Podcast 039 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 039 page.
[music]
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Welcome to InDesign Secrets episode 39. I am Anne-Marie Concepcion and I am here along with my co-host Mr. 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. Today’s episode is sponsored, once again, by Trumatch.
David: Some of you have heard about Trumatch, we have been talking about Trumatch and how they make the ColorFinder process color books. They are swatch books with lots of process colors in them. Really really great, we use them all the time, except for one time recently where we had rather an embarrassing story which we are not going to tell you about the one time that we did not use our swatch books and got really, really bad color. So do not trust what you see on your screen, trust the swatch book. That is the important thing to keep in mind.
Anne-Marie: That is right.
David: And you can visit them at trumatch.com.
Anne-Marie: Coming up on today’s show, we have the answer to last episode’s Quizzler.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: And the final, we are going to have the final Quizzler question where we give away a set of Trumatch ColorFinders.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: We will be talking about our love-hate relationship with the default Basic paragraph style.
David: Ah yes.
Anne-Marie: What is better to give to your printer, this is something that a reader wrote in to us, “What is better to give to your printer, a native InDesign file, or a press-ready PDF?” And the obscure feature of the week-eek-eek-eek is increase/decrease left-indent.
David: Yeah, where is that hiding? That has been hiding well.
Anne-Marie: That would be a good Quizzler, huh?
David: Yes, it would. Well if you remember, Trumatch is giving away these ColorFinders and it is $170 value, it is the process color swatch book that we have been talking about, and last episode the Quizzler question was “How can you change the measurement units, you know the picas, inches, millimeters, whatever, how can you change those measurement units without going to ‘Preferences’ or using the rulers or using a keyboard shortcut?”
Anne-Marie: It taxed the brains of lots of our listeners.
David: It is true, we only got a few in. Actually last time we were commenting on how we had not had any winners outside of North America, so I am very happy to say that we do this, this time, this episode, our winner is from outside North America and the winner is Anders Lundblad from Norway. Anders won this prize with the correct answer, and that correct answer is… Anne-Marie?
Anne-Marie: Go to the info palette, and in the info palette, of course I do not have it open here in my screen…
David: There is, in the upper left corner…
Anne-Marie: I came up with this question. In the upper left-hand corner there is X and Y, or actually the X and Y position of something or other, but to the left of that there is a plus-symbol with a tiny, tiny, it looks like a piece of ant-poop [laughter], it is a little tiny triangle, you press and hold on it, and oh my gosh, it is a menu, a dropped-out menu listing all the different measurement units. So you quickly switch on-the-fly to a different measurement unit. So, pretty cool.
David: It is pretty cool. It is pretty obscure, but it is there.
Anne-Marie: It hiding there.
David: The info palette ant-poop, that is the official technical name for it.
Anne-Marie: The first time I saw it, I licked my thumb and rubbed the monitor screen because I thought there was something on my screen, but oh no, that is a menu.
David: That is right, there is a little, tiny triangle there. It is supposed to be a triangle. That is very funny. So that is the answer to the Quizzler. We are going to have one more Quizzler at the end of the show here, for giving away one more set of those ColorFinders.
Anne-Marie: So listen up. All right, so the Basic paragraph style, David?
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Do you love it, or hate it?
David: Love it, or hate it… e) all of the above. I was very, very pleased when Adobe implemented the Basic paragraph style in InDesign, because by default, any time you make a text-frame, you start typing in there, you by default have a paragraph style applied to your text, like in Microsoft Word you have the normal style, in InDesign you have got Basic paragraph style.
Anne-Marie: And it is new, I mean it is new in CS2, right?
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Before that we had all the paragaph style palettes said was “None”, I believe, or “No paragraph style” with every new document.
David: I cannot even remember CS. Is that what happened?
Anne-Marie: Yeah, that is what it was like, and people were constantly asking, “How can I change the default font in my document because there is no normal style to edit?”
