Podcast 026 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 026 page.
[Intro music]
Anne-Marie: Welcome to InDesign Secrets. I’m Anne-Marie Concepcion and I’m here along with my co-host, David Blatner.
David: [Deep voice] Well, hello there.
Anne-Marie: [Laughter] My co-host, David “Mr. InDesign” Blatner, is the…
David: [Deep voice] Well, hello there. [Laughter]
Anne-Marie: All right. That is fine. Very good radio voice!
David: Thank you.
Anne-Marie: He’s everything InDesign–editorial director of the InDesign Conference, editorial hoo-ha at InDesign Magazine… What is your title there?
David: Editorial director. That means something–I don’t know what. I guess I direct something.
Anne-Marie: He’s the co-author of Real World InDesign CS2 with Olav Kvern, as well as my co-author for InDesign Breakthroughs. He’s an all-around nice guy, usually.
David: [Deep voice] Well, hello there. [Laughter]
Anne-Marie: Except when he gets on a tear, like he is now. [Laughter] I run a design studio in Chicago, and I’m an Adobe certified instructor for InDesign and InCopy. In my spare time, I write a tips and tricks e-zine called DesignGeek. You can find links to all these things on our website, InDesignSecrets.com.
Coming up on today’s show, we’ll talk about pleasure of spine alignment–that CS2 feature that lets you align to or from the spine in facing pages documents. We’re also going to have–are you ready for this?–the return of the InDesign quiz contest! The Quizzler, the Puzzler, whatever you want to call it. We had one last month and it was a lot of fun, and we’re going to do it again. Stay tuned for the question, because your correct answer will win you a cool prize. Finally, our obscure InDesign feature of the week eek eek eek …
David: We need an echo effect.
Anne-Marie: Yes. Echo, echo, echo. [Laughter] Let’s add that to our budget.
David: We have a budget for this?! [Laughter]
Anne-Marie:…is Convert to Profile and Assign Profile–two very obscure, but powerful features in InDesign. All right, Mr. Chiropractor, David Blatner, talk about aligning to spine.
David: OK. Everyone stand up in a good posture and align your spine.
Anne-Marie: Do a manipulation to your InDesign document.
David: That’s right. Very good! I like that. The spine alignment has to do with whether your object or text is going to move toward your spine or away from it. Let’s talk about text first.
Anne-Marie: But let’s mention you’ll only have a spine if you’re working with facing pages documents.
David: That is true. If you have a non-facing pages document, you’re spineless.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. So, the spine is where the two pages face each other–that vertical line that you see in the Pages palette.
David: Generally, we call those vertebrate, as in vertebrate versus invertebrate documents. [Laughter]
So, do you want your text to be moving toward it or away from it? This is interesting. They stuck this into CS2, but most people didn’t even notice that it was hiding in there, but if you select some text, say, a paragraph, and you select the Paragraph mode of the Control palette, you’ll find Left, Center Align, Justify, and so on. Way over on the right side of those weird, mysterious icons, there is an Align Towards Spine and Align Away From Spine.
This is useful in certain layouts, where you have a heading and you always want the heading to go on the outside toward the page trim. Or, vice versa, if you want it toward the spine. You can set that up simply either as locally formatted in the Control palette, or set that up in the Paragraph style for aligning toward or away from the spine. It is a pretty cool feature that they snuck in there. Do we need to say anything more about that–other than that it exists?
Anne-Marie: I think that, without this feature, what designers usually do is they’ll create two style sheets–one called Head Left and the other Head Right.
David: Right, right.
Anne-Marie: In this way, all you need to do is say, Head, Away From Spine. Choose that as the paragraph alignment. Then, no matter where you apply that style, InDesign will see should it be left or right and will apply the correct setting.
David: Oh, it is great! They really built in a lot of automation features–ways to automate text formatting in InDesign CS2, so you don’t need to do those things manually anymore. Another thing they added was the ability to make anchored objects that sit outside the text frame. This should be a whole other topic. But, basically, if you have an anchored object inside of a text frame, then you can set that up to flow toward the spine or away from the spine.
Now, we’re not talking about inline objects. Normally, if you have an object, you cut it with the Selection Tool; you paste it with the Type Tool into some text flow. You get an inline object. But, if you select that object–and, we will cover this very quickly for those who are unaware of this–with the Selection Tool, go to Object, Anchored Object, submenu Options. You can also find Anchored Object options in the context menu. Then, you have the choice to change this from an inline object into a custom anchored object.
