Podcast 029 Transcript

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 029 page.

[music]

Anne-Marie Concepción: Welcome to InDesignSecrets, episode 29. I’m Anne-Marie Concepción, and I’m here along with my beautiful co-host, David Blatner.

David Blatner: Well, hello, hello, hello!

Anne-Marie: David and I love to talk InDesign! And we use this podcast and our blog at InDesignSecrets.com to share our favorite InDesign tips with everybody. David’s the editorial director of InDesign Magazine and the InDesign Conference. And he’s the co-author of a bunch of books, including Real World InDesign with Ole Kvern, and the one that we wrote together, InDesign Breakthroughs.

I’m an InDesign and InCopy corporate trainer and consultant, I own a design studio, and I write a tips-and-tricks e-zine called DesignGeek. You can find links to all these things at our website, InDesignSecrets.com.

David: Yes, definitely. Go to InDesignSecrets.com, you’ll find lots of information there. Also, if you want to send us information or tips or questions, go ahead and email those to info @ InDesignSecrets.com, or call us on our listener comment line, at (206) 888-INDY–that’s 4639–and just leave us a message.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. We love getting those voicemails! And you know what’s cool–I don’t know if people realize this, but when you leave a voicemail, our service emails the voicemail to us. So we can listen to it in the email. I just love that thing!

All right, coming up on today’s show, we’re going to talk about the upcoming InDesign Conference Master Class, which is going to be in Seattle in early November. We have news about one of our favorite InDesign plug-ins, Q2ID– Quark to InDesign–from Markzware. We have some tips to share about how to make proper-looking fractions, whether or not you have an OpenType font or not. And we have Quizzler #3, yes we do!

David: Indeed indeed!

Anne-Marie: Stay tuned for that question and the prize. And then also our Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week, eek, eek, eek, is “Update Library Item.”

So tell us about this Master Class–I think it’s the first Master Class InDesign Conference you’ve ever had?

David: Well, this is what happened. We’ve been doing the InDesign Conferences around the world in various places: in Melbourne and Amsterdam and San Francisco and most recently in Chicago. And we thought, “Hey, let’s do one in Seattle.” Seattle has two great benefits. One, it’s where I live, so I’m kind of happy that it’s showing up…

Anne-Marie: [laughs] Drive over, yes!

David: Exactly! But the other great benefit is that Seattle is also where InDesign lives. That is to say, the InDesign development team is primarily in Seattle. So we get to sit down with the InDesign engineers, a bunch of the management team and the engineers, the people who are actually writing InDesign code. We’re going to be able to pick their brains, like, “Hey, how does this work, what is going on with this feature?” So a lot of power users and trainers and those of us who really need to know InDesign inside and out are going to find this particular conference extraordinary.

And because it is such a rare event that we’re going to be able to sit down with the Adobe engineers, we’re calling it the Master Class, because we’re going to go really, really deep–deep into XML, deep into color-management, deep into transparency, deep into a lot of things.

Anne-Marie: Excellent.

David: It’s going to be really cool. There are going to be some sessions there for if you’re just a beginning Quark… Quark XPress! Beginning InDesign user, whatever this program is! How embarrassing.

Anne-Marie: [laughs] That was a Skype artifact.

David: [laughs] Exactly! I’ve just been doing a lot of speaking recently about Quark XPress versus InDesign, and so “Quark XPress” keeps coming out of my mouth.

Anne-Marie: No problem.

David: So we’re going to be going really deep with InDesign and talking about all kinds of cool stuff.

Anne-Marie: That’s November 6-8 in Seattle. Now, isn’t it at Adobe? Is it at Adobe or near Adobe?

David: It’s right near Adobe. It’s going to be on the Adobe campus. It’s a great opportunity. We’re also hoping to get all kinds of other secret stuff, like insider peeks. We’ll be able to peek inside people’s windows and go, “Hey, look what they have on their walls!”

Anne-Marie: Hey, all right!

David: It’s going to be fun. It’ll be a fun conference, and like I said, very in-depth.

Anne-Marie: That’ll be nice.

David: And what’s interesting, too, is that it’s going to be much smaller than previous conferences, much smaller than the Chicago show, simply because we have much more limited space. So definitely sign up sooner rather than later, because there’s a very reasonable chance this is going to sell out.

