Podcast 049 Transcript

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast Podcast 049 page.

[music]

Anne-Marie Concepción: Welcome to InDesign Secrets, episode 49. I’m Anne-Marie Concepción and I’m here along with my co-host David Blatner.

David Blatner: Howdy-do!

Anne-Marie: Howdy-do, David. 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 before we start talking about what we’re going to cover in this session, I just want to throw out some last breaking news about the InDesign Conference in New York, New York: the Big Apple, the Big City.

Anne-Marie: The Big Cheese.

David: The Big Cheese, and what ever euphemism you want for New York. We’re very excited about the InDesign Conference. Anne-Marie and I will both be there and we’re going to be doing a live podcast from the InDesign Conference and Michael Murphy, who does the InDesigner, will also be speaking; he’s got several sessions.

Brian Wood from Evolve is going to be there. Brian is the guy who did the newest version of the InDesign Classroom in a Book, which is a really good upgrade. For the first time, I think I’m actually going to be able to start recommending Classroom in a Book after all these years.

Anne-Marie: [laughs]

David: So, I’m very pleased that that’s happening.

Anne-Marie: I’m excited because I’m doing a new session for the first time called “The Zen of InDesign Repair.” So, it’s all about fixing broken documents. And, hey, if anybody out there in listener land has any broken InDesign documents, documents that you can’t get rid of spot color, or something like that, please email them to me. I need working samples to show people.

David: That would be great. Good idea. Also, Morty Golding just added two new tutorials. There are a bunch of tutorials that go alongside the conference. Anne-Marie, you’re doing one on InCopy, Andy Cullen is doing a coupled book on the Creative Suite, and also, to help InDesign get up to speed quickly, we also just added a couple more. Chris Murphy is going to do a half day session on color management.

So, if you want to go really deep into color management, Chris is one of the co-authors on Real World Color Management and it’s going to go deep. He’s going to melt people’s brains in that session.

We’ve got somebody doing a session on XML, which is also going to be great. But the other new session that we just added will be Morty Golding doing a follow-up on his very successful Illustrator: Fall in Love with Illustrator All Over Again session. And that’s going to be an all-day session, which is Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Illustrator, and I’m very pleased.

He did that last week at the Pixel and Vector conferences in Chicago, and it was extremely successful; people were just raving about it, so he’s decided he’s going to do that again in New York. So that’s going to be great, we hope we can see you all at the New York show. For those who can’t make it to New York, at least you’ll be hearing something from the show, as long as we get all of our recording gear set up.

Anne-Marie: We’ll put a link to the conference in our show notes and include that $100 discount off of the attendance fee.

David: Oh, yeah, that’s great. A hundred bucks off.

Anne-Marie: And you know, there is another little bit of news that I want to get out there, though we wrote it on the blog so I thought we should mention it on the podcast that, David, your InDesign CS3 Essentials series of video tutorials is live and running at Lynda.com.

David: Oh, thank you. Thank you for pointing that out. It’s not Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About InDesign, but it’s the essentials. It’s sort of what you need to know about InDesign if you’re a beginner InDesign user.

I had a great time doing those videos and it’s nice that they’re up there. If you’re not a Lynda.com subscriber, you can still see some of them free. In fact, you could see all of them free if you wanted to because we have a special code and we’ll put that in the show notes. If you type that code in, you can get a full week subscription to InDesign free at Lynda.com.

Anne-Marie: Right, to any of the videos. So you can watch all of them within a week. There you go, you can get it free. But, of course, we don’t want you to do that; we want you to watch all of the great videos. They have about, I think, 200,000? [laughs] They have a ton of videos on lots of different kinds of programs.

David: It’s like 19,000 movies. Everything from Excel to Windows, to InDesign, to Acrobat. Pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about anything.

Anne-Marie: How many hours is your video?

David: It’s like ten hours.

Anne-Marie: Wow.

David: It’s a little under ten hours to get you up to speed quickly with InDesign.

Anne-Marie: OK, cool.

David: OK, and then, Anne-Marie, your InCopy title will be up there soon. We’re still waiting for the final note that it’s going to be live. But Anne-Marie did a whole session on InCopy and that will be on Lynda.com pretty soon.

