itself and use the custom underline thing that Anne-Marie was just talking about. Just select the tab, remember a tab character is an actual character, so you can select that character in the text flow and then alt or option click on the underscore icon and give it an underline. You can give it any underline you want. It could be wavy, it could be dotted.
But remember, a tab character is an actual character, and so you can select that character in the text flow and then Alt or Option-click on the underscore icon and give it an underline! And then you can give it any underline you want–it could be wavy, it could be dotted–the choice is yours. So that is a clever way to do those underscores as well, and give a little bit more flair to your leader characters. Because you’re not really using a leader character, you’re using a real line that reaches the entire width of that tab character.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: And there’s other ways, too. Sometimes I find it’s often easier just to embed, to anchor a rule, a line. Just draw a line with the Line tool, draw a line, make it as long as you want it, and then cut it with the Selection tool, paste it into place with the Type tool, and there! There you go! You’ve got a rule after your text. Now, in that case, you cannot create a character style from it, so that’s kind of a hassle, but it’s another way you can do it.
Anne-Marie: Okay.
David: Okay.
Anne-Marie: These are all good.
David: I’m done [laughter]. There you go.
Anne-Marie: all right. I think you should sit back and take a sip of your coffee.
David: I think I’ll do that. More coffee!
Anne-Marie: Maybe no more coffee. [laughs]
David: Right. The decaf.
Anne-Marie: That was amazing. Right. Let’s go on. We have an interesting email that came in from Kevin Fagin–love that name–
David: [laughs] Thank you, Kevin.
Anne-Marie: Yes. And he had a question, but first I want to mention that in his email he said that he just discovered our podcast, And I want to give a special shout-out to him, because, listen to this. He discovered our site in the podcasts. He downloaded all 24 podcasts that we’ve done so far–this is number 25–and he listened to them all in a day. In a day!
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: I couldn’t believe it! And I wrote him back, and I said, “How did you do that?” And he wrote me back this morning saying–it was kind of funny–he was taking a shower and now in his head was the theme music for the podcast.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: [sings "bum, ba da da, da, bum ..."] When he starts the car, or in the shower.
David: Yeah, you listen to 24 of those you never know what’s going to happen in your head.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: He was also very flattering; he said that after listening to them all he wants to “Nominate us both for the Best Thing Since God Created the Sun Award.”
David: [laughs] Forget sliced bread! This is–
Anne-Marie: Thank you so much, Kevin.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Right. So his thing was, he was listening to podcast 3, at sometime like 1:00 in the morning, and we were talking about creating custom sets for your custom keyboard short cuts. You can go to Edit Keyboard Shortcuts. And we said don’t edit the default set; create a new set based on it. Save that set, name it “Anne-Marie” or “David” or “Kevin” and then go ahead and customize your keyboard shortcuts that way; it’s easy to go back to the default. And he said when he tried to save a custom set with his name “Kevin” he got an error in Windows: “Can’t create a file for this set kevin.indk. A disk error occurred.” And why would that be? And I’ve seen this a few times before. I’ve only seen it on Windows, though it might happen on a Mac–
David: Yeah, it does. I’ve had this problem on a Mac too.
Anne-Marie: On a Mac, too–It’s because both XP and OS X are multi-user systems. And there are two kinds of user accounts–there’s an admin account, and there’s a regular limited user account. By default, the first account that you have after you install the OS or upgrade, you’re in an admin account, but in a lot of companies, the IT department will put everybody on restricted user accounts. It makes their job a lot easier; with the restricted user account, you cannot write files outside of your little home directory files, you can’t install programs or things like that. And when you’re on that kind of account and you create a custom keyboard set, InDesign is trying is trying to write that file to the InDesign program folder, I suppose. But on a Mac, it’s written to the Library folder, so I don’t see why that would count under a restricted account on a Mac. But anyway–
David: You want to know why?
Anne-Marie: Yes, I do.
David: Permissions problems. They’re the old permissions problems. I’ve had this happen a number of times on Mac OS X machines; you get permissions problems because it just seems to be a problem on the Mac, and all of a sudden you can’t write stuff. I couldn’t write the keyboard shortcuts, I couldn’t write–what was the other stuff? There’s other stuff that it’s tried to write to disk and it would just freak out, and it was very frustrating, and–
Anne-Marie: So if you did Disk Utility Repair Permissions, did that fix it?
David: You know, that didn’t even fix it. I don’t even remember what I ended up doing. I had to go in with File Info and change the ownership of the directories, and–
Anne-Marie: Eeesh.
David: It was horrible. Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Well, Kevin, anyway, I think you’re answer’s a lot simpler, and it’s just that you’re on a user account. You need to log off and log on as the admin account for that computer, or get your IT people to do it. Once you’re logged on as an admin user, you can open up InDesign and create your custom keyboard shortcuts, save it, and then log out and log back in as your regular Kevin account, and then you’ll see that appear as a choice in InDesign. Just like you see right now, Pagemaker shortcuts, Quark shortcuts, you’ll see your custom keyboard shortcuts, so you can use it but you just can’t edit it. So that is the good and bad part of it.
