Podcast 038 Transcript

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 038 page.

[music]

David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets episode 38. I am David Blatner and I am here along with my co-host Anne-Marie Concepción.

Anne-Marie Concepción: Insert appropriate greeting here. [laughter] I mean, hello everybody.

David: Do not just read the script. You need to interpret the script. Put it in your own words.

Anne-Marie: OK. Welcome.

David: Good. Excellent. Excellent word. This is the InDesign Secrets podcast and you may also know our companion blog at InDesignSecrets.com, we are the independent resource for all things InDesign. Today’s episode is sponsored by two excellent companies, Markzware and TruMatch.

Anne-Marie: I love Markzware, they make FlightCheck professional, and one of my favorite plug-ins Q2ID, that is the plug-in for InDesign that lets InDesign open any version of QuarkXPress file from version three on up all the way up to version 7.

David: Yes.

Anne-Marie: They have extended their 20% off offer for our listeners to December 31st, so if anybody wants to buy anything from markzware.com, go to their store and enter the coupon code “idsecret”, singular, and you will get 20% off in both the US and European online stores.

David: That is great. Also, our other sponsor is TruMatch, makers of wonderful process color swatch books called ColorFinder. There is over 2000 processed colors mixes printed on coated and uncoated stock, and you can spec your processed colors in your software, you can also visit them at trumatch.com and get all kinds of information about TruMatch there, that will be very good. And in fact, we will be giving away those ColorFinder later on in the Quizzler.

Anne-Marie: That is right. On today’s show we are going to have the answer to last week’s Quizzler, and announce the winner of the ColorFinder from last time, and a new Quizzler question for another award of the ColorFinder. Also, we are going to talk about how to agates in InDesign, why you should or should not link to Excel or Word files, how to type weird little characters.

David: They are weird all right.

Anne-Marie: And the obscure feature of the week-eek-eek-eek is patient user mode.

David: Patient user mode.

Anne-Marie: I heard that for the first time, when was it, last week. I know what it is, but I think I never heard of the term, but that is what they call it, so that is pretty obscure.

David: That is right. We were, Anne-Marie and I both, were shooting some videos for lynda.com, so we were down in Southern California shooting those videos, and somebody mentioned that, the patient user mode, and we looked at each other and went, “What? What is that? That is obscure.” So we are going to talk about what the patient user mode is in InDesign, that was good.

We should mention, by the way, while our videos are not available from lynda.com quite yet, but there are lots and lots of other videos available at lynda.com, and they are doing a cool deal for InDesign Secrets listeners. They are going to give a free 1-week subscription to any of their movies. Basically, you sign on and you have got a week to see lots and lots and lots of training videos from lynda.com. So they are giving it only to InDesign Secrets listeners. You go to lynda.com/IDsecrets. We will have a link there from our show-notes at InDesignSecrets.com, but if you go there, you just sign up and they will give you a free week, and you could see 50 videos if you want.

Anne-Marie: Right. They have a ton of wonderful software training videos. I have been their subscriber for two years, actually. They have software training videos for everything, not just Adobe stuff, but Macromedia stuff, and Apple stuff, and all sorts of cool…

David: Microsoft stuff.

Anne-Marie: Right, even things like, I was looking at one last week, doing search engine optimization for your website. They have a whole lesson on that. It is really good.

David: It is very cool. So anyway, free stuff. We are great believers in believers, getting free stuff out there.

Anne-Marie: We like free.

David: We like free. Free good. So check that out, and if you like it, then go ahead and subscribe and you can get even more free stuff from them, so that is a good thing. So we better jump in with the answer to last week’s Quizzler. You may remember that TruMatch is giving away a set of ColorFinder, right? $170 normally for these two things for the lucky winner of our Quizzler.

Anne-Marie: They are doing it for four episodes in a row. Last time it was the second episode, so the question in that episode was, “Where in InDesign can you find the version of a font that you are using in the document?” We had many more answers to this, many more people responded to this one than the last one, so that was good. Where is it, David, that you can find that information?

