Podcast 035 Transcript

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 035 page.

[music]

Anne-Marie Concepción: Welcome to InDesign Secrets Episode 35. I am Anne-Marie Concepción and I am here with my co-host David Blatner.

David Blatner: Well, how do you do?

Anne-Marie: The InDesign Secrets podcast and our companion blog at InDesignSecrets.com is the independent resource for all things InDesign. If you are a new listener, welcome to the show, and if you are a grizzled podcast veteran who knows all of our punch lines already, all we can say is, “Thank You.”

David: Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you. And it is so good to have you back Anne-Marie.

Anne-Marie: Thank You.

David: Anne-Marie was sick last time and I had to go on do the show without her, and it just was not the same, I think everybody can agree.

Anne-Marie: I appreciate all your good wishes during the podcast; I listened to it, and I guess everybody wished me well, because I am feeling much better even though my voice may not sound like it, I am feeling 100% better.

David: Hurrah!

Anne-Marie: Yay!

David: We are getting better, we are all getting better, little by little. Before we get into the show, we want to welcome our first sponsor. We have been doing this show for almost a year now and we have our first sponsor sponsoring the InDesign Secrets blog and podcast, and that is Markzware. Our friends at Markzware are now a sponsor.

Anne-Marie: Remember we talked about them a few episodes ago, about their Q2ID plug-in and how fast they were…

David: We did. Markzware has been doing plug-ins and utilities for over a decade, probably 15-16 years, and they just have a great, great history of making good software.

Anne-Marie: I think a lot of people know them from FlightCheck Pro.

David: Yes, the FlightCheck software is an excellent way of preflighting. This gets into a different issue, but we are going to cover preflighting in a future edition on how silly InDesign’s preflighting is, in my opinion. But that is why you need really good preflighting software like what they have.

Anne-Marie: But the big news for InDesign users is their Q2ID plug-in, which is like a miracle plug-in. That is what we talked about before. You put the plug-in into your InDesign program and from then on you can open up any QuarkXpress document, and it automatically converts it on-the-fly to an InDesign document. Without the plug-in…

David: Not any, not any.

Anne-Marie: Not, any, well not version 2.

David: I still have my Xpress version 2, and Xpress one from 1987.

Anne-Marie: Oh my lord. [laughter]

David: It won’t open those files.

Anne-Marie: Oh well then forget about it.

David: Right, but everything else from Xpress three on to 7. They just released the new one that does Xpress 7, right?

Anne-Marie: Yeah, that is the big news, that just came out last week. Some shops buy software.

David: I guess so, something like that.

Anne-Marie: They have to use version seven or if you are a freelancer who gets files in all different formats and you need to use them in InDesign, that is the way to go. Because without the plug-in, InDesign can only open Quark version 3.3 and version four documents, right?

David: That is right.

Anne-Marie: Also, for our listeners, for the InDesign Secrets listeners, Markzware has a special deal for you guys. Until November 30th, you can get 20% off the cost of the plug-in. You go to their online-store, we will have a link to the store in our show notes, but in case you can not get to our show notes right away, it is markzware.com/store_usa, you get 20% off, go to the store, purchase it, and in the coupon code area, enter this: “idsecret.” Just “idsecret” and then you get 20% off.

David: Yeah, it is great. It is a good value, and it is a very, very good plug-in. So it is definitely worth, if you run into QuarkXpress anywhere in your workflow, it is worth having that.

Anne-Marie: That is right, thanks again Markzware. We met a whole bunch of InDesign Secrets podcast’s listeners at the Master Class Conference earlier this week, and it was so cool. I was sitting at a table at lunch and somebody came over with a funny smile on her face, staring at me, and I looked at her and I said, “Do I know you?” and she said, “I recognized your voice from across the restaurant, because I hear your voice all the time, I never met you in person, I just wanted to meet you in person.” That was pretty wild.

David: That is great.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: I got some of that too.

Anne-Marie: Did you?

