Podcast 047 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 047 page.
[music]
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Welcome to InDesign Secrets episode 47. I am Anne-Marie Concepcion and I am here along with my co-host David Blatner.
David Blatner: Hey there, how you doing?
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Stop. Are you let down after…
David: I figure I have to be… It’s cool to be disaffected.
Anne-Marie: After all of the excitement from last week.
David: Yeah, exactly. So now I’m whatever.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where’s CS4? That’s what I want to know.
David: That’s what I want. If Adobe were really on top of things.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. For those of you new to our podcast, the InDesign Secrets podcast and our companion blog at InDesignSecrets.com is the independent resource for all things InDesign.
David: Indeed. And this week on the show we’re going to talk about all kinds of stuff including the 4.05 update. That’s if you are a CS2 user, which most of us are. CS2 users can update to 4.05 quickly, we’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about the Hot Button Topic of the Week, which reflects the most talked about topic on the InDesignSecrets.com blog, and that is the CS3 pricing model, and we will talk about that just a little bit. Also the CS2 Topic of the Week will be adjusting the settings in display performance. And then we are going to talk about a CS3 topic, we are probably going to talk briefly about XHTML export and why that’s so cool. And then the Obscure Feature of the Week is first baseline offset. So we will talk about that.
Anne-Marie: First baseline offset, though it may not be obscure to some people, I would say to at least 80% of the people who use InDesign, that’s a bit obscure.
David: It is, and how best to use it is I think what’s really obscure. And that is what we are going to talk about.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, that’s true.
David: So we will cover that later.
Anne-Marie: But, before we get into all that good stuff, a quick reminder for everybody, there’s a couple conferences coming up that you should know about. The first one is coming to my hometown in Chicago, Illinois, the Vector and Pixel Conference, in a month, right? That’s the beginning of May.
David: Yeah, actually it’s technically two different conferences: the Vector Conference is basically all about Illustrator and Flash and the Pixel Conference is basically about Photoshop for designers. It’s not high end digital photography kind of stuff. It’s for those of us who are designers who are creative professionals who need to use Photoshop well. This is everything you need to know about it.
We are having Ben Wilmore coming out, Ann-Marie of course, you’ll be at those shows, I’ll be there, Deke McClelland is coming out and doing some great one-on-one Photoshop stuff which is exciting. Mordy Golding is coming out and doing some great Illustrator stuff. Sandee Cohen will be there. It’s going to be great; I’m really looking forward to those conferences.
Anne-Marie: There is a day in the middle when the twines meet.
David: That’s right. They are back-to-back conferences and the one day that they are overlapping, it’s really how pixels and vectors are working together.
Anne-Marie: Right, right.
David: Which is really a Creative Suite type of day. So that’s going to…
Anne-Marie: Yeah, that’s when I’m doing a session that day on Bridge in CS2 and CS3.
David: And so that’s going to be great information. Also, it will be one of the first opportunities for people to really get their eyeballs on CS3. We’ll be doing lots of CS3 stuff during those shows.
Anne-Marie: Come and watch our computers crash as we bounce back and forth between CS2 and CS3.
David: No. [laughs] No, no, no. It all works perfectly. It’s all going to be great.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. And then, one month later is the InDesign Conference in New York City.
David: [laughs] High tech echo there. Yes, I’m really looking forward to that. That is the show of the year for InDesign Conference users, certainly in North America. I’m sure we will be having people from Europe and elsewhere coming into New York for that event. It’s going to be really quite an exciting show. Lots of good speakers, lots of great information.
Anne-Marie: Including Michael Murphy is going to be speaking, our videocast guy.
David: Yup, he’s going to be there. And we will of course be there; in fact we are going to be doing another one of these live InDesign Secrets podcasts from the show. So, definitely come on by, and we will be answering questions, and figuring out how to do the audio better in person this time. Now we’ve got one…
Anne-Marie: Maybe we will do, we can do a live quiz or something.
David: Sure.
Anne-Marie: A Quizzler or something like that.
David: A Quizzler, definitely, I like it. So that is coming up in June, June 4th through 7th in New York City, definitely come.
Anne-Marie: We’ll have links to both of these conferences in our show notes if you haven’t signed up yet.
David: Also, $100 off discount coupon. We’ll put that coupon code in the show notes as well. $100 off the registration, either Pixel Conference, Vector Conference, or the InDesign Conference, if you get a whole conference pass.