Anne-Marie: It’s just going to be called “InDesign/InCopy CS3 Workflow Essentials.”

David: There you go.

Anne-Marie: Is that a mouthful, or what?

David: It is. So, that’s great. OK, more stuff on the show today. We’re going to talk a little bit about some tips with working with threaded frames. Both threading and unthreading, or linking frames, whatever you want to talk about. How to get text to flow from one frame to the other. We’ll be talking a little bit about that.

Also, we’re going to cover the hot button post of the week, which is the - eek ekk - over-print preview in Acrobat 8. We’ll talk about that in a little bit. And also the Obscure Feature of the Week geek eek…

Anne-Marie: Eek eek eek, sorry.

David: [laughs] Come on, back up, back up there.

Anne-Marie: OK, try again.

David: Obscure feature of the week… [laughs] There you go. Use inline input for non-latin text.

Anne-Marie: Now that’s an obscure one.

David: It is obscure.

Anne-Marie: I love that one. And we also have a Quizzler today.

David: Oh yeah, the Quizzler too.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. So we’ll talk about that before we get to the feature.

David: It’s a good one. It’s a hard one.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. OK, so lets’ start out with talking about threaded frames, AKA linked frames. You can’t say linked because Quark has a patent on that name. So they’re threaded frames, that when you have two frames and they are threaded together by clicking on the out part of one and clicking anywhere in the second text frame. We’re just creating a new text frame with the loaded text cursor.

So that, as you edit text in one story, it pushes through to all the other frames.

David: Right. They’re flowing together or threading together.

Anne-Marie: Now that we have that concept down. So what’s the big deal… what are some cool things that you can do with threaded frames?

David: Well, a couple of things. First of all, I just want to talk about how you un-thread them. There are a lot of people that figure out how to thread and then they never get around to learning how to un-thread, how to break that link.

There are two basic methods on breaking a link. One is that you can simply double click on one of the ports. So if you have a port, click on the out port, the one in the lower right corner. Go click on it and it breaks the link at that point.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: Double click on the in port and it breaks the link to there. So that’s one way that you can break a link. Now, what if you want to break a link and keep the text in the separate frames? That’s the tricky one, that’s the one that really throws people. Because if you just don’t click on the port, it breaks the link and all the story stays in the first one.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. All the text gets sucked up there.

David: That’s right. But what if you want to break a link and keep the text in the particular story? That’s where you need a script or a plug-in. There’s a free script that comes with InDesign called Split Stories and, as we’ve talked about in previous podcasts, these free scripts that come with InDesign don’t get installed automatically in CS2.

Anne-Marie: They do in CS3.

David: But they do in CS3, that’s right. But in CS2, you can find them on the goodies disk, basically. You know, they’re on the install disk or you can download them from Adobe’s scripting website. You can just download them and install them.

Anne-Marie: We’ll put a link to there in the show notes.

David: Yeah, and we’ll also put a link to the page that shows how to install scripts.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: That would be good too.

Anne-Marie: Very simple to do.

David: Yeah. Very, very simple. So, there’s a script, Split Stories, and it basically takes your whole story, however many frames your text links thread through, and it splits it up into individual frames. Each frame gets its own story in it. So that’s a very clever one.

Anne-Marie: Yes. Instantly into that. I know lots of clients who thought that project would be a nightmare because they have whole series’ of books that are 200 pages long. And they need to split up every single page into a standalone frame. And they thought that they would just have to hire somebody to do it for three months. But I said, “Wait, look at this script. You just double-click it once and bam, everything is perfect!”

I mean, all the text stays exactly where it is, it’s very well-done.

David: I have a feeling that Ollie Kvern wrote that one. He is my co-author on Real World InDesign. And I have a feeling that Oli wrote that and then included on the scripting samples, because that’s exactly what we need to do with the Real World InDesign.

Anne-Marie: Really?

David: We have lots and lots of threaded… all the figures, all the figure number and captions were one long thread and it was just driving us insane, so we had to break it down into each one being its own frame.

Anne-Marie: And weren’t you glad that you had that script?

