Podcast 051 Transcript

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast Podcast 051 page.

[music]

Anne-Marie Concepción: Welcome to InDesign Secrets episode 51. I’m Anne-Marie Concepción and I am here along with my co-host David Blatner.

David Blatner: Hello, hello!

Anne-Marie: Hello, David.

David: Hello.

Anne-Marie: We are the independent resource for all things InDesign… ign… ign…ign.

David: [laughs]

Anne-Marie: Well… not we, personally, but this podcast and its companion blog at InDesignSecrets.com. Is…

David: That’s right!

Anne-Marie: Our…

David: We’ve got… [laughs]

Anne-Marie: Something…

David: We’ve got a lot to cover in this episode.

Anne-Marie: The resource…

David: Let’s get right… [laughs] You can be the resource; I’ll be the independent.

Anne-Marie: All right. OK.

David: OK, let’s get right to the table of contents today. We’ve got a couple of announcements. We’re going to be covering some stuff about hyperlinks in InDesign - we’ve gotten a lot of emails recently about hyperlinks, so we better talk about that. And also a new CS3 feature that we want to let you know about called Text Variables–very, very cool whether you have CS2 or CS3, you must know about variables.

Also the “Hot Button Post of the Week” is… [laughs] is Anne-Marie’s rant about the one-button mouse users. You have to learn about using a two-button mouse. So we’re going to be talking about the whole one-button versus two-button mouse thing.

Then, the “Obscure Feature of the Week” –

Anne-Marie and David together: Eek… eek… eek.

David: … is File Info.

Anne-Marie: Yes!

David: It’s a command of the File Menu. We’re going to talk about File Info. It’s obscure, but very powerful.

Anne-Marie: Yes, it is. Thank you, David. All right… so for the announcements! First of all, my InCopy CS3 InDesign CS3 Integration - III!

David: [laughs]

Anne-Marie: I’m going to call it that for short for now.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: It’s a video tutorial series at lynda.com, is live and on the air. Yay! I’m so happy it’s up there!

David: Yay! Congratulations! Mazeltov! It’s wonderful.

Anne-Marie: Yes! Thank you, thank you. The CD should be coming out soon, but there is eight hours of over 80 videos.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: You know, the InCopy CS2 one was five hours.

David: Wow!

Anne-Marie: But this one covers a lot of the InDesign stuff. There are lots and lots of videos just for the InDesign user who is participating in the workflow. It’s, I think, a little bit beyond the essentials, so it’s funny it’s so long.

David: Yeah. I mean, it’s all very good and well to know about just InDesign or just InCopy, but you’re really talking about the integration of the two, how they work together in the workflow.

Anne-Marie: That’s right.

David: That’s what’s so cool about it. It’s very good. And, people, anyone interested in InCopy should definitely check that out.

Anne-Marie: Hm-mmm.

David: And of course, if you don’t have a subscription to lynda.com you can go checkout some sample movies at the site there. We’ll put a link in the show notes. But there’s also the free one-week subscription to lynda.com.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: Use our link, go to lynda.com, sign up for a one-week subscription - totally free, no hassles, no strings attached and check it out.

Anne-Marie: I recommend people do that because the free ones that are available for mine are the, in my opinion, somewhat boring introductory ones. For all the videos, it’s always the introductory ones that are free.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: But when you really get into the meat of it, like Track Changes, or how to work with the Remote Workflow or Assignments, that’s later on and you need to have a subscription - either free or the trial subscription to see those.

David: Right, right.

Anne-Marie: So, check that out. And so, between this title, David, and your InDesign CS3 Essentials title, I believe we have the field covered.

David: I think so! InDesign, plus InCopy… everything you ever possibly wanted to know about it. So there you go.

Anne-Marie: There you go. And the other announcement! Lots of people have been emailing us about this, “When is the InDesign keyboard shortcut poster coming out?” Assuming we’re going to be doing one.

David: [laughs]

Anne-Marie: And of course, yes we did it. It took us three months to figure out, “What should be the background color?”

[laughing]

David: Yeah, exactly! But after we figured that out, then it was easy.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. And they’re at the printers?

David: Actually, I think they just came off press, so we should be able to offer them very soon - within the next week or two, as soon as they get shipped. So that will be great.

