Podcast 032 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 032 page.
[music]
David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets, episode 32. Thirty-two, that’s two to the 5th for all you geeks out there. I am here along with my co-host, Anne-Marie Concepcion…
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Hello, everybody.
David: …and our special guest star today, on the line with us today is Cari Jansen, InDesign expert and one of Australia’s leading Adobe trainers and consultants.
Cari Jansen: Hello, everyone. Thanks for having me, and I should obviously say “G’day.”. [laughs]
David: [laughing] Thank you!
Anne-Marie: Yay!
Cari: And also, I don’t think I’m a geek. You know, none of us are geeks, we’re just sort of, you know… OK, we’re geeks!
David: Ultimately we are. No, I was just waiting for you to say “G’day,” that’s made my day right there.
Cari: Yeah, you just want to hear the “G’day.” I’ll say it again: G’day.
David: Thank you.
Anne-Marie: And that’s it for our show today, everybody, so any comments… oh, OK.
[laughter]
Cari: Yeah, have a g’day!
Anne-Marie: Right. I’m satisfied.
David: Cari, it is great that you are able to join us, especially with the massive time difference between Chicago and Seattle and Perth, and so… Are you in Perth, near Perth?
Cari: I am near Perth. Yeah, just a little bit northeast of Perth, probably about ten miles. I’m doing miles, I’m not doing metrics, I’m adjusting already!
David: I’m impressed, Cari! Very well done! So we’re going to be talking to Cari in-depth more later on the podcast. But first, Anne-Marie, why don’t you introduce the podcast for any new listeners out there?
Anne-Marie: Sure. Of course. Well, InDesign Secrets is the independent resource for all things InDesign. Dave and I started this podcast and our companion blog at InDesignSecrets.com because we basically live and breathe InDesign for some reason. And we just wanted to share all the great tips and techniques and cool links that we come across with everybody else who uses InDesign. You can find out more about us and how we got this way by visiting the “About” page at our website, InDesignSecrets.com.
David: And also there’s lots of blog entries there, lots of more information. And also the videocast–for those of you who haven’t gone to the site recently, that’s the other big news that we introduced in the last episode–The InDesigner videocast, Michael Murphy’s InDesigner videocast is at InDesignSecrets.com as well now. So if you like video as well as audio, you know where you can get it.
Also, you can always leave comments there, on the show notes or in the comments on the blog. Or you can call our listener comment line at 206-888-INDY–that’s 4639.
Anne-Marie: And leave a message. Yeah, we got a funny message the other day, that we won a Ford Explorer.
David: That’s true!
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: I think we should include that in the podcast.
David: It was the strangest thing! You know, we’re getting all this spam, of course, I’m used to getting spam in my inbox, but I’m not used to getting spam voicemails, and this was so obviously a spam voicemail…
Cari: I didn’t even know that existed!
Anne-Marie: Oh yeah.
David: It was very disturbing. So there you go.
Anne-Marie: It’s an unfortunately common American spam done by voicemail.
David: There you go.
Anne-Marie: Anyway, hey, Cari, how would you like to do the “What’s coming up in our show today?” I’ll send this to you by iChat.
Cari: It’s coming across.
Anne-Marie: Go ahead.
Cari: It’s coming through now, so let’s see, what are we going to do today?
Anne-Marie: Just read ‘em through.
Cari: We’ll share the latest news about upcoming InDesign conferences. Some cool new techniques on rotating text inside a frame, which is courtesy of Adobe’s very own Tim Cole. Michael Murphy’s released a great videocast on photocompositing in InDesign. Cari’s going to sing Australian folk songs, including “Cockies of the Bungaree” and “Freedom of the Wallaby”–hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on!
[laughter]
David: All right!
Cari: You do not want me to sing!
Anne-Marie: Yeah!
Cari: I am not going to sing!
Anne-Marie: No, no, no, no. We just did that for fun.
Cari: I would scare everyone off!
David: We want folk songs!