David: Oh, it was incredible!

Anne-Marie: It would have been a nightmare.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: How wonderful it must be to have a co-author who is like a scripting genius.

David: [laughs]

Anne-Marie: You know?

David: I will not lie, it is a wonderful thing indeed.

Anne-Marie: It’s like being married to a car mechanic or a gourmet chef.

David: [laughter] Exactly. It is a great thing. Olav Kvern is a wonderful co-author in many ways so that is very helpful. There is another way to do it…

Anne-Marie: What about… Go ahead.

David: There is a plug-in from AExtra. AExtra is also the people who did our InDesign Secrets tip of the day plug-in which is still, unfortunately not upgraded to CS3. I need to get onto that quickly. But the AExtra folks did a plug-in called Clever Text Link. Clever Text Link sounds like it’s for linking or threading frames together but it’s actually all about unthreading. It’s actually about breaking apart links and it’s very clever and that’s why they call is Clever Text Link.

Anne-Marie: Why, is it more clever than the split story one?

David: It is. It will do the basic split story thing but it will also do other kinds of splitting for example you could put your text cursor right in the middle of a frame, just as an example… Put it in the middle of a frame and say I want it to split right here and it will split it automatically for you.

Anne-Marie: Well that’s pretty cool.

David: It’s pretty cool. It’s a big step beyond what the script will do. It also has a nice little palette. Some people like floating palettes. So it’s a nice little UI.

Anne-Marie: Is it expensive?

David: No, no. It’s, I don’t know $50, $40.

Anne-Marie: I can change, my good man, I can change.

David: That’s a cool thing to know about as well.

Anne-Marie: The other thing I thought we should mention is how to go backwards. What happens if you have a whole bunch of unthreaded frames and you need them to be threaded.

David: Good point.

Anne-Marie: For example, you want to export them all as a single story. That’s actually pretty simple to do but the one thing is that as soon as you thread two frames together, the thread from the second frame gets sucked into the text of the first frame of course. You might end up deleting a paragraph because the very first word of the second frame becomes the last word of the last paragraph of the first frame.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: So you don’t want that. And then your styles get all messed up. So if you’re going to thread unthreaded frames, make sure that you have an empty character turn at the bottom of each frame.

David: Yeah. It’s a really important one and it’s one of those things that I wish that there were preferences to do automatically because if you have to thread a whole bunch of frames together, let’s say you’ve got 50 frames and you want to thread them al together into one story, it’s a hassle. You basically have to go through and add a character turn at the end of every frame before you thread it or else everything is going to merge together into a single paragraph which is annoying.

Anne-Marie: After you have added you character turn at the end of every story then you just use your selection tool to click in the empty out port of the first frame. Then you’ll see a loaded text cursor even though there’s no text loaded in there and click anywhere inside the second frame and then those two are threaded and continue on your merry way. Do the same thing for the second and third and so on.

David: Yeah. So a few little things about threading and unthreading frames of texts. So that’s good important information to know about. Let’s talk a little bit about CS3 for a minute. That stuff is both CS2 and CS3 or even CS1 but here’s a CS3 thing that came up.

Rufus Deuchler posted something which was on the blog about the overprint preview issue in Acrobat 8.

Anne-Marie: Yeah that’s different.

David: They changed something in CS3 and it’s something we just want to throw out there for those of you that aren’t following the blog closely. In earlier versions of InDesign, there were times that you would have, let’s say, a drop shadow behind some text. And then you’d print and the background when you printed would come out just white, just around the drop shadow. And it was crazy making. What’s going on? It would especially happen when you were printing on top of a spot color. Let’s say you’ve got a spot color background and then text on top of the drop shadow and it would not print properly. And the real problem there typically was that this would happen when you opened it in Acrobat and you did not have the overprint preview turned on and you would see that white box.

Well in CS3 and Acrobat 8 they’ve changed it. They’ve changed the way InDesign CS3 seems to do have done that and Rufus discovered this and posted this so check out his post but quickly, the change seems to be that… It’s a little unclear what’s going on in my mind but.

