Podcast 028 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 028 page.
[music]
David Blatner: Welcome to InDesignSecrets, Episode 28. I’m David Blatner and I’m here with my co-host Anne-Marie Concepcion. Howdy! Anne-Marie gives me grief about saying “Howdy” all the time, so she had to throw in her row in a “Howdy!”. Ok, we’re also joined today by a special, special guest star, Sandee Cohen, who’s the co-author of “Real World Creative Suite 2″, along with Steve Werner, and she’s the author of the in-design visual QuickStart guide, from Peachpit press. In fact, she is the only person to have ever written a book about every individual version of In-design. Isn’t that right Sandee?
Sandee Cohen: That’s it!
David: So we are so pleased. She also does the Q&A column for InDesign magazine, which she gives great answers to all kinds of strange questions that come in about in-design.
Anne-Marie Concepcion: And he’s a trainer extraordinaire, and a wonderful speaker, and…she’s also Vector Babe. Didn’t you get Vector Babe?
David: She is. Sandee, welcome to the show!
Sandee: Thank you, I am so thrilled to be here! Because I listen to you guys as I do my grocery shopping and its wonderful. We don’t have cars in New York, so I have to walk to the supermarket.
Anne-Marie: We can say, “Sandee, don’t forget, six tomatoes”
Sandee: Bananas, Bananas, send Bagels to Anne-Marie.
David: That makes us the first truly North American trans-continental episode we’ve done, I’m on the West Coast, Anne-Marie is in Chicago, and Sandee is in New York City. And we are sort of slowly expanding across the miles. Its exciting.
Anne-Marie: Firs time we bring in people from Australia, and Europe.
David: That’s right, and then Antarctica. So, listen, coming up on today’s show, we’re going to be talking about creating interactive PDF files. And we’re going to be talking about the expert of creating interactive PDFs, Sandee Cohen.
Specifically talking about the states palate, we were thinking of doing the states palate as an obscure feature of the week, but instead we’re going to do a whole episode on that. But we’re also going to have an obscure in design feature of the week, this week. The topic is going to be, flush space! [verbal sound effect of toilet flushing]
Anne-Marie: Sound effect of toilet flushing.
David: Flush space.
Sandee: You know, this is low toilet humor.
Anne-Marie: Tell us what flush space is not.
David: What is flush space not?
Sandee: Flush space is not something to do with poker.
David: Like a royal flush space?
Sandee: Right, right. It has nothing to do with carpentry.
David: Like keeping something flush?
Sandee: It has nothing to do with tea.
David: What do you mean tea?
Sandee: Like, you know, within tea. No, no, the very prime little leaves of the first crop of tea are called first flush.
David: Oh. First flush of tea.
Anne-Marie: Ah. Yes, yes.
David: I’m drinking coffee today.
Sandee: Well, David’s in Seattle.
Anne-Marie: How could I not know that? Right, exactly. all right, we’ll talk more about flush space later. In deep space design.
David: We will, we will. Let’s talk a little bit on the states palate. Where is the states palate and what does it do Sandee?
Sandee: Well, you know, they’ve hidden it. They did a good a job of hiding it under the window menu interactive sub-menu. But that’s your clue to know that the states palate has to do with anything that allows to create interactive PDF. It has nothing to do, if you’re going to print, just ignore it. You have nothing to do with states palate, but when you get the states palate up, it looks really empty, and it may not have anything there, actually I’m just cleaning out my old states here.
David: By default there’s nothing there.
Sandee: Well, if you don’t have an object or something selected, you have a very empty states palate.
David: Looks lonely.
Sandee: Yes, its very quiet.
Anne-Marie: Do you need to have like a button selected or could it be anything selected?
David: I think you need a button, I think you have a button first.
Sandee: Well, you can select an object but it won’t show any states in the states palate. But any object can be converted to a button, or you draw a button, with what tool?
David: A scissors tool!
