Podcast 046 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 046 page.
[intro music]
David Blatner: Welcome to ‘InDesign Tips’ episode CSI-I-I!
[laughter]
David: I’m David Blatner, and I’m here with my beautiful co-host, Anne-Marie Concepcion.
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Are you OK there, David? [laughs]
David: [laughs] I’m doing great! I’m doing great. Well, we can start talking about CS3. This is actually episode 46, of course, but as of a few minutes ago, Adobe let the cat out of the bag. We get to talk about the new version of InDesign, CS3. [in fake Spanish accent] Ce esse tres!
Anne-Marie: CS3, baby.
David: Oh, yeah. CS3.
For those of you who are new to our podcast, both the podcast and our companion blog at InDesignSecrets.com, is the independent resource for all things InDesign.
Anne-Marie: [faking echo noise] -ign, -ign, -ign…
David: This episode, today, is sponsored by DTP Tools. They’re the makers of some of our favorite InDesign plug-ins, including Page Control, which is a plug-in that lets you do multiple page sizes within the same document, very, very cool.
That was actually developed in cooperation with one of our contributors, Pariah Burke. It’s a wonderful little plug-in.
The History plug-in, which gives you a history palette inside of InDesign. The X-Ray is another one of their plug-ins. That lets you change the opacity of your palettes. All very, very cool. Definitely check those out at dtptools.com. We’ll have a link to them in the show notes on our site, as well.
Oh, also, I forgot to mention: there’s a 15 percent off discount coupon, if you use the coupon code ‘idsecrets1′ at their website. You can get 15 percent off any of the InDesign plug-ins.
Anne-Marie: Definitely. So, coming up on today’s show, of course we’re going to be talking about the new version of InDesign, InDesign CS3. We’re also going to discuss InDesign CS3.
David: Yeah, yeah.
Anne-Marie: Also, I think we’ll have a tip about InDesign C… no.
[laughter]
David: CS3, all the time.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. We’ll be talking about our favorite new features in the new version, our favorite improved features from previous versions, and what you can expect when you open up the box.
For those of you who are still going to be using CS or CS2 for awhile, which I would imagine would be most people, stick around for the obscure feature of the week: fill with placeholder text. This works in all versions of InDesign, including CS3, we just checked.
David: OK, so can we do it? Can we talk about CS3 now?
Anne-Marie: Yeah. Yes, I give you my permission.
David: [laughs] So, look. We can’t talk about all of the new CS3 features in one podcast. We just can’t do it. It’s too much stuff.
We’ll probably spread them out over several episodes. And we’ll be posting about them on the blog at InDesignSecrets.com and all kinds of stuff like that.
Also, if you’re not already an InDesign Magazine subscriber, definitely subscribe right away, because the next issue is chock full of articles about CS3, really in-depth stuff about how to use the features in CS3.
So, go to indesignmag.com and subscribe. In fact, on our show notes, we’ll have a little discount coupon, and you can go and get a discount for your subscription. So, subscribe to that and read the next issue cover to cover. I think you’re going to really like it a lot.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. OK. So first, let’s bring everybody up to speed on the new features in InDesign CS3 that Adobe’s already talked about, a few weeks ago or a couple of months ago. We also talked about them in our blog.
David: Yeah, the stuff that got leaked out.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Such as, it’s going to be a universal binary, which means that it runs natively on the Intel Macs, providing a pretty significant speed boost for those of us with the Intel-based Macs.
David: It’s much nicer.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, it starts up faster, things just move much snappier.
It’s got Photoshop transparency effects built in; like that you can do bevels and glows, inner shadows.
David: That’s great. So it’s like, select text, apply a bevel and a glow to it, and make really incredibly ugly-looking text. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: That’s right. [laughs] You can apply that to text in a frame, or you can apply to just the stroke. You can also apply effects and transparency to just the background of a frame and not its contents. That’s fantastic.
Unfortunately, you still can’t just select a couple of words and give them a drop shadow, and let the other words not have a drop shadow.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: It’s all or nothing.