Anne-Marie: Something about how white is no longer overprinting or something like that. You’re going to see a different result if the overprint is set incorrectly in Acrobat 8 than you did with InDesign CS3 than you did in InDesign CS2. Or is it differently in Acrobat than it is in InDesign?

David: I think they changed it with InDesign and the difference is how that drop shadow thing is faked, how they are faking the drop shadow effect. I say faked but faking really is how all the transparency things are done. It’s faked with overprinting. If overview print preview is not turned on with Acrobat then you can’t see the effect.

With CS2, what you get was that big white box which was incredibly annoying. In CS3 what you get is just the text with no drop shadow. The drop shadow simply disappears because it has to do with what’s overprinting what and the spot color ends up overprinting the drop shadow. You can’t see it so you have to still turn over print preview on Acrobat. You don’t have that option. But the difference is, if it’s not turned on Acrobat, it will just look like text with no drop shadow. You won’t get that big ugly white box.

Anne-Marie: So you won’t freak out your clients as much as before. However, it’s a lot easier to miss that problem…

David: I guess that’s true.

Anne-Marie: Because you don’t see the big boxes. You just see text that looks normal so you don’t think there’s a problem when actually the text is supposed to have the drop shadow.

So that CS3 topic is also our button post of the week because we’ve got a lot of people talking about this. I think almost 30 comments on it. So we’ll put a link to this post in our show notes and you can see the screen shots of what Rufus is talking about and the implications for all InDesign users who are using drop shadows which I think is 110%.

David: Exactly. Everybody uses drop shadows! I want to throw one other thing that they’ve changed in CS3 which is kind of wacky. It has to do with the transparency flattening when you’ve got a transparency effect over a small text, let’s say a 12 point text.

So you’ve got some 12 point text, you’ve got some kind of transparency effect maybe like a drop shadow or feathering that goes on top of the text. I know a lot people say you should always put your text on top of your transparency effects but every now and again you need for the transparency effect to be on top of the text. Well in CS2 and earlier there were some issues there especially on briscripts and you had all kinds of problems on briscripts.

And they seem to have changed the algorithms in CS3 to do some really clever stuff. And I personally have not tested this yet but I hear that they’ve done some really clever stuff so you should not have problems with this on a briscript anymore. You shouldn’t have to do any of the old workarounds of setting your line work up or setting your CT layer up to a thousand DPI or 1,500 DPI.

It should just work properly and I’m quite curious to see if anyone responds here if you have a briscript and you’ve go CS3 try it out and see if you see any difference. What I’ve heard from others is that it’s really quite good.

Anne-Marie: Excellent. So does that only apply to briscripts or does that apply to any rip that uses CT line work?

David: Any CTLW rip but I think that it basically works on any rip. It’s just that other rips you didn’t notice the problem as much in previous versions. Now, on any rip, they’re basically doing the flattening differently. It’s pretty tweaky what they’re doing but it sounds great.

Anne-Marie: But it’s better.

David: It sounds better. It should be wonderful. You only get it on really small chunks like small text or small objects, things like that. If you put it on top of a large effect or a large piece of text, you don’t see the difference because it worked just fine in previous versions too.

Just something to throw out there. They continue to make these incremental improvements in CS3 and the transparency flattener in the PDF output and all of those things. Each version they seem to make it a little bit better and that’s pretty cool.

Anne-Marie: Yes, I would love that. I would love just to be able to not have to worry about transparency. We should also just mention that other thread that’s going on in our blog. I think we’ll put a link to it in the show notes about maybe we won’t have to worry about transparency soon if our printers buy the PDF rip.

David: Yes. Adobe released last year the PDF Print Engine and they’re starting to show up in RIPs I believe.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: And that’s a good thing.

Anne-Marie: Agfa announced theirs is coming out in June–the Agfa Apogee is going to include it.

David: Oh, good, good. And there’s also clone RIPs. You know, Harlequin has had this for awhile. And clone RIP manufacturers have had this ability to actually send PDFs with transparency directly to the RIP without transparency flattening.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: So it’s a very cool way to do it. Personally, I’d rather use an Adobe RIP, but that’s just my bias. So, I’m excited about the PDF Print Engine from Adobe. The ability to not have to worry about transparency flattening is very cool. And one of the ways that you send that is, with what Steve Werner was talking about on the blog, the PDF/X4 file format, which is basically much like PDF/X1A or X3, but you don’t have to flatten them.