Anne-Marie: So keep an eye out on our site. We’ll put an announcement up in the blog on the home page when it’s up. And then I think we’re also going to be selling them face-to-face at the InDesign Conference in New York City in a week and a half.

David: Yeah, we’ll definitely have a stack of them there that you can buy one at the conference if you’re going to be there. Come on down to the…

Anne-Marie: If you want, we can autograph them–five bucks each.

David: Oh! Ow… ow…

Anne-Marie: That’s what I charge; I don’t know what you charge.

David: [laughs]

Anne-Marie: I have to give a buck, twenty-five of that to my agent.

David: Oh, OK. Everyone has to get their cut, I guess.

Anne-Marie: Uh-huh! [laughs]

David: So come on down to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. We’re going to be doing the InDesign Conference. It’ll be lots of fun.

Anne-Marie: [laughs] It cracks me up that they’re going to have all these InDesign geeks at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

David: I know. It’s very funny. It’s very cute.

Anne-Marie: Yes, I know. Well, I hear that as long as we all dress in black, we’ll fit in.

David: Yeah that’s what Scott told us. Scott Citron is also going to be there, he is doing session. His office is down the-

Anne-Marie: He’s a native New Yorker. And Sandee, a native New Yorker.

David: Exactly, Sandee Cohen also will be there, a native New Yorker. Lots of us non-New Yorkers will also be there.

Anne-Marie: Gee, Ma! Look at the big city! Hey, Pa!

David: [laughs] I’ve never seen a building that big before!

Anne-Marie: [laughs] Look at all these people!

[laughter]

David: It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be really good.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: I’m looking forward to it. OK, so we should talk about hyperlinks.

Anne-Marie: Hm-hmm.

David: Hyperlinks! I’ve been surprised. For some weird reason, I’ve got a dozen emails or something from people who are saying, “What about hyperlinks? How do I do hyperlinks?”

Or, alternately they’re describing something and they can’t figure out what’ going on and I quickly realize that what they’re talking about it hyperlinks. So, they don’t even realize they’re talking about hyperlinks. Anne-Marie and I figured, “Something’s in the air, we’d better focus on hyperlinks here.”

Anne-Marie: People are getting hyper about hyperlinks.

David: I think so. First of all, what is a hyperlink and how does it work in InDesign? The quick version is a hyperlink typically doesn’t work in InDesign at all.

Anne-Marie: [laughs]

David: It works in the PDF, after you get a PDF out of InDesign. That’s when the hyperlink becomes live.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: Or HTML, if you want to get HTML in CS3 out. That’ll work, won’t it? I think so.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, that’s true.

David: But it’s not really something you’re typically using within InDesign itself, but you’re specifying them in InDesign. In order to do that, you have to use the Hyperlinks Palette, which is under the interactive submenus.

So you go to the Window menu, choose Interactive and then you can choose Hyperlinks. The Hyperlinks Palette, or Hyperlinks Panel in InDesign CS3, lists all the different hyperlinks in your document. That’s one thing you should know about.

Now, what is it that people keep encountering that they don’t know that they’re encountering hyperlinks? It’s this black box.

There’s this black box around text. So if you’re ever looking at your InDesign Document or a PDF that’s come out of InDesign, and you see a black box around some text–maybe one word, maybe a sentence–that black box is usually a hyperlink.

Hyperlinks can be visible or invisible and often times, by default, they are visible hyperlinks. The visible hyperlink means, “Put a black box around it to show that it’s a hyperlink, ” which is a really dorky way of making a hyperlink, but there you go.

Anne-Marie: [laughs]

David: So if you ever see some black box sitting around some text, there’s probably a hyperlink there. Then all you have to do is open up that Hyperlinks Palette, look for that hyperlink - just put the text cursor on that, you know, select the text that has a black box around it, and look in the Hyperlinks Panel. The hyperlink will be highlighted and you can just delete it if you didn’t want it to be a hyperlink. You can just delete it out of the Hyperlinks Palette.

Anne-Marie: Right. It doesn’t delete the text or anything, it just deletes its hyperlinkedness.