David: It was a wonderful conference. The InDesign conference Master Class here in Seattle on Monday through Wednesday was just extraordinary. We had speakers from Adobe, we had speakers from all over the world, doing just incredible sessions on InDesign, going very, very deep into InDesign, and I learned a lot.

Anne-Marie: Right, it was a huge geek-fest. A very good vibe, lots of people I loved. I noticed people making friends left and right and just going out to diners and lunches with each other, and it was neat, because a lot of these conferences you come to by yourself and you are like, “Uhh, what am I going to do when I am not sitting in a seminar and I will be all by myself,” but it was not like that at all. People got along really well, and we all had this common bond. Plus it was so cool being right next to the mother ship, we were right across, maybe 30 steps, from the InDesign team on the Adobe campus. They were coming in and out, you could see them working in their windows from our building. I was like “Hmm, I wonder if he is working on some palettes. Maybe I should send him a note about what I want.” It was kind of cool.

David: Just go up and put a sheet of paper against the window saying “Add my feature!” You never know what they are going to do.

Anne-Marie: Exactly.

David: And in fact, a lot of people got tours of the Adobe office. That was one of the benefits of the conference. A number of people went on guided tours of the Adobe offices and went around and saw the inside of these offices.

Anne-Marie: Right, and their tour-guide was always somebody like a big honcho from the InDesign team. That was neat.

David: Yeah, Whitney McCleary did a bunch of the tours, and Whitney is way up high in the hierarchy there. I was very impressed.

Anne-Marie: Miss InDesign.

David: Indeed. Miss CS now.

Anne-Marie: Oh that’s right, Miss Creative Suite.

David: I was very pleased that she was willing to do that. It was awesome.

Anne-Marie: Our podcast listeners, I want to mention that, we had a seminar scheduled that we were going to do a live podcast, right?

David: We did.

Anne-Marie: So David and I showed up and we think “How many people are going to show up, like maybe 10 or 20?” and we had standing room only. There were people standing up against the back, they were packed in there, it was probably at least 100 people in the room.

David: It is true, it was great, but we were missing something important.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: We had lots of people, we had Anne-Marie, we had I/me.

Anne-Marie: Everybody looked very excited to be there.

David: Yes it wonderful, and we suddenly realized we had a little problem.

Anne-Marie: We did not have any microphone. [laughter]

David: No microphones at all. It was no cables. Actually we had microphones but we did not have any cables to plug them in, it was even worse.

Anne-Marie: Right. We tried yelling really loud into the microphone, but it did not make it into the computer.

David: So close and yet so far. But we were able, a little ways into the session, we were able to record a little bit of it, and we will play some of that for you later on.

Anne-Marie: We will play some segments from it. We did have a good time once we got going. Lots of questions and answers. We made people come up and say who they were and where they were from and speak into the mic. Actually it went pretty well.

David: It did, it was a lot of fun. So besides hearing excerpts from our podcast session, we are going to talk about a couple of other things here in this session today. One is, well, we got this rather passionate email from a listener. She swore at us several times. So we are going to be talking about the issue of outlining type, and when you might or might not want to be converting your text to outlines. Also, we will play a little bit from that session, and we are going to do our obscure feature of the week-eek-eek-eek, thank you Anne-Marie.

Anne-Marie: You are welcome.

David: I so missed that.

Anne-Marie: I know.

David: We are going to talk about the barbell.

Anne-Marie: Yes, the barbell.

David: Where the barbell shows up in InDesign.

Anne-Marie: It is hiding.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: all right, but first can we hear a little snippet from our live session?

David: Yeah, let us do a couple of little snippets here. And I will sneak that in.

What we are showing here is the palette options that have little elves in it. And the question that Sandy Cohen asked was, “Which palette, when you choose palette options, gives you little elves?” Where do you see the elves? Gnomes? Are they Elves?

Anne-Marie: Dwarves?

David: Gnomes, are they elves? Gnomes? Dwarves? Something. Wizard. Wizards. Little wizards. Where does that show up? This is an old Photoshop image, actually. This is from the old days of Photoshop, a little old Photoshop Easter egg which snuck its way into InDesign. It was the old layers palette in Photoshop, but where is that in InDesign? So Anne-Marie, where did you find that?

