Podcast 042 Transcript

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 042 page.

[music]

David Blatner: Hello! Welcome to InDesign Secrets–Episode 42. Forty-two: the answer to everything. And in fact, we are going to give you the answer to everything in this episode today. I’m David Blatner, and I’m here along with my lovely co-host, Anne-Marie Concepción.

Anne-Marie Concepción: Hello, everybody.

David: Today we are talking about InDesign. This is the InDesign Secrets podcast. Our companion blog is at InDesignSecrets.com. We are the independent resource for all things InDesign.

Anne-Marie: Yes, that’s correct. Coming up on today’s show we have a bunch of great topics for you. First of all, we are going to talk about multiple page PDFs and solutions for importing them into your InDesign document while avoiding carpal tunnel syndrome.

We want to talk about the ‘Clear Overrides’ button, which is a sweet new feature in CS2, but frequently overlooked, in my experience.

David: It is. People just don’t see it there.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. And we have an awards program, just like the Oscars and the Grammys. Our awards program is: The Least Useful InDesign Palette Award. We will be taking nominations, so we’ll be talking about that in a bit.

And, the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week is: Align based on size.

David: The ‘Align Based on Size’, which you could search for 34 hours in InDesign and not find; it’s that obscure.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. All right. So, David, what about these multiple page PDFs?

David: Well, we get a lot of emails from people who need to import multi-page PDF files. Different people want different things, but in general, they want each page of a PDF to show up on a different page of their InDesign document. They are sometimes importing a 10-page PDF, or sometimes a 500-page PDF, and they need to get them into different pages in their InDesign document. It’s a surprisingly common workflow. So, we are going to talk a little bit about that.

The quick thing that we should mention, the built-in semi-obvious thing, is that if you import a PDF file, and you want more than one page, you can turn on ‘Show Import Options’ in the place dialog box.

Anne-Marie: If you want more than one page, you have to turn that on. Right?

David: Well, except for the script thing that we are going to talk about later. But yeah, if you want to simply use the ‘place’ command for importing your PDFs, you have to turn on ‘Show Import Options’. I don’t usually turn on that checkbox. What I do instead is I shift-double-click on the file, or shift-click-open in the place dialog box. That’s the same thing as turning on the ‘Show Import Options’ dialog box. So, the PDF import options dialog box shows up, and by default you just get the first page. But if you want more than one page, you can choose ‘All’ or you can choose a range. You can actually choose what range of pages you want from there.

There’s a list, a helpful little preview, so you can actually preview each page of the PDF and pick which ones you want. That’s really quite handy. Then, when you click ‘OK’ you get a cursor for placing your PDF file. There’s two things you can do at this point: you could click, which simply places the first page of the PDF, the first part of that range, or you could…

Anne-Marie: Option.

David: Option!

Anne-Marie: ‘Option’ or ‘Alt’.

David: It’s not in front of me! You can Option- or Alt-click. That simply places all of those pages, all the pages that you selected, on the same InDesign page.

Anne-Marie: One right on top of each other. Just drops it a little bit. It’s so useful.

David: Right. They get tiled. They kind of get tiled a little over–not tiled, but they get kind of fanned out so you can see each one. That can be very useful, but that puts all of them on the same InDesign page. Then you have to move them all over the place. So, that’s interesting. Instead, if you just click, you get the first page. Then, the place cursor kind of reloads and you can go someplace else and click again, and you get the next page and go to the next place cursor.

Anne-Marie: The place cursor looks a little different when you’ve got a multiple-page PDF loaded and you’ve said that you want more than one page because it has a plus-symbol next to the logo for Acrobat.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: You know, that squiggly ‘A’. Then it shows a plus-symbol.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: Meaning you’ve got lots of pages loaded.

David: Lots of pages. So, that’s the main way the people have been getting multiple-page PDFs into InDesign. But what if you need to do it automatically? If you have 500 pages, you really don’t want to be doing that: click, click, click.

Anne-Marie: Unless you get paid by the hour.

David: That’s true. Good point, very good point.

Anne-Marie: Or an intern is doing it.

David: That’s a good point too, but the interns, it’s either free or…

Anne-Marie: Here you go, Billy. Keep yourself busy for a while.

[David laughs]

Anne-Marie: Place this PDF. And by the way, if you ever do need to manually place a multiple-page PDF, we’re going to tell you about a really cool shortcut. But, to manually place one of, like let’s say five or 10 pages, you have to add that number of pages to your document first of all and then if you zoom out to like 10 percent, you can see a bunch of spreads at once. Then you can just click, click, click on every page. It’s a lot faster than scrolling to a new spread or anything like that. So, that’s a fast manual way to place a multiple-page PDF.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: But anything more than five pages or so, then you probably want to use this cool script. And what’s that script?