David: Right, right. Or, if you want it to be a hyperlink, but you don’t want that black box around it, again, select the text that has the hyperlink. Go to the Hyperlinks Palette and then double-click on the hyperlink that’s highlighted and it will give you an option to make it visible or invisible.

What you want is an invisible hyperlink. Do that, click OK and the black box goes away.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. So, one guy wrote in and said that he thought he was creating hyperlinks. He would select some text, then he would right-click or Control-click… [laughs]…with a one-button mouse…

David: [laughs] Yeah, we’ll get to that later!

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: And I’m looking for the command right now, but he said something about “make a hyperlink” or he was choosing “make a hyperlink” from the right menu, but I’m not seeing it, actually, here.

David: Yeah, I don’t know what he’d be seeing.

Anne-Marie: Actually, that wasn’t what was happening. He was actually creating hyperlink destinations.

David: Oh… yeah, yeah.

Anne-Marie: He said that when he would export it, it would work.

David: Yep.

Anne-Marie: And, so, why not? What was the problem? That is another very confusing issue. When you create a hyperlink it wants to know, “Where is this link going to?” That’s the hyperlink destination.

So if it’s a URL, you have to choose “Type of Hyperlink.” And if you choose URL then you can enter the URL. That’s the destination.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: If you want to choose a different page in the InDesign document, then you have to choose under type “Page” and you already have to have the destination created before you can link to it. It’s a two-step process.

David: Well, you don’t have to. This is one of the most confusing things about how Adobe implemented hyperlinks in InDesign. First of all, I just need to say the hyperlinks user interface…it doesn’t entirely suck… but it’s close to it. It’s really problematic and very, very confusing.

One of the most confusing things about the way that Adobe implemented hyperlinks is this concept of a destination. Often times you’ll find people - they’ll select some text or they’ll select an object. They’ll go to the Hyperlinks Panel; they’ll go to the fly-out menu in the Hyperlinks Panel and it says, “New Hyperlink Destination.”

And it looks like you need to create one of these destinations, and you don’t. You don’t need to. This is what I try and teach people in that it’s rare that you should use named hyperlink destinations. The only time you really need to do a named hyperlink destination is if you’re going to be linking to the same thing a whole bunch of times in your document.

Let’s say you are going to link to InDesign Secrets in your PDF and you’re going to be linking to that 30 times in different places in your document. Well, in that case, then yes you’d create a new hyperlink destination.

And you’d say it’s going to be, let’s say, a URL destination. And you’d actually give it a name. OK? Once you name that destination, then you can target that name multiple times in your document.

But in most cases when I see people doing hyperlinks, they’re not linking to the same place multiple times from various places in their document. They’re just making a link someplace.

Anne-Marie: You’re absolutely right.

David: So in that case, forget the whole destination thing entirely. Instead select the text, or select the object. Click on the “New Hyperlink” button in the Hyperlinks Panel, and the first thing that you should do is make sure that the “Name” pop-up menu is set to “Unnamed.”

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: OK? That’s really, really important and I wish that, by default, it would always set to “Unnamed” but it doesn’t. There’s a stupid bug in there or some stupid implementation there. But you typically want to change it to “Unnamed” before you set up your URL or anchor or whatever. So, that’s the key.

Anne-Marie: You’re right! You know, I just learned something. I thought that you had to set up a destination if you wanted to go to a different page. But as you’re talking, I’m trying it and you’re absolutely right.

Because if you choose type “Page” then it has a page field that knows how many pages are in your document. You can just say which page you’re supposed to go to.

David: Mm-hmm!

Anne-Marie: Yeah, so I thought you had to save that page as a destination but you don’t.

David: It looks like you need to, but you really don’t.

Anne-Marie: Interesting.

David: If you use “Unnamed” then it’s totally flexible. This is a lot like using unnamed colors. You know where usually we say, “Well, you should create a color swatch first. Don’t use unnamed colors…”

This is the same thing, but it’s just the opposite. I recommend people use unnamed hyperlinks, which are just used in the local instance, unless you really are going to be using that hyperlink in multiple places like you would use a color swatch in multiple places. So, that’s the key there.

Anne-Marie: Interesting.

David: When you’re doing that, make sure you set the type from visible rectangle to invisible. You don’t want a visible rectangle because then you’re going to get that really dumb black line around the text.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. And then, when you want to have these work in the PDF when you choose “Export PDF” you have to remember to turn on “Include Hyperlinks” at the bottom of the General Options.