Anne-Marie: No, no, you’re going to talk to us about that interesting new project that you were telling us about.
Cari: I certainly will.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. And what’s the obscure feature of the week, eek, eek?
Cari: It can be anything, can’t it?
[laughter]
David: Well, it could be, but today, what are we going to do today?
Anne-Marie: The obscure feature is “Adjust View Settings.”
David: Adjust View Settings. It’s like adjusting your rear-view mirror in your car.
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.
Cari: Yep.
David: Indeed. Hey, before we talk about that stuff, I just want to throw out another little plug about the conferences.
Unfortunately, the Stockholm InDesign conference has been postponed until the end of January, although maybe that’s fortunate for people who weren’t able to make it in October. But hopefully you’ll come at the end of January, where it’ll be rather dark, but we’re going to have lots of fun anyway.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: The Seattle show is going gangbusters, and that’s going to be November 6-8 here in Seattle, and that’s going to be a big show and I’m very excited about that.
The other thing that’s happening at the exact same time as the InDesign conference in Seattle is the Adobe plug-in developer conference. There’s a whole big Adobe Plug-in Developer Summit, and that’s actually happening all over the world on unfortunately the exact same dates. Some of it is actually happening in Seattle, and if you’re an InDesign developer there’s a good chance that you’re going to want to be at the InDesign Plug-In Developer Summit in Seattle to meet up with the developers. Anyway, that’s going to be lots of fun. And if you are a plug-in developer and you’re not near Seattle and you can’t get there, then we’ll put a link to where you can get more information in our show notes.
Anne-Marie: In our show notes. That’s right. All right, thank you. And we want to talk about our friend Tim Cole, from Adobe. He’s the evangelist, right, for… everything?
David: Senior…
Anne-Marie: What is his title?
David: Senior Super-Duper Evangelist Guy, I think that’s his title.
Anne-Marie: He’s a wonderful…
Cari: He’s even visited Australia at some point. He’s been to some of the Adobe road shows here and presented. A great guy.
Anne-Marie: That’s right, and he’s fun to watch, too, as a presenter. He’s a real live wire!
Cari: Absolutely.
Anne-Marie: Well, Tim has given us in the past a few very interesting, cool techniques as PDFs that we’ve talked about, and you can download them from our site. He’s given us a new one; it’s a very interesting way to rotate text inside of a frame without rotating the frame.
David: Yeah, I love this…
Cari: That’s interesting!
David: …because sometimes you want the frame, maybe your frame is a particular shape, some kind of weird shape, but you want the text rotated within it. You don’t want to rotate the frame, just the text inside. I thought you couldn’t do this. I just figured it was something that can’t be done.
Cari: So did I!
Anne-Marie: Because we’re not a visual medium, we’re an audio medium, I think it would be easy to explain if you can imagine that in InDesign you’ve created, with say the pen tool, a text frame that looks like an hourglass, all right, in the shape of an hourglass, and you’ve filled it with text. Now, what if you wanted that text to be rotated, to be at a 45-degree angle, but you didn’t want the hourglass rotated, right? How can you do that?
David: Good visual, very good, Anne-Marie. That was excellent.
Anne-Marie: All right. You cut all the copy from the hourglass frame and paste it into a smaller frame. And then move that smaller frame on top of the hourglass frame. Then you select both of those frames…
David: And when you say “on top,” you’re saying the little text frame that has all that text should be entirely inside, entirely on top of, right?
Anne-Marie: Right, the little frame shouldn’t be larger than the hourglass.
David: Right.
Cari: So it needs to be on top of the stack, if you’re thinking stacks.
Anne-Marie: That’s exactly right. Oh, and with that little one, then you rotate that little frame, you select that little frame and then you rotate it using the control palette, or I like just using “E,” that’s my friend. That’s the shortcut for the Free Transform. I’m going to start a band and call it “Free Transform.” That’s always my favorite command in any program.