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: We should talk about 4.05, just quickly. If you’re a CS2 user you definitely want to upgrade to 4.05. It’s a free update. The easiest way to do that is to just go to your Help Menu and choose Check For Updates. Is that what it’s called? I’ll look here.
Anne-Marie: Yup.
David: Basically, look for… It just says Updates. And it will go out and it will download the update, and install it, and it’s all very smooth and easy. It does fix lots and lots of little things that have gone wrong over the years. We get a lot of emails from people and some of them are, “Why am I crashing?” or “This just doesn’t work right for me.” And often times we are scratching our heads, well it works for us. And Adobe is paying attention to those things and they have made lots of little fixes.
I got an email recently about indexing, this guy was having trouble indexing his document, and it was just crashing. InDesign was simply crashing and it was one of those, well, it works for me, I don’t know what is wrong with yours. It turns out that there’s a known problem in CS2 that InDesign documents that were originally PageMaker documents that have been opened in InDesign and then when you index them sometimes you have crashing problems. That’s fixed in 4.05 apparently, and its one of those little things that if you are having problems you really want it fixed.
Anne-Marie: I wish they would post a list of all the little things that they already know don’t work. Instead of waiting for the fixer to come.
David: Yeah, that would be helpful. There is a list of everything that’s fixed in 4.05 however, and it’s not easy to find, but we tracked it down. So, we’ll put a link on the show notes to that PDF on Adobe’s website and you can download it. And literally there’s probably, I don’t know, 70 or 80 different things that they fixed in this update. So, nothing huge, but it is important.
Anne-Marie: And I think that, isn’t a big part of the 4.05 update is so CS2 users can read the INX files that CS3 users will be exporting to?
David: Yeah, apparently they did add that. My understanding is that CS2, if you don’t get the 4.05 update, it will still be able to open those INX files, but I think 4.05 does it better. I think they just made it better.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: I don’t know the exact details there; we will have to look into that.
Anne-Marie: All right. So, what was the Hot Button Topic of the Week on our blog? Let me tell you, a bazillion responses to our main post where we introduced InDesign CS3 and talked about some of the cool stuff in it, and quickly the topic focused on pricing, which in North America seems pretty reasonable, but the issue was how much does it cost outside of North America?
And, over half the people who visit our blog are not in North America, so it’s a big topic with our users. And, the problem is that it appears that Adobe is charging a heck of a lot of money if you’re in Europe or Australia to buy the same stuff that we can get much cheaper in the U.S.
David: Yeah, it’s not just 10-15% more, which would probably be understandable, but in some cases it’s 30%, 50%, or even 90% more, almost double the American cost. So, a lot of people are complaining about that, they are hoping Adobe is going to change their pricing structure.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Like that’s going to happen. You think it’s going to happen?
David: Well, you never know. It could, Adobe is still in a position where they could change those things if they wanted to.
Anne-Marie: They could say it was a typo or something.
David: [laughs] No, but they could say, “Look, we are listening to our customers, there’s been an uproar, and we are going to change it.” I have no idea what they are going to do.
Anne-Marie: Then the terrorists win.
David: [laughter]
Anne-Marie: You know [laughter]
David: [laughter] Well, in this case, it’s the end design users winning, and I’m all for that. I’m all for lower cost when it’s possible.
Anne-Marie: I agree.
David: You know, it is strange.
Anne-Marie: It’s not just Adobe, though. I mean it’s other software companies. It’s hardware manufacturers. I had a friend of mine who flew in from England last month so that he could buy a ThinkPad here in the U.S. It was cheaper for him to do that and then bring it back with him on British Airways than to order it in England.
David: Wow! Wow!
Anne-Marie: Yea.
David: Yea. Well that’s one of the things that people were talking about on the posts: is that they’re simply going to fly over to the States, buy Creative Suite and fly back with it. That too would be cheaper. So it’s intriguing. I think that we’re going to have to see. You know, we’ll track what happens here. We’ll have to see if Adobe does relent or change policies, or maybe they could announce for the first x number of months they will give special discounts for upgrades. You know they can do that kind of thing pretty easily. So, it is intriguing and it is unfortunate that Adobe has hiked their rates so dramatically overseas. On the other hand, like you said their U.S. rates are quite reasonable in most cases. I was especially blown away, and I think I mentioned this last time, I was blown away by this $199 upgrade no matter what version of InDesign you have or even if you have PageMaker you can upgrade for like $199 for CS3. And that’s kind of shockingly great. So…
Anne-Marie: Well, it’s great if you are an InDesign 2 or a CS1 user. It’s not that great if you’re a CS2 user.