David: Well, we looked all over the place. We were looking on the web; we knew we had seen this place multiple-page PDF script somewhere.

Anne-Marie: It’s like Bigfoot; everybody talks about it, some people say they’ve actually seen it and used it.

David: And we downloaded it. We downloaded various things that we found on the Adobe Exchange, and tried them, and they failed, and it was very frustrating. Then suddenly we both realized at the same time–in two different cities we both realized at the same time–”Wait a minute! This is the script that ships with InDesign”.

Anne-Marie: Right, we emailed each other at the same time: “Hey, we have this script. It’s right here in the scripts folder.”

David: Yeah. So actually, like most of these scripts, or all these scripts, they are not installed automatically, you have to go back to your install disks or download them from the website–we’ll give you the link in the show notes on how to get that.

You place that script in the scripts folder and it shows up in your scripts palette. You double-click on it and it asks you what document you want to place, which PDF you want to place. You pick a PDF, and it just works. It creates a new document and it places the first page of the PDF in the first page of the document, and the second page in the second page, and so on. However many pages you have, it just fills up an InDesign document. And it’s beautiful, very nicely done.

Anne-Marie: You know, it can also place it into an existing document. It doesn’t have to place into a new document.

David: Oh, I didn’t know that. Are you sure?

Anne-Marie: Yeah. Yes, I’m positive. There’s a dropdown menu. When you double-click the script, and by the way, [sarcastically] the script has a very obscure name: It’s ‘Place Multi-page PDF’.

David: [sarcastically] Yeah, you would never know, right?

Anne-Marie: So you should write that down. When you double-click it, it says, like you said; “Where is the PDF?” You load the PDF, and then it says: Do you want to create a new document or output to an existing document? And the dropdown menu shows you a list of all your open documents.

David: No, I tell you what’s funny, is that I don’t have that dialog box asking me that.

Anne-Marie: Really?

David: You have that. You might have to be in the Midwest to get that.

Anne-Marie: Do you have a document open?

David: Yeah. But here on the Pacific Coast, you don’t get that dialog box. So, there you go.

Anne-Marie: Maybe it’s the way you double-click. I double-click with love.

David: [laughs] That’s what it is.

Anne-Marie: If you are in a rush, you know, too much caffeine.

David: Yeah. Don’t rush.

Anne-Marie: It’s like: All right fine; you get a new document or nothing buddy.

David: Good point.

Anne-Marie: I’m given the option after I save my open documents, is which page do you want to start placing the PDF on.

David: I tell you what; we are going to compare our scripts, because you may have a newer version of the script than I do. So, we are going to compare our scripts and we will make sure that that script is available for you. Whichever one is the better one, which I think Anne-Marie’s is the better one at this point.

Anne-Marie: Yes.

David: I don’t know, that’s very strange. I don’t get that.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. It does automatically add pages to the InDesign document, by the way. So, it’s kind of like when people are like: “Oh, I wish there was an auto-flow for multiple-page PDFs”. And look, by golly, there is.

David: Cool. Wow! All right. We better talk about clear overrides.

Anne-Marie: OK. So, the ‘Clear Overrides’ button; you know there is this little tiny button at the bottom of the paragraph styles palette, it’s the paragraph symbol, which I always forget its name. There is actually a name for that symbol. Do you know?

David: No, I don’t know.

Anne-Marie: It’s like an “osecule”! Or something like that.

[laughs]

David: If any of our listeners know, then put it in the show notes.

Anne-Marie: I’ve read this about ten thousand times.

David: What is the character that means paragraph?

Anne-Marie: The paragraph symbol. The backwards P.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: Anyway, there’s this little backwards P symbol at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles pattern, to the left of the icon for New Style. It has a plus symbol after it with a red slash through the plus symbol. So, anybody familiar with InDesign iconography could probably suss out that that means “get rid of overrides in a paragraph”. That’s because the plus symbol following the name of a paragraph style means that your selection has an override.

David: I thought it just meant get rid of all your paragraph styles. Just delete everything, and the text with it.

Anne-Marie: Then the red slash would be through the backwards P.

David: I see. Instead it’s through everything.

Anne-Marie: Yes. It’s only through the plus symbol.

David: So, this only gets rid of the plus symbol. It gets rid of the overrides. Very interesting.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. Now, everybody knows the way you get rid of overrides in text is that you ‘Alt’ or ‘Option-click’ on the name of the paragraph style that has been applied to that paragraph. And that clears out any weird manual formatting someone has done, and resets it to the settings inside that paragraph style.