[laughter]
So you rotate the smaller frame, and then you select both frames, and then open up the Pathfinder palette. The Pathfinder palette is one of those hidden palettes. You go to the Window menu, go down to Object & Layout and choose Pathfinder.
David: If you’re going to go through all of that trouble, instead of using the Pathfinder palette, just use it from the Object menu…
Anne-Marie: True.
Cari: Yeah.
David: …because you can just say Object menu and just pull up Pathfinder from there.
Anne-Marie: OK. Object, Pathfinder, and then you want to choose the very first command, which is Add. And Add combines the selected shapes and makes them into one shape. But the shape that’s on top, that’s the…
Cari: [gasps]
Anne-Marie: …the formatting, and the attributes of that shape are retained. So the rotated text is retained, but the shape of the largest object is also retained. So the frame of the hourglass is retained.
David: Isn’t that amazing? I heard Cari gasp in the background.
Cari: That’s amazing. I’m doing this with you, I’ve got InDesign here. This is really cool.
Anne-Marie: It’s a really cool technique!
Cari: That is a very cleverly-thought-out… that’s amazing. I’m going to have to steal that and show that to some people out here.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: Well, download the PDF. It’s in the show notes at InDesignSecrets.com, you can just click on the show notes, click on this episode.
Anne-Marie: It’s four pages with the step-by-step, so you can follow…
David: Yeah, it’s great. Nice step-by-step, it’s very easy, it goes a lot faster than it sounds. It’s really quite clever. Thank you Tim, so much, for doing that.
Anne-Marie: Thank you very much, Mr. Cole.
David: Excellent. OK.
Anne-Marie: So I know, David, you were very excited about this latest videocast of Michael Murphy’s.
David: Well, I just thought it was great, because A, I’m very pleased to have the whole videocast thing on there because I like seeing this stuff in video. So I was very pleased to see Michael’s videocast at InDesignSecrets period. But then when it turned out that the first thing he did was on photocompositing, I just got very excited because this is a feature…
Anne-Marie: That’s your thing!
David: It’s my thing, it’s been near and dear to my heart–the whole idea that you can use InDesign as a way to pull together a bunch of photographs and do clever things with them. And he just came out with some just great solutions, things I hadn’t even thought of, so…
Anne-Marie: That’s right. And I love the sound effect for the truck.
David: Yes, that was… [laughs]
Anne-Marie: He has a truck backing up, and he’s got the sound effect of the “beep, beep, beep” going on.
David: It was very, very funny. Anyway, I just wanted to throw that out. I don’t really have anything much to say about it, other than I encourage you to go take a look at that video. And you can watch that videocast on your computer screen, or you could download it, there’s a separate one that you can download for your iPod if you want to listen to it on your iPod, if you’ve got really good eyesight…
Anne-Marie: That’s right. And I think a big point of that videocast is, instead of separating out objects in Photoshop on different layers, just keep them as individual Photoshop files and then use InDesign’s ability to support the transparency to layer the things right in InDesign, and it gives you a lot more freedom and flexibility.
David: It sounds so simple, but there’s such great power in doing it that way, so much more flexibility. Your workflow could completely be changed by doing that kind of compositing in InDesign instead of going and doing it in Photoshop. There’s lots of reasons why you’d want to do it that way.
One of my favorite things is simply the ability to take a bunch of different images–and they may be vector, they may be raster, some may be RGB, some may be CMYK, you might have different resolution images, but you can just put them all together on one page and composite them. Whereas in Photoshop, you’d have to convert everything over…
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Everything has to be the same color mode, same resolution,…
David: Yeah. And the vector stuff is very frustrating, because when you do vector stuff in Photoshop, if you do it as paths you can retain it, but if you do it as a Smart Object, you can’t retain vector artwork in Smart Objects. It’s vector within Photoshop, but as soon as you try and get that into InDesign, it rasterizes, it turns into bitmaps.
Cari: That’s true.