Anne-Marie: Right, it supports transparencies, which is like the Valhalla, I think, at this point.

David: In many ways it is. I mean, it certainly would be an awesome thing for everybody I think. But, it’s not today, it’s probably for tomorrow, but it’s pretty cool–something to think about.

Anne-Marie: I would say… You know what I would love to do? Have a list of printers who have that PDF Print Engine. Wouldn’t that be cool?

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: Because the question is where are these people? And where can I send them my files?

David: Let’s ask Dov Isaacs. Dov would know. Dov knows everything.

Anne-Marie: Or maybe there’s a printer in the audience who’s listening.

David: Let us know.

Anne-Marie: And they’re getting one in September or something like that. Let us know.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: We’ll talk about it.

David: It’s info @ InDesignSecrets.com.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: OK.

Anne-Marie: All right, let’s do the Quizzler.

David: Oh, yeah, yeah, Quizzler.

Anne-Marie: Let’s do the Quizzler. We have a good one for you today.

David: Oh, it’s so hard.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, it’s a great one, but it’s fun, all right? It’s not real technical, all right? But it’s fun. It will keep you hunting for something in InDesign for awhile. And it works with both CS2 and CS3.

David: Yup.

Anne-Marie: OK. And the Quizzler question is: How, in InDesgin, can you find your operating system’s Color Picker? So like on the Macintosh there is a Macintosh OS Color Picker that comes up that the dialog box includes all the different crayons. I’m sure people who use Macs are like, “Oh, yeah. I remember seeing that once.”

And on Windows there’s also Windows Color Picker. So it has nothing to do with InDesign, it just has to do with the OS itself. There is a way to invoke, to see that Color Picker, and to use colors from it in InDesign. How do you do that?

David: Yeah, how do you do that? So let us know. Email us at info @ InDesignSecrets.com. Don’t post it on the show notes on the blog. Just email us info @ InDesignSecrets.com. And we will pick from among those winners, we’ll pick a random winner to win a copy of the InDesign Secret’s Keyboard Shortcut poster.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: For those of you who haven’t heard about that before, it’s a single poster–all the Mac keyboard shortcuts on one side and Windows on the other side. And it’s getting rave reviews from its users. We’ve been very pleased about the response we’ve gotten from that. And so we’ll be mailing those out.

If you have not gotten one of those yet, you could also buy one if you don’t win the Quizzler. You could always buy one at InDesignSecrets.com. Just click on the link to buy the poster.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: And you can get one of those shipped out to you wherever you happen to be on the planet. We will send it to you.

Anne-Marie: That’s correct. And so, is there a deadline for this?

David: Oh, we need a deadline.

Anne-Marie: We didn’t talk about that.

David: Yeah, deadline. How about the, oh I don’t know, how about the 15th? Middle of the week. Middle of the month I mean.

Anne-Marie: OK.

David: May 15th at midnight Pacific Time.

Anne-Marie: [laughs] All right. So, send in… We will close the contest after that time, and then we will randomly choose from any of the correct answers. And we’ll announce the winner in the next podcast.

David: That’s right. Excellent, most excellent. OK. Now, the Obscure Feature of the Week, eek, eek, eek.

Anne-Marie: This is a good one.

David: Use Inline Input for Non-Latin Text. That’s the entire… That’s what the feature is actually called. Use Inline Input for Non-Latin Text. What is that about?

Anne-Marie: And I’m the one that found that one.

David: You did. You did.

Anne-Marie: Yes.

David: So, it’s not difficult to find if you just look in the Preferences dialog box, and you click on the Advanced Type pane. Click on Advanced Type, in Preferences, you’ll see and it says Input Method Options - Use Inline Input for Non-Latin Text. So you can turn that on and off all day, and you…

Anne-Marie: It’s off by default.