David: Right, so they added the Basic paragraph style so every time you start writing text you automatically get the Basic paragraph style, and that you can edit. It is easy to edit the Basic paragraph style to whatever you want that to be. So that is cool. But I also hate this thing, because it is, if you do edit it, let us say you edit it to change the font and its color and its size or whatever, then you select some text-frame that has some text in it, and that text has been tagged with Basic paragraph style, you copy it, you go to a new document, and you paste it. What happens to all the text in there?
Anne-Marie: It changes to the receiving document’s definition.
David: That is right, which is in some ways logical. In some ways it is logical because you are copying out of one document into another one, so it should use the definition from the new document, but it has caught me off-guard so many times, and it has messed up my life so many times, because I want the formatting from the first document, not whatever the default was in the new one. So very, very frustrating to me.
Anne-Marie: Yes, and it is even worse when somebody modifies the Basic paragraph style, and then they create additional paragraph styles based on their modified paragraph style.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Because then when you bring those in, then they all change. Like, “What the heck happened here?”
David: Yeah, it is a real disaster, and, even worse than all of that, when you make a new paragraph style by default in InDesign CS2, it is automatically based on your paragraph style.
Anne-Marie: Your Basic paragraph style.
David: Your Basic paragraph style, it is based on Basic paragraph, what we call BPS, the Basic paragraph style. So most people who are making paragraph styles are basing them on Basic, and then you have that problem that you just described.
Anne-Marie: Right. You don’t even notice that they’re being based on Basic because it’s there in the first tab where everybody just passes right by, where you enter the keyboard shortcut and define the next style.
David: Exactly.
Anne-Marie: So it’s just sort of hiding there. Yes, this is based on Basic paragraph style. You try to… What we try to tell people is to always, when you create new paragraph styles, to base then on None.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: That’s one of the choices there. Base it on No Paragraph style.
David: Right, which I really, really just want to emphasize that. I really strongly encourage people, when you’re making paragraph styles, base them on No Paragraph style, not Basic.
Anne-Marie: Correct.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Right, so we like it and we hate it.
David: It’s nice that’s there. For beginner users, it’s nice that you have at least some paragraph style, because we want everyone to be using paragraph styles. But we hate it because it can really mess you up when you’re moving stuff from one document to another. It’s not quite…
Anne-Marie: That’s the only time that that happens, I believe. That, and also when you load styles too.
David: Yep, load styles might put up…
Anne-Marie: When you load styles you have to be careful about the difference between the definitions of the Basic paragraph style. But other than that, if you just open up… David, if I modified a document’s Basic paragraph style and then mailed that to you and you opened it up on your copy of InDesign, it would still maintain my modifications.
David: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it would.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Until I copy and paste it out of that into one of my documents or something like that.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Drag and drop, or you snip it or something like that. Let me just go back one step here, if I may, and just clarify this. I said always base new paragraph styles on No Paragraph style. Let me just clarify that. I don’t mean base all paragraph styles on No Paragraph. I just mean don’t base them on Basic.
What I’ll typically do is, I’ll create a new document and I’ll make a new paragraph style – let’s say Body Text or whatever you want to call it. Then I’ll print a new style based on Body Text. So I will use… I love the based on feature. I just don’t want to base it on Basic, on the BPS. That’s what I’m… I just wanted to clear that. I like based on, though. OK, so that’s an important thing.
We got another email from somebody asking about PDFs. We were talking about PDFs and what kind of PDFs and how do you do good PDFs and so on.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. We said better to export to PDF or better to write post where you can distill it.
David: Exactly. Yeah, we were discussing those issues. But somebody said, “Hey, wait a minute. I always thought it was better just to send the native InDesign file.” He thought that if you sent a PDF, you would degrade it because when you export it, somehow you’ve got a loss, a generation loss or something.
Anne-Marie: PDFs are usually much smaller than the InDesign document.
David: Good point, right.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: So something must be lost there. Which would we rather send, a native file versus PDF? So Ann-Marie, what would you rather send?
Anne-Marie: Most of my printers ask for both and they want the native as a backup in case they need to make a last minute change and I’m lost on a deserted island or something like that and they can’t do it in the PDF. But I would almost always rather send a press-rated PDF with live transparency.