A custom anchored object gives you a choice of setting this up relative to spine. You can then make the object go toward the spine or away from the spine, depending on how you set up this incredibly arcane, bizarre UI–the Anchored Object option dialog box. Pariah Burke did a really great job of describing this in InDesign Magazine. Sometime last year, he wrote a great article on anchored objects and how to move them away or toward the spine and so on. We also covered that in Real World InDesign as well. But, that is the other place where you can find Away from Spine and Toward Spine.
Anne-Marie: Let’s imagine this. You’re reading a book. There is a main content flow, and then in the outside margins of the book there are headings, like Hanging Headings…
David: Or pictures, or pull-quotes.
Anne-Marie: Right. You want those headings, pictures, or pull-quotes, to always be next to a certain instance of text. As you edit the text, you want that pull-quote to move up and down. You already know that you can do that by assigning it as an anchored object. But, with Align to Spine or Align Away from Spine you can have them flip from being on the left side of the main content flow to the right side of the content flow, if the text moves to the right-hand side of the page.
David: It is really cool.
Anne-Marie: Right-hand side of the spread I mean…
David: Yeah?
Anne-Marie: Yeah!
David: [Laughter] And that is all there is to say about that. Now, your spine has been aligned. We have done our chiropractic duty and should move on to the Quizzler.
Anne-Marie: Yes. The Quizzler. Actually, before we get into that, Let’s talk about a little…
David: A little background…
Anne-Marie: No. Even before the background, we need to talk about the rules and get that out of the way. First the rules. First, no previous winners of the contest can win this one. So, please, do not answer, Jean-Claude! You know that you know everything. [Laughter] Jean-Claude, you are wonderful, but let’s give someone else a chance to win this one.
Also, this is only the second time we’ve done it, and the first time, what we learned is that you might be sleeping when we release this, depending on where you are in the world, and you might not have a chance to listen to this podcast before someone else has already sent in the answer. So, we’ll close off comments to the show notes on our website–that’s how you answer, by posting a comment to the show notes–for 24 hours after this is published. I’ll put a note in the show notes, mentioning that, in case people are trying to comment on it. After 24 hours, we’ll go in and turn the comments back on. The first person to post the correct answer as a comment after 24 hours wins the prize. The prize for this contest. Uh … what is the prize?
David: The prize this week is… [Laughter] a subscription to InDesign Magazine. We are going to give away a one-year subscription to InDesign Magazine, published by CreativePro.com. If you already have a subscription, then… well, let us know, and we’ll figure out something. We may give you all the back issues, and then you can read Pariah’s article about anchored objects! [Laughter]
Anne-Marie: OK. So, that’s it. Those are the rules. Now, some background. Let’s say that you want to create an arrow. You drag out a line, either via the Line Tool or the Pen Tool, and then with that line selected, give it some weight. Go to the Stroke palette, and under the Type dropdown, where you can say the type of line, there is a start and an end dropdown. That is where you choose the arrows. Under the start dropdown–I’m doing it right now–it will start with a circle and end with a triangle arrowhead. On my screen, which, I’m sure, all of you can see out there in radio land, is an arrow, beginning with a circle on the left-hand side, and on the right-hand side is an arrowhead. Let’s suppose I’ve done this 50 times and then my clients tell me the arrows should be pointing the other way.
David: [Screams out]
Anne-Marie: How do you do it? How do you make the arrowheads and circles flip? You could select each individual arrowhead and change the start and end in the stroke palette, but that would be a nightmare. Instead, what you can do is reverse the direction of the path.
David: This is an important point. All paths in InDesign have direction from beginning to end. Even closed paths like a circle has a beginning and an end, inherently, and it has a direction that the path travels. It is an important issue to understand with InDesign and how InDesign functions.
Anne-Marie: Yes. It is a postscript function, which means it’s in Illustrator as well. Which way does the path go?
Anyway, to flip the position of the arrowhead without changing the line itself at all, you need to reverse the path of that line. Now, I think we’ve said this before in an earlier podcast, that the way to reverse the path is, first of all, you have to select it with a Direct Selection Tool, selecting at least one point on that path, in order to reverse it. Once you’ve selected a point with the Direct Selection Tool, then you can you use the Object menu, Paths, and then you can chose Open, Close, or Reverse Path. You can choose to reverse it there. Or, the last icon in the bottom right, in the Pathfinder palette, is also Reverse Path, which changes the direction of the path. You click that icon or choose Reverse Path from the Object menu and reverse this.
Having to use the Direct Selection Tool has always gotten under our skin, because that is not the first impulse, right? You just want to select it with the Selection Tool and reverse the path. Well, we’ve discovered a way to do this. This is very exciting for InDesign geeks.
