Podcast 041 Transcript Podcast 041 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 041 page.
[music]
Anne-Marie Concepción: Welcome to InDesignSecrets, episode 41. I’m Anne-Marie Concepción and I’m here along with my good-looking co-host, David Blatner.
David Blatner: Well, hello there.
Anne-Marie: Howdy, David, how are you?
David: [laughs] I am doing very well, thank you.
Anne-Marie: Good. The InDesignSecrets podcast and our companion blog at InDesignSecrets.com is the independent resource for all things InDesign.
David: We love InDesign.
Anne-Marie: We love InDesign. Let me tell you what’s coming up on today’s show.
David: All right.
Anne-Marie: We’re going to wrap up the Quizzlers, we have a few news bits to share, and the main content is that we’re going to be talking about designer wars. We have three topics that have been discussed lately, and the blog, and with our colleagues, that designers feel very strongly about one way or the other.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: And our Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week–eek eek eek–is slug.
David: The slug, the lowly slug.
Anne-Marie: I know, but I don’t know if we can talk about slug because I did write down in my divorce decree that I would not talk about my ex-husband.
David: Oh, yeah, that’s it. Good point.
Anne-Marie: So we’ll just have to talk about the InDesign slug.
David: Exactly. That’s a good idea.
[laughter]
David: So, let’s start with the Quizzler. We’ll talk about the Quizzler a little bit and get that out of the way. You know, we never gave the answer to the previous Quizzler the last time we talked, Anne-Marie. So, we should at least mention the answer to that.
We did have a winner, but never said what the winner answered. The question had to do with triple-clicking. When you triple-click, sometimes you get a whole paragraph versus just one line. It all has to do with the preference. If you go to the ‘preferences’ dialog box, you can choose triple-clicking selects a paragraph. It’s in the top panel.
That’s all it was, just a nice, simple little preference. There are lots of ways to customize InDesign to the way that you work, and that is one of the things that some people like.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. OK, so now we’ve said it and we also said it in the blog, in the comments, once we got about 20,000 emails saying, ‘You never said the answer!’ OK, sorry!
David: [laughs] Oh, well.
Anne-Marie: All right, so what about the most recent Quizzler?
David: The most recent Quizzler had to with the menus. Where do you find type-oriented palettes? There are a bunch of palettes in InDesign that have to do with typography and type setting. Most of them show up in the ‘type’ menu, but not all of them. There are a couple that show up in the window menu.
Anne-Marie: Only.
David: That’s right. So, which are those? We asked for two, and we got a number of answers, great answers from people. It’s a relatively simple one, because you just had to compare the two menus. We forced you to actually go look at the menus.
Anne-Marie: Say the answer.
David: That’s right, we’ll make sure we say the answers this time. The two main ones are ‘tables’ and ‘index.’ The ‘tables’ palette and the ‘index’ palette. Also, I would argue that the text-wrap palette also counts as a palette. It’s a text-relevant palette that shows up in the window menu, but not on the top menu.
We had a randomly chosen winner from all the people who answered correctly this time, and that winner is…
Anne-Marie: Elaine J. Hooten. Elaine, yes, and she said thank you very much for throwing her an easy one this time.
David: That’s right, she’s a long-time listener.
Anne-Marie: And a newbie user.
David: We’re going to send you the InDesignSecrets keyboard shortcuts poster. It’s that big wall poster that has all the Mac keyboard shortcuts on one side, and all the Windows shortcuts on the other side, full-color poster. And we hope you enjoy it. If you did not win and you are still interested in getting a poster, ramble on over to the InDesignSecrets.com page and click on the little button for ‘give me information’ about the poster.
Anne-Marie: Well, it says ’store.’
David: It’s the store. You click on ’store,’ but it’s also a little ad flashing and you go there.
Anne-Marie: The ad in the lower right. And don’t forget to enter the coupon code ‘feather’ to get 25% off.