David: Yeah, all or nothing. It’s close, it’s getting there. It’s a lot better than it was, but there’s always more to wish for.
Anne-Marie: The other big feature that Adobe already talked about is that when you go to “Place”, you can select multiple files in the Place dialog box. So, you can Shift-click, or Command- or Control-click, and load up that cursor with a lot of images at once.
David: Or text and images together, either way.
Anne-Marie: That’s true. And then, the cursor gives you a little preview of what’s about to be placed into your document. You can cycle through them and do all sorts of fun stuff.
David: That’s really cool. So that’s all stuff that Adobe has talked about publicly before, and we blogged about. Now, let’s talk about the stuff that has not yet been made public, until now.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. That’s right.
First of all, the user interface looks just like what Steve Werner pointed out in his blog posting about the Photoshop CS3 new interface.
David: Which is cool, and it’s not that much different. It’s similar. It’s a similar feeling, and yet it’s much more efficient, especially with the ability to stash palettes off to the side into little icons, or icon and name view.
That’s really nice. I just find it much more flexible. I think Michael Murphy’s going to be talking about that in his next videocast, the ‘InDesigner Videocast’. Definitely check that out.
Anne-Marie: You just made a fatal error there, David. You called them palettes! I’m reporting you to Adobe!
David: Oh! Right. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: The new rule is that they’re no longer called “palettes”. They’re called “panels”.
David: Panels.
Anne-Marie: Panels, panels, panels.
David: Panels, that’s right.
Anne-Marie: Drill that into your head.
David: I’m trying. I’m trying. Panels, I mean panels.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: Other stuff that they added in the user interface is that you can now customize your menu items. You can actually turn on and off menus, just like you could in Photoshop CS2. You can actually turn off a menu item, or you can colorize them.
So, if you are often looking for something in a long menu, and you don’t know where to find it, you can colorize it so that it’ll just pop right out at you. So, that’s very cool.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. It comes with some pre-built workspaces that have pre-colorized things. Like what’s new in InDesign CS3.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Just like Photoshop CS2 did. So that’s pretty handy.
David: That is very handy. I like that.
Anne-Marie: And I think that a welcome new feature is table and cell styles, just like object styles, paragraph styles, and character styles.
David: We get so many requests, people asking us, “So where are the table styles in InDesign? How can I do a style for a table?”
Anne-Marie: Exactly.
David: We keep saying, “No, I’m sorry. They’re not there.”
Anne-Marie: And with a clever use of table and cell styles, you can update linked Excel files, too, which you’ve made into a table. You don’t lose the formatting. It’s pretty cool.
David: That’s very, very helpful. In the past, what we’ve had to tell people is that you have to go get a plug-in, like Teacup Software’s TableStyles and CellStyles plug-ins. Which is great, and it’s wonderful, but now it’s built into CS3.
In fact, it actually looks virtually identical to Teacup Software’s. So that’s interesting. I hope they did a deal there, because it’s very, very, very similar. So that’s very cool.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: Another new feature, variables. This is a hot one for me, because you can make variable text. Like ‘current date’, or ‘current time’, ‘name of document’, ‘number of pages in this document’, that kind of thing. All of these variables that automatically update.
Anne-Marie: Very easy to use. Right from the ‘Type’ menu, ‘Insert Variable’. Different kinds of variables, and you can customize variables. Finally, you can create running headers and footers, what a lot of people have been asking for.
You can set one to pick up a paragraph style, the first or last paragraph style on a page, automatically. So, for laying out headers for catalogs and things like that, very useful.
David: Yeah, like “pick the first heading one on this page, and put it here”. Or, “pick the last one”. Really, really clever. Very nice, very efficient.
Another one of my totally amazing favorites in InDesign CS3 is an ability to place an InDesign file inside another InDesign file.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: This is mind-boggling.
Anne-Marie: It’s very cool. And it works just like placing a PDF. You can get a little preview in the ‘Place’ dialog box, you can flip through the pages of another InDesign document, choose just the page you want to place, or all the pages, and it’s linked to that InDesign document.