David: I suppose that’s true. Well, you know $200 and what you’re getting is a very good upgrade with some great features. So I’m, I still think it’s worth it for that. On the other hand, what you’re not getting is the whole suite. And, most of these people, if you only have InDesign two or CS or whatever, you typically want to upgrade and get the entire suite. And that’s definitely a lot more money.
Anne-Marie: Well, I applaud that decision to make it the same price regardless of which version of the software you are using to upgrade. I love it when software companies do that. And I think that will motivate lots of people to jump right to CS3 which is what I want to see happen. But, I think they could at least throw in a couple of Starbuck’s coupons [laughter] or something for the people that have CS2 already, throw us a bone, a t-shirt or something like that.
David: [laughter] That’s true. That’s true.
Anne-Marie: All right. [laughter] That’s my rant of the week.
David: [laughter] All right. Well, there were a lot of other posts about CS3 on InDesignSECRETS.com. Steve Werner talking about the new impositions stuff in there, and Sandee Cohen was talking about stuff. Pariah Burke was talking about Find/Change object attributes. So definitely check out the blog. If you haven’t seen it in the past week, go up there and read because there’s lots of information on CS3 up there already.
Anne-Marie: And CS2 still.
David: Yea, absolutely! Yup. Yup. We’re going to keep doing CS2 stuff so people, because ultimately our job is to make you more productive. And that’s what we’re trying to do here.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: OK, so let’s talk about the display thing. This is a CS2 topic having to do with, well actually it’s CS1, CS2 and CS3. It has to do with display performance. In the preferences dialog box there is a panel called Display Performance that lets you adjust how the display performance features work. That is, the typical display, the high quality display, and the fast display. And what’s interesting about display performance is that you can, I think we’ve talked a little about this a little bit in previous podcasts, but what’s interesting about this is you can control any of those values. I mean you can change the fast display performance so that it is actually better than high quality. I mean they are all completely adjustable. They really should just be called one, two and three.
But what I like to do, and this one thing I wanted to throw out as a tip, is what I like to do is I like to open the Display Performance panel of the preferences dialog box and then change the vector graphics setting to high resolution. And that’s the one thing I do is I change vector graphics just for typical. The benefit here is that the Photoshop images, raster images, still come in with their proxy. They still look like they’re 72 dpi. But vector graphics will by default be high res. The reason that’s reasonable is it doesn’t take that much calculation for InDesign to make those high res. And the benefit is huge. Generally when you import a pdf file or an eps file or something, you want really nice looking graphics, vector graphics. The raster stuff, it doesn’t really matter so much, 72 dpi is fine. But the vector stuff…
Anne-Marie: Yea, the payoff is incredible for the small amount of processing power that it adds. It’s like everybody’s used to what the horrible low res EPS previews look like. They’re like from Nintendo 8 or something right [laughter]? They’re this big block of things and then you change it to high quality and it looks like you created it right there in InDesign. You’re looking at it in Illustrator. It’s just incredible.
David: So you just change it in one place. You just open the preferences dialog box, click on Display Performance, drag the vector graphics slider over to high res, and then click OK and you’re basically done. That changes it for this document. If you wanted it for future documents, of course, you would do that with no documents open. And as Anne-Marie said, the payoff is huge, the downside is small. There are times when you’ll import a pdf or something that you’ll just notice that it is taking too long to image on the screen, and for those instances you could set it down to a regular proxy. But in most cases, high res just works great.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: Yea, that’s my one little thing that I really want to throw out about CS2.
Anne-Marie: All right. So I want to talk about a very cool feature in CS3 that I would have given my eyeteeth for at the past InDesign conference. At the InDesign master class thing that we did in November, I was supposed to speak on, and I did speak on it, exporting InDesign documents to web pages.
David: You were very brave in talking about this topic.
Anne-Marie: Yes I was, because five minutes before the thing started and I still didn’t have a solution to tell people.
David: Well, there is a solution, right? There’s the whole package for GoLive thing.