David: Oh, yeah. That’s right, 25% off if you type in ‘feather.’
We got this very funny email.
Anne-Marie: Oh, right, I love this.
David: Fred Barrett at Kent State University in Ohio sent us a little note. Ohio is closer to you, why don’t you tell us what Fred meant.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Well, Fred said that he’s teaching at Kent State University, he’s adjunct professor, teaching InDesign and photography. This is his first semester teaching, and as an assignment, he told his students to go on a scavenger hunt for a couple of tips. The place where they searched for InDesign tips was our site. Wasn’t that a great idea?
David: I think it’s a very clever idea if you’re trying to get people to learn about InDesign, send them on a scavenger hunt, and go find the differences between distilling PDF versus exporting PDF. Go find that on InDesignSecrets.com, or something like that. That would be a fun scavenger hunt.
Anne-Marie: That gets people into the site and new users can say, ‘Oh, yeah, well, this site does have a lot of tips I could use.’
David: Yeah. So welcome, Fred, welcome, all your students. We hope you learn lots and lots about InDesign. Lots of cool stuff.
Anne-Marie: What other news bits do we have? What about the CS3 branding?
David: Well, one of the little pieces of information that Adobe has let out of the bag about CS3 is their new branding, new icons, new logos, and so on. It’s kind of fun, it’s kind of a wacky reinterpretation of the periodic table of elements is how I see it. John Knack wrote about that on his Photoshop blog and it quickly escaped into the blogosphere.
Anne-Marie: A lot of people were amazed (and I count myself as one of them) because those icons were just stand-ins for the beta of Photoshop, for example. And when CS3 would actually come out, then we’d have a gorgeous new set of icons that would be written up in all the design magazines, like poor CS1 and CS2 were. But they said, ‘No, these are the final ones.’ So, some designers were like, ‘Well, this is fantastic and I love it,’ and other ones were, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe it.’
David: They really ignited their own little flame war there.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, they did.
David: Pro and con on this branding.
Anne-Marie: We have a link, by the way, in our show notes, to John Nack’s post where you could see all of the icons for all the Adobe products that he laid out on a color wheel.
David: It’s real interesting the way they did that. Also, Steve Werner, one of our contributors, did a comparison between the actual icons and the periodic table of elements and most of them are different, but there are a few similarities.
Anne-Marie: For that post, I think Steve deserves the geek-of-the-week award!
David: [laughs] There you go! Steve Werner is the geek of the week. That’s right, it’s our new annual, semi-annual, quasi-semi-annual geek-of-the-week award.
Anne-Marie: Did somebody sit down and spend their morning writing up comparisons of the periodic table of the elements with Adobe software?
David: That’s right, thank you. And another contributor of ours is Pariah Burke. Pariah is also the host of another site, called QuarkVsInDesign.com, which is a wonderful site, all kinds of good information there. And one of the things that they’re now doing is a ‘design your own logo.’ [laughs] If you don’t like the Adobe logos, design your own.
Anne-Marie: He’s got a big contest; he’s got $7,000 worth of prizes that are going to be divvied up among the winners.
David: It’s great. Yeah, it’s great.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, it is.
David: So we encourage lots of people to design your own icons and your own branding, and send it in to QuarkVsInDesign.com.
Anne-Marie: We’ll put a link.
David: Yeah, we’ll put a link. It’s fun, so that’s good.
Anne-Marie: And another one of our contributors, Sandee Cohen, is at this moment, in beautiful Stockholm.
David: Yes, very beautiful Stockholm. Although, Stockholm in January… I don’t know. I’m not thinking beautiful, I’m thinking very cold. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: I don’t know. Compared to Chicago in January, it’s probably beautiful.
David: Is it cold there right now?
Anne-Marie: Yes. It’s, I think, negative eight or something like that.
David: [laughs] Jeez.
Anne-Marie: I’m looking out the windows. Well, we’re finally getting snow. In December and November it was ridiculous; it was like 50 degrees and muddy. Now it feels like normal winter.