You can have somebody creating an ad in InDesign, for example, and then you place that InDesign document into your magazine. And when they update the ad then you just say OK, update this ad.
David: I just have to say, as an aside here, because you know, I have been looking at QuarkXPress 7 and their whole thing about composition zones. This is just the way Adobe implemented. Placing an InDesign file inside another InDesign file is so easy, because it treats the InDesign file as it were a picture like a PDF.
And you look at QuarkXPress composition zones and it is so amazingly complex. In my mind, I mean I have still not quite figured out which menu item to do this or you bring up this dialog box, you select this. It’s just that they have a user interface that’s just incredibly bizarre. And this is just really, really easy. So I was very pleased to see that they added this.
Anne-Marie: One feature that dropped my jaw was the Find, Change. Not only can you–there are lot more features just for regular Find, Change text–but also you could ‘Find, Change’ object formatting. You can say find every picture frame with a red stroke and change it to a blue stroke or increase all the strokes two points or you know all sorts of cool stuff that you could do with objects that people have been asking for, forever. And there is even for all the geeks out there in the audience, grep. You can Find Change grep.
David: Yeah, you can use GREP, which is like a regular expression programming languages as it were. To do very complex searches and replacements in your document including wild card searches and all sort of such things.
And if you are concerned that you wouldn’t be able to do this because you are not programmer or you are not a geek, you know Sandee Cohen just wrote this article. It is in the next InDesign Magazine and she wrote a whole article. And as Sandee points out if she can do this then anyone could this.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: I mean you know she is so not into scripting and tweaking and being a geek she really wants it to be easy and straight forward, like most of us do. I mean, you know most of us just want it to work. She explains it in a very easy to understand way. It is a very powerful feature.
Anne-Marie: Oh, I am looking forward to that article. But for those of you who are still like what I don’t understand? Here is an example. See there is a story with a lot of parenthetical statements and you wanted to do a find change to apply a certain character style to everything within those parentheses. Now there is no way to do that with regular Find/Change because the text within each set of parentheses is different in every case.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: But you could do that find change with grep.
David: Easy.
Anne-Marie: That will be an easy one.
David: Well I don’t like easy. Won’t that easy? But if…
Anne-Marie: Easy for Sandee.
[laughter]
David: Easy for Sandee. Here we go, it’s easy for Sandee. So I am looking forward to that.
OK, other features that they have put into the CS3. Quick Apply: one of my favorite features in CS2 is now far, far better. Quick Apply, which you get when you just do a command enter or you know control enter on windows.
Quick Apply, which used to let you just apply paragraph styles, character styles, and object styles, now it lets you trigger scripts. It lets you trigger menu items. So like, if you can’t remember where drop shadow as an example, you can just do a command enter and just type drop. And it guesses, Oh, you want the drop shadow feature. It will actually let you pick menu items.
Anne-Marie: Drop shadow dialog box. It would just open it up. And it is completely customizable. So if you are not into that you know, if it is too many things to look at, then its fine you can turn them all off.
But if you just want to use Quick Apply to apply menu commands because you have already got all your keyboard shortcuts memorized for your styles, you can do that too.
David: For those of us who are in to keeping our hands on the keyboards and working quickly in the production environment, Quick Apply is going to be a huge step forward for us. That’s great.
Anne-Marie: Another big feature is what they have done to the automatic numbering and bulleted list feature.
David: Yeah, Specially numbering.
Anne-Marie: Unbelievable, yes especially numbering. For people who are really pining for the Microsoft Word or Framemaker style of doing automatic numbering where you have a category numbered one point zero and then sub categories under there should be automatically number one point one, one point two, one point three and so on. InDesign CS3 can do that for you now.
David: Yeah, we have complained vociferously on our blog about the limited type of numbering in CS2 and all of that. All of those complaints have gone now in CS3. They have really done a very powerful job with it.