David: So there’s lots of good reasons to do this kind of stuff in InDesign instead, and he demonstrates several things really beautifully. So anyway, thank you, MIchael, for pulling that one together. I think we’re going to see a lot more good stuff coming in those videocasts.
Anne-Marie: Oh, yeah.
David: OK, so we better move on and talk to Cari about her project, because this is…. Well, just tell us, what have you been up to recently?
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
Cari: What have I not been up to? I reckon I need at least another two or three hours in each day, but I think it’s the same for you guys. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Well, why don’t you tell everybody what you do for a living. I mean, what is it that you do there in Australia?
Cari: OK. I’m one of Australia’s few Adobe-certified instructors. In WA, I would say I’m the only one that’s got certifications in InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat.
Anne-Marie: And “WA” is…?
Cari: Is Western Australia. [laughs] I’m so sorry, I did it again, David!
David: [laughs] You did! It’s like, I live in WA!
Cari: It’s one of those things I’m not talking about Washington,..
Anne-Marie: …I live in Perth, Washington! Right!
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: All right.
Cari: But yeah, so I do a lot of consultancy, training, support work, probably very similar to some of the stuff you do, Anne-Marie. And I have a love affair with the big red A. And I’m part of a newly-created Adobe Ambassadors Team, of certified experts in Australia. So we’re actually going to be flown over on Sunday, and we’re going to get two days’ training on Monday and Tuesday in Sydney.
Anne-Marie: How nice.
Cari: Which is something I’m really looking forward to, especially to some of the new Acrobat stuff obviously that’s just been announced.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
Cari: But recently I’ve been working as a publication coordinator here at West Australia Newspapers, which has got a subsidiary which is Special Publications, and they’re currently publishing a wine guide of Western Australia. This is a book that’s published annually by Ray Jordan, that lists, oh, close to 400 wineries with all detailed information. And the project’s actually completely done in InDesign this year, which is quite exciting.
Anne-Marie: Wow.
Cari: I’ll run through how how it works. It’s a really bizarre workflow, but it works, and it has definitely saved a lot, a lot of time. Rather than typing in–imagine the actual document itself, it’s got left and right pages, each page is going to have a winery listed, or a vineyard, I think you say in the US, or they might mean different things.
And on the left-hand side, on the outside, you’ll get a color bar that’s got lots of information, regarding cellar door, postal address, number of hectares, the annual crush, whether they’ve got a restaurant, the prices of the wines, lots of details that we need to get from somewhere. So what we ended up doing is, all the wineries were entering their details online in sort of like an XML database-driven product developer, Formdesk, and we extracted the data from there into Microsoft Excel. The only problem I had…
David: Now, they were entering this just through a web browser?
Cari: Yep, through a web browser. They were given a web address and they had passwords to get in. Each winery could enter their details and we would get a little email that said, “This winery has now listed their details.”
Anne-Marie: Formdesk.com?
Cari: Formdesk.com, yep. You can have a look at it, I think you can run a free trial for, I don’t know, 60 days or something, so if you want to have a look at using it.
So from there, the data was all extracted into Microsoft Excel format, and after which a little bit of stuff was taken out. And the problem I had, I needed to sort it and I wanted to really extract it into XML, because I thought, I’m not going to be formatting the words “cellar door” in green and the next line in black and the next line in green and the next line in black…
Anne-Marie: Right.
Cari: Can you imagine going through…. or you could go through Next Style in InDesign, but it’d still be a lot of hard work.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
Cari: So I developed an XML running template in InDesign, and after running the data into a FileMaker Pro database, sorted it by region, sorted it in alphabetical order by winery name, and then extracted it into XML.
Ran that–not immediately into InDesign, still did a little bit of clean-up in TextWrangler, which is a Macintosh product that allows you to do really quick and easy multiple find-and-changes or find-and-replaces, because what you’re actually doing is, you’re doing a dummy recording and you’re actually automatically creating an AppleScript. I don’t know whether you guys have used it…
Anne-Marie: It’s very good.