Anne-Marie: Oh, forget about it. That does not work and I just emailed that to a client of mine today. She says, ‘Why doesn’t it work? Why wouldn’t it work? Can you just give me more details?’ And then, she quoted me out of the help file about how to package stuff from an InDesign file [laughter]. So I’m telling you, as a GoLive fanatic and an InDesign fanatic, I jumped on that and it just does not work. It doesn’t work because it’s just all tied up in proprietary InDesign and GoLive stuff. I suppose that if you package for GoLive and then you drag and drop these honking component things into an empty page and stuck that on the web, then it would work kind of cool. But very seldom have I, in fact I have never encountered a job like that. Usually I need to get content out of InDesign to put it into an existing web site, with an existing design, existing templates, existing CSS, and in that instance it just all falls apart, the package for GoLive. Because, you have to rip it apart, and then it crashes, and it gets all flaky on you.
David: Yea.
Anne-Marie: There are some solutions out of CS2, but I was so relieved and so thrilled to see that in CS3 we actually have an export to XHTML.
David: Hooray!
Anne-Marie: Yea! It says export to XHTML/Dreamweaver. I think that is because they want to remind people who are not web freaks, I guess, or people who don’t know anything, “What is XHTML, what is that for? Oh yea, this would be for Dreamweaver, that web package that came in my suite.” It’s actually not just for Dreamweaver, right? It’s for anything that understands XHTML. And XHTML is just another form of HTML, just a little bit more modern and a little bit more strict in how you write the code. So, not a big deal.
David: Yea. It was very great that they added this in. Note that you cannot find it in CS3 in the export dialog box. Normally, you would say I will just go to the export dialog box and get my HTML. It’s actually a separate thing. You have to go to the cross media submenu.
Anne-Marie: Yes, file cross media export. And then they have XML, XHTML, Dreamweaver and XHTML Digital editions, which is a topic for another podcast. But, the XHTML…
David: Let’s just throw out there quickly that the Digital Editions thing, just for the people that are curious. Digital Editions is a beta version, a beta technology that Adobe has at their labs. If you go to labs.adobe.com they have a lot of sort of prerelease technology that they are testing.
Digital Editions is basically their cool eBook reader thing. You can export right out of InDesign CS3 and open it in their eBook reader. That’s kind of a cool thing.
Anne-Marie: Right. The eBooks have a bunch of cool features that you can’t do in PDF, so that’s just something to consider.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: But back to XHTML, just briefly, in that after you choose the menu item, it asks, “What’s the name of the HTML item you want to save and where do you want to save it?” and then you get a dialog box, not too complicated, just three sections of it.
One of them is, “Do you want to export the selection, or the entire document?”
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: That’s nice, because you can export an individual HTML file for every article in your file which is easier than in previous versions where you had to choose a page or the document. Very often you just needed a few things on a page.
It can map bulletin numbers to unordered and ordered lists automatically.
David: That’s great. If you’re using the automatic bulletin numbering feature of course.
Anne-Marie: That’s true. Right, right. And with your images you can have them converted to GIFs and JPEGs, though you don’t get any previews. There’s no “Save for Web”, which I would love to see in InDesign.
David: Yeah, definitely. You’re really just trusting it to do this automatic conversion to GIF or JPEG which I’m not hot on personally, though. It’s nice that it does it, I suppose.
Anne-Marie: But what is cool is that you have a choice of saying, “Grab the entire image and leave it as it is” or “Grab the entire image that’s here and convert it to JPEG or GIF.” Or, you can say, “I want you to convert it as it looks.” So, as I’ve cropped it and scaled it.
And finally under the Advanced panel you have the choice of how to deal with the CSS, the code inside the HTML file that governs the formatting, the look of the content.
What I love is choosing no CSS. Because that means I get a completely clean export. I don’t have any weird tags in front of every single paragraph, like you get from Word, or from QuarkXPress or anything like that. Just simple little opening and closing paragraph tags. You do lose italics and bolds and things but even so that’s just a little bit of work. We’ll come up with a workaround later.
David: What I like is the ability to link to an external CSS file. Because, if I already have a CSS for my site, I just say, “Link to that” and, as long as the paragraph and character styles are named exactly the same in my InDesign document as in my CSS, they just map perfectly. It’s amazing!
Anne-Marie: There’s just one missing feature there.
David: Yes. [laughs] And that is, generally my CSS styles don’t have anywhere near the same names as my InDesign document, so…
Anne-Marie: Yes, it’s missing a little button: ‘Map CSS to Styles’ or something like that.