The other thing we’re going to be doing is a bunch of hands-on sessions. Like Dave Saunders is going to be doing this hands-on session on learning JavaScript…

Anne-Marie: Oh, Dave is the guru of scripting! He’s always on the InDesign User-To-User forum and the InDesign listserv, offering scripts left and right. He’s great. I think we’ve posted a couple of his scripts.

David: We have. So he is the JavaScript guy, and he’s going to be doing a hands-on session in this special little hands-on room that we have, this incredible hands-on lab. Also, Brian Wood is going to be doing sessions on Dreamweaver and Flash. So we’re going beyond just InDesign, we’re going to a whole other level. But really, most of the sessions are going to be focused on InDesign and getting all kinds of good stuff…

Anne-Marie: And I heard there’s some chick who’s doing an InCopy hands-on session, too.

David: [laughs] Yeah, let’s see, oh, Anne-Marie!

Anne-Marie: That’s right!

David: Anne-Marie is going to be doing InCopy stuff, which is great because there are so few places that you can go to really get any kind of good InCopy training, and this is clearly one of them. It’s going to be great.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. I’m looking forward to that. All right.

David: So yeah, November 6-8, and you can get information–we’ll have a link on the show notes, or you can go to IDConference.com.

Anne-Marie: OK. Next up. I want to talk about this little story that happened with one of my very favorite plug-ins, and a favorite plug-in of a lot of InDesign users, especially those who are moving from Quark XPress, which is called “Q2ID.” It’s a plug-in published by Markzware, the people who do FlightCheck and all the other cool plug-ins–that’s Markzware.com. We’ll have a link there too.

The issue was that, as usual, I was extolling the benefits of Q2ID on a listserv last week, along with a bunch of other users who are real happy with it. What Q2ID lets you do is, you drop the Q2ID plug-in into InDesign CS2’s Plug-Ins folder, and then that lets you just use InDesign’s File-Open menu to open not just Quark version three and four documents, which InDesign can do on its own, but also Quark version five and six and 6.5 files. So it’s just a no-brainer, and it opens up great, and it comes with a wonderful Readme saying “Here’s what happens to the Quark elements: they get converted.” And it’s just so much nicer, instead of trying to figure out how you can take your Quark six document and save it back to 5, and then open it in five–that’s always the killer, who has Quark 5? Me and maybe four other people–and then save that back to four so you can open it in InDesign.

Anyway, some guy said that he was having a problem with Q2ID and he can’t use it, because he said that when he converted documents, Q2ID would lose local style formatting–you know, the kind of style formatting you’re not supposed to do in Quark XPress but you can do in InDesign? You select a word and then you press Command-Shift-B or Ctrl-Shift-B to make it bold, or you click the little “B” icon in Quark’s Measurements palette. You’re not supposed to do that, we all know that, but a lot of people still do anyway.

David: Well, I would argue that it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do, even in Quark XPress, as long as you know what you’re doing. But a lot of people didn’t know what they were doing, so they were doing things like Zapf Dingbats bold or something, or italics…

Anne-Marie: That’s right, I did that over and over and over again, and it took me about five publications before I realized my checkboxes were not bold. Like, “What’s wrong with this thing?”

David: Yeah, exactly, you can’t do that. It often won’t work, but you can do it. But it sounds like Q2ID was screwing that up.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, exactly. What would happen is that, like if you had saved that document, that “badly-styled” document, down to three or 4, and opened it in InDesign, InDesign would select those things that you had styled and they would pink them out or they would convert them. Like if you said something was Helvetica and then you double-clicked it and made it bold with the keyboard shortcut in Quark, InDesign would actually convert that to Helvetica Bold, a true font, whereas Q2ID would very often just leave it at Helvetica, the roman font.

David: Wow, that’s bad!

Anne-Marie: And it would happen throughout and would not give you a warning. So I’m like, “Wait a minute.” So I tested it and I confirmed that it was correct! And I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” Because I guess I had never worked with a Quark document that had had that kind of styling before.

So I emailed Markzware–and we all love Markzware because they are very responsive. And within a day I got emails from support and from salespeople, and they said, “Have you tried the latest version?” And I said, “Well, I downloaded the latest version from your website before i tested this.” And it turns out that the problem was that they had a latest version that fixed the problem, but they just hadn’t updated their website yet.

David: [laughs] Oh, oops! That’s a problem!

Anne-Marie: So in the space of like two business days they updated the website, and I announced back on the list, I caught everybody up to date, and said version 1.59 of the Q2ID plug-in fixes that problem. In fact, when you download that, the Readme file has a history of what was fixed in each version, and in version 1.57 it said that it had been fixed. So if you have Q2ID, make sure and update that plug in.