But the problem is, what if there are some overrides that you want to keep, and there are some that you want to get rid of? ‘Option’ or ‘Alt-clicking’ on the style is all or nothing. And that’s where the ‘Clear Overrides’ button comes into play.

You can make a selection–let’s say that you have a paragraph with some italic text, and for some reason, one of the sentences appears to be a different size. You want to keep the italic text, but you want to get rid of the weird size of the sentence in the paragraph. So, you select that sentence, and then you click on the ‘Clear Overrides’ button. And ‘Clear Overrides’ will only clear overrides in your selection. So, it leaves the italic text, since that wasn’t selected, and resets that weirdly sized text to the size specified in that paragraph style.

David: That’s interesting. So, you mostly use ‘Clear Overrides’ for selecting some text and just removing the overrides from that selected text within a paragraph. I use ‘Clear Overrides’ in a different way. I like ‘Clear Overrides’ because if you do the ‘Option-click’ on a paragraph, you select your paragraph and you ‘Option-click’ on a paragraph style and it wipes out all the local formatting from that paragraph. You go to the next paragraph, and you ‘Option-click’ on the next paragraph style and so on.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: It’s so tedious to go through a whole story, that I gave up on that.

Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.

David: So, instead, I just place the cursor in a story, do a ‘Command-A’ or ‘Control-A’ for select all, select the entire story, click the ‘Clear Overrides’ button once and it’s as though I did an ‘Option-click’ on each and every paragraph throughout.

Anne-Marie: That’s right.

David: It’s a very fast way to remove it from everything. So, that’s cool. There’s two different ways that you can use that.

Anne-Marie: Right. And if you hover over that little button you’ll see a couple tool tips. One of them says if you ‘Command’ or ‘Control-click’ on the button with your selection. It’s going to only clear out any character overrides, like type size, all caps, type color, that kind of thing.

If you ‘Command’ or ‘Control-Shift-click’ on the button, it will only get rid of paragraph-level overrides. It will keep your italic and your weird type size but if somebody made this paragraph centered or with a weird space above, it will clear those overrides only. So, you can get pretty finely tuned override control with this little thing.

David: Absolutely. I find that I virtually never use those modifier keys.

Anne-Marie: No, me neither.

David: I just want to wipe out everything. But it’s nice to know that it’s there. That’s good.

Anne-Marie: Well, I’ve worked on clients’ files where they have really messed up the space above.

David: Ah.

Anne-Marie: Every space above is different, because they’re trying to do some sort of weird aligning or something.

David: Uh-huh.

Anne-Marie: And, I want to get rid of that but I don’t want to get rid of the italics and the bolds.

David: Oh. Interesting.

Anne-Marie: So, I’ve used it in that case and that really saved the day.

David: Interesting. That’s a good point. All right. Good example. Nice that it’s there.

Anne-Marie: ‘Clear Overrides’ is also available in the paragraph palette menu, and it’s also available in the Control Palette Menu -

David: Speaking of the paragraph palette menu. [laughs] Anytime anyone says: “paragraph palette” or “character palette”, I immediately start thinking: the Least Useful Palette Award.

Anne-Marie: Oh yes! Good segue.

David: Because the paragraph palette is virtually useless. It’s all replaced elsewhere by the control palette. The character palette is the same way. But there’s still a few things you can do in those palettes, I think, that you can’t do elsewhere.

Anne-Marie: Wait a minute. I misspoke. It’s not in the Paragraph Palette menu. It’s in the Paragraph Styles menu.

David: Oh, the Paragraph Styles menu! Sorry. That’s a useful palette. But the paragraph palette is less.

Anne-Marie: Right. And it has been segregated into its own little group of lonely, useless palettes.

David: [laughs] I know. It’s kind of sad.

Anne-Marie: It is. Character, Transform… They’re in the palette ghetto. We don’t need these anymore. We did need them in CS1, but in CS2, I’d say virtually all of their functions are in the control palette at the top.

David: I think so. And it’s sweet that Adobe feels that they need to keep those palettes around just for old-timers like us, but I think it’s time -

Anne-Marie: Well, I have actually used the character palette sometimes because I am working on something towards the bottom of the window, and I just want the palette commands really close to me, instead of always having to move my mouse all the way up to the control palette. So, sometimes if you’re doing some close-in work it can be useful.

David: Yes. [laughs]

Anne-Marie: These can be useful. Some people like these floating palettes. They’re not into the control palette that much. I would say the least useful palette in InDesign, in my opinion, is the color palette.

David: Ah, yeah. The color palette. Yep.

Anne-Marie: It’s part of the default set, it’s the first thing I get rid of and make my own default workplace.