David: Yeah, it’s of by default and you can turn it on and off, and you probably will never see any difference whatsoever, because it only has to do with non-Latin text. So, what’s an example of…

Anne-Marie: OK, I thought that it should be on because I never write in Latin.

David: Oh, good point. Good point.

Anne-Marie: Yes.

David: So if you’re doing like the Fill with Placeholder Text, it would be inline because that’s Latin. But if you turn it off… No, it has nothing to do with the Latin language.

Anne-Marie: No, it has to do with the letters and how they appear and how you read from left to right. They’re the letters A through Z, in other words. Anything that’s not A through Z is non-Latin. Is that correct?

David: English, Spanish, French, German - these are all Latin texts, right? Japanese, Chinese, Korean - those are non-Latin texts. Arabic, Hebrew - non-Latin texts. So this feature has to do with what do you do when you want to input some non-Latin text - Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, whatever - into your InDesign document. You can do this with the English version of InDesign, but you have to use an input method. The input method changes depending on which operating system you’re on.

For example, on the Macintosh, you can go to System Preferences, click on International, click on the input method button, and you have a bunch of options for input methods. If you turn on the Japanese input method, then InDesign and the other apps actually let you type in Japanese inside InDesign. So that’s very clever.

But the question is, is it going to be inline or not? Inline means where the text cursor is. When this preference is turned off and you start typing in Japanese, by default the OS actually opens up a new little window, a little floating pallet, for you to type in, and you type in that little pallet, you type your sentence in Nihongo, and then you hit Enter, and it then places it into the text flow. Whereas if you have that preference turned on, then when you’re typing your Japanese, it actually shows up there in the text frame itself.

Anne-Marie: Right, as you type. You don’t have a second little window appearing.

David: That’s right. It’s whether you want that second little window or not, and some people like that, and some people don’t.

Anne-Marie: I think this is the coolest thing ever. I was talking with David when we were working with this before the podcast, that I have seen clients do this, but because I never needed to set something up in a foreign language, then I could never figure out how to do this. My problem is that I need to go watch Diane Burns do one of her seminars at the InDesign Conference.

David: That’s right. In fact, next month she’ll be doing her multi-lingual publishing session at the InDesign Conference. She’ll go into great detail here about how to do multi-lingual publishing in InDesign.

I mentioned Hebrew and Arabic and stuff - you should not be fooled into believing that this will let you type right to left, for example. You can’t type right to left, or up to down. This doesn’t control that. You still have to type left to right in the English or the international version of InDesign. There is a Middle Eastern version of InDesign which will let you do right to left text entry, but not here. But this is useful if you only have maybe a couple characters that you want to type. For example, I know a bunch of people who have to do Hebrew text, and they simply type the word backward. You just type it last character and then to the first character. Even though you’re going left to right, the Hebrew word shows up properly. Does that make sense?

Anne-Marie: Yeah, it does. I guess what always just astounds me is how you actually type something in English, right? Because you only have the A through Z keyboard in front of you. We were practicing with the example of how do you write “Japan” in Japanese. So you said you type N-I-H-O-N, yes?

David: Nihon, uh-huh.

Anne-Marie: Nihon, but as long as your input method is set to one of the Japanese languages, then as soon as you press Space or Enter, they will transform themselves into the calligraphy of Japanese.

David: Right, into Kanji. It actually changes from, let’s say, the Hiragana, changes into the Kanji characters for the word “Japan” - Nihon - in Japanese. Of course, you also have to apply a Japanese font to the text, or else you’ll just get the pink rectangles of doom.

Anne-Marie: all right. OK, well, I think that’s it. Are we done?

David: We’re done.

Anne-Marie: We’re done for episode 49. Everybody, we would 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. That’s also the address where you would send your Quizzler responses, or if you’re a printer who’s going to be adopting the PDF print engine, or if you have any wonkie InDesign documents that I can use for samples during my seminar.

David: There you go.

Anne-Marie: Send it all to there, OK? We can’t always respond to everybody’s emails immediately, but we try to get back to you as soon as possible.

David: Yes indeed, we do. But until we meet again, this is David Blatner and…

Anne-Marie: Anne-Marie Concepción 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 Podcast 049 page.