David: Absolutely. And Q2ID is available for both Mac and Windows, which is a great thing. A lot of Windows users were complaining because they didn’t have one. So Markzware did do one for Windows as well. But all plug-ins, you really need to keep in touch with the developers and make sure you have the newest versions, because they change. All software, they fix bugs, they come out with new versions and so on. It’s definitely a good idea to keep up with that stuff. That is a good one.

Anne-Marie: If you ever have a problem with a plug-in, I would strongly recommend that you just email support or email the developer, because they want you to be happy and they want all their users to be happy. I’d say especially the InDesign plug-in developers, because there’s relatively few of them, and they’re trying to make their way into a market that is only a few years old.

David: That’s right. And they are very responsive. Most of these companies are very small. They are very responsive. They can turn on a dime and fix things very quickly. It’s one of the great things about using plug-ins.

Same thing with scripts, as well, a lot of the scripts that are out there, both commercial and free scripts. If you come up with a problem–like Dave Saunders, who we were talking about earlier, Dave Saunders has a script that he has released on his site, called Text Reporter, or Text Style Reporter, something like that. It gives you a report of all of the paragraph and character styles you’ve used in your document.

Anne-Marie: Oh, excellent.

David: It gives you a list of what they do, what they look like, and so on. That’s a very important thing for a lot of people; they need to have documentation about what all their paragraph styles look like. So he has a script to do that, it’s a really cool one. And there was a little tiny bug, and some people were running into it and some people weren’t. Well, as soon as he learned about it, he fixed it, and the next day he posted a new one and he was good to go. So they’re very responsive. Definitely get in touch with them.

Anyway, so that’s great about Q2ID. That’s good to know that they’re keeping up with stuff.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for them to do a Quark XPress seven version of that. Currently I think it’s still only 6.5. What they’ve done is, they have come up with this technology which basically pulls apart documents–Quark XPress documents, InDesign documents–they can look inside the documents and see what’s there, and they have this technology that in theory they could have it convert anything to anything else like Quark XPress to RagTime, or to Microsoft Publisher. In theory, they could do all of that, but it just takes them a little time.

OK. So let’s talk a little bit about fractions.

Anne-Marie: Fractured fractions!

David: Fractured fractions. Fractions are a perennial problem for people. They’re forever saying, “I’ve got all these fractions, and how do I turn them into something that looks good?” And so we just want to mention a couple things about fractions, if you’re in this position.

One is, the best thing to do with fractions, best-case scenario with fractions, is to use a font that has fractions built into them, especially intelligent fractions, such as the Pro OpenType fonts. There are OpenType fonts out there like Adobe Caslon Pro, or Garamond Pro, Minion Pro, Myriad Pro. And these Pro fonts have characters in them that they can create any fraction on the fly. Not just one-half or three-quarters, but 15/16, or 22/7–they can very quickly create any kind of fraction you want, because there’s intelligence built into the font.

Anne-Marie: It’s not just that they look like fractions, it’s that the characters used have been cut so that the number isn’t just scaled and superscripted. It’s actually made for a numerator or a denominator, so they look much better than any fraction that you could do yourself.

David: That’s right. Because you know, the old XTensions and stuff for Quark XPress, and some extensions even today for InDesign, will fake a fraction–they basically make the numerator and denominator smaller, maybe a little bit wider, or something like that. They kind of fake it to make it look like a real character. But it’s not the true numerator or denominator characters, which you might be able to find in an Expert Set font, or something like that. But in a Pro OpenType font, they’re typically there in the font itself.

So you have a real true–like you said, it’s really cut, it’s been designed by the font designer to be a fraction character. In order to get one of those, you simply select the fraction, and from either the Character palette or the Control palette when it’s in Character mode, you go to the little flyout menu and you’ll see an OpenType submenu. And in the OpenType submenu, you’ll see in that long list of OpenType options, it says “Fractions.” And if “Fractions” has brackets around it, it means that that font can’t deal with fractions, there’s nothing in there.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. You’re out of luck, buddy.

David: You’re out of luck, exactly. In fact, they should have just put that on there. Instead of having a bracket, it should just say, “You’re out of luck,” or have a…

Anne-Marie: A sad face.

David: A sad face, good, good, that would work.