David: [Laughter]
Anne-Marie: You select the path with the Selection Tool and you can reverse the path. The quiz question is: How. How is this possible? How do you reverse the path with the Selection Tool?
David: I just want to be clear on this: we didn’t discover this. You, Anne-Marie, discovered this incredibly twisted and weird way to reverse the path with the Selection Tool. I’m proud of you. It is amazing.
Anne-Marie: Thank you. It’s not twisted; actually, it’s pretty simple, I don’t want people going crazy about it. We’re thinking about giving out hints, though you guys are pretty smart. I will say it has nothing to do with the InDesign interchange format, paths, or anything crazy like that.
David: [Laughter] You don’t have to install a custom plug-in.
Anne-Marie: Exactly. There’s a way to do it with the Selection Tool, but it involves a couple steps.
David: This arrow thing turns out to be one of the most common reasons you need to reverse a path, but there’s another way this is used. Say you have a word with the letter “O” in it and then you select that word, and then convert it to outlines. You then split the compound… what do they call it? On the Object menu, go to Compound Paths and say Release. So, you release it, because you want to have each letter of the word do a different thing. You want to have separate objects. Well, if you have a word that has the letter “O” in it, then the little circle inside it is actually built with a separate object–there are two ellipses on top of one another. When you release the compound, your O fills in. The little one.
Anne-Marie: The counter.
David: Right, the counter fills in so you just have a black oval on top of a black oval.
One solution to deal with this is to select both ellipses and turn them into a compound path again. So, you choose Object, Compound Paths, and then Make, but the problem with this is that it doesn’t work! It should work, but it doesn’t. The reason it doesn’t is that, somehow when you release the compound paths of the word, the inner oval–the inside counter that should be blank–has a path with the wrong direction.
Sandee Cohen gave a great solution for this a while ago, where you make the compound path, and it doesn’t work, so you release the compound path of the “O” and then make it again. Guess what, it works. Apparently, each time you release the compound path, it seems to reverse the direction of the path. So, that’s one way. But, there’s another way, which is with the Direct Selection Tool or our Quizzler answer: reverse the direction of the paths and suddenly you can see through the “O” again. You get a transparent background in the middle of the “O” again. That’s another reason why you may want to know about reversing direction.
Anne-Marie: Hmmm.
David: It is trippy, but true. [Laughter]
Anne-Marie: Okay, this is the quiz question. If you forgot it after David’s explanation, rewind and listen to it again. So, the question was… what was the question?
David: [Laughter]
Anne-Marie: Select the path with the Selection Tool. How to reverse the path with the Selection Tool.
David: Right. Basically, how to make the Reverse Path option available (that’s usually grayed out) with the Select Tool. OK.
Anne-Marie: All right. The obscure InDesign feature of the week -eek -eek, is: Convert to Profile/Assign Profile.
David: Yes. You can’t really talk about one of these without talking about the other. Unfortunately, you can’t talk about either of these in less than a two-hour discussion. [Laughter] So, buckle your seatbelts.
Anne-Marie: But, we don’t have two hours.
David: I know, I know, we will just go through a quick version of this. First, where are the Convert Profile and Assign to Profile?
Anne-Marie: And what is a profile?
David: Yes, excellent point. I’ll get to that. Let’s see … These commands live under the Edit menu. At the bottom of the Edit menu, you see Color Settings, Assign Profile, and Convert to Profile. Those three are all Color Management issues. Color Management is on all the time, even if you’re not aware of it. Color Management, again, is a huge, hairy topic. We’ll have discussions of Color Management at the InDesign Conference in Seattle in November.
The Assign Profile and Convert to Profile have to do with assigning the RGB and CMYK profiles to your InDesign document. Specifically, assigning the default values to your document. The default RGB and CMYK values refers to the RGB and CMYK values of any object or color that is not tagged otherwise. Say you’ve worked on a photograph in Photoshop and used Adobe RGB (if you don’t know what that is, don’t worry about it right now). You save it and bring that image into InDesign. Well, your image will be tagged with Adobe RGB, so you don’t have to worry about it. This Assign Profile and Convert to Profile have nothing to do with those images.
On the other hand, let’s say you take a shot with a digital camera that doesn’t tag its images with a profile. You bring that in. (Lots of digital cameras don’t tag their images correctly–they might be too big or have the wrong color assigned to them.) When you bring an untagged image, the default RGB is given to it, because InDesign has to give something to it. So, it uses the default RGB, and that may be Adobe RGB, sRGB, or whatever else you set it to. Well, using Assign Profiles lets you assign a particular RGB or CMYK default to your InDesign document. That’s all it does. It says your RGB colors are these RGB, and your CMYK colors are based on this CMYK. That is what Assign Profiles does.