It’s not perfect we know, like I said earlier there is always some thing more to ask for. The user interface for the new numbering, I personally think needs some work, in CS4 or something.
Anne-Marie: Topic for future podcast.
David: We will definitely talk more about that. How it works and what you need to know but the fact that it’s there is terrific.
Anne-Marie: Now, there is like we said there are ton of new features. I just have to squeeze this one in under the wire, which is the new features for InDesign and InCopy workflows. The biggest thing is, how you can create packages from InDesign that will send an assignment and related stories in one neat little package with the bow to remote editors.
So they have now finally included support for remote workflows within InDesign and InCopy. And in fact, you could do an all remote work flow. You don’t even need a server if you want to. So, I have a few virtual publishing company clients that are just going to jump all over this.
David: Well actually, on the InCopy thing, we should probably note that InCopy, all the InCopy plug-ins are now installed by default.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: When you installed CS3. So, you get all the InCopy features even if you are not working with InCopy. You still get all those features built in. So that’s very cool.
Anne-Marie: A lot of them are handy. I mean, like the notes feature and things like that.
David: Absolutely. OK.
What about the features that are fixed, improved? There is lot of you know, new and improved stuff in CS3. So here is just a quick sampling. Quick, quick sampling of the…
Anne-Marie: OK! Quick sampling.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: How about scaling? No more those parenthetical read outs.
David: Yeah, like the type sizes that it seems…
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: All that goes away.
Anne-Marie: They fixed that.
David: Yeah, it’s great.
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: Also styles, you can put styles inside folders. So you can have like different groups of the paragraph styles, different groups of character styles, which is very, very nice. We are going to go into a lot more depth on that later.
Anne-Marie: In the Pages Panel, you can automatically have thumbnail previews of every page in the Pages Panel. You can actually see a little miniature of the content. Makes it a lot easier to move pages around. You can you know, make large or small previews… very handy.
David: Very handy. Also, in a lot of the dialogue boxes, there are a lot of these little things. In fact, you know I don’t mean to keep harping on ‘InDesign Magazine’ but I just wrote this big article in ‘InDesign Magazine’ for this coming issue. About the little things and how important the little features are. So here is a little thing that just saves a little time but it saves you know you do it so often that it ends up saving a lot of time.
So you get this little make all the settings same icon. Little chain link icon thing. So for example, the text insets, inside text frame options you can type in the one text inset, hit the link and all of those of four values; all four sides get set to the same. It’s a little thing but it just going to save you a lot of time.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. What were CS2 people always asking? Well, how come that ‘make all settings the same’ isn’t here like how it is in the new document dialogue box when I’m setting margins or bleed guides. But we don’t know.
David: Right and now…
Anne-Marie: Just, they were waiting for CS3.
David: They were waiting for CS3. That’s shows up in text wrap as well, which is great. I looked on that text wrap, very, very handy.
Anne-Marie: Oh! Yeah. And one of my favorite new improve features is the ability to turn off InDesign penchant’s for converting non-text frames into text frames just because you accidentally clicked on them with the type tool.
David: Right, Right.
Anne-Marie: You can turn off that ‘feature’, quote unquote. If you like. So I love that.
David: I like having the ability to click on any frame and have it turned into a textframe. I like that but certainly there are many people who would drive this crazy. And so it’s just a preference now. Change the preference and boom it won’t happen anymore. So that’s kind of cool.
Aligned a page or spread, here’s another one which has baffled me for years.
Anne-Marie: Lots of people ask for this.
David: Yeah, you know, just center this on the page. You know, you can’t do that. In the past you have only been able to center two other objects. Now you can center to the page or center to the spread or center to the margins. I mean all of those controls are in there now. That’s nice.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
You know, in Find Fonts under the Type Menu, how you can search, replace fonts in the document but CS2 will always trip you up because those fonts were still in the style definitions. So you had to go one by one to the Style definitions and change them there as well. Well now in CS3, Find Font can optionally also change them within the style definition. Friendly little checkbox there that I probably would have paid $99 for a plug-in.