David: Where do you find the information for your fonts? You find your font-information in “Find Font”. If you go to the “Type”-menu and you choose “Find Font”, it is hiding there. The problem is it is hiding behind the “More Options”-button, you have to click the “More Options”-button, then choose your font, and it will tell you what version the font is.

Anne-Marie: Right, part of that little tiny type at the bottom. I hate the name “Find Font” for that menu.

David: Yeah, I know, it is frustrating.

Anne-Marie: It should be Font Info.

David: Yeah, that would be much more reasonable. I have to just say this one thing. One listener wrote in about the font-versioning thing. He said that font versioning was very important to him and he wrote, “You would not believe my outrage when I discovered that for two days I had activated a font version 1.0433 when I really wanted to have version 1.045.”

Anne-Marie: Oh, I hate it when that happens. It really gets you.

David: The truth of the matter is that it does. If you have the wrong font version, you can have all kinds of problems, but there was just something about that I thought was just great.

Anne-Marie: Well, 1.0433 and 1.045.

David: Right. Well it is just the details. Sometimes you really have to pay attention to those details.

Anne-Marie: Unfortunately, that guy did not win, sorry but we loved your answer, we were both cracked up. Instead, out of the many correct emails we received this week, the winner, drawn randomly, was Matthew Jebb from M-Dash design in Montreal, Canada, our first international winner, I think.

David: Yes, thank you Matthew.

Anne-Marie: Oh no wait, Jean Claude won.

David: Yeah, Jean Claude won. This is our second international winner.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, that is right. The Canadians are coming in second place so far, next to the US people. Nobody yet from Europe this one.

David: Keep it up; we will get some with that next Quizzler that we are going to be doing later in this show.

Anne-Marie: So Matthew, you need to email us your contact information, address, phone number, that kind of stuff. Serial numbers for all your software, and we will handle it, we will take care of you. [laughter]

David: We will take you the cleaners. No, we will send you the TruMatch ColorFinder stuff, that is good. Hey, agates. Somebody emailed us asking about agates, which I thought was…

Anne-Marie: Agates are beautiful crystals, they are like, you find them in mineral deposits. You can get some beautiful ones in Mexico. I have a bracelet with a gorgeous agate. Next topic!

David: And that is it for agates. Next topic! No. Agate is a measurement. Some people are still using agates, which I find just unbelievable. It is just like the old; do you remember the “q”-measurement in QuarkXPress? They snuck in a measurement called a “q” in QuarkXPress, which was a quarter of a millimeter, if I recall, or something.

Anne-Marie: A “q”?

David: Yeah, it was like, “What are you talking about?”

Anne-Marie: Oh my God.

David: Anyway, there is such a thing called an agate, and there still are plenty of people who use them, but the problem is that agates do not appear in the measurements, you can not get agates in your rulers, and so you can not measure things in agates.

Anne-Marie: Let us see what they are. They are from the newspaper industry, right?

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: It is like the stock tables, and sports scores are often done in agates. They are about five and a half points.

David: It is actually one-fourteenth of an inch, for anyone who cares. It is one-fourteenth of an inch, and that information actually turns out to be very useful because while you can not specify agates, and agate measurement in InDesign, you can set up your ruler to show agates. So for example if you are trying to measure agates vertically in your page, you could set up agates, you could set up your vertical ruler to show agates. And the way you do that is right-click on your vertical ruler, and you get the little context menu to let you determine which measurement system you want to use for that ruler, and you choose custom. And if you choose custom, it will say, “What measurement do you want?” to type in here.

Anne-Marie: all right and I am following along, and one-fourteenth of an inch is…? How much is it? Mr. Pi?

David: A lot of people round up to the 5.5 points, but it is actually much closer to 5.143 points. So what I would do is, in the custom measurement unit dialog box, you type in 5.143, and then you click OK, and then, suddenly, your vertical ruler changes, basically, and agate ruler. And that is good. Now, your control palettes and your other measurements will not show agates, they will still show points or centimeters or whatever, but the ruler itself will show numbers of agates.

