Podcast 036 Transcript

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 036 page.

[music]

David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets, episode 36. Thirty-six: three times… something.

Anne-Marie Concepción: Twelve.

David: Twelve. That’s it. Three times twelve. Episode 36, end of November 2006. I’m David Blatner and I’m here along with my co-host, Anne-Marie Concepción.

Anne-Marie: Howdy! And, David, I want to wish you happy anniversary! I believe this is our first anniversary of the podcast.

David: Thank you, Anne-Marie. That is very kind of you. It is our one-year anniversary of InDesign Secrets. That’s very exciting.

Anne-Marie: What did you get me?

David: ..

[laughter]

David: Let’s see. First anniversary, I think that’s a headset anniversary, isn’t it?

Anne-Marie: Something like that.

David: Yeah, pearls or…

Anne-Marie: On The Simpsons yesterday they asked Homer, “Did you forget your anniversary?” And he said, “No, we’re not having an anniversary this year!” I love that.

David: [laughs] There you go. Hey, so this is InDesign Secrets, and you probably know about our blog at InDesignSecrets.com. Both the blog and the podcast are the independent resource for all things InDesign. Everything you ever wanted to know about this program. If you’re a new listener, welcome to the show. If you’ve been with us for a while, welcome back. We’re going to have a good show today.

Oh, today’s sponsor. We’ve got a couple sponsors.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. In addition to our first, premiere sponsor, Markzware, we’d like to welcome a new sponsor, debuting in today’s episode: Trumatch. One of my favorite companies.

David: Absolutely. Wow. I’ve been using Trumatch swatchbooks for years and years and years.

Anne-Marie: Yep, me too.

David: They’re very cool. You know, the whole idea of a swatchbook is that if you want a color, you can’t typically trust what you see onscreen. If you want something that’s like a dark blue or something, what are you going to pick? How are you going to pick it? If it’s going to be a CMYK color, what are you going to pick?

I’ve always pushed the Trumatch swatchbooks because they’re just so easy to use. You just flip through it, you find the dark blue color you want or whatever, and then you could use that Trumatch color right in the program–you can spec because they all have their own code–or you can just look at the CMYK values and type the CMYK values yourself, which, to be honest, is usually what I do.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. I mean, those fanbooks are so useful. So many times, you encounter people using the Pantone swatchbooks when they actually should be using a process-color swatchbook, because they’re spec-ing four-color process, CMYK.

David: Absolutely. If you’re spec-ing CMYK process colors in your documents, you absolutely should be using a process-color swatchbook. And I think the best one out there is Trumatch. Pantone has one; I personally don’t like it as much. I think Trumatch is more logical; it’s just easier to find the colors I want, it’s easier to get the CMYK values that I want. There’s a coated version and an uncoated version, and these days they’re all printed direct CTP, direct to plate, which is great. They’re very nice. Really, really nice.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. Now, if you want to purchase a fanbook for yourself, they’re 85 bucks each, you can go to Trumatch.com. But you could get both an uncoated and coated version free today, and for the next three episodes, right?

David: That’s right! We’re going to be giving away free ones from Trumatch. They gave us permission to give some away. That’s like $180… I don’t know, some amount. What is that, 85 times two…

Anne-Marie: Wait, let me get my calculator.

David: I’ve completely lost my ability to do math.

Anne-Marie: Wait, Dashboard, Calculator. Let’s see, how do I do this?

David: [laughs] It’s a $170 value for you. We’re going to be giving away at the end of this show, we’re going to be doing a little Quizzler, so stay tuned for that. That’s going to be very, very cool.

Also, Markzware is our second sponsor; this is their second time sponsoring our podcast. They have lots of very cool tools, including the Q2ID plug-in. It’s the ability to open QuarkXPress 3, 4, 5, six and seven documents in InDesign. They do a very, very nice job, and you can get 20% off of any of the Markzware products right now if you go to Markzware.com/store_usa and use the coupon code IDSECRET. We’ll put that in the Show Notes as well, so you can get that there. That’s very cool.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. But that deal ends November 30, so…

David: Oh that’s right, that’s coming up!

Anne-Marie: … you’ve got to get over there quickly.

David: Yeah. OK. Oh, and I should say something: I’ve been going on about these sponsorships. I should say something about this. You know, if you’re wondering, “Is this, like, all commercials all the time, and what’s happened to independent, unbiased reporting?” or something. This is our plan: InDesign Secrets is going to be sponsored by various companies, but these are only companies, we are only accepting sponsorship from companies that we like their products anyway and we would probably be talking about it anyway. So this is stuff that we already use, we already like, and that is basically our deal. We are not trying to, we are just not going to take sponsorship from everyone, but this is a way to actually maintain this podcast that we have been doing for the last year, for $0. So we want to keep this $0 for you, so we are going to start taking these sponsorships. But we are still being unbiased, and we are going to tell you how we really feel about all of these things.