David: Right. Well, there you go.
Anne-Marie: So there’s the InDesign Conference happening in Stockholm right now…
David: In Stockholm right now, which is wonderful. So, go see Sandee if you’re anywhere in the Sweden area. Also, coming up at the end of February or beginning of March is the Miami Creative Suite Conference. So you can get lots of information about Creative Suite. And in June, our favorite topic, InDesign; the InDesign Conference comes to New York City.
Anne-Marie: Woohoo!
David: The Big Apple, at the beginning of June. We hope to see all of you there. That’s going to be lots of fun.
Anne-Marie: It’ll be great.
David: We’ll probably do another one of these live podcasts there, one way or another.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. This time we’ll bring a microphone.
David: That would be excellent.
Anne-Marie: That would be good.
David: Excellent idea.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: We won’t make Barry run around like a chicken with its head cut off. All right…
David: That was not one of our highlights. All right, let’s get on to the debates.
Anne-Marie: Yes, the debates. The designer awards. I was talking about that there are three issues that a lot of designers feel very strongly one way or the other about.
David: Well, there are more than three, there are hundreds…
Anne-Marie: We’re going to cover three.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: One of them is: How do you actually work with InDesign? Do you work with InDesign locally? You know, you open up files on your local hard drive and save them and then, maybe if you’re working in a big office, you might copy them to a server and copy them back to your local hard drive for backup purposes. Or, do you work directly off the server?
David: Yeah. And I have a simple answer to that, a very simple answer: Don’t open things across a network! Don’t open things from a server…
Anne-Marie: That’s interesting.
David: Copy them to your local hard drive, work with them, and then save them to your local hard drive and send them back.
Anne-Marie: I have a simple answer.
David: All right.
Anne-Marie: Work off the server.
David: [makes pained sound] Oh! [laughs]
Anne-Marie: I’m serious.
David: Seriously?
Anne-Marie: Seriously.
David: Oh man. I would never do that.
Anne-Marie: I can sort of see what you’re talking about with maybe, Photoshop–huge, gargantuan Photoshop files, but with InDesign files, there is no problem working over the network, as long as you have a good and stable network. Half of my clients do that. And when I ask them, ‘Do you guys work off the server, or do you work locally?’ a lot of them, their jaws will drop and they’ll say, ‘People work locally? Well, how do they do backups?’ It’s very common in large companies and in medium-sized companies for people to just work off the server.
David: I hear you. I know it’s convenient as all get-out, but I still, to this day–here we are in 2007–I still do not recommend that people do that. I just keep hearing one problem after another: people either have corrupted documents, or they can’t open the documents anymore. It’s just weird stuff.
And the biggest problem is, when all your files are on a server–I know what you’re talking about with Photoshop files being huge, but I’ve worked with plenty of huge InDesign files, and even more of a problem, I’ve worked with plenty of large InDesign files that have links to large Photoshop files on the network. Or that somewhere it’s on my hard drive, or it could be on the server…
Anne-Marie: But you’re only seeing the previews of the links in the InDesign files.
David: Yeah, but when you open the links palette, when you open the InDesign document, it has to check all those links. There’s no way to say, ‘Look, don’t check all my links this time. Open the document, and forget about my links.’ That would be a nice feature. But it always has to check that stuff.
Anne-Marie: I suppose so…
David: So it takes a lot longer to open your documents when all that stuff’s on a server.
Anne-Marie: Don’t agree.
David: All right. Well, there you go. That’s our first debate…
Anne-Marie: [laughs] I think you’re used to very old servers, or maybe you’re remembering the last time you worked off a server in 1982 or something like that.
David: No, I’m talking about people.
Anne-Marie: But these days, go to any of the big clients and they are all working off the server. And Adobe does not have a problem with it either, by the way, at least as far as InDesign is concerned.