David: Yes!

Anne-Marie: It’s not turned on by default. So, you turn on “Include Hyperlinks” and then it should work.

David: Yeah, that’s one of the number one mistakes people make when they’re doing hyperlinks. You know, they do all these hyperlinks in InDesign, they look at the PDF and none of it works because they’ve forgotten to turn on that checkbox. So, yeah… very important that you do that.

Anne-Marie: Did you that hyperlinks do work inside InDesign?

David: Oh, for page hyperlinks, or for any hyperlink?

Anne-Marie: For page hyperlinks and URL hyperlinks.

David: Really? Wow! OK!

Anne-Marie: You select the hyperlink in the Hyperlinks Panel, or Palette, and at the bottom there is a left arrow and a right arrow…

David: Oh! Of course!

Anne-Marie: The one on the right is “Go to Hyperlink Destination.”

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: And if it’s a URL and you click the “Go to Hyperlink Destination” button, it opens up the URL in your default browser.

David: Very interesting. Good point.

Anne-Marie: And if it’s a page hyperlink, it jumps to the page.

David: So you could use it for navigation within your InDesign document if you wanted to.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, you could of you wanted to.

David: Interesting! Well that’s good to know. That could be helpful. I usually use the Bookmarks Palette for that.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: But that’s good to know that you could do it in hyperlinks as well. So, there you go.

Hey, one other thing about hyperlinks that somebody wrote in about and they were asking about - they had a character style called hyperlinks and they were trying to figure out where this character style came from. Whenever they applied it to some text, it made it blue and underlined, like, “Ooh, this is kind of cool!” They seemed to like that sort of thing.

But then they upgraded to CS3 and it went away. What’s the deal?

Well the deal is that the hyperlink thing is just a regular character style. Just because you apply a character style to some text doesn’t mean that it’s actually going to turn it into a real hyperlink. It just makes it blue and underlined.

And where did that character style come from? It probably came from Microsoft Word because one of the most annoying things, in my humble opinion, about Word is, by default, when you type anything that looks like a URL it automatically gets assigned a hyperlink to it.

Anne-Marie: Mm-hmm.

David: Right? That’s one of the Auto-Correct of Auto-Format things in Word. Then if you save that document and import it into InDesign, the hyperlink comes in as a real hyperlink in InDesign, which is kind of cool. But it also brings in the hyperlink character style.

Anne-Marie: Right, which uses the beautiful RGB blue color, in case you’re wondering how that ever got into swatches.

David: Yeah, there you go! Perfect. So if you’re looking for, you know, where did that blue thing come from, or where did the hyperlinks character style come from it’s because it came along with your Word document. You may not have even known it. So, something to think about.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, we have a whole post about how to fix that, by the way, on the blog.

David: We need to link to it. Let’s link to that.

Anne-Marie: Let’s include that in the show notes.

David: You know, one of the things that I’ve been frustrated with our blog, Anne-Marie you’re aware of this, is that I am constantly forgetting what’s there and what’s not. And the search feature has been pretty limited so Pariah Burke just implemented an advanced search on our blog now, which is pretty good.

It’s not there yet. We need to do little tweaking on it, but it’s going to be much easier to find the kinds of things that you want. I should go use that right now and search for hyperlinks.

Anne-Marie: It does work pretty well. I tried it and you can search by date range, or by person who posted, or just in comments or just in posts.

David: Cool! That’s a new thing in this past week, so we need to play around with it some more. OK.

Anne-Marie: All right, so going on! The CS3 feature that we wanted to talk about that we’ve also been getting emails or reading posts about is pretty cool. It’s called Text Variables.

You’ll find the Text Variable commands under the Type menu. It’s a fly-out and it says, “Define” or “Insert Variable.” Then out of “Insert Variable” there are some preset variables like “Creation Date” or the “Last Page Number.”

How many times did we get asked that, David, for CS2?

David: Yeah, totally!

Anne-Marie: “Is there anyway that I could say this is ‘page X of so many pages’ and have InDesign automatically track how many pages are in the document?”