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: Because first of all, the native InDesign document is usually huge because I’m placing all these huge PSD files in there. I like to ftp or attach them to emails to the printers. That would be huge with the native InDesign document.
Then there’s other things, like I’m a… You have to make sure and bundle all the fonts and that kind of thing. In a PDF, all the fonts are already there. They’re subset and embedded, so I don’t have to worry about that.
When I make a PDF, if I don’t want the images to be degraded when I export the PDF I go to that panel and turn off “Down sample all the images.” That’s all.
David: Yeah, it’s very easy. You could make a very high-resolution, high-quality PDF by turning off “Down sample images” and setting the compression to zip instead of jpeg.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Because, jpeg you will get some image degradation. Zip, there’s no image degradation at all, and so you could do that. To be honest, though, jpeg–maximum quality jpeg–it’s going to be really hard for you to notice any image degradation. If you’re going to print, it’s just not worth the difference, I’d say.
I used to use zip all the time, and then finally somebody pointed out the maximum quality jpeg. I said, “You know, that’s a really good point.” You’re just not going to notice the difference. The PDF file size is smaller if you are going to ftp it or email it and you’re just not going to notice much of a difference at all.
But if you really, really want highest quality, you turn off the down sampling and you use zip compression. That is going to be a high quality as if you send the InDesign file itself. You don’t lose a generation of quality or something when you’re sending a PDF. It’s very, very high quality.
I agree. I typically would send a PDF to anybody. You really have to pry an InDesign file out of my hands. I don’t like sending an InDesign file if I can possibly avoid it. A lot of that is just especially from the old QuarkXPress days. I was burned too many times by people who… printers who were trying to be really helpful: “Oh gosh, we’ll change such-and-such to let’s change all his E’s to A’s” or something. I just was not happy, so I would much rather send a PDF.
In the really old days, the early ’90s, I always sent PostScript files. I would actually write the PostScript to disk and just send a PostScript file, so there was no way for them to, or it was very difficult for them to go in there and change anything.
Anne-Marie: You love that PostScript.
David: I do.
Anne-Marie: You’re a PostScript queen.
[laughter]
David: I guess so. But now PDF is the way to go in most cases.
Anne-Marie: Just be actually very clear to people who are, like, “Hey, I’m looking in my Export to PDF dialogue box. I don’t see a button that says ‘Do not down sample.’” You go to the compression panel. By default, this is by Cubic under Color Images and Grayscale Images and Monochrome Images. There’s a drop-down menu that sets it by cubic down sampling. If you click on that drop-down menu, you’ll see one of the options is “Do not down sample.”
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: So you choose “Do not down sample” from each of those.
David: There you go.
Anne-Marie: The other thing is, there’s really no reason, these days, to send the native file because most printers worth their salt should be able to do whatever kind of edits they need to do to the PDF. If you have the right PDF software, PitstopPro and that kind of stuff, they should be able to fix any problems they might find. This is assuming, though, that you haven’t flattened transparency, in some complicated pages and messed it all up. If it’s live transparency it’s easier for them to edit..
David: There you go! All right!
Anne-Marie: OK!
David: OK. Let’s talk about – Oh! It’s time now…
Anne-Marie: Oh! The Quizzler! We do the Quizzler first, don’t we?
David: You’re welcome to, if you like to..
Anne-Marie: all right..!
David: Let’s do The Quizzler!
Anne-Marie: (clears throat) This is the..fourth Trumatch Quizzler I believe.. It’s their final one for now. It’s sponsored by Trumatch, where the prize is a set of Color Finder Swatch Books, coded and un-coded, a one hundred seventy dollar value. And here it is The Quizzler is: When you triple-click your mouse, you select a single light, right? When does triple-clicking select a whole, multi-line paragraph?
David: Oohh, a whole paragraph!