David: Adobe does not have a problem with it, but I have a problem with it. And this is not old stuff. As you said, half your people are doing that; the other half are doing it the other way.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: So this is one of those ties–honestly, I see this as a tie in the industry. People do it both ways, but I continue to argue that it seems like a more efficient way to do it, but it is more problematic in the long run. And I’m putting my foot down there. But Anne-Marie disagrees. And that’s OK; we can disagree on these things.
Anne-Marie: All right. I think it depends on the strength of your IT support. If you’ve got good IT support and good servers, then there is no problem. You’re not going to see much of a difference, even.
David: You know, that could be. If it’s a fast enough network and you really trust your IT people, that’s fine. My IT people is me…
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: …and I don’t trust him, so I’m a little more skeptical about it.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: But even the larger companies that I work with, I’m still skeptical of that work flow.
That said, I do want to point out, I think it was the creative text guys who pointed out kind of an interesting thing, and that has to do with: sometimes people have trouble opening their InDesign documents over the server. Remember that comment they made?
Anne-Marie: No.
David: And the solution that they came up with was that it was more reliable to open your documents–if you’re going to be opening your InDesign documents over a network…
Anne-Marie: Oh right, I remember this.
David: …it’s much more reliable to use the Adobe dialog box, instead of the regular Macintosh or Windows dialog boxes.
Anne-Marie: I don’t know if they ever confirmed that, though.
David: I’m getting mixed reports from people, but certainly some people have said, ‘Yes, it is more reliable.’ I don’t think they nailed it. I don’t think they’ve proved it. But it’s good enough for me, from what they’ve described to me.
Anne-Marie: All right. I’ve heard another thing that could be an urban legend, could not be. But I’ve been passing along to clients who are having occasional troubles with corrupted documents over the network. And that is, if you’re using an OS 10 server, an Xserve–which is UNIX-based–then to name your files like you were putting them onto a web server. Don’t use spaces in the filenames, because that converts to %20. Just use alphanumerics, the hyphen, and the underscore.
David: That’s clever.
Anne-Marie: And from a couple of my clients who kept having these occasional corrupted documents, where it’d say, ‘Cannot open document, ‘ or, ‘You don’t have a filter to read this, ‘ they started renaming their files that way and that solved the problem. Now, I know a ton of clients who are using Xserves that don’t do that, and they’re not having problems. But it’s just another tool to add to the toolkit.
David: You know that’s funny, because that just touches on my own personal taste in file naming.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: I generally want to use web-type naming for everything anyway.
Anne-Marie: Ah.
David: I don’t mind using really long names but I don’t like putting spaces in and I don’t like using special characters partly because at any moment I may be asked to just throw an InDesign file up on my website…
Anne-Marie: That’s true.
David: …so someone can download it or something like that. It’s just easier, more convenient. I opt for ultimate flexibility. So try and make sure that it’s going to work in UNIX, in Windows, on Macintosh, so don’t use any kind of special characters. So I think that’s a great solution.
And by the way, if you didn’t follow my comment earlier about what the creative text guide said–the Adobe OS, when you go to the ‘Save As’ or the ‘Open’ dialogue box in InDesign there’s a little button in the corner that says, ‘Use Adobe Dialogue’. And you click on ‘Use Adobe Dialogue’ and you get a different dialogue box. Steve Werner has also, and I think we’ve talked about that on the blog as well.
It’s a nice work around. Use their dialogue box instead of the standard dialogue box for opening and saving and that might solve you some problems. So, there you go, there’s a couple of good things that we can agree on, thank goodness.
Anne-Marie: Yes. OK, the next issue is, and I was just talking about this when I was doing training last week. You’re looking at the new document dialogue box where it’s asking you what is the width and what is the height of your document. And a lot of new users, especially, will enter the width and height of the paper that’s loaded in their printer.
David: Right, like letter size, legal size, whatever.