Anne-Marie: Well with the help of the audience, because I had no idea what you were talking about, I thought maybe you are on drugs or something. [laughter]

David: That is a great question.

Anne-Marie: It is in the states palette, which is in “Window” -> “Interactive States” -> choose “Palette Options” from the states palette. What is it asking exactly?

David: It is asking the size of the thumbnails.

Anne-Marie: Oh, the size of the thumbnails and for drawings of the thumbnails, it has got a bunch of little elves marching off a cliff, or something. [laughter]

David: Palettes. I know I did not even register that that was a color palette, like a paint palette.

Anne-Marie: Oh yeah.

David: There are also keyboard shortcuts. One of the things that a number of people asked me recently about is keyboard shortcuts for scaling. And they are keyboard shortcuts, they were Quark keyboard shortcuts in Xpress, and I believe it is the same thing. Command-option period and comma will scale larger or smaller by 5%. Is that right, do I have these keyboards shortcuts right?

Anne-Marie: Yeah. It is command-option lesser and greater than. That is what I call those. Less than makes it smaller, greater than makes it greater then. What do you call them here in Seattle?

David: Angle brackets.

Anne-Marie: Angle brackets. Angle brackets, they are so green in the spring time. Angle brackets.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: Command-option period and comma.

David: So this will actually make the picture bigger and smaller. Now what is frustrating to me about these keyboard shortcuts, and I am going to say this loudly and clearly so that the people from Adobe in the back will hear me, is that this scales larger and smaller by 5% increments. Now, the problem is that if you have something that is, say, 10 picas large, 10 picas wide, and you scale it up 5%, what do you get? 10.6 picas. 10.6 picas? Do I have that right? Now if I scale that down 5%, does it go back to 10 picas? No because 5% of 10.6 picas, so you get like 10.2 picas. And if you scale up again you get 10 point something picas, and you scale down again,…

Anne-Marie: We have already entered the twilight zone by doing it more than twice. I make it 10 picas wide and then scale it up 5%. 10.6 picas, very good. [laughter] So I am just going to put it back…

David: I wrote a book about Pi.

Anne-Marie: That is right, I forgot about that. All right, 10 picas, scale it down 5%, 9.6 picas, then 9.02 picas, whatever it makes sense. But I am scaling it back up, and now it is doing it, let us see what is happening. It is going into…

David: Yeah, so now we are now at 10.586 picas and so on. So pretty soon, you get to Pi, in fact.

Anne-Marie: Yes, that is correct.

David: This is actually one way that you can figure out the value of Pi, is by scaling up and down about 400.000 times, and that will about get you to Pi. But it is frustrating. So just be aware that we are dealing with percents here, not dealing with absolute values. Does that make any sense at all? Does that count as an obscure feature of the week? That is pretty obscure.

Anne-Marie: Well that was great.

David: Yeah, it was fun. It was fun. The recording quality was not exactly up to regular stuff.

Anne-Marie: No.

David: The irony that we were live in the room together and the audio quality was not nearly as good as when we are a thousand miles away from each other.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, that was kind of a theme. But we will figure it out better for the next time we do this.

David: Next time.

Anne-Marie: Because I think it was worth it.

David: Yes, it was fun. OK, good.

Anne-Marie: all right, let us talk about this passionate email.

David: Well, so we have talked in the past about how it is not so good to outline fonts, and we have blogged about this, and mentioned it a couple of times.

Anne-Marie: Right, yes.

David: This person emailed us from Ohio, basically swearing every now and then and tearing us a new one.

Anne-Marie: He is a printer. He is a printer, and he said that, I believe what he sent in his email is that what he does is that he asks all of his clients to outline all their fonts in their InDesign documents before sending them to him to print. Not just InDesign documents, but every single kind of document, he prefers that people outline before giving them to him.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: So I guess he is not taking PDFs.

David: I don’t know. It is just, it was very painful.