So if there are no brackets, if it just says “Fractions,” then you know that there are fractions built into the font. You can choose that, and you get the real characters, which is great, that’s a major step forward. Even the slash automatically gets converted to the virgule, the fraction character, which is not the same as a normal slash. So that’s a great thing. Now, if you had a lot of those to do, though, then you might not want to select every single one, right?

Anne-Marie: And I know a lot of people–and this is what I did, I’m like, “Well, I have a ton of fractions in this paragraph, I’m going to select the whole paragraph and turn on fractions.”

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: Which works as long as you don’t have a comma anywhere in there.

[David laughs]

Anne-Marie: Because it’s going to make a numerator version of a comma.

David: Yeah. Or even any numbers. Like if you’re saying “three and three-quarter cups of sugar,” or something–if you do that entire line as fractions, the three probably would become a numerator, and then the next three becomes the numerator and the four becomes the denominator. So you don’t want to turn the fraction character style on for an entire line of text or an entire paragraph. You only want to turn it on just for the fraction itself.

So if you had a lot of these, you could do a search-and-replace for them, that would be one option, and it’s a little bit tweaky the way you do that. But in the Find/Change dialog box, you could say “find any digit.” And the way you do a digit is that little flyout menu next to the “Find what” field. At the bottom of the list, you click on that little flyout menu in the Find/Change dialog box, you click on that, and way down at the bottom of the list you’ll see that it says “Any Digit.” And “Any Digit” just puts in a little wild-card character, which is ^9. And the ^9 character means “just find any digit,” whatever digit it is.

You could say any digit, ^9, slash any digit, which is again ^9–you could just type ^9 yourself if you want–and that will find any fraction which is one digit slash another digit. So that would find all your fractions that are just single-digit fractions. What you’d probably want to do, though, is find–if you had double-digit fractions you might want to do a ^9^9/^9^9, and change those to the OpenType fraction style.

And for those of you who don’t have a lot of experience with the Fnd/Change dialog box, in order to change that into the OpenType fractions character, you have to click on More Options–there’s a little button in Find/Change that says “More Options.” You click on More Options and then in the Change Format Settings area at the very bottom, you click Format and then click on OpenType Features, and in the OpenType Features area, you can say Fractions. You just turn Fractions on there, click OK, and what you’ll get is, it’ll convert all your fractions, anything that looks like a fraction, the ^9/^9, any digit-slash-digit.

Leave “Change” to blank–if you leave “Change” to blank it means just leave it alone, don’t change anything to it. And apply the OpenType fractions formatting to it.

Did that make any sense at all? [laughs]

Anne-Marie: Wow. You know, I have a different way that you can do that.

David: OK.

Anne-Marie: And that is a wonderful way to go throughout an entire document and fix that. But another way is, you can apply the OpenType fraction style to a fraction that you have in your document, and then after it turns into a beautiful fraction, you select it and turn it into a character style.

David: Oh yeah, sure.

Anne-Marie: And the character style is just OT fraction.

David: Right, right.

Anne-Marie: And then as you type, whenever you want the next characters to be fraction style, you select that character style–or you use a keyboard shortcut that you’ve assigned that character style–type your fraction, and then you have to click “None” to turn it off, to continue typing.

David: Yep. Yep.

Anne-Marie: You have to do that. You can also make a keyboard shortcut, under Edit Keyboard Shortcuts, to character OpenType fraction. You can try that, too.

David: Yep! Absolutely. But the key is, you only want to apply the OpenType fraction style just to the fractions. That’s the key.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, you can’t do the whole thing. It’s too bad.

David: And the problem is, that only works for OpenType fonts. So if you don’t have an OpenType font, then you’re lost. And even some OpenType fonts, I think, even if it’s just a regular OpenType font, it may not have fractions built into it–and in that case, you’re lost. So what do you do?

Anne-Marie: So then it’s plan B.

David: Then you move to Plan B. And Plan B is either a plug-in or a script, probably, to do that. And it turns out there’s a bunch of scripts available to do that. Like Dan Rodney has a script called–Proper Fractions, is it?

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: Proper Fractions. It’s a JavaScript, so it’s both Mac and Windows, and it works…

Anne-Marie: And it’s for CS and CS2.

David: Great. And you can download that off of share.studio.adobe.com.

Anne-Marie: Or we’ll put a link to it, too.

David: We’ll put a link. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

Anne-Marie: Because he has his own site where he talks about it. He’s got a little QuickTime video explaining how to use it.