Anne-Marie: A whole multi-line paragraph, with just three clicks. Normally it’s four clicks. ‘When does it work with three clicks?’ That is the question, and if you have the answer, please email it to us – don’t post it as a comment; and you guys have been very good, by the way, of not posting these as comments, we appreciate it. info-at-in-design-secrets-dot-com, enter “Quizzler” in the Subject line, and when does their answer have to be emailed by…
David: Let’s say January second; give them a little time to recover from the first…
Anne-Marie: ..OK!
David: ..the New Years..?
Anne-Marie: OK. Midnight January second.
David: ..Well, December thirty-first is New Years..
Anne-Marie: Well, this gives them a little extra time to listen to the Podcast!
David: all right all right Midnight January second.
Anne-Marie: Oh, and a little hint. When triple-clicking selects a paragraph, quadruple-clicking selects a what? [both laugh]
David: This is like the algebra test!
Anne-Marie: When x equals y…I don’t know, it’s just a little hint.
David: It’s like a second Quizzler! [laughs].
Anne-Marie: Quadruple-clicking selects the entire story!
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Well, I don’t know, maybe it’s not a hint, but it’s an interesting point. So what do you do to make that happen? OK good.
David: Now it’s time – OK can we talk about -
Anne-Marie: It’s time.
Together: The Week – week – eek – eek.
Anne-Marie: “Increase And Decrease Paragraph Indent”
David: It’s actually left-indent. I wrote it wrong.
Anne-Marie: Oh. Left-Indent! Where is that? It is hiding in a pallet.
David: A pallet. Which pallet?
Anne-Marie: The pallet is hiding itself…Oh, the pallet is not hiding, the pallet is right in the window, under the Pagemaker Toolbar.
David: To me it’s hiding just because I would never select something called “Pagemaker Toolbar.” One of those things, I’m just not going to select it.
Anne-Marie: You think it’s more when you convert documents from Pagemaker that’s what you’re supposed to use, but it’s actually got a bunch of useful features, and one of them is ‘increase and decrease left indent’, a feature that’s found nowhere else!
David: It’s just a couple of buttons in the Toolbar, and the Toolbar is Basically a whole bunch of buttons, that have shortcuts to everything: Save and Print and… a shortcut to turn on and turn off invisibles… I actually use it all the time [laughing].
Anne-Marie: -The pallet is great for people who like buttons! For people who just want to click on a button instead of remembering keyboard shortcuts; and there’s nothing wrong with that, I personally wouldn’t admit to actually using this.. there’s nothing wrong with it per se, but it does have these features that don’t show up anyplace else in the program.
David: Paragraph: if you click on increase left indent, then one click moves it in a half an inch or three picas. Keep clicking to keep shoving that guy in by another half-inch at a time, and then the other one of course, once it’s indented, will decrease the left indent by a half an inch at a time.
Anne-Marie: This feature’s also called the “Make it work like Microsoft Word” feature.
David: Right. And there’s no way to change the increment by the way I tried!
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Have you?
David: Yes I have.
Anne-Marie: I never tried. That’s a good point.
David: But that’s it. It’s obscure and it’s almost useful! Not entirely.
Anne-Marie: I love these obscure feature-of-the-week things. I think by the time somebody completes all of these obscure-feature-of-the-week things, they could go to work for Adobe…Pretty much.
David: [laughing]
Anne-Marie: I think so. So that’s it for Episode 39. Thank you Trumatch for your support of InDesignSecrets. Thank you listeners for your support.
David: And don’t forget to send in your answers to The Quizzler. Put Quizzler in the title, and email it to info-at-in-design-secrets by midnight Tuesday – midnight January second. You’ll get the Trumatch color finder set.
Anne-Marie: Absolutely. OK.
David: Oh, and please leave your comments – not your Quizzler comments – but other comments at InDesignSecrets-dot-com. Send us messages at info-at-InDesignSecrets-dot-com.
Anne-Marie: Or call us at (206) 888-INDY.
David: There you go. OK. Until we meet again, this is David Blatner…
Anne-Marie: …and Anne-Marie Concepcion!
David: [laughing] for InDesign Secrets…
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 039 page.