Anne-Marie: Because he said he keeps running into missing font problems, and that in a perfect world, everybody would include fonts and everybody would make crop-marks and include bleed allowances, but it does not happen, and what happens when it is midnight, and you have to go to press, and it says that you are missing a font.

David: I feel for the guy, I really do, but at the same time, I just do not think converting everything to outlines is the way to go. I mean I agree there are times when it is reasonable to convert text to outlines. If you need to tweak the outlines of a font, sure. There are times…

Anne-Marie: And in case people do not know what we mean by outlining fonts, for the newbie users, that means you set some type, and then you select type, and then you go to the type menu and you choose “Create Outlines.” It turns the type into Bezier shapes that are filled with your fill color. They are as though you had drawn each letter by hand. They are no longer editable with the type tool, but it means that it no longer a font, so you do not have to worry about including the font with the job.

David: Right. So anyway, in general I do not think that it is a good idea to do it. There are times when you want to do it. Here are a couple of quick tricks just in case you need to convert text to outline. If you select the text when you select “Create Outlines”, it actually converts the text outlines and anchors it in position one line at a time, each line becomes an anchored object in the text, which is kind of interesting. If you hold down the Option or Alt key when you choose “Create Outlines”, if you have actually selected a text first and then said “Option-Create Outlines”, or “Alt-Create Outlines”, in that case it converts the outlines but it leaves your original text. It makes a duplicate of it and converts that to outlines.

Anne-Marie: When would you want to do that?

David: When you want a really good trick to show everybody. [laughter] I do not know. Maybe if you need an outline to do something special in addition to the text that you selected.

Anne-Marie: When you want to move it away off the font and put it somewhere else.

David: There you go, sure.

Anne-Marie: Also converting fonts to outlines in-line, just selecting a few words can bring it into outline, that is a trick. That way you can apply a drop-shadow to that text.

David: That is right.

Anne-Marie: Or fade just that text within the rest of the text frame. Then you select the outlined text with the selection tool, and now you can apply a drop-shadow to it.

David: Yeah, that is a good use for converting text outlines. But that is only converting a little bit of text outlines, maybe one word that you want to apply a drop-shadow to, or apply a glow to, or something, that you would not want to apply to all the text. That is really different from converting all the text.

Anne-Marie: I think it would be a big pain to go through every page of a document and convert everything to outline.

David: In fact, if you do do that, when you do convert text to outlines, you loose some pretty important stuff like rule-above, rule-below, the paragraph rules just disappear.

Anne-Marie: Right, that is true.

David: They are gone. When you convert text to outlines in InDesign, they are just gone. So, that is interesting. That is not possible.

Anne-Marie: Also, the letter-writer said that there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing it this way, but I have always heard that there is something wrong with it, because when you convert to outlines, it looses some features that you might need so the type looks good. First of all, as soon as you do it, all the type looks fatty, kind of bold. I know that is because that is because you are looking at it at a low resolution on your monitor. What is happening there is loss of hinting, I think is what it is called. Mordy Golding, on his blog for Illustrator, quotes Tom Phinney, who is the Program Manager for Fonts, I believe is his title at Adobe.

David: Tom was actually at the InDesign conference.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: And he discussed this issue at the conference at well that when you loose the hinting on any kind of low-resolution device, whether it is your screen, or all the way up to even a laser-printer, you are going to get fatter looking text. Because the hinting and the filling algorithms, they are different. You do not have that anymore. Because it is no longer text, it is a Bezier outline.

Anne-Marie: Right. Yeah. We will put a link to the post of Mordy’s where he quotes Tom Phinney so people can read the nitty-gritty of what happens. Though Tom Phinney does say how much difference this makes depends on the size and the style of the type, and especially on the resolution of the output device. So maybe that is why our printer friend is not seeing anything wrong. If you print to very high resolution, like at least 2400 dpi, with regular text sizes, not like Sans Serif at six points or something, then the effect is barely noticable.

David: Yeah, it is.

Anne-Marie: At a lower resolution it definitely looks different.