Sandee: A button tool! This is why I’m a teacher.
Anne-Marie: You know, on the button tool, the hand is always giving you the finger looks like to me.
David: Yeah, I don’t like that.
Sandee: Yes, it is.
Anne-Marie: No, no, I think its a little inside joke.
Sandee: Yeah but don’t you get that throughout the web?
Anne-Marie: Yeah its true.
David: Every where you go you get the finger, is that the idea?
Anne-Marie: No, I think that’s just in New York.
Sandee: Oh, oh, I see, ok.
Anne-Marie: all right, forget about it!
David: Hey, press the button, go ahead. Ok, so we’ve got a button, so you can draw with the button tool a button, just to focus this discussion here a little bit. So we could draw with a button tool, or if we have any object, let’s say a text-frame or a picture-frame. How do you turn it into a button?
Sandee: Well, you select the object and then you go up to the “Object Menu”, and you go down again. Here’s the cool trick: remember you found states under interactive? Well again, go to object interactive sub-menu, and you will see convert to button. And you can use that.
David: Ah. So now you can convert an object into a button, and then suddenly the states palate kind of lights up.
Sandee: It does, it lights up and says hey I’m up! And that’s what it says, “Up”, What does that mean?
Anne-Marie: What does up mean?
Sandee: Up is the state, the appearance of this button in the PDF, when the mouse button has been released or lead to go Up, it is also…and web designers, this is where it gets a little confusing. Web people call the normal state, so the Up state…so, for those of you who are used to web-design you can call this the normal state, but it is also called the Up-State. When you release the mouth button.
David: Isn’t Ithaqua in up state?
Anne-Marie: Oh, stop. Focus David! Focus!
David: Oh, sorry, sorry. Focus.
Sandee: Oh, God, help us.
Anne-Marie: Sandee doesn’t know what she’s getting into.
Sandee: Ok, so now we have an Up state and what we can do is, you can add text. If you click on the text tool you can turn this button into a text-frame. If you simply go and get picture, you can place a picture into the up state. Now here’s where the fun part happens. When you have the states palate at bottom or at palate menu, you will see something called new state.
That used to be a Y, now its just not. But we click and choose new state and the roll-over state appears. Now, the roll-over, and this is also for those of you who use other programs, this can be called mouse enter state, and that’s when the viewer the viewer puts their cursor or rolls over the button. Now here’s..
David: It’s called hover also.
Sandee: I wish if we can get a set of things here. Here’s the fun part, if you can content select, and content select is my word for selecting into an object, you can put different content in each of the states.
Anne-Marie: Wait, wait a minute. Content select is selecting into the object, you mean direct selection tool? Or with the content select?
Sandee: That’s also content select, there’s also the object select content command.
David: Ah.
Sandee: Which is why I call that content select thing.
David: I like that, so you’re selecting the content. I think its important to note a funny thing about buttons, is when you have a button in design, its actually putting a new type of object, a new type of frame around whatever you selected. So for example if you choose a text-frame, and you say convert to button.
It actually creates a new frame, a button-frame, and puts your text-frame into that. So you can choose that text-frame still, you can edit it and so on, but its living inside of another frame. So you can use the direct select tool to select that frame and move it around inside the button frame. Its a new thing, there’s really no other user-interface to get a button frame.
Anne-Marie: And you even see the word button on it, when you have show frame edges. If you have “Show frame edges”, if you have frame edges hidden, you don’t see it, but normally you work with frame edges showing and it says button, or the name of the button will light the little picture of the icon in the button tool.
David: That’s right.
Sandee: Now, the fun part of having these different states, and if you want you can choose a state and in the palate you can place content into the state. And that allows you to pull any image you want in there.
David: Interesting.
Sandee: But here’s the cool part, you can have different images in each state.
David: Cool.
Sandee: So think of this, you have a happy face in the up state and for the roll-over state, the happy face may give you a little wink, and then for the final state, and In-design only gives you three states. You have a down state, and that could be the little happy face blinking or shutting his eyes with his tongue out at you.