David: Interesting.

Anne-Marie: It’s just a heartbreaker. You select something and choose a color from that cool little spectrum. Then, when you want to use it again later on in the document, you’re like “Oh, where’s that color? Oh, I forgot to add it to the swatches”. You have to hunt through the document, find the object that you used with that color, add it to the Swatches palette.

Forget it! You might as well pick colors from the Swatches palette only. I always close the color palette and don’t include it in any of the workspaces that I use.

David: Interesting. You know, a lot of people like the Color palette just because it’s very interactive. You can quickly grab a color and run. I agree with you that I wish there were a way to turn on a preference–whenever I choose a color, automatically apply it to the Swatches palette.

Anne-Marie: Yep.

David: But you have to do that manually. If you do use the Color palette, then you can drag that little swatch that it makes in the palette over to the Swatches palette and that will add it to the Swatches palette.

Anne-Marie: You could assign a keyboard shortcut to add the swatches.

David: Right. Like in the flyout menu from the Color palette, you can say ‘Add to Swatches’. Or in the Swatches palette flyout menu, you can say ‘Add All Unnamed Colors, and it will go through your whole document and it’ll grab all the unnamed colors’, all the colors that you assigned using the Color palette, and add those to the Swatches palette.

Anne-Marie: Sure.

David: Those are all workarounds though. They’re all kind of kludgy. I do agree that it’s much better to make a swatch first in the Swatches palette and apply that. But there are a couple things about the Color palette that are interesting.

Oftentimes if you simply select an object the color palette just shows up with a little gray ramp, a little color ramp like a tint, which is nice for setting tints. But you typically want to change that. Oftentimes, you want to change it to a different color. One way you can do that is ‘Shift-clicking’. Of course, that just gives you the RGB.

Anne-Marie: ‘Shift-double clicking’.

David: Well, ‘Shift-double-clicking’ gives you the CMYK. ‘Shift-clicking’ gives you RBG.

Anne-Marie: That’s what you want.

David: Usually, you’re right. Usually you want a CMYK. So, ‘Shift-double-click’ to get over to CMYK and then you could pick a color from the ramp. But again if you’re going to use the Color palette, make sure that turns into a swatch, in the Swatches palette one way or another. I would not say that the Color palette is the least useful palette in my opinion. In my opinion, transform maybe, Transform palette is completely useless. I think every feature in the Transform palette has been duplicated in the Control palette.

Anne-Marie: That’s true.

David: So, that is completely useless, that could complete go away. Another one that I think that I would nominate; Can I nominate two for this award?

Anne-Marie: OK, i’ll allow it.

David: OK, thank you. [Anne Marie laughs] This, my second choice would have to be the Navigator palette and some people are going to.

Anne-Marie: Oh yeah! I forgot about the navigator.

David: Yeah, I mean its interesting if you can choose navigator (I don’t even know where they put it anymore, I am looking around in here).

Anne-Marie: It’s in Object & Layout.

David: Object & Layout. There you go, the Navigator palette lets you navigate through your document. I don’t know, I just don’t find myself ever, ever, ever using it. There are probably people who do. I mean, its nice cause it gives you some thumbnails of the pages.

Anne-Marie: You could go to the navigator palette menu and choose ‘Show All Spreads’ and then you get like a little 5% view of all the spreads in your documents in a scrolling window, but they’re thumbnails. It would be nice, if the Pages palette could show the thumbnails. That would be nice.

David: That would be helpful. But you could also just open a new window. You say: Window menu > Arrange New Window and you can open your own new window and zoom back to 5% or something and you would see the same thing. You get the thumbnail of all spreads in a separate window. Some people like the Navigator palette I’m sure but I don’t. In the old days, if you had the Navigator palette open, it would really slow down InDesign hugely and so many us just stopped using it because of that would make it go away. But I have heard from, I have not tested this recently, but I have heard this from one of the engineers on the InDesign team that that should not happen anymore. It shouldn’t slow you down, at least not significantly. But still, I just don’t use it.

Anne-Marie: Well, we would love to hear from all of our listeners about what you consider to be the least useful palette in InDesign for your own purposes or anybody staunchly defending the color palette, transform palette [David laughs] or Navigator palette, we would love to hear from you too. Like, “Oh! Its indispensable for, you know, x, y and z”

Or nominate your own, or vote for one, whatever. Then in the next podcast, before the next podcast goes we’re going to randomly choose a comment, any comment from the show notes for this podcast, and that person will win a poster.

David: Yeah. Absolutely, so if you are free to post, go to show notes, go to InDesignSecrets.com and click on this podcast and you can leave your reply, ‘what your nomination is for the least useful palette’ and why Adobe should abandon the ship and get rid of it.