Anne-Marie: Right. And so you always need to teach, ‘No, it should be trim size here.’ If you’re doing a business card the width is 3′ and the height 2′, something like that?
David: Whatever that is.
Anne-Marie: But some people will say…
David: Unless your using one of those moo, the new mini moo cards, at moo.com, that little tiny mini business cards. They’re very cool.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: Anyway. So the trim size, basically make your InDesign document the size of whatever you’re trying to create. If you’re trying to create a business card, make your InDesign document that size.
Anne-Marie: But there are people who, like the people who always ask on the forums–’How can I create crop marks in InDesign?’ We’re like, ‘Why would you need to create crop marks in InDesign?’ Because they prefer if they’re doing a business card to do maybe four up on a letter-size page and they want to put crop marks around each one.
David: I guess there are reasons to make your own crop marks and there’s plug-ins to make your crop marks and there’s scripts to make your own crop marks and that’s cool and I’m glad that those things exist. But in general I agree, why would you want to do that?
So I encourage anybody who has a really good reason to do their own crop marks on the InDesign page and not make your actual InDesign document the size of what you’re trying to create, let us know. Go to InDesignSecrets.com and click on this podcast and write in the show notes in the comments under the show notes. Tell us your reasoning because that’s always baffled me.
Again, if you’re making your own business cards on your own inkjet printer or something, then sure I can understand that, but for professional work for ad agencies and so on, I’m still curious why people would want to do that.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, because usually the printer or the print vendor will take your trim size document and they’ll impose it and make it 2-up or 4-up or 32-up, whatever, with their own software, usually in Acrobat. You giving them a 4-up thing of business cards in a letter size document just makes their work much more difficult.
David: Let me throw out one other reason why someone might want to make their own crop marks, their own trim marks. Some people want very custom types of marks and, especially for registration marking, they want very custom registration marking. And that’s one area where I can definitely see somebody wanting to use their own marks, if you need a specific style.
Somebody pointed out recently that the registration marks in InDesign, I haven’t checked this recently, but their comment was the registration marks in InDesign don’t look particularly good when you have them on top of a dark color. So if you have a bleed that goes–you’ve got a color, a dark color that’s bleeding off the page and then the registration mark is going to sit on top of that, you really need to kind of knock out better the registration mark. You know what I’m talking about?
Anne-Marie: Couldn’t you adjust the offset, though, of the registration marks so it’s further away from the bleed?
David: You can, but they wanted it close in and they wanted to knock out better from that bleed area. So they…
Anne-Marie: They want their cake and they want to eat it too.
David: That’s right. Exactly.
Anne-Marie: They want everything.
David: So there are ways to-so in that case they may need to create their own crop mark. On the other hand, they may not need to and in an upcoming InDesign Secrets post I’m going to talk a little bit about how to make custom printer marks, which is something we’ve talked about. As far as I know it’s only documented in our book Real World InDesign.
Anne-Marie: Doesn’t it involve writing postscript?
David: No, not postscript at all. It is relatively straight-forward. It’s very tweaky, it’s a real geek-out kind of thing, but you can customize your print marks and all kinds of interesting ways. We’re totally off topic here, but I just thought I’d throw that thing out there.
Anne-Marie: Let’s angle back to our topic, we’re heading back, we’re getting on the entrance ramp and here we are, we’re back on topic. The third designer war issue–and this was a lot of fun, if you’ve been following the blog lately–is the knockdown between David and Morty mostly about layered .TIFF’s versus PSD files in InDesign.
What’s the better basic file format for Photoshop files? Is it PSD, which every InDesigner knows is the best thing for InDesign because now you don’t have to make TIFFs anymore, just keep them as native PSD’s? Or is it layered TIFFs, because TIFFs are more generic and anybody can understand a TIFF?
David: Right. I think what Morty and I were talking about. There’s that one but there’s a related one. I think Morty and I were talking about PDF versus Adobe Illustrator files.
Anne-Marie: All right, that’s the fourth one.