David: I love TextWrangler. TextWrangler is just BBEdit, right?
Cari: Yep.
David: BBEdit basically came out with this other version called TextWrangler, and it’s free, right? It’s free?
Cari: Yep.
David: Extraordinary text editor on the Macintosh. I love TextWrangler.
Anne-Marie: So you recorded find-and-changes as scripts?
David: Wow.
Cari: Exactly. You can actually record an AppleScript that way. So especially if you’ve got customers that send you the same type of data regularly and you need to regularly clean up things, you can actually use it. It’s not a bad thing to do.
So after that, put some clean tags in, removed empty elements–for instance, if somebody doesn’t have a cellar door, you don’t want to have the words “cellar door” appear in your text. Then grabbed that XML, ran it all into InDesign, and from that point, really started with the whole production phase.
And if you get to have a look at the product, the product’s not totally finished yet, the second proof was actually dropped off last night at 8:30, so I had a long week too!
[laughter]
But the product uses just about every new feature that InDesign CS2 has got. Because you never know when there’s a vineyard that needs to be included.
Anne-Marie: Right.
Cari: So your left and right pages keep alternating. So because the book is quite thick I’ve used the Book functionality. So lots of different documents, each region’s got their own document–some regions that are really big have been broken down into multiple documents–and the pagination occurs automatically using the Book palette. And what happens is, the actual color bars down the left- and right-hand side are actually anchored objects.
David: Right. Right.
Cari: All are custom anchored objects that retain their location on the outside of the margin. Any ads, any wine-label images that are placed within the text, they’re all made into anchored objects. So if there is a single winery insertion, everything can just flip from left to right and right to left.
Anne-Marie: Wonderful. Right. So you’re using the “Align to Spine” feature.
Cari: Exactly. Yep. Exactly. And I just think that I know I like sliced bread, but I think this is better than sliced bread, to be honest!
[laughter]
And then using a combination of nested styles, because the actual author of the book also does wine tasting; he tastes over a thousand or two thousand wines for the publication of this book. I don’t want to see him walk a straight line because I don’t think he can…
[laughter]
But yeah, literally, formatting some of his editorial, I used a combination of the “Next Style” feature, which is fantastic. You highlight your text, you say, “This is the very first style I want to start applying,” talking paragraph styles here…
Anne-Marie: Yes.
Cari: …and then automatically, sort of like a domino effect, it just applies one after the other after the other.
David: Right.
Cari: And then within those Next Style features, also used Nested Styles, which formats numbers in a different way, different color, and stuff like that. It was an amazing project. Using mixed inks, because it also has varnish.
David: Wow!
Cari: So a combination of using a process color that I’ve actually created as a spot color.
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.
Cari: So that we can mix it in different percentages with the spot varnish. And then on the output side, in the Ink Manager in InDesign, you can just say that one spot color, which is actually supposed to be process color, make that a process color, and it actually retains its varnish all the way throughout.
David: Beautiful!
Anne-Marie: That’s amazing.
Cari: Yeah, it’s a fantastic project.
David: So this is a very complex project. But did this actually save them time, in putting it together this way?
Cari: We’ve brought down the production probably to about 15-20% of what it was last year.
David: Fifteen to twenty percent!
Cari: Yeah. It was done in an earlier version of InDesign last year, but no XML was used, no automatic running, obviously they were not using the “Next Style” features, they also didn’t use the “Nested Style” features…
Anne-Marie: Align to Spine…
Cari: …so imagine doing this all manually. And then when a page was inserted, they had to flip all the left and right pages over and reposition the artwork!
David: Wow.
Anne-Marie: Oy.
David: So the CS2 features basically cut off 80% of the time! [laughs]
Cari: Absolutely amazing. And properly utilizing InDesign, you know?
[dogs barking]
David: I hear dogs!
Cari: What’s that in the background?
Anne-Marie: Sorry!
[laughter]
David: I hear dogs! Those aren’t my dogs.