David: Oh, great! That’s good. OK. So you can just download it from there, we’ll put a link to his site.

Anne-Marie: That script works like Quark’s “Make Fraction.”

David: Exactly. Fakes it.

Anne-Marie: You type up the fraction and then you select it, and then you run the script by double-clicking it in the Scripts palette. Or you can assign a keyboard shortcut to the script, so again, you can just choose your keyboard shortcut. And it turns it into a fake fraction–I mean, it’s fake but it looks OK. If you liked how it looked in Quark XPress, then it’ll be perfectly fine.

David: Absolutely. And it’s the best you can do in a font that doesn’t have the special fraction characters. So that’s the best you can do.

Anne-Marie: Let’s go on to the Quizzler!

David: Ah, the Quizzler!

Anne-Marie: InDesignSecrets Quizzler #3!

David: Yes. Number three, three, three!

Anne-Marie: We came up with this Quizzler question a while ago, and we were sort of thinking about it, and now we decided it’s time to unleash it. David, what is the Quizzler?

David: Unleash the Quizzler! Quizzler number three, three! The Quizzler is… If you’ve read the CS3 post at InDesignSecrets.com, you know that CS3 is going to have a feature that will bevel an object on your page. So you just select some text or you select an object, and you can bevel it, just like it’s beveled in Photoshop: sort of beveled, embossed, and it’s going to be very cool. That’s going to be a fun feature for doing all kinds of outlandish designs right in InDesign.

Anne-Marie: Right. Everything will not only have to have a drop shadow, they’ll also have to be beveled.

David: Exactly. For the full 3D effect.

Anne-Marie: It’s going to be in the new EULA for CS3.

David: Yeah. That’s right. So if you like that sort of thing, if that’s the sort of thing you like, [laughs] you may have to wait until CS3, and we know that CS3 is coming out in the spring of 2007. So it’s right around the corner. But if you like that kind of thing, you should be aware that CS2 has a bevel feature too.

Anne-Marie: Oh yes, it does!

David: Oh yes, it does!

Anne-Marie: Oh yes, it does. There is a Bevel command inside CS2.

David: The question is, where do you find Bevel? Where do you find the Bevel feature in CS2? So here’s how we’re going to do the Quizzler. Instead of posting something to the show notes, in the comments on the podcast at InDesignSecrets.com, don’t do that. Don’t post your answer to the show notes. Instead, email us at info @ InDesignSecrets.com. email us your answer. And we’re going to collect…

Anne-Marie: Please put “quizzler” in the subject line.

David: Yes, please.

Anne-Marie: That way we can quickly find them all. Because we are going to collect those for a few days, up until when, Thursday?

David: Thursday. That’s right. Thursday the 31st, the last day of August, at midnight.

Anne-Marie: And then David is going to bring those all together in Eudora, and he’s going to throw a dart at his PowerBook screen. And then whichever email it lands on, that’s going to be the winner. That’s going to be our random drawing.

David: And that’s how we’re going to do it! Exactly! And I can do that because I just got my MacBook Pro, so my old PowerBook, it doesn’t matter if I put a dart through the… No.

Anne-Marie: Please have your wife film this while you do it so we can post it as a QuickTime video. I would love to see that.

David: [laughs] No, I’m going to keep my… We’ll find some way to automatically do a random drawing. And if we only have one person who comes up with the right answer, then that’s who will win.

Anne-Marie: That’s correct.

David: But everybody can win. Find the Bevel feature, and email us at info @ InDesignSecrets.com. And we will pick that before August 31. And then, in the next podcast, we will announce the winner. And what will they win?

Anne-Marie: What will they win?

David: How about a copy of Real World InDesign?

Anne-Marie: That’s a good idea. Real World InDesign CS2.

David: Real World InDesign CS2, by Olav Kvern and me, and that’s…

Anne-Marie: More pages than you can shake a stick at.

David: Yeah, it’s like 900 pages on everything you ever want to know about InDesign. So we’ll send you a copy…

Anne-Marie: It’s a man’s book!

[David laughs]

Anne-Marie: It’s a man’s book! A red-blooded American software reference like they don’t make them anymore kind of book.

David: That’s right. That’s exactly right.

Anne-Marie: This isn’t going to be a Web 2.0 30-page e-book, forget it! It’s a real American book.

David: This is one serious book. And let’s just say I hope that whoever… I hope that the shipping cost isn’t too great for sending it to you.