Anne-Marie Concepción: Yeah, and I think that the first time that a new sponsor joins, we’ll talk about them in some detail, like we did with Trumatch, but in order to get to the content faster in subsequent podcasts, we’ll try to shorten that up a bit; but you can always see the full details in our show notes, or we will refer you back to their debut episode. We have talked about both Markzware and Trumatch, I believe, in previous episodes, even before they became our sponsors. They are great companies.

David: So what are we going to talk about today?

Anne-Marie: So yeah, about that content: on today’s show we are going to be talking about our InDesign Secrets keyboard shortcut poster. That made its debut at the InDesign Master Class Conference, and a few dozen lucky people were clutching those posters, and took great care of them on the airplane on the way home. We also have them for sale on our website.

David: Yeah, speaking of commercials!

Anne-Marie: Yeah, that’s right.

David: Selling stuff, that’s right.

Anne-Marie: Other than that, the other content is the interesting, useful, and too-often overlooked paragraph setting, the “keep” options.

David: Yeah, we’ve got to talk about “keep” options.

Anne-Marie: The keeps. Oh, and then finally, the Quizzler, for the Trumatch prize; and then finally, the obscure InDesign feature of the week–eek! Eek! Eek!–is the “J” key.

David: “J.”

Anne-Marie: That’s what you called it, the “J” key, AKA “Apply Colour.” The “J” key is the shortcut for that, which is something that I never use.

David: Oh, I use it all the time, I love it. I love it. So we’ll talk about that obscure little feature. So the “keep” options, let’s jump into “keep” options.

Anne-Marie: No, no, no.

David: Oh no, the poster.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, the poster, the poster.

David: Well, you already said, we have got a poster, and it’s a big, big, big poster, it’s like 18 by 26, and it is two-sided. One side is every keyboard shortcut for the Macintosh, and you flip it over and it’s every keyboard shortcut for Windows.

Anne-Marie: For InDesign.

David: For InDesign, yeah. I mean, not every keyboard shortcut for every program, just for InDesign. All the keyboard shortcuts you ever wanted to know about InDesign. It is a lovely design, you can see it on the web site.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. David and I spent weeks working on this poster, because we wanted one place where all the keyboard shortcuts appear in logical order, because in the InDesign menus there is a whole pile of great keyboard shortcuts that aren’t there in the menus. You have to find them by digging into the “Edit Keyboard Shortcuts” dialogue box.

David: Yeah. So go to InDesignSecrets.com, click on the shop…

Anne-Marie: Store. I think it’s called the store.

David: Store.

Anne-Marie: You’ll see little screen shots. We’ll be putting up screen shots. Now, this will be up by the time this podcast has been published. If you don’t see little screen shots of the poster on the store page, just give it a day or two, because I might need some time to finish coding that picture. It’s going to go up there.

David: This is Anne-Marie, eating Thanksgiving dinner while doing the last final coding on getting the e-commerce stuff working.

Anne-Marie: Yes, OK. So that’s about it for the poster. Let’s go on. What about them there “keep” options?

David: Well, “keep” options are a way for you to control how text flows through your text frames. This is important because, one of the things, we have gotten a number of questions recently, I don’t know, a whole bunch of people seem to need this all at the same time, we’ve gotten a number of emails from people saying, “How do we handle things like widows, orphans, our text flow. How do we handle keeping headings along with the following paragraph and that sort of thing?” Those are all handled with “keep” options. “Keep” options shows up at the end of the flyout menu of the paragraph palette, or in the control palette, when you are in paragraph mode, you can go to the little flyout menu on the right and choose “keep” options. But typically, where I handle “keep” options is when I am editing a paragraph style.

Anne-Marie: Style, right.

David: Yeah, so I mean, you’re making a paragraph style, you’re defining the style, and inside there, there’s a “keep” options panel that gives you all the options. The basic options are “keep with next number of lines,” “keep lines together,” and “start paragraph.” Those are the three things that this dialogue box focuses on. “Keep with next lines,” you use that, let’s say you’ve got a heading and you always want the heading to stick with the following paragraph. So you could set that heading paragraph to “Keep with Next one lines.” You just type in the number that you want–you could have “Keep with Next 10 lines…”

Anne-Marie: You probably want “two lines.”