Anne-Marie: This is very cool, that is something you can not do in “Preferences”. There is no custom field in “Preferences” -> “Units of Measure”, right; you can only do this…

David: Actually I thought it was hiding in there. Yes, in fact you can. If you go to “Preferences”, you can do the same thing by going to “Preferences” and you click on the “Units and Increments” panel, and for the vertical ruler, you select “Custom”, so you get the same thing there. You are right; I forgot that that was hiding in there. So either of those places, you type in 5.143 points and you get units of that size, so that is kind of interesting.

Anne-Marie: Yes, and you too could get a job laying out Cubs scores, or Bears scores. [laughter] Go Bears. Got to say that.

David: Go Bears, woohoo. That is like hockey, right? Or baseball?

Anne-Marie: Something like that.

David: Or something.

Anne-Marie: Lacrosse.

David: That is it, lacrosse. Now, why you should or should not link to Excel or Word files. A lot of people do not realize that you can do that, right, that you can import, normally when you import a picture, like a TIFF or a PDF, it is linked to the high-res file on disk, but normally when you import a Word file, or RTF file, or Excel file, it is not linked, it is completely embedded in the InDesign document.

Anne-Marie: Right, and for a good reason, because if somebody updates that Word or Excel file, and you see it in your links palette, and it says “Out of Date”, and you update it then you loose all the formatting that you might have done to the text-frame. It just basically re-imports the file just as though you had imported for the first time without doing any formatting on it, so it is a big pain.

David: But sometimes that fact can be useful. For some workflows, it is actually really useful to be able to link to your Excel or Word file on disk.

Anne-Marie: If you are perfectly fine with the Word or Excel formatting and you are not going to do much to it, or you can hold of to later in the workflow before you apply formatting, you just want to have an up-to-date version of the content, then it is perfectly fine to go ahead and link. You do that by going to “Preferences”, before you bring in the file, go to “Preferences”, to the “Type”-panel, and toward the bottom there is a little section called “Links” with only one item that says “Create links when placing text and spreadsheet files”. You will see that it is unchecked; you need to check it, and then click “OK”. And now go ahead and bring in a Word or Excel file, and you will see the name of that file appear in your links palette.

David: Which is really cool. I think it is really cool. I would say a large percentage of times when I am working with Word files, I am importing them and I have already set up the paragraph styles and the character styles to map perfectly from Word to InDesign and I am not doing anything to those files in InDesign.

Anne-Marie: Mr. Perfect.

David: Well, it pays to do that work in advance, to set it up in advance.

Anne-Marie: Yes.

David: Because once it is in there, if I do not need to touch that text in InDesign, them I am in a great shape to be able to link to that file on disk, then somebody goes ahead and change that file on disk, as long as long as they do not screw up my styles, then I go back to my links palette, it sets it is modified, I click on it, I click “Update”, it re-imports it, and it just falls right in place. It is perfect; it is a thing of beauty.

Anne-Marie: That is right. When you are in that workflow though, you have to make sure that the other person, who is using Word or Excel or, basically, any kind of text or spreadsheet file program, that they do not change the name of that file. Because if they do a “Save As” as “Version 2″ or something like that, then their changes are not linked to your layout anymore.

David: Sure, but that is the same as a picture to. That is virtually identical to, if somebody is changing a TIFF file in Photoshop, if they change the name, then it is messed up as well. But basically the fact that you can do it, a lot people do not realize that you can do it, but as Anne-Marie pointed out, the reason they do not turn that on by default is if you do make your changes, if you do make any changes in InDesign, those changes will be wiped out as soon as you update it, because updating is exactly the same thing as throwing it away and re-importing from scratch.