David: Yes, that would be cool. So right on export you could say: ‘In InDesign if I have a paragraph style called Body Text that should map to the P style or something.’
Anne-Marie: Right, exactly.
David: Yes, that would be cool.
Anne-Marie: Well, maybe we’ll come up with a solution for that, too. But that is a wonderful new feature in CS3 that I wanted everybody to know about.
David: Yes, right.
Shall we talk about the Obscure Feature of the Week? Eeek Eeek!
Anne-Marie: Eek! Eek! Definitely. I believe it’s First Baseline Offsets.
David: First Baseline Offset – technically just First Baseline, but then Offset gets in there. Where do we find that?
Anne-Marie: We find that in Object Text Frame Options.
David: Command-B or Control-B.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Go to Baseline Options, not General. It’s the second panel that’s not immediately visible.
David: Yes. Which makes it obscure. It’s not immediately visible, so it’s obscure; it’s hiding back there.
Anne-Marie: Yes, that’s true.
And I want to know, in a text frame, where should the first baseline of the first line of text be? How much should it be offset from the edge of the frame?
The default setting is – what is it? Is it a cent? I think it’s a cent.
David: I think a cent, yes.
Anne-Marie: What is cent, what does that mean?
David: Well, it’s basically like the ascender of whatever font you are in. And you know some fonts have a really tall ascender, some have a very small ascender. So the baseline will shift depending on what font you’re using and what size you’re using. Which, if you’re writing shopping lists to take to the store that’s fine, but if you are trying to do a really professional layout you often want to know exactly where that baseline is going to fall. Especially if you are trying to align your baselines across pages and so on.
So a cent, which I think is also the default in QuarkXpress, it’s just kind of silly. I’ve never understood why they default to that. What I prefer is either fixed, which is very cool. You can say I want it to be exactly two picas down from the top of the frame or something like that.
What I typically use is leading. Because leading, if you know you’ve got 12 on 15 text, you’re leading is 15 points, leading will automatically make sure that that baseline is exactly 50 points down from the top of the frame. Then, if you know that your frame is exactly on your leading grid then you know that all of your other text is just going to fall right on that leading grid, even if you’re not using a lined baseline grid.
Anne-Marie: Which is the way that you like to work, as we’ve learned.
David: [laughs] That’s right, I like to leave that turned off but I still want to use my baseline grid. I can do that by setting first baseline offset to ‘leading’.
Anne-Marie: That’s a feature that Quark never had.
David: That’s right! They never got the idea.
Anne-Marie: They just have cap and ascent and cap plus accent.
David: It’s a big step forward using leading.
Another example of why I might want to use leading or fixed:
Let’s say you’ve got a 3-column text frame. The first character you want to be a raised cap, not a drop cap but a raised cap. If you do that, then automatically your baselines don’t align, it just completely throws everything off, because that first character is going to have a much larger ascent because it’s huge, so it’s pushing your first column down.
If you want all three of your columns to align you just change your baseline options to first baseline offset to leading or fixed and boom, they just align perfectly. It just works. That’s one of those things that’s easier seen than talked about.
There are lots of reasons why you want to use very specific first baseline offsets instead of this willy-nilly ascent or cap height or something silly like that.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. What I use the ascent or the offset leading for is to fix the problem of rules above.
David: Oh, yes, yes.
Anne-Marie: Because if you leave it at ascent and you set a paragraph to have a rule above the rule is floating above the text frame. If you change the offset to leading then it snaps right to the top of this text frame.
David: Really?
Anne-Marie: It pushes it into the text frame.
David: Oh, how interesting. I will have to try that. That’s a great example.
Now in CS3 they actually added a rule above feature that will allow you to keep the rule above or rule below inside the frame automatically, but in CS2 I can see how that would be very, very valuable. I’ll have to play with that. Cool, cool!
Anne-Marie: All right, well ladies and germs, that’s it for Episode 46. Oh, no, that was Episode 47!
David: Oh yeah, 47! Hooh!
Anne-Marie: That’s it for episode for 47. We’d love to hear your feedback. Post a comment in the show notes in the blog at InDesignSecrets.com or email us at info @ InDesignSecrets.com.
We can’t always respond to emails right away but we do try to get back to you as soon as soon as possible.
David: As much as we can. Until we meet again, this is David Blatner.
Anne-Marie: And Anne-Marie, 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 047 page.