David: Or the “Next two lines.”

Anne-Marie: You know, I remember calling you about this, because I could not figure this out–because “Keep with Next blank number of lines,” and then underneath that, another section: “Keep Lines Together,” how many do you want to keep together? So I’m like, “Aren’t these the same thing?” But actually, “Keep with Next blank lines” refers to two different paragraphs.

David: That’s right.

Anne-Marie: So say that you have a sub-head, and then following the sub-head is body copy. You’d never want the sub-head to end up by itself at the bottom of a column or a frame. So for that sub-head, you’d say, “Keep with next two lines” so that every time there is a sub-head at the bottom of a column or frame, if two lines of the subsequent paragraph won’t also fit, then InDesign will automatically push that sub-head to the top of the next column or the next frame. Whereas “Keep Lines Together” refers to the same paragraph.

David: Yeah. For example, within that sub-head you may have a two-line sub-head, or three- or four-line sub-head–maybe it’s a really long sub-head–and you want the whole sub-head to stick together. You don’t want it to break across columns. So for that sub-head you could set the “Keep Lines Together”–you turn on that little checkbox and then you say…

Anne-Marie: “All Lines in Paragraph.”

David: For a sub-head you probably want “All Lines In Paragraph.” For your body text, let’s say you’ve got a long paragraph and you want to make sure that it’s at least two lines–some people like three lines, it’s up to you–that stick together. You don’t want a single line at the bottom of a column or a single line at the top of a column, so typically for a body text paragraph, I’ll turn on “Keep Lines Together” and I’ll say, “Keep the first two lines together and the last two lines together.” And that’s how I avoid those widows and orphans–those single lines that stick around at the top and bottom.

Anne-Marie: It’s amazing to me how many users don’t even realize this dialog box is here. Even if they came from QuarkXPress, which also had Keep Options, they didn’t realize it was there. I run into lots of users who are using hard returns or soft returns or frame breaks.

David: [groans, laughs] Don’t do that!

Anne-Marie: Yeah, I know, it’s unbelievable! Whenever you edit the text, then you have to go through and fix all that. If instead you used these “Keep Lines Together,” either on a paragraph basis, or better, like David said, in your styles, then you would never have to worry about this.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: Then there’s that other cool feature that’s only in InDesign, not in QuarkXPress, in this dialog box, which is “Start Paragraph.”

David: Yeah! “Start Paragraph” is great, because sometimes you always want your heading to start at the top of a column, let’s say. Or you always want it to start on an odd-numbered page. So you can set those in the “Start Paragraph” popup menu. You just go to Keep Options and you click in the “Start Paragraph” popup menu. “In Next Column,” “In Next Frame,” “On Next Page,” “On Next Odd Page,” or even “On Next Even Page.”

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: How ever you want to set it up. Basically, what you need to think about: the Keep Options is a way of defining the behavior of a paragraph. That’s what this is all about. How is your paragraph going to act in your text flow? So just keep that in mind, the idea of: you’re changing the behavior of the paragraph, so you’re not having to actually add paragraph returns, carriage returns, or something like that; that, you’re actually changing the paragraph itself. You just want to change the behavior: how does it act?

Anne-Marie: Right. InDesign will take care of it for you.

David: Yeah. I love that. I love the Keep Options.

Anne-Marie: Let the computer do the work. Yes. Those are great.

All right. So is it time for the Quizzler?

David: Oh yes, we’d better do the Quizzler.

Anne-Marie: Let’s do the Quizzler before we do the obscurity.

David: OK.

Anne-Marie: All right. You chose this question, so you go ahead and ask it.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: Again, the prize is two Trumatch Colorfinder fanbooks. One for coated, one for uncoated.

David: Yep. $170 value. And once again, the way this is going to work is, when you have the right answer, email us. We want to have your answer by midnight on November 30. So by the end of November 30, send us your answer. email it to us at info @ InDesignSecrets.com.

Anne-Marie: Put “Quizzler” in the subject line.

David: That’s a good idea. Put “Quizzler” in the subject line, email us, and then we’ll gather those up, and maybe it will only be one, or maybe it will be ten, who knows. Then we will pick randomly from that list and give away the prize then, so that’s how that will work.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. Do not post your answer in the Show Notes, because you’ll be automatically disqualified and we’ll throw rotten tomatoes at you.

David: That’s right.

Anne-Marie: So right, we’ll choose a random winner, right? I’ll do the dart at my screen this time.

David: Oh, thank you, I appreciate that.

Anne-Marie: You did it last time.