Well, now you can by using the “Last Page Number” variable. You can also, if you choose “Define”, create a custom text variable. So that –

David: Yeah, that’s one of my favorites. It’s kind of subtle, but you can just put any custom text into your variable, like your company name. If you think your company name is going to change pretty soon, you might want to make a variable out of it. Then anytime you use that company name it’ll show up as one name, and then later you can change the definition of the variable and it’ll change throughout your entire document. It’s very slick.

Anne-Marie: And then the one a lot of people also like to use is the more dynamic one called Running Header.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: Which could actually just be a running header, running footer, running sider for that matter. It’s a variable that, like all the other variables, you create a text frame and then you choose Insert This Variable in there.

But for Running Header, you normally want to edit it. You select it in Text Variables and click New and tell it “on the page that I insert you, I want you to pick up the text that’s used by which style sheet, ” and it could be a paragraph style sheet or a character style sheet, because you have a running header paragraph style and a running header character. Did I just say that?

David: Yeah, you have two kinds of running headers.

Anne-Marie: You have two kinds; one will pick up a paragraph style, the other will pick up a character style.

David: Exactly. So you figure for like a directory. If you have a directory and you’ve got a directory of names and you want it to pick up the first name and the last name on a page and make a little header out of that, it’s really, really easy to do now. You just set up two variables, one that picks up the first instance of the paragraph style on that page, and one that picks up the last instance of that paragraph style on that page. Put them together on your master page or on your document page and boom, it just works. Very, very slick. It’s a great feature.

Anne-Marie: Now one thing that people are learning as they’re actually using this in real jobs is that, first of all, when you… Let’s say that you pick up the style called Product Name into my running header. So the product might be widgets, and so at the top of page nine, or you start talking about widgets, the header says widgets but it appears in the basic paragraph formatting. Because while it’s picking up the text from that style sheet it’s not picking up the actual style.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: So that’s one thing. People are like “Hey, I thought it was supposed to pick the style.” No, it’s using the style to tell it where is the text, but It’s not actually picking up the formatting. The good news is that you can select that variable in the text frame and apply any style that you like, a completely different style if you want.

David: Yep, yep. Usually you’d want to.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, that’s true.

David: If it’s a header, you probably want the header to be in a different format. But there’s a more subtle thing going on there. I think it was Jamie McKee who pointed this out recently. That if you have, let’s say your header is a book name, “Moby Dick” or something, and you have that styled with a character style or local formatting as italic in your header, so you then pick that up and put it into, as a running header, the italic. The local formatting or the character style that’s been applied to that book name also will not be picked up in the header.

So there’s no way. What you get in the header is going to be plain vanilla text. It pays attention to none of the formatting that’s actually placed on the page itself. So, something definitely to watch out for.

Anne-Marie: There’s no way to mix formatting in that either because the variables are essentially a single character.

David: Yeah, that’s the important thing to know.

Anne-Marie: So if you apply… Like after I read his message I was playing around with it and I thought, well what if you made a paragraph style for these running headers that had a nest style that would apply a different character style to the first word, would that work? And, no, it actually applies that character style to the entire instance of text because it is just one character.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: And so, yeah, it’s thinking, “Well, here’s the first character of the first word, ” even though it might be picking up a long bit of text.

David: Yeah, a variable is basically a single character. And that’s one of the reasons some people are having troubles with variables, because variables never break onto two lines. So while you might want to put a running header at the top of the page or the bottom of the page or whatever, you probably don’t want to put variables in an actual text flow, like inside a paragraph, because the variable will never break. Even if there are two, three, ten different words in the variable, it will actually not break from one line to another. It’s acts as a single chunk.

Anne-Marie: Well, you wouldn’t want to put a running header or maybe like creation date, but you could certainly put in last page number.

David: OK, sure. Something small like that.

Anne-Marie: It wouldn’t work anyway.

David: Yeah, I suppose that’s true. But it’s something to keep in mind that it does not break over lines. There’s another. One more thing that’s important to know about these types of running headers is the whole numbering bullets and auto-numbering.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: Yeah, that took me by surprise as well.

Anne-Marie: That’s all lost.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: If the style has auto-bullets or auto-numbers applied to it, when the running header picks it up it picks up the text, the bullet and number is not there.