Cari: No, that’s not mine either, nope, no dogs around here.
Anne-Marie: Somebody’s trying to join in this Skype conference call.
David: Is it a dingo, is that a wild dingo? What is that? Get it away from my baby!
[laughter]
Cari: You do know, when you walk into Perth and you’re in the central business district, we don’t really have kangaroos walking down the center of the central business district.
David: You don’t, really? Not really? Oh well.
Cari: No, no. Of course not. No.
David: Wallabies, though. You’ve got wallabies.
Cari: Wallabies and kangaroos, yeah, both of them. You can truly see them out here….
David: That sounds like a really great, great project. And we have to move on to our Obscure Feature of the Week.
Cari: Show us the View Settings!
David: View Settings! Exactly. So we should cover Adjust View Settings. But I want to see more of this project, Cari.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, definitely.
David: Maybe we could get some screenshots to put on the InDesignSecrets.
Anne-Marie: Could you send us some PDFs or something?
Cari: I certainly can do that, yes.
David: That would be great.
Cari: I’ll do some visuals of a couple spreads, so you can sort of see what it looks like. Definitely can.
David: Excellent.
Anne-Marie: All right, so the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week, eek, eek, is Adjust View Settings.
David: Yes. Where is that?
Anne-Marie: Adjust View Settings is found in Preferences, and if you choose Display Performance, in I’d say one of the top five most confusing interfaces in Adobe InDesign…
David: I agree.
Cari: It’s typical, isn’t it?
Anne-Marie: It’s weird. You have Options at the top, and Adjust View Settings at the bottom, and they don’t really work together at all.
David: Yeah, there’s a lot of problems with this. This one panel in Preferences, the Display Performance panel, is trying to do a lot of different things, and it’s complicated. But it is very powerful, and it lets you do some cool things in here.
Anne-Marie: So what is Adjust View Settings?
David: .. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: OK, Adjust View Settings, it says “Typical.” Hey, I’m typical!
Cari: It does something, doesn’t it?
Anne-Marie: It does something. It adjusts how you view things. And so this is where you set them. All right, well thanks, everybody, for listening to the show!
[laughter]
Cari: What kind of things, Anne-Marie, what things? I’m looking. What things in InDesign?
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: OK, it’s basically a way to speed up InDesign as you’re paging through a long document full of color images, or balancing speed with…
David: With quality.
Anne-Marie: With quality of the images that you’re looking at.
David: I just want to throw one thing here, that the three options here are Fast, Typical, High Quality. And those, of course, are the same thing that you see in Display Performance when you can go to Fast, which nobody ever uses, or Typical or High Quality. And the one thing that really bugs me here is this should not be called Fast, Typical, or High Quality, this should be called 1, 2, and 3, or…
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: You know, there’s nothing special that makes High Quality high-quality. There’s simply three settings, and you can set them to anything you want.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, that’s true.
Cari: Yeah, because High Quality could be fast.
David: Yeah, High Quality could look really terrible, and Fast could look really great–it’s completely up to you. The key is, you have to choose each one of those separately. So you can adjust the view settings if you pick… usually it’s set to Typical. So if you set “Typical,” you’re setting up what the typical view settings are going to look like. And by default, the raster images, like your Photoshop images, are set to Proxy. Vector images are set to Proxy. Transparency is Medium Quality. And “Greek Type Below”–I think that defaults to seven, right?
Anne-Marie: Right.
Cari: Yeah.
David: Seven points. So first of all, I almost always change the “Greek Type Below,” because I hate looking at greeked type, right, the little gray bars.
Anne-Marie: Right, the gray bars. And Cari, isn’t it true that when you’re training people, I often find when I’m training people and they see the gray bars, they go, “What’s that? How come I can’t edit the text? What is that thing?”
Cari: Exactly.
David: Right.
Cari: I just drop it down tremendously.
Anne-Marie: I set it to zero, personally.