Anne-Marie: Right, right.
Sandee: So what you get is three different images within the same state frame, button frame.
Anne-Marie: Since I am following along with you, is there any way to preview this? When I move my mouse over nothing changes.
Sandee: Oh, well, you would have to click on each one of these states, or, and this is the cumbersome part. You immediately command or Ctrl-E, and create a PDF which you then have the interactive element set form, and you immediately switch to acrobat, and preview with that.
David: In other words, No! The answer there is No. Its truly unfortunate that you cannot preview any of the interactive elements, either buttons or movies or sounds. Any of that you can’t really preview in In-design. You have to export the PDF and let acrobat do that, I’m hoping they’ll change that in the future. Because its cool stuff, but I think people just don’t even mess with it partly because you can’t preview it.
Anne-Marie: You can click on the states to see at least that that works.
Sandee: The other one that I always like to say though is to always click the view PDF after exporting, because in your exported, there will be PDF.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
Sandee: And that gives you the fastest route to see the interactions. One more thing though that I need to talk about these states. You can select or content select each of the images that might be in the three different states. And here’s the fun part, you can apply different transparencies to the same images. So one images could be the dark part of it, the other one could be lightened using transparency control, so you can actually make a three states button without needing three different images.
Anne-Marie: That’s pretty interesting.
David: That’s very interesting.
Sandee: Remember you have to content select for direct select.
David: So basically you select the object, the button has to be a button, you add one or two different states to it, of a roll-over state or a down state. And then you can click on that on the states palate, which makes that state visible. Then use the dress select tool to select inside the button.
Sandee: Yes.
David: Then you use the transparency palette.
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Select.
David: Object menu submenu or the button up on the control palette whatever you do to content select to select inside the button object. Then you use the transparency palette to adjust that. That’s very cool and I think, I think I mention text frames because, you’re right, I think most people make buttons out of pictures but I think it is pretty cool out of text as well. You can make your own formatted interesting text frame turn that into a button and then do exactly the same sort of thing but the button would actually look like the text.
Sandee Cohen: And it would be live text.
David: It would be live text, editable text, Yes. Not editable but it would be live text.
Sandee: Right. Which means that your PDF would be able to see that text.
David: That’s very cool. I think that is very powerful. A lot of people kind of throw off the idea of buttons and interactive PDFs and so on as why would I ever want to do that. And they forget that these are the same people often who are doing print work and then they are making PowerPoint slides for their sales folks and.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: The reason you want to interactive PDFs with buttons and all that stuff is so you don’t have to use PowerPoint any more. How many people really enjoy being in PowerPoint.
Anne-Marie: Exactly.
David: Use InDesign.
Anne-Marie: I create all my presentations with Acrobat and InDesign. But you know PowerPoint has some cool features that InDesign doesn’t like you can’t build a slide. That would be a cool plug in I think in case any plug in developers are listening. To be able to build a page in InDesign so that one bullet point appears, then the second, then the third, then the fourth instead of you having to do that manually with master pages for something.
David: Sure but that is not hard to do with master pages. There are things that you can do with PowerPoint that you cannot easily do with Acrobat.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: some of the transition stuff, some of the animation stuff. But in general you still get so much better quality, especially with type quality out of InDesign and I think that more than makes up for it.
Anne-Marie: That’s true.
Sandee: I have a little tip for anybody who does want to use InDesign for presentations on screen.
David: Yeah.
Sandee: What size should you make your document? Now you could say 640 pixels by 480 divide by seven carry the three [
David: Laughter] now I’m confused but the easiest way to do it is take eight x 11 and cut it in half on the horizontal plane and that size is exactly fine for 99% of your presentations.
David: So letter size page which is eight x 11″.
Sandee: Right.
David: you cut that in half and you get 11 by [Laughter] five no eight by five.