David: Yeah, and that’s very frustrating. So if your heads, let’s say you’re picking up headings and all your headings are numbered, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., that numbering doesn’t show up in the running head, and that can really throw you for a loop.

There is kind of a workaround for that. If you need to do that, the workaround would be to not use actual auto-numbering but to convert the auto-numbering or auto-bullets to actual text. All you have to do is put the text cursor on one of those headers and choose from the Type menu Convert Bullets and Numbering to Text. And the numbering then becomes part of the paragraph itself, and then it’ll show up in the head.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, but that means you can’t go back. You can’t select regular text bullets and numbers and say, “Convert to Auto.”

David: That’s true; you can never look back. You can never go back.

Anne-Marie: So it’s a last resort kind of thing.

David: Right, it is last resort.

Anne-Marie: I guess depending on the project, if I really needed to do that I might actually resort to typing in the number myself, because a text frame can contain more than just the variable.

David: That’s true, yeah.

Anne-Marie: You could say this is number one, and then choose Insert Variables.

David: Good point.

Anne-Marie: So you could type it in yourself manually.

David: Good point. OK.

Anne-Marie: Well it’s a first iteration of variables in InDesign, and lots of room for feature requests, but I think they did a pretty good starting job at least.

David: Very, very good starting job, and definite room for improvement in the future. So that’s good.

Hey, we should talk about, really quickly, the hot button post of the week. Your post–your rant–about using…

Anne-Marie: Unbelievable how much response that got.

David: Yeah. Anne-Marie basically said… She could have written like one sentence, but instead she wrote this whole rant about “Hey! Use a two-button mouse! Do yourself a favor and get a two-button mouse if you don’t have one.”

Anne-Marie: Mac users.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: Mac users, yes.

David: I’ve been saying the same thing for years, but the results were impressive. A lot of people jumped up and down and said, you know, a lot of people agreed with Anne-Marie and said, “Absolutely, couldn’t live without a two-button mouse.” Some people said, “Oh, what do I care? I use a Wacom tablet.”

Anne-Marie: All right. And some people said, “You’ll take this one-button mouse out of my cold, dead hands.”

David: Yeah, exactly.

Anne-Marie: Well, I was a Windows user for many years, and when I switched to the Mac I was happy to use a one-button mouse because it’s more ergonomically correct, or the interface is designed correctly. Windows needed to have a second button because the interface wasn’t quite what it should be. But my point was, if you’re using InDesign and you’re not using a two-button mouse you are missing out on a lot of productivity.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: Because if you don’t have a two-button mouse, yes, you could always Control-click to get that contextual menu. But how many people will Control-click? How many people actually do that unless they’re really motivated? If you have a two-button mouse it’s just as easy as blinking to get that menu. And I listed just a small sampling of all the very cool contextual menus that you can find in InDesign that may surprise you.

David: Yeah. It’s really worth right clicking. Right click on everything. And it seems like every version of InDesign they add more stuff to context menus. For example, in CS3 you can now right click on a number of the panels and get a lot more–there’s only a couple of the palletes in CS2 that had context menus in them. Now in CS3, a bunch of the palletes have context menus in them and it’s really handy, much more efficient than using those fly-out menus and so on.

Anne-Marie: If you prefer a tablet or a trackball or whatever, that’s fine. All those I’m sure come with a second button for the right click.

David: Yeah. I use a trackpad. I don’t have room on my desk, actually. Literally, I don’t have room on there for a mouse so I use a track pad, Kensington trackball thing, not a trackpad, a trackball. But, of course, it has actually far more than two buttons on here, but I basically use two buttons, left and right, so I can be efficient. You just can’t be efficient with a one-button mouse, period.

Anne-Marie: So if anybody is interested, just check out that post led. This morning I counted there was 36 replies and it had only been up there a couple days, which is a heck of a lot for a post. Unbelievable.

David: That’s great. People are passionate about this. If you insist on using a one-button mouse then who are we to stop you? But I really believe that two-button means efficiency. And then there’s the one-button Mighty Mouse, which is, I think, part of what you were talking about, what got you going on this.

Anne-Marie: Yes.

David: The number of people who use the Mighty Mouse but don’t realize that it actually is a two-button mouse. It has two-button functionality.