Anne-Marie: That is right. Now, if you are working with a linked file and now you are ready to do your own formatting or you just do not want to have anything messed up, you do not want to have to update the link anymore, you can easily unlink a linked file. You select it in the links panel, select the name of the Word file or Excel file, and then in the links panel menu choose “Unlink”.

David: Great. And that basically embeds it as though this preference had been turned off, so the whole thing is within there, it is not linked to the file on disk anymore. Great. Very, very useful.

Anne-Marie: OK, so David, you were telling me about this very neat script that you figured out for inserting any kind of glyph from the glyphs palette, is that right?

David: That is right. Well, we had somebody write to us and say that they were working on a magazine, and at the end of every story in the magazine, they needed to put a special character, a special end-of-story character, and they wanted to know, “How would you type that character?” because there is no keyboard, there is no Option-Shift-G to type that. So how do you type a character that just shows up in the glyphs palette? The glyphs palette under the “Type”-menu shows you every character in a font. Every character, it could be thousands of characters and it shows you every single character in a font, but it will not tell you how to type it. There are various tricks for learning the keyboard shortcuts for how to type some of those, but many of those characters, many of those glyphs simply cannot be typed at all. They just show up there.

Anne-Marie: They exist in an outside-the-keyboard dimension.

David: That is exactly another dimension. A dimension of sight, of sounds, of glyphs. So he asked, “How could I type one of those characters?” and I thought about it for a second and I thought, “Wait a minute! A script. We should build a script that does that.” And I remembered that we had a script already, I had a script sitting on my hard-drive that inserted a character. The best way to come up with a new script is go grab somebody else’s script that they have written, look at it and say, “Oh, wait a minute, if I change it this way, or that way, it will do what I want.”

So I took the script that I had, I changed it so it types the character that this guy wanted, and I sent him the script. So we are going to upload this script for you to the InDesignSecrets.com website so anybody can download this. If you want a specific glyph, in other words a specific character in a font, all you have to do is download the script, open it in any text editor, Notepad on Windows or BBEdit or TextWrangler, whatever, and change the Unicode character that shows up.

I think it is totally obvious, you look for where it says Unicode character, you change that, that is four letters long, four numbers and letters long, you change that to a different Unicode character and save the script and then it will work for you.

Anne-Marie: So you get the Unicode character by, is this the thing you see when you hover over the glyph? The little tool-tip?

David: Exactly, that is where I was going next, the glyphs palette. When the glyphs palette is open, find the glyph that you want, the character that you want, and just hover the cursor over it. If you see a Unicode character there, you know you can target it. So for example a dagger-character, which is not a very good example because that is something you can actually type, is 2020.

Anne-Marie: So that would be the code that you would put into the script.

David: That is the code that you would put into the script, the 2020. Here is another one, I do not know the name of this character, but it is Unicode, I am just hovering over a character in the glyphs palette right now, and it says Unicode 00F0. It is hexadecimal, which means that each part of the Unicode could be a number from 0-9 or from A-F, so 00F0 is a number.

Anne-Marie: I get this funny feeling like we are falling down the rabbit hole here.

David: I know, OK. So let us get out of that rabbit hole. So the people know if you need to do a certain glyph and you need to type it, then use the script. Now, what about the typing part? The typing part is the old “Edit Keyboard Shortcuts” thing. If you want to apply keyboard shortcuts to a script, you go to “Keyboard Shortcuts” under the “Edit”-menu, and you select “Scripts” from the “Product”-area, and all of your scripts show up there. So find the name of the script, give it a keyboard shortcut, click “OK”, and now whenever you press that keyboard shortcut, you will get that glyph.

Anne-Marie: Excellent, excellent.

David: That is all I wanted to, so go ahead and download the script. It is really, really to edit and use it.

Anne-Marie: That is very cool.

David: OK.

Anne-Marie: I could have used it this weekend.

David: Phew.

Anne-Marie: OK, so, it is time for the third TruMatch Quizzler.

David: Yes.