David: So here’s the question. The question is–and this is actually one that came up at the InDesign Conference, I should say, but I know most of our listeners weren’t able to get there, so: where in InDesign CS2 is there a hyperlink that, when you click on it, it takes you directly to Quark? Directly to Quark’s own website?

Anne-Marie: Oh! When you said “directly to Quark,” I thought you meant directly to Denver!

David: [laughs] No, it doesn’t take you to Denver.

Anne-Marie: You’re not transported.

David: That’s right. No, no,

Anne-Marie: It’s when you click the Uninstall button that it sends you to Quark.

David: I guess so. No, it sends you to to Quark.com, to Quark’s website.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. There is a hyperlink buried somewhere in InDesign’s interface that does that, right?

David: Yeah, it’s so weird! [laughs] It’s so weird. Anyway, that’s our Quizzler. Send us the answer: info @ InDesignSecrets.com. Put “Quizzler” in the subject, and we will pick from that group. Looking forward to hearing from you.

OK. We should talk about the Obscure Feature of the Week.

Anne-Marie and David together: Eek, eek, eek.

David: The J Key!

Anne-Marie: The J key!

David: What does the J key do? What happens when you press J?

Anne-Marie: Well, I get a “j.” Or if I hold down the Shift key–and this is a cool tip that you’ll only learn here–you get a capital “J.”

David: [laughs] Right! That’s right. When you are editing text or typing, you can get both lowercase and uppercase “J” just by pressing the J key! No, but in this case, we want to talk about pressing the J key when we’re not editing text, when there’s no text selected in a text frame. The J key does something different then.

The J key is a way to toggle between the “Formatting Affects Text,” and “Formatting Affects Container”–”affects the frame” buttons. Those buttons show up at the top of the Swatches palette, and they also show up at the bottom of the Tools palette. They’re just little buttons. They’re really obscure, in my mind.

Anne-Marie: They’re very easy to miss. I mean, if you’ve ever done this: if you’ve ever clicked on a text frame with the Selection tool and then chosen a color, because you wanted to change the background color, and suddenly all the text changes color. You’re like, “What the heck happened?” The J key will flip those things.

David: Right. In fact, what happened was you clicked on–there’s a little tiny “T” icon, and that “T” means the formatting is going to apply, the color that you click is going to apply, to the text inside the frame, not the frame itself. So that’s the J key: toggles between the two. Hit “J” once and it will apply to the text; hit “J” again and it’ll apply to the frame. So you have a choice.

Again, you can do Fill or Stroke of the text, or Fill or Stroke of the frame. The one key here that you have to keep in mind is: sometimes the J key doesn’t do anything at all. For example, if you have a text frame which is linked to another text frame, you’ve got a text thread, it doesn’t work on threaded text frames.

Anne-Marie: Unfortunately.

David: Unfortunately. I find that annoying. But there’s no way to apply the text inside that threaded text frame, to the text itself, other than using the Text tool, selecting the text, and then applying the color. But if your text frame is not linked to anything else, not threaded, then the J key will push those buttons for you.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. You know, I don’t even know why they call it “Formatting Affects Container” and “Formatting Affects”–what do they call it, Content?

David: “Text.”

Anne-Marie: Oh, “Text.” Never mind, then. I take it back. They did it right. [laughs]

David: Well it’s just this “Container” word. Engineers at Adobe are into this idea of containers. Where you and I would just say it’s a text frame, they say, “Well, it’s a container.” Which technically I suppose…

Anne-Marie: Because they were bottle-fed when they were babies.

David: [laughs] Is that what it is? [laughs]

Anne-Marie: They have this thing about containers. [laughs]

David: Oh! Well, there you go. OK.

Anne-Marie: I’ll never get a free copy of InDesign again. All right.

David: That’s it. That is it! That is it! It, it, it for episode 36.

Thank you, Markzware, thank you, Trumatch, for your support of InDesign Secrets. Thank you, listeners, for your support, for being here. Learn more about our sponsors at Markzware.com and Trumatch.com, or just go to InDesignSecrets.com and you can click on the Show Notes and get information there.

As always, we’d love to hear your comments on the topics we talked about today, or suggestions for future topics; just let us know. Go ahead and leave your comment in the Show Notes, in the “Reply” area, or you can just email us at info @ InDesignSecrets.com. Or you can use Anne-Marie’s favorite technique, which is our listener comment line. Open 24/7! Dial using Skype so it won’t charge you anything: (206) 888-INDY, that’s 4639.

So until we meet again, this is David Blatner and…

Anne-Marie: …and Anne-Marie Concepción, 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 036 page.