Now, Convert to Profile does something very different. It takes all the colors in my document, for instance, a 100% cyan color in my Swatches palette, and now converts it some other working space. That working space might be newsprint. Well, your 100% cyan is not going to be 100% cyan anymore. It turns into something totally different.
Anne-Marie: Hmm.
David: You can try this out. Open a blank document and select Convert to Profile under the Edit menu. Under the CMYK profile, give it a new profile. Let’s say we’ll set it to newspaper. You’ll see all the colors in the Swatches palette change–your 100% cyan all of the sudden has some magenta and yellow in it. What was 100% magenta now has cyan and yellow in it as well. Basically, it muddies the color. Why does it do that? Because it’s trying to create the same appearance of color, even if that means tweaking the numbers.
This is deep stuff. It is obscure, but it’s important to understand the difference between Assign and Convert. Assign never changes your numbers. It won’t change your numbers. It just changes the meaning of what red or cyan looks like. So your colors on the screen might shift a little bit, but your underlying colors and their numbers don’t change. Convert to Profile does just the opposite. It will try to look the same on screen by tweaking your numbers. But very rarely is that what anybody wants.
Anne-Marie: No, you’re right. I just tried it as I was following along, because this is something I’ve never quite understood. (That was an excellent explanation.) I created a square, filled it in with 100% cyan, and converted to newsprint profile (which, by the way, starts with the name “Kodak” in case anyone else is looking for it). So, Kodak, Newsprint, under the CMYK profiles, and it did get darker and muddier. Then, I opened the Separations Preview palette, turned on Seps, and under Cyan it says 81% and Yellow, 7%.
David: Yep. Just look at the name at the Swatches palette.
Anne-Marie: Oh … wow.
David: See, even the names in the Swatches palette change.
Anne-Marie: My default cyan’s name changed to C81 M0 Y7 K0. Bizarre!
David: It changes because it tries to maximize the look of that color. In Newsprint, it says in order to have the same color, you better add a little bit of yellow and magenta.
Anne-Marie: So, if I’m actually designing a color publication that is going to be in newsprint, should I do this?
David: I would not do that. It’s quite rare that you’d want to use Convert to Profiles in InDesign. There are some instances in which you might, but it’s really rare.
Anne-Marie: You would do that in Photoshop?
David: I would do my conversions in Photoshop. In fact, I think using Assign Profile and Convert to Profile in InDesign is something you’d hardly ever do, but sometimes you might do it. Again, the key here is that the profiles that we’re talking about here in Assign Profiles and Convert to Profile have to do with untagged colors. That means imported images that do not have a color profile tagged to them. Or, it means the colors in your Swatches palette. Those are the main two colors these things refer to.
Let’s suppose you convert an RGB image to CMYK in Photoshop and then you do Save As. In the Save As dialog box, you turn off the embed profile checkbox. (It’s turned on by default.) So, let’s say you turned that off. I always turn it off for CMYK, because CMYK profiles are huge, so it makes my CMYK files much larger than they need to be. Then, import that CMYK image into InDesign. Now, InDesign has no idea what color I mean by those CMYK values, so I have to tell InDesign in Assign Profiles that, in this particular document, these values are supposed to be separated for newsprint or whatever. That’s the only way you can give InDesign the information about colors. Now, if you embed the profiles in your documents and images, then these things have no meaning whatsoever, except for the colors in the Swatches palette.
Anne-Marie: Remember if you select an image, you can tell if it has a profile or not by looking at the Info palette.
David: Absolutely, yes. Great point. The Info palette gives you that information.
Anne-Marie: Wow …
David: Yes. I know. This is deep and obscure stuff, but important when you really care about color.
Anne-Marie: Excellent. Well, thank you so much.
That’s it for our show today. Don’t forget to check InDesignSecrets.com after 24 hours–or maybe it might be longer, if people can’t figure it out [Laughter] –to find out the winner of the contest. Just go to our show notes in the podcast section, see what people are posting and what they’re arguing about. [Laughter] Also, remember… [Pauses]
David:…Remember what we are supposed to talk about! [Laughter]
Anne-Marie: [Laughter] … Oh, right, remember if you have the answer, don’t bother trying to post it in the first 24 hours. I’ll try to remember to post a show note saying that it comments are closed temporarily so everyone gets a chance, to check back later. Otherwise, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for us, let us know, leave your voicemail comment, and we’ll listen to it. That’s 206-888-INDY, 206-888-4639, or email us at info@indesignsecrets.com. 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 026 page.