David: If it’s below two, then I’m not going to see it anyway. But I would set that down to like two or three or something.
But what really freaks people out, I find, is they may change the “Greek Type Below” to two or three points, and then later they switch into High Quality mode, and all their text gets greeked out again. Why? Because if you set it in that dialog box, you’re only setting it for Typical. If you want to change High Quality, you have to switch the pop-up menu to High Quality and then make all your changes all over again! Change your greeked type, change your raster, vector, transparency, whatever.
Anne-Marie: They should just have Adjust View Settings with no dropdown menu, no 1, 2, 3. Just Adjust View Settings. And then change what you want for rasters, vectors, and transparency.
David: Well, yeah, but I find it very useful to have two different things, like between Typical and High Quality. One change that I make all the time with Typical, for example, is I set vector to High Quality.
Anne-Marie: Definitely.
Cari: I do exactly the same.
David: Yeah. So raster images I leave set at Proxy, because if I have a 50-megabyte Photoshop file, I don’t need to see every pixel in it. Proxy is just fine. But if I have an Illustrator image, I want that to be high-quality, so I set vector graphics all the way to the top. Even for Typical. So that’s a way to tweak the Typical setting to the way I work.
Anne-Marie: That’s true. I mean, I keep raster images at Proxy for the same reason, and the thing is that you can always right-click on any image in the document and choose High Quality just for that one image to see it really sharpen up.
David: Right. Right. But I just find it annoying to have to right-click on each vector image, one at a time, to set just those to high resolution. But you don’t have to. You just set it in one place here, in your Display Performance preferences. Change your Typical setting to vector graphics all the way up to high resolution and then all of your vector images are going to be high-res. Cari, you agree with that, that’s the way you do it?
Cari: I actually do the same. I actually advise that to a lot of my clients as well, when I do training. Because a lot of the graphic designers, they do work with a lot of vector art. And they go, “Ah, it looks all jagged and it doesn’t look right.” And I say, “Well, you’re using the Typical display performance and you can change that setting right there.”
David: Yeah, and it’s amazing–when you change it, it looks like you had created the artwork right in InDesign, because it’s so sharp.
Cari: Exactly. It’s fantastic. Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And as always, with any preference setting, if you have a way that you’d like to work with all your InDesign documents, start up InDesign, close any documents, and then make the changes to Adjust View Settings in Preferences.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: That way it becomes an application default, and that’ll be what it’s set for from then on.
David: Great point. Very good point.
Cari: Spot on.
Anne-Marie: OK, well I think we covered that, guys.
David: Yeah. So that is the Obscure Feature of the Week: Adjust View Settings. And that’s it for episode 32, we have to move along. Thank you, Cari, so much, for joining us.
Anne-Marie: Thanks, Cari!
Cari: Thank you so much for having me. I’ll make sure you get some of those screenshots of the wine guide.
David: That would be terrific. That would be wonderful. And some of the wine, too, could you send some of the wine?
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: I actually have two bottles of Australian wine right here, and I’m halfway through with one of them.
Cari: Hang on, hang on, is it from WA?
Anne-Marie: I can’t tell, I don’t know, my vision’s all blurry right now, can’t really read it.
[laughter]
Cari: You’ve been drinking too much of the good stuff!
David: There we go. [laughs] Oh my goodness.
Cari: Thanks heaps for having me, guys.
Anne-Marie: Of course, Cari.
David: And thank you all, out there in podcast-land, for listening to us. We’d love to hear your comments on any of the topics that we talked about, or suggestions for future topics, just let us know. Leave your comments in the show notes as a comment there, or you can email us at info @ InDesignSecrets.com, or the voicemail. Voicemail works well, at (206) 888-INDY, that’s 4639.
And until we meet again, this is David Blatner and…
Anne-Marie: Anne-Marie Concepcion, and…
Cari: Cari Jensen.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: For InDesign Secrets. Thanks, everybody.
Cari: Bye-bye.
[music]
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 032 page.