David: That’s the fourth one, but all of these. Basically what kind of file format should you use and my answer is whatever Morty says.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Because Morty’s big and strong. He can beat us up.
David: Morty Gold’s bigger then me so I give him the benefit of the doubt. No, we all have our rationales for doing certain things, but I think that…
Anne-Marie: Let’s leave AI versus PDF to another podcast.
David: Sure.
Anne-Marie: Let’s talk about layered TIFF versus PSD.
David: All right.
Anne-Marie: Now I would always use Photoshop files, layered Photoshop PSD files, but you prefer layered TIFFs. Is that correct?
David: I like layered TIFFs. When you’ve got a Photoshop file that has layers, you can do a ‘Save As .TIFF’ and it will show you a dialogue box that says, ‘What do you want to do with layers? And you can zip compress the layers, which makes them really small. You can either compress or not the actual .TIFF file and what you end up getting is kind of a combo .TIFF plus.PSD in one file. You’ve got the layered.PSD part, stuck on the side of a flattened .TIFF.
And the reason I like this is it’s just more flexible. And again it comes back to options. If somebody suddenly says, ‘Hey, I need to drop this into PowerPoint or QuarkXPress’ or something, I’m like, ‘Fine, sure, take the .TIFF’, and you can put it in there. If somebody else says, ‘Actually, we need to put it in InDesign,’ then I can put it in InDesign. If somebody wants to open it back up in Photoshop then I can open it back up in Photoshop, and the layers are still there.
Basically, if you open it in Photoshop you get the PSD stuff. If you open them in any other file, you get the flattened composite .TIFF.
Anne-Marie: Really? So you are positive layered .TIFFs work in PowerPoint?
David: You know what, I’m going to stand back from that comment.
Anne-Marie: I don’t know.
David: I’m relatively sure they work. They work in QuarkXPress so yeah, I assume if they can work in something as old as QuarkXPress 4…
Anne-Marie: But you know QuarkXPress since version six has been able to understand PSDs.
David: That’s true.
Anne-Marie: Layered PSDs.
David: If you are using Express six or seven then layered PSDs might be reasonable. At 6.5 or 7, layered PSDs may be a good option for you if you need Express. But, we are talking InDesign here. Most of us are just creating images for InDesign. So then the difference between layered .TIFF and PSD comes down to this.
PSD is a very clearly proprietary format that Adobe owns and they can do anything they want with, and 20 years from now when I need to open this file, is anything going to open PSD files? .TIFF is a file format which is marginally proprietary, marginally open, and I know that 20 years from now I’m going to be able to find a .TIFF reader.
Now, does that really matter in my day-to-day? I don’t know, probably not, and probably PSD is the better solution. [laughs] But, I don’t know. Maybe this is a old workflows diehard kind of thing, but I still prefer .TIFF.
Anne-Marie: I know. This is like the proverb with the ant and the cricket or the ant and the grasshopper. Some person is being careful and thinking long term and the other one lives for the day.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: I like PSDs because I don’t have to think about it.
David: There’s a lot of good reasons to use PSD. And one of the best reasons to use PSD is it supports spot colors, including duotones. Another reason to use PSD is the whole layered thing. You can’t open up a layered .TIFF and turn layers on and off. You can with a PSD.
Anne-Marie: That’s correct.
David: That right there is a great reason to use PSD instead of the layered .TIFF.
Anne-Marie: I figure 20 years from now if there is a .TIFF opener somewhere there is also a PSD to .TIFF converter somewhere because of all the PSDs floating around.
David: On VersionTracker we’ll be able to go to VersionTracker 2020.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: There you go. There is always two sides to every debate. And there is no right answer. And that is one of the frustrating things. A lot of new users get frustrated. They are like, ‘Give us the right answer, what’s the right answer?’ And the answer is there is no answer. Everybody is different. Everybody needs to figure out the workflow that works best for them. And so we just want to give you some tools to do that.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. If in doubt ask Anne-Marie because she always has the right answers.