David: Personally, I think it’s a flaw in InDesign.
Anne-Marie: I agree.
David: I don’t think InDesign should worry about that kind of thing. So Adobe folks, if you’re listening, fix it, please.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: So, let’s move on. Our Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week! Eeek-eek-eek-eek.
Anne-Marie: Eek.
[laughter]
David: View Threshold. Where is View Threshold?
Anne-Marie: Where is the Threshold and where can I view it?
David: Exactly. I think it’s like a wedding, you’re carrying someone across the Threshold–
[laughter]
David: –And you want to view the Threshold first. Isn’t that what it’s about?
Anne-Marie: Yes. All right, well that’s it for our show today…
David: [laughs] No, no, no. Wait. Hold on. View Threshold, it’s about guides, it’s all about guides. The View Threshold shows up guides. So for example, if you select a guide on your page, you pull a guide out of one of the rulers and then select it on your page, and then Right-click on it or Control-click if you have a one-button Mac mouse, then choose “Ruler Guides, ” you are controlling the look and feel of this, the look and behavior, I should say–
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: –Of this ruler guide, of one or more ruler guides. And the two options in the Ruler Guides dialog box here are “Color” and “View Threshold.” Color is easy; it’s just simply what color do you want to assign to this, what color do you want this guide to be. View Threshold is the tricky obscure part. And View Threshold has to do with “when is this guide visible?” When is this guide visible? And if you set this to, let’s say, 100%, that means that this guide will only be visible on your screen when you’re at 100% or closer. Okay? You’ll see it at 200%, you’ll see it at 4000%, but if you go back to 95%, it’s gone, it’s disappeared.
Anne-Marie: Right. And the point is, you’re working on a spread, and you have a ton or ruler guides all over the place. If you’re zoomed out to 50% or something, or 10%, or 15%, the whole thing would be a mess of guides. You could barely see any of your text frames or objects. So at some point you probably want the guides to disappear so that you can see the content of the page, and that’s what the View Threshold is. By default, it’s set at 5%, meaning that they would basically never disappear, because that’s the lowest that you can go, is 5%. So if you have too many guides and they’re obscuring your view, you want to select those guides and change the View Threshold to something higher, like maybe 50% or 75%.
David: Right. And if you’re going to create a bunch of guides and you want to set the Threshold for all of them, set it once to begin with, just change the default way that guides are set up, by choosing “Ruler Guides” out of the Layout menu; if you choose Layout Menu, Ruler Guides, you can set the default color and the default View Threshold for your guides, and then drag a bunch of guides on, and they’ll all be set to that. And–
Anne-Marie: There is one other place–
David: Go ahead.
Anne-Marie: I was going to say, that other place–but this is about baseline grids, is that what you were going to say?
David: Yeah, yeah. Baseline grids.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, if you’re a Baseline Grid kind of person–and we all know how I feel about Baseline Grids–
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: But if you’re a Baseline Grid kind of person, when you turn on under the View menu, Show Baseline Grid, that’s a heck of a lot of guides that you’re seeing. By default, Baseline Grids View Threshold is set to 75%, so that if you’re zoomed at anything over 75%, like at 100%, you’re not going to see the Baseline Grid. And we’ve gotten emails, I think, David, from people saying, “I turned on Baseline Grid, but I can’t see it, ” all right?
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: The reason is you need to zoom in a bit. You can see that setting, it’s in Preferences, under Grids. The View Threshold is set at 75% just for the Baseline Grid, not for the Document Grid. And if you want to change that View Threshold, this is where you would do it.
David: Yeah, this freaked out a lot of people. This freaked out me for a long time. I kept turning on the Baseline Grid and nothing would happen, and I would turn it off again, and turn it back on, and nothing would happen. I’m like, “Where’s my Baseline Grid?” And then it finally, suddenly hit, “Oh, that’s right, I’m zoomed out.”
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: So I can’t see the grid.
Anne-Marie: View Threshold, no longer obscure!
David: No longer! Tick that one off! No longer in fear of View Threshold. So anyway, that’s it for our show today. Before we sign off, we do want to urge you to sign up for the InDesign Secrets mail list. Just go to indesignsecrets.com, click on our mail list link on the site, enter your email address, and–we’re not going to share that with anybody, we don’t give that away or sell it or anything. That’s just for our announcements for you. We send out emails when the podcasts go out, we sometimes throw out extra tips in those, et cetera. Once you’re on the lists, that’ll be great, you’ll hear all about our stuff in our newsletter.
Anne-Marie: all right, thanks! Well, people, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for InDesignSecrets, let us know. Leave your voice mail and comments on our listener comment line. That’s open 24/7, 206-888-INDY, or 206-888-4639, or visit indesignsecrets.com, or email us at info@indesignsecrets.com. And until we meet again, this is Anne-Marie Concepcion 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 025 page.