Anne-Marie: For this contest, don’t email us. Add your comments through the show notes.

David: Yeah, but we’ll do that whenever our next podcast is, in probably, the deadline should probably be in about a week from now. So, that’s going to be around the 14th, Valentine’s Day.

Anne-Marie: Yes, exactly.

David: OK, excellent.

Anne-Marie: all right.

David: Oh, the obscure feature of the week…

Anne-Marie: Is ‘Align based on size’?

David: Where on earth is that?

Anne-Marie: What they used to do in elementary school, when you’re lining up for recess.

David: That’s right.

Anne-Marie: Make everybody line up by size. What’s the point of that, I never understood that. [David laughs] I was always at the very beginning, cause I was like 3′2. You know what I’m saying.

David: Aw. I was always in the back, cause I was 6′5 when I was in sixth grade.

[Anne-Marie laughs]

David: So, it changed. I started getting shorter. [Anne-Marie laughs] But back then I had quite some stature.

OK, moving along.

[laughter]

So the obscure feature of the week, ‘Align based on size’, where is that Anne-Marie.

Anne-Marie: It is hiding in one of the tiniest palettes in InDesign at the Story palette.

David: Yes.

Anne-Marie: You can open the Story palette from the Window menu, if you go down to the Type & Tables nest of palettes down there. Or you can open it from the Type menu. And the Story palette has one reason for being, it turns on and off optical margin alignments. And that’s what a lot of people call “hanging punctuation”. It’s a checkbox, and you select a frame and the story (that’s why its called the Story palette) and you turn on and off optical alignment margin and in there, there’s field right below there that has ‘12 points’ by default with this funny little icon to the left of it.

David: Its so much like a drop cap icon or, its totally obscure, I can’t see.

Anne-Marie: I thought it was a C-clamp.

David: A C-clamp, yep, yep, its for squeezing your brain, yep.

[Anne-Marie laughs]

Anne-Marie: Align based on size, that’s what the tool-tip says. What you’re supposed to do is after you’ve turned on optical margin alignment, you set this field to the type size that is used in the story, or I guess, the most commonly used type size. Like if you have a story that’s full of a nine point text, you would change this from 12 point to nine point and that is so that InDesign can better hang the punctuation and the quotes and things like that, often to the margins.

David: You can also set that, the align based on size field, the C-clamp feature, to wildly different sizes. You could make it much bigger or much smaller and when you experiment with it you find that it actually changes your margins on both left and right sides slightly in a really obscure and unpredictable way. It is as far as I can tell.

And I hardly recommend using that when, you don’t have a deadline. You can play with that for a while.

Anne-Marie: From my high-end projects, I almost always turned on optical margin alignment for the main text flow. I love how it looks.

David: Oh me too.

Anne-Marie: And usually, just a subtle look. But I know a lot of people, when I am teaching, they’ll say: “Where is that hanging punctuation feature?”. Ill say: “OK” you’re thinking about this and they put in an open double quote and it doesn’t complete hang outside. Just you know, part of it hangs outside. What you’re actually looking for is add a space before the quote then corn it in lots and lots and lots, so that the quote marks came outside.

David: Yeah, optical margin alignment is actually doing an analysis of every character on the left and right sides of your justified text and its is manipulating each line slightly. So, a ‘t’ a capital ‘T’, is going to end up in a different place than a lower case ‘a’ or something. So, its moving all of the characters, sometimes just a tiny bit and sometimes a lot. But punctuation is where you see it the most but it actually changes every character.

So, that is the obscure feature.

Anne-Marie: One more obscure feature that is no longer obscure, is it?

David: Yes, align based on size a.k.a. ‘The C-clamp’.

[Anne-Marie laughs]

David: I like that.

Anne-Marie: All right, that’s it for episode no 42. Don’t forget to post a comment about which of InDesign CS2’s palettes is least useful to you and why. Any suggestions for improvement would also be good.

David: Go to InDesignSecrets.com. Write in the show notes for this, what yours is, and we’ll pick one later and one of you lucky posters will win a InDesign keyboard shortcuts poster. That’s one of our posters with Windows keyboard shortcuts on one side and Mac on the other. So, that’s good. As always we’d love to hear your comments about other topics and other topics that you’d like us to talk about and so on. Feel free to email us with your suggestions at info @ InDesignSecrets.com or call us: 206-888-I-N-D-Y and that’s it. Until we meet again this is David Blatner.

Anne-Marie: And Anne-Marie Concepción for InDesign Secrets.

[ending music]

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 042 page.