Anne-Marie: And here is the question. Since we were talking about agates and changing units of measurements, I thought this would be a really good one. How can you change the unit of measurement in InDesign CS2 without using the ruler, without using a keyboard shortcut, and without using the “Preferences”-dialog box?

David: Right. Because earlier we were talking about the various ways, If you right-click on a ruler, you can change the measurement, in “Preferences” you could do it, there is a keyboard shortcut that lets you do it, but there is another, hidden way how you could change the measurement units. Very, very good. Wow. And people need to email their answers to us by midnight, Monday December 18th, Pacific Time. Email it to info @ InDesignSecrets.com. Make sure you put “Quiz” or “Quizzler”, or whatever in the subject line.

Anne-Marie: Good. All right, now it is time for the obscurity of the week-eek-eek-eek. And that is patient user mode.

David: The patient user mode which primarily is used by doctors. Is that correct? Doctors have patients.

Anne-Marie: All right, no. What is it, actually? When you are a patient user, you take your time with things inside InDesign, right? You are not trying to force the computer to go faster. You are patient. So when you, for example, click on an image with the direct selection tool and you pause for a second before dragging, because you are patient, you see a preview appear outside of the frame that is ghosted back, and it is like what is going to be cropped out. If you are fast, if you are an impatient user, you just start dragging around; you just see the bounding box of the image, right?

David: Right. Same thing with text. If you have the selection tool and you select a text-frame and you just click and drag it, you will just see the rectangle or the shape of the frame move. But if you click it and hold it for a moment and then drag, then you will see this, or if you are resizing it. If you click and hold before resizing it, you will actually see the text re-flow and re-wrap inside the text-frame instead of just moving.

Anne-Marie: That is right. It is especially useful, I found, patient user mode, when you are moving an object around that is causing a wrap.

David: Yepp, yepp.

Anne-Marie: Right? So that you can see how the new wrap is going to look as you drag.

David: Yepp. So you click and hold for about a second. I wish there were a way to control how long that was, because sometimes I want it to always kick in immediately.

Anne-Marie: Well, there is a way, but it is only available with one tool.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: And that is with the position tool. The position tool is hiding underneath the direct selection tool, and it is kind of neat when you use it for working with images. It is one tool that can both change the frame and change the contents of the frame, the image itself. But if you double-click on that tool, you get a little dialog box, and it says “Show masked portion of image” and a drop-down menu. After “Short Delay”, which is default, “Standard Delay”, “Long Delay”, “Never”, or “No Delay”.

David: Yeah. Which is great, but it is still only for that one tool. I want those same preferences inside the “Preference” dialog box that would let me control the other tools as well, the other selection tools. So it is a step in the right direction.

Anne-Marie: OK. That is great.

David: All right. So that is it for episode 38. Thank you very much to Markzware and to TruMatch for your support of InDesign Secrets. You can learn more about our sponsors at markzware.com, or TruMatch, go to the show notes and click the links there that will be easier.

Anne-Marie: And do not forget to send in your answers to the Quizzler with “Quizzler” in the title, email it to info@InDesignSecrets by midnight, Monday December 18th, and the winner will get a set of TruMatch’s ColorFinder.

David: Yes, and once again those will be chosen randomly from everyone who answers correctly. Good.

Anne-Marie: Or whoever sends us the most money.

David: Well, uhm, we do not want to give away any secrets.

Anne-Marie: They send $100; they are still $70 ahead.

David: That is true, good point, good point.

Anne-Marie: My PayPal-account is annemarie…

David: [laughter] So anyways everyone, we would love to hear your comments on anything we have talked about today, go ahead, go to InDesignSecrets.com, leave your comments there in the blog, or send us email at info @ InDesignSecrets.com.

Anne-Marie: Or call us! Nobody ever calls us.

David: We get calls sometimes.

Anne-Marie: 206-888-INDY. We would love to hear your voicemail.

David: We do, we do.

Anne-Marie: And until we meet again, people, this is Anne-Marie Concepción, and…

David: People, this is David Blatner for InDesign Secrets.

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To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 038 page.