David: That’s right. Anne-Marie and Morty. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: All right, let’s go on to the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week. What is it, David?
David: Well, here in the Northwest we have a problem, a perennial problem called the slug. And we have a lot of slugs up here. This whole idea of keeping your slugs out of your garden, we just kind of laugh at that idea.
Anne-Marie: Oh, I hate those things.
David: There are so many slugs up here, and we get really big ones, four or five inch slugs.
Anne-Marie: Oh my god.
David: Oh, they’re great.
Anne-Marie: You guys probably serve them at dinner.
David: You know, apparently banana slugs, which we don’t have up here, but banana slugs apparently are extremely high in protein, I’m told. I have not actually tried this but that’s what I was told. So, there you go.
But that is not the kind of slug we are going to talk about. We are going to talk about InDesign Slugs. And those slugs have to do with information outside of your page. Like we were talking earlier, make your page the size of your document. So if you are doing a business card or an ad make the InDesign page the size of that ad. But, what if you want to add more information? You know, contact information or your logo.
Anne-Marie: Put stuff in the pasteboard you mean.
David: Put stuff on the pasteboard but you still want it to actually print. But you don’t want it to be part of your page itself. So, what do you do?
Anne-Marie: Well, that’s a slug.
David: That’s the slug. You put it in your slug area. InDesign has a slug area, but very few people ever see that slug area, because it is one of those hidden options. InDesign has all these hidden options where you have to click on the More Info button or choose More Info or Show Options. This is one of those things. In the New Document dialog box you click on More Options and you get Slug.
Anne-Marie: Lead guide and slug guide.
David: Lead guides and slug guides.
Anne-Marie: Yes. And so, the slug. The lead guide I think everybody understands; it puts a little guide around the edge of your page in the pasteboard. That helps you drag out items that should bleed off the edge of the page. You get the bleed allowance from the printer and you set that for the amount for the bleed guides, and there you go.
But slug guides, people are always like, ‘Eww, what’s that, slug guide?’ A slug guide is basically the same kind of thing. You usually set just one side even though it shows four fields. You usually just set one side, say on the right-hand side make a two inch slug guide. So that means on every single page of your document you will see a slug guide out on the pasteboard.
Inside that area, between the edge of the trim and the slug guide, you can put things, such as the text frame that contains information about the document, little lines where people can sign off. You know that they’ve seen it or approved it with changes.
The kind of thing that a lot of workflows you make a printout and then you have a stamp or Post-It that you put on the proof and it makes its way around the office or with your client and people sign off on it. This is just a way to add a slug yourself electronically. And so you see, whenever you export to PDF or you print the document, you get the option of including the slug area and not.
David: Right. That’s in the Marks and Bleed panel of either the Print dialog box or the Export PDF dialog box. You just click on Marks and Bleed and then you’ll see a little checkbox that says use Document Bleed Settings. And then there is another checkbox that says Include Slug Area. You turn that checkbox on and you’re going to get your slug. You turn that checkbox off and the slug gets cut off.
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.
David. So, it’s as simple as that. But, it is very, very handy to add that slug information on. I see it mostly used in ad agency work where you need to add a bunch of stuff, or design firms where they want to add stuff onto the side, send it along but they want to get it trimmed off later.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, for a multiple page document it would make sense to add that information to the master page, so that slug of information appears on every page. So that’s it. That’s what a slug is.
David: That’s it for episode 41 too.
Anne-Marie: We encourage you to go to InDesignSecrets.com. Post what you think about our designer wars. We don’t have a Quizzler this week, but we will come up with one shortly. And, as always everybody, we would love to hear your comments on other topics. Just give us a call at 206-888-INDY, that is 4639. Or email us at info @ InDesignSecrets.com.
And, until we meet again, this is Anne-Marie Concepción and…
David: 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 041 page.