Anne-Marie: We can get a calculator.
Sandee: Now we know why David went into graphics.
David: Exactly.
Anne-Marie: So I’m using my scissors to cut the page. The scissors tool doesn’t appear to cut the page though.
David: No. You create a new document and the new document is going to be the same width so it is going to be eight inches wide.
Anne-Marie: I always just did a landscape of a letter page. Can’t you just do that?
Sandee: That is causing it to shrink. But you are always in fit window, you are shrinking it down.
Anne-Marie: That’s true.
Sandee: And this gives you a 100% document.
David: That’s interesting. I like that I would prefer to do 1024 x 1268. Virtually every presentation I do is going to be on a 1024 x 768 pixel monitor and so I just type that in as the page size. The page size is 1024 points wide and then the height is 768 points and that seems to work for me but.
Anne-Marie: I don’t know because I thought that some monitors have different dot pitch. I mean they are not all 72 dots per inch anymore A lot of them are 96 or something in between.
David: It gives me the exact pixel dimension when I export it out. I could export a jpeg of my page. My jpeg would be. You just go to file export and choose jpeg. Export each page out as a jpeg then I can do whatever I want with it. But that jpeg is going to be exactly the same dimensions as the screen 1024 x 768.
Anne-Marie: I see. I got you. I have two reactions so far. Sandee, this is fantastic and I learned something new. I didn’t know you could have live text in the different states. That’s really amazing. I did find though that with live text you have that horrible button icon sitting right on top of the text if you just have one line. If you turn off frame edges then you can flip through the states and see the text change a lot easier.
David: Good point.
Anne-Marie: And the second question I had was Sandee Is there anything, I am curious. I don’t know the answer. Is there anything, could you do all this in Acrobat or is there anything special that you could only do in InDesign or only do in Acrobat as far as button states are concerned?
Sandee: You can do everything that the button states does in Acrobat.
The interface.
Anne-Marie: You can place images and stuff?
Sandee: Yes in Acrobat if you draw a button, let me just.
David: Acrobat Professional.
Anne-Marie: Acrobat Pro.
Sandee: But if you have drawn a button in Acrobat and you go to the button properties and then you click on the options you’ll see something there that says layout. Now the way the layout is by default says label only. If you choose icon or icon only or any of the ones that give you an icon you will see something in the middle that says choose icon.
Anne-Marie: Oh. Ok and that’s equivalent to place image.
Sandee: Yes. Now here’s the fun part. You can choose any form of jpeg or.pit or.bmp or.pdf but there’s one format that you cannot use.
Anne-Marie: And that is. [Laughter] Was there a question? What would that be?
Sandee: What is the number one image editing program?
David: Right. psd.
Sandee: [Laughter] You can’t use it.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Oh, OK.
David: I would say that you couldn’t use AI native illustrator file.
Sandee: I think you can use an AI if you got a PDF preview with it but in native without no Acrobat don’t know AI.
David: Isn’t only part of the creative suite. It’s not actually part of the Creative Suite.
[Laughter]
Anne-Marie: That is a program onto its own.
David: It is. It’s own little universe. We better move on and talk about.
Recorded Man 1: The obscure feature of the week.
David: Which is going to be for this week flush space.
[flushing sound]
David: Thank you for that flushing sound.
Anne-Marie: You are welcome.
David: Very nice.
Anne-Marie: All right, a flush space.
David: What is a flush space? Where do we see it? Why do we want it? I actually didn’t realize InDesign had it, I am embarrassed to admit. I actually didn’t realize that InDesign had a flush space until a couple of weeks ago.
Anne-Marie: Really?
David: One of those many features that I looked at. I saw. It flashed on my retina many times. But it didn’t actually go into my head.
Anne-Marie: I have actually used it in projects.
David: Tell us. What is a flush space?