Anne-Marie: That’s right, the winner has to pay for shipping!

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: But it will be autographed by Mr. Blatner at least, right?

David: Yeah, and we’ll try and get Ole to autograph it as well, that’d be good. But no, we will ship it to you and it will be complements of InDesign Secrets. So that’s the Quizzler. We’d better do the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week, eek, eek…

Anne-Marie: Is Update… hang on a minute, it is…

David: Update Library Item!

Anne-Marie: Update Library Item.

David: [laughs] You can tell how often we use this. Update Library Item has to do with Libraries. OK, show of hands, everybody in the audience, how many people use Libraries?

Anne-Marie: Let’s do that as an Obscure Feature: what is a Library?

David: For a lot of people, that would be a good one. Libraries are incredibly useful, but I do find very few people use them, and it’s frustrating to me. You make a Library out of the File menu; under the File menu you say New, and then you say Library. And you can put anything into a Library. Any object that you can put on a page, you can put in a Library.

Anne-Marie: It’s a collection of objects from your InDesign document–you know, like all the pieces that go into making a sidebar, or everything that goes into a footer, stuff that you want to re-use in other documents or in other pages of this document. A handy place to keep them.

They’re not linked to the original item at all, they’re not like Placed items or anything like that. They’re just a collection of small pieces of InDesign documents.

David: And it’s great to have Libraries. You can have multiple Libraries open at the same time. You could put Libraries of colors together–we’re getting off the topic here. But you could assign a color to an object or to a bunch of objects, throw all of those into the Library, and then you can drag them out of the Library into a new document, and the colors come with them.

Anne-Marie: And any styles, object styles, all that stuff.

David: Libraries are really, really useful.

Anne-Marie: So there’s a Library palette menu, of course, and one of the items in the Library palette menu is “Update Library Item.” Now, we just said, “Hey, these are not linked or anything,” so what is updating a Library item? What could that be?

David: What could it be?

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: Do you know? I don’t know!

[laughter]

David: No, we know what…

Anne-Marie: OK, Update a Library Item. I have a perfect sidebar and I have dragged it into my Library. And then as I’m working, I realize I forgot to put a headshot in the sidebar. So I stick it in the sidebar that’s on my document page, and I realize, “Oh, I have an old version of that sidebar Library item in my Library.” So I locate that old version of the Library item in the Library, select it, and I select the new sidebar on my document page, and then I go to the Library palette menu and choose Update Library Item. That replaces the old Library item with the one that I selected. I don’t have to drag-and-drop it into the Library.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: It does not change anything that you’ve dragged onto the page elsewhere from the old version, doesn’t update other instances of that Library item that you’ve placed. All it does is update the item inside the Library.

David: Yeah. What it’s really doing is it’s throwing away that item that you’ve chosen in the Library, and inserting the one that’s on the page. But it is important to know that when you do that, it does not give you a warning. It will replace any item, and it’s not undo-able. It’ll just wipe out anything that’s in your Library with whatever you have on your page. So use it carefully. Use it carefully.

I actually do think that it should be called “Replace Library Item.” I don’t think it should be called “Update Library Item,” because I think you’re right, it’s confusing, because it’s not updating anything on your page, it’s simply replacing what’s in your Library with what you have on your page.

Anne-Marie: That’s true. Because I was thinking, “Well, if it says ‘Update Library Item, ‘ anybody who’s choosing this knows exactly what they’re doing.” But I didn’t know that it was not undo-able. I always thought that InDesign would always give you a warning if you’re about to do something that cannot be undone.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: Hmm. So caution.

David: Caution. So you have to understand, Library items are actually snippets. So each one of those things in CS2, they’re actually a snippet, and the Library is sort of an asset manager. It’s almost like Bridge just for snippets. And so when you throw something in there, it’s making a snippet out of it, and it’s just collecting all those snippets. I don’t know if that’s interesting to anybody, but that’s something to think about.

Anne-Marie: Topic for another podcast.

David: Yes. there you go.

Anne-Marie: Yes. There we go. Well, that is it for Episode 29. Don’t forget to email your answer to the Quizzler to info @ InDesignSecrets.com. And if you have comments on topics that we talked about in today’s show, or suggestions for future topics, let us know. Leave your comment on the blog at InDesignSecrets.com, or send us a voicemail comment at our listener comment line, open 24/7, at (206) 888-INDY, 4639.

And 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 029 page.