Anne-Marie: Because Apple cripples it when it ships it because it thinks Mac users don’t know how to walk and chew gum at the same time. It makes both buttons act like the primary button and you actually have to go to system preferences and set the right side of the mouse to be the secondary button, or the left side if you’re left-handed. Oy, oy, oy.

David: I’m left-handed but I use a right-handed mouse. So there you go.

Anne-Marie: I’m ambi-mouse-trous.

David: Ooh, wow. I don’t think I could do it with my left hand. That’s just too weird to think about using a mouse with my left hand.

Anne-Marie: It’s good exercise for the brain.

David: What brain?

Anne-Marie: [laughter]

David: OK. We should talk about the Obscure Feature of the Week. Eek, eek, geek, geek.

Anne-Marie: It is File Info.

David: File info. Where is File Info?

Anne-Marie: File Info underneath the file menu. Go down to File Info. When I first saw that I thought, oh, I’d like to find information about this file.

David: And it’s blank.

Anne-Marie: And you open it up and there’s no information with the file. [laughter]

David: That’s right.

Anne-Marie: It’s asking for information about the file.

David: Exactly. Right.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, it’s kind of weird. Tell us about this dialogue box. I think you know more about this than I do.

David: This is metadata. This is all about metadata. The whole idea of metadata is data about your data. So in this case the file info let’s you give background information about your InDesign document.

What’s nice about this file info dialogue box is it’s the same dialogue box that appears in Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat–it’s a little bit hard to find in Acrobat–but all of the Creative Suite apps have file information dialogue boxes. You go to file, file info–except in Acrobat where they have to hide it from you.

But the idea is you can give information about your document and then when you give your document to somebody else, they can get information about it. They can see what you’ve written.

Imagine in the old days it was like using a soft blue pencil on something that would repro. Or you’d write on the back of a photograph, the information about that photograph. Then you’d hand the photograph to someone and they could turn it over and look, oh, here’s the caption I want to use.

Well, this is the same kind of thing that we can do for an InDesign document as well. You could say who designed this document? What’s the description of this document? What’s the title of the document? And so on. What are key words for this document? All kinds of metadata that you can add to your InDesign document.

One of the reasons you want to do this is you can very easily search for the stuff later using Bridge. Very easy in Bridge to say find me all my InDesign documents that have such and such in the description. And they all pop up. So that’s one use for metadata.

Another thing that people don’t realize about this file information dialogue box is if you put that metadata in there, then you export your PDF, it shows up in the PDF’s file information dialogue box. Or in Acrobat they call it the document information, what you get if you do a command d or control d. Right? You get a whole bunch of information like the title of my PDF and the author of the PDF and so on.

And once it’s in the PDF it can also be searched for. Acrobat can search for it. You can find that stuff on the Web more easily and so on and so on. So it is both a strength and a weakness about the whole PDF.

Sometimes you want to be able to add that stuff in InDesign and get it in your PDF. Sometimes you might have private information in your metadata that you don’t want in your PDF. So when you export your PDFs you have to be careful to go and strip that stuff out from the PDF later. So that’s something to keep in mind as well.

Anne-Marie: I don’t know, I’ve had problems trying to find this information in Bridge.

David: Really? What’s…

Anne-Marie: Like if I type in Concepción for the author field and then I go to Bridge and I say find any metadata with Concepción, it doesn’t find it.

David: Oh, really? Well, that’s interesting. We’ll have to look at that because that has worked very successfully for me. Maybe it’s because Concepción has an accent in it or something.

Anne-Marie: I didn’t type the accent.

David: Oh, you didn’t. How interesting.

Anne-Marie: But your point about–this is actually a very good search engine optimization tip for PDFs that you put up on the Web because all the search engines index all this metadata.

David: Right. Well, one of the things that I find frustrating about Bridge is that a lot of this file information stuff doesn’t appear in Bridge’s metadata panel by default. You have to go into the metadata panel inside Bridge and change its preferences so that it will actually show author, description, and so on. Then you can actually view this stuff right in Bridge itself because in the metadata panel in Bridge, it’s set up for basically looking at photographs.

Anne-Marie: True.

David: For me, I’m mostly looking at Illustrator and InDesign documents and so I want to have the file info