David: Yeah. I mean, it was again a great example of little things. Just one check box but it makes a huge difference. Every time I open a document that has missing fonts, I need to change all the fonts, just change it through out the whole document, including the style definitions. Very, very cool.
Also you can synchronize your master pages across books, or you can load master pages from another document. So if you want a master page, it is really easy to say, ‘Load Master Page’ from the master pages panel fly out menu, and it brings all the master pages in. Really lovely little feature, save a lot of time.
Anne-Marie: How about this little annoyance in the links panel. You have placed a logo 20 times, and then you want to update the logo, so it says that, you want to re-link it. So you got to re-link one and you have to re-link every single instance that I have. No longer true in CS3. There is a friendly little check box that says, ‘Relink All Instances’. It does it for you.
David: It gets very, very nice, finally.
We are putting it in the new and improved little features category, but the truth of the matter is, it is a huge feature, and that is the ability to export to HTML. In fact, it is export to XHTML, and the cool thing about exporting to XHTML here, is that the names of your paragraph styles and your character styles in your document are automatically mapped to CSS style names. So if you already have your external CSS file, you can automatically map it as a one-to-one ratio. It is just awesome, Very, very slick.
Anne-Marie: One minor one from me is that, you have something on a master page, and you want text frames in the document to be able to wrap around that item on the master page, you can do that now in CS3. Before you always had to override those master page items. Now, when you create the master page item, you can say whether or not the text wrap works on the item or not.
David: There are like five other major master page item things, four or five other features that we will talk about in the feature podcast. But that is a big one, the ability to have text wrap on a master page item. That’s one I have been asking for, for a very long time. So that’s great.
Anne-Marie: Definitely. We have to let people get a chance to actually buy the software though first, before we start spending lots of podcast time on it.
David: Definitely.
In fact why don’t we mention very quickly, Adobe has announced the upgrade fees for this, which is kind of interesting. If you just have InDesign, just the point product InDesign–these are by the way, unfortunately, these are the North America prices, the US prices for the upgrades and for the cost of the software. We don’t have the international ones yet, but hopefully in the next day or two, we will be getting those international ones. We will post those in InDesignSecrets.com. If you just have InDesign, you can upgrade for $200, $199, which I think, that’s lovely. In fact, it is not just CS2, they have told us, even if you have InDesign 2.0, or InDesign CS, you can upgrade to CS3 for $199. Or PageMaker, if you just have PageMaker, you can upgrade to CS3 for $199.
Anne-Marie: Excellent.
David: So that’s very cool. If you have the Suite and you want to upgrade to the Standard Suite, the one that doesn’t have Acrobat Professional–we just still don’t understand why they would sell something that doesn’t have Acrobat Professional, but that’s a topic for another day. The Standard Suite is going to be like $1,200, but the upgrade, if you have CS1 or CS2, you can upgrade for like $399, which is pretty cool.
Anne-Marie: That’s a good deal.
David: If you have the Premium Suite, then you can upgrade for $599, basically about $600.
Anne-Marie: With the CS3 Premium, you don’t get Acrobat and GoLive, now you get Acrobat, Dreamweaver, and Flash.
David: That’s right; Dreamweaver and Flash are the things that are in the Creative Suite Premium now, which is very interesting. GoLive has been removed. We are told that it is still going to have a life out there, but not in the Suite, which is, to me, quite sad, but there you go. So Dreamweaver is in there, Flash is in there, Acrobat Professional eight is in the Premium Suite, plus, of course, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Bridge. The new version of Bridge, which we will have to talk about in some detail.
Anne-Marie: We will put a link in the show notes to the Adobe pages that discuss everything having to do with the Suite.
David: Yes, great.
Anne-Marie: Yes, let’s do that. There is a lot to talk about.
David: There is a lot to talk about. It is going to be a great upgrade. I am very, very pleased with the InDesign portion of this upgrade. To me, it is very compelling, really, really compelling features that are going to increase productivity hugely.