David: It is unless you have, as I mentioned earlier, the rule-above or rule-below or even straight-throughs or underlined. Underlined text is gone. So that is a problem with converting text to outlines. You have to be very careful when you do that. Here, however, is a great trick to get around it. If you need to get outlined text to your printer, for whatever reason, I don’t know why, but they really want it to be outlined, send them a PDF. A flattened PDF, meaning Acrobat four PDF, and send it to them with all the text converted to outlines automatically. And the way you do that is, you go to, under the “Edit” menu, you choose “Transparency/Flattener Presets”, and choose.

The high-resolution transparency/flattener preset, because that is the one you are going to base this off of, and then click the “New”-button. And the “New”-button lets you create a new flattener preset, and in this preset, you can turn on the “Convert All Text to Outlines” check-box.

Anne-Marie: Ahh.

David: You turn on that check-box, give it a name, click “OK”, and then next time you print or you make a PDF, an Acrobat four PDF, you use that flattener preset to make your PDF. And as long as there is any transparency on the spread…

Anne-Marie: So you might have to put some fake transparency on there.

David: Yeah, you might put some footing object in the corner that is at 0.5% transparency, you know.05 opacity, so that it is virtually gone, but it is just enough to kick in the transparency flattening. Then, when you create an Acrobat four file or you print with that flattener, all your text gets converted to outlines, but it retains the strike-throughs, it retains the rule-above, it retains all of that stuff. It is really a nice trick. It is actually one of the cool things that you get from there.

Anne-Marie: That is pretty clever.

David: But use the built-in stuff.

Anne-Marie: I do not think it would help this guy. How would it help this guy? How can he get a PDF of the missing fonts.

David: This guy does not need help from the PDF. This guy needs help with blood pressure medicine [laughter]. This guy needs some medication to calm himself down. If you read the email you would understand. Some people. I do not know how it would help him other than if he wants a PDF with the text converted to outlines, he would rather have this. Everything would then be in outline mode, so there you go.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: But the flattener preset lets InDesign do the converting for you at export-time, so you do not have to convert stuff in InDesign itself.

Anne-Marie: And please, designers, always, always include all your fonts when you are sending a native file to your printer, so you do not give them a high blood pressure.

David: That is very nice.

Anne-Marie: When the job has to go to press.

David: That is right.

Anne-Marie: I always give them my phone number and say “You can call me 24/7, any time that there is a problem, because I do not want you to be stuck with the problem. I can help you.”

David: That is so nice of you.

Anne-Marie: Yes it very nice, I know, that is why they love me.

David: I guess so.

Anne-Marie: You know one of my favorite parts of the conference was the Butterfly Island contest.

David: Butterfly Island.

Anne-Marie: Escape from Butterfly Island. Sandy always puts this on. She has so much fun with that. This is where they get ten hapless volunteers from the audience to sit upon stage and David and Sandy have huddled together for weeks coming up with diabolically difficult InDesign questions to pose to them, and they have to answer on-the-fly without any help from a book, or…

David: Some of it is trivia, some of it is, really, what is in the program. Some of these were very hard. We figured this was a nice surprise.

Anne-Marie: And if they got one wrong, then they were kicked out. There was no second chance. The one person left standing, or actually sitting in this case, won a copy of the Creative Suite Premium.

David: Yeah, the whole thing. It was great. That is the big benefit. There are big, big prizes at this game show. And Sandy Cohen did a wonderful job putting these things together. We had great fun doing it.

Anne-Marie: She was quizzing me with some of the questions beforehand. And one that I thought was interesting, I do not know whether you guys used this one, because I was not able to sit in for the entire contest, was, “What are the five English language dictionaries that come with InDesign CS 2?”

David: Great. Yeah, that was a good one.

Anne-Marie: Name all five. Do you know them?

David: I do if I actually open the preferences down…

Anne-Marie: No, no, no, you cannot open it!

David: I cannot?

Anne-Marie: No, no, no, these people could not open the program. Sit there. Do not look.

David: No they could not? Absolutely!

Anne-Marie: No, name them, go ahead.

David: We know there is English USA, and English UK, and English Canadian. But that is when it gets tricky. Then, beyond that, then it is…

Anne-Marie: I got it. I got it.