Anne-Marie: A flush space only applies to text that is fully justified and that means left or right. What I use it for is setting justified text in document. At the end of an article or story you have a little dingbat that signifies this is the end, you can stop reading now.
If you want that dingbat squished already to the right edge of the frame and regardless of how much space it has to fit you can insert a flush space after the last period or the last word of the article. So you type a period, then insert a flush space then enter your dingbat and that dingbat would always be flush right on that last line.
So I just use it because I felt like using it. You can also use your right tab, the right margin tab.
David: The right margin tab. That’s what I usually use which is the shift tab.
Sandee: I had a student who used it in a most ingenious fashion. She was laying out business cards and wanted at the bottom of the card to have her address and then a space and then her phone number and then a space and then her email address. Now, the regular spaces between her address, she uses regular ones. She then used flush spaces between the three categories and it automatically spread them out with nice spacing between.
David: Basically flush space is a way to always have equivalent spacing between columns. Let’s say. Right So add a bunch of. If you have two flush spaces on a paragraph they will even out right so they will both have the same amount of flush space between them.
Anne-Marie: Yes. That’s correct.
David: Maybe that’s a good way to put it. What I always heard about flush space is it’s for tabular material. If you aren’t using tables in a design but you want to have equal space between a bunch of columns you use a flush space. I remember people asking for this in Quark Express 15 years ago. Why doesn’t Quark Express have a flush space? Apparently it showed up in InDesign.
Who knows how long ago, without me ever noticing it. I like that use of it. You have four or five different columns of whatever numbers, catalogue information whatever and you want there to be always the equivalent amount of space between them. You don’t have to use tab stops to set them up you use flush space no matter how wide your text gets you’ll always get the same amount of space between columns.
Anne-Marie: That’s true.
David: Your text frame gets you always same amount of space between columns.
Anne-Marie: And you can do a find and replace with flush spaces too.
David: What’s that, Sandee?
Sandee: I am also realizing that that could allow you to change the column width of your frame without having to go in and change all the tabs stops.
David: Exactly. Right. You just change, because they are always flexible they will always adjust. Now as Anne-Marie said this only works with fully justified text. But even if you have only one paragraph. Let’s say you just have one paragraph like Sandee’s student had one paragraph that had three columns you can still make it justified text by using the forced justified all lines.
The button in the control column in paragraph when you are in paragraph mode it is the third over from the left. It’s one that forces all lines of a paragraph to be justified even if there is only a single line. It works that way too.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. What I said before is that if you already have something set you can insert flush spaces where you have other characters by using find change. Don’t forget flush space is one of those things that you can use. From the drop down menus in the find change fields.
David: That’s good. Good. So if you have some other character in there you ca just quickly search for it. I like it.
Anne-Marie: I love it. Go ahead.
Sandee: There is something you’ve forgotten to tell people. So how do I insert this beautiful wonderful thing?
David: Oh no, we don’t want to cover that.
[Laughter]
Anne-Marie: I just wiggle my little nose. [Laughter] Flush the toilet.
Sandee: Where can I go?
David: Sandee, that is your honor, please.
Sandee: You can insert a flush space type by going to type menu or contextual menu in insert white space and you will see a flush space. There is no default keyboard shortcut for it. Of course you can always set one. And the other thing you should know is when you do insert a flush space its hidden character appears as a little tilde with a dot underneath.
David: I like that.
Sandee: These are secrets, you know.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. That’s why people listen.
David: That’s right. I love it. So that’s it for our show today. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, or political commentary whatever you want to throw out there let us know, visit InDesignsecrets.com or email us at info @ InDesignSecrets.com.
Anne-Marie: And don’t forget about our phone line.
David: Oh, our phone line.
Anne-Marie: 206-888-INDY or 206-888-4639.
David: Give us a call. Until we meet again this is David Blatner.
Anne-Marie: And Anne-Marie Concepcion.
David: Oh, Anne.
Sandee: And Sandee Cohen.
Anne-Marie: 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 028 page.