Anne-Marie: Yes, I completely agree.
People should also check out Michael Murphy’s new videocast. It should be there available now, or very shortly. He is going to actually show some of the CS3 features, that we have been talking about or at least a portion of them.
David: Yes, it is going to be great.
OK, we better talk about the obscure feature of the week!
Anne-Marie: I don’t know how obscure this is, but I find a lot of clients never even notice it. It is hiding there at the bottom, all lonely, in the type menu, near Show/Hide Invisibles.
David: And again this is applicable both in CS2 and CS3.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Fill with placeholder text, and all you would do is drag out a text frame, choose the command, and it fills it with Lorem Ipsum sort of text.
David: Yes, if you just need to fill in any text frames or any thread of text frame, with random text, just pull it right out of the type menu, or right-click on the text frame and you can fill it from the context menu. Very, very handy. But there are a couple of little tricks with ‘Add Placeholder Text’, which we should mention.
One is, if you simply choose to fill with placeholder text, you get one sort of random Latin, random Lorem Ipsum text. If the ‘capslock’ key is held down, I kid you not, if the ‘capslock’ key is held down, you get fill with placeholder text, with a different form of Latin. It actually looks slightly different. I believe it is based on Cicero, if I am not mistaken, as opposed to Seneca. Something like that. It’s a…
Anne-Marie: Cicero, Seneca, it’s all coming from me. Seneca is the name of my company. I live about half a mile from Cicero.
David: [laughs] There you go. So the ‘capslock’ key–big difference in the look and feel of the text.
Anne-Marie: Without the ‘capslock’ key, you get the Lorem Ipsum, with the capslock key, you get the Ipsum Lorem. I guess that’s how it works.
David: [laughs] There you go. But what is really interesting about placeholder text, is if you want your own placeholder text, let’s say you work for a pharmaceutical company, and you want a bunch of random pharmaceutical-looking text, where all the words are four times bigger than normal words; you can create your own Lorem Ipsum text and place it in a text file, straight ASCII text file, called placeholder.txt. And where do you put that, Anne-Marie?
Anne-Marie: You put that inside the InDesign CS2, CS1, or CS3 application folder. Right inside the program folder and it is floating at the same level as the program itself. You don’t have to quit InDesign and start it again to have it work. So just go right back in InDesign and use ‘Fill With Placeholder Text’. Do you know what I use? I went to gutenberg.org and downloaded an Aesop’s Fable, and saved that as a text file. So now whenever I fill placeholder text, it starts out, “In olden days, the king had three lovely daughters, blah, blah.”
David: Now the trick to custom placeholder text, the feature is not let your document go to press with that text in there. [laughter] You have to remember that you have to get rid of that and replace what is supposed to be there.
Anne-Marie: It is a great April’s Fools joke too. Coming up on April 1st, people should know about that. You just write some interesting little text file, drop it in a co-worker’s application folder and ask them to fill something with placeholder text and it could say like, “Help! I am trapped in here in your computer. Please let me out.” [laughter]
Or like, ‘I am watching you, I see you…’
David: Another option is that there is a Lorem Ipsum generator on the web. There are actually a number of these out there, but I have found one I really like. You can create a whole bunch of Lorem Ipsum text, in a number of different languages, including Japanese and Hebrew and all kinds of stuff. You create a bunch of random text and then you could save that to that text file and have it import automatically.
Anne-Marie: We will put a link to that.
David: Yes, we will put a link to that site on our show notes.
Anne-Marie: All right. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that’s it for Episode CS 46.
[laughter]
David: CS3.
Anne-Marie: We’d love to hear your feedback. Post your comments in the show notes in the blog at InDesignSecrets.com, or email us at info @ InDesignSecrets.com. We can’t always respond to emails immediately, but we will try to get back to you as soon as possible.
David: We will. Until we meet again, this is David Blatner.
Anne-Marie: And Anne-Marie Concepcion for InDesign Secrets.
[closing music]
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 046 page.