David: Did you? What are the other two?

Anne-Marie: Legal and medical.

David: Legal and medical. That is right.

Anne-Marie: Legal and medical. They are both English. English Legal. You know, I was doing some training at a pharmacy company, not a pharmacy, a pharma-company, a drug manufacturer, the marketing department. And man, they loved the USA medical built-in dictionary, because they have to write these really long, obscure medical terms in their marketing literature, and then they had to send it to the doctors to proof-read. Like doctors have nothing better to do.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: So now they were able to catch the misspelling and stuff with their medical dictionary.

David: Wow. That is great.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, that is very cool. They were thrilled to see that.

David: There were all kinds of other questions that came up. One of my favorite questions that came up had to do with the palettes. Almost every palette in InDesign has a little fly-out menu with more options but not all of them. There are a couple of palettes that do not. So we were discussing, one of the questions was, “What palette, name one palette that does not have a fly-out menu?” Nobody got that.

Anne-Marie: all right, I am going to guess. I am not looking. I did not see this one.

David: all right.

Anne-Marie: I am going to guess, is it the story palette.

David: The story palette? Oh under the type menu. Story palette. Does the story palette have a fly-out menu? No, it does not. You got it. You win!

Anne-Marie: I got one! Oh my god!

David: You win, you win a swift kick in the pants.

Anne-Marie: Are there other palettes that do not have menus?

David: There are a couple, yeah, there is a couple. Go look for those and we will talk about those later.

Anne-Marie: all right.

David: One of the best questions that came up, here is one that Sandy came up with, I had no clue. It was, “Where does barbell show up in InDesign?” And I looked at her, and I was like “A barbell?”

Anne-Marie: This one I know, this one I know, because she asked me beforehand to, and I know this one because I use it all the time.

David: So this brings up our obscure feature of the week-eek-eek-eek-eek. So the obscure feature of the week is the barbell.

Anne-Marie: The barbell.

David: So, Anne-Marie, where is the barbell? Where do we find that?

Anne-Marie: Well, you apply strong anti-aliasing, and then you need the barbell to apply it. No, sorry, that is Photoshop. [laughter] Barbell is a preference setting for the shape of the cursor, and you get your choice of cursors in the story editor.

David: Yes.

Anne-Marie: And that is the other view, one of my favorite views to work with text in InDesign, click inside any kind of text frame or select it with the selection tool, and then go to the “Edit”-menu and choose “Edit in Story-Editor”, or press Command- or Control-Y, right. And in the story editor, you are looking at just an editing font. You do not see the actual formatting, so sometimes it is pretty easy to loose the cursor, which is why if you go to preferences under “Story Editor”->”Display”, you have your choice of four different cursors. One is the standard one, one is a thicker version of it, one is like a block that takes up the size of a letter, and one is called a barbell. That is a thick, vertical cursor with a triangle at the top and the bottom. Kind of like a barbell. Very easy to see when you switch to the barbell cursor and it is blinking inside the text-frame, excuse me, inside the story-editor. I would to love to be able to get that inside the text-frame, but…

David: Yeah, I think maybe…

Anne-Marie: Maybe in the next version.

David: Yeah, I often loose that cursor when it is just sitting there in a text frame, but that is where barbell exists, in the story-editor display preferences.

Anne-Marie: all right, well, that is it for episode 35. Thank you Markzware for your support of InDesign Secrets, and we encourage everyone to take advantage of their time-limited offer, remember you have until November 30th to get 20% off of Q2ID, go to our podcast show notes to get to the link, or just go to markzware.com/store_usa and enter “idsecret” as your coupon code.

David: I do not know why they said “idsecret” instead of “idsecrets”, it seems it should be secrets, but in this case it is not. It is just one. It is just “idesecret”, so there you go.

Anne-Marie: As always we would love to hear your comments on topics that we have talked about, or suggestions for future topics, or rants about outlining fonts, loved that, leave your comment in the show notes, or call us at 1-206-888-INDY (4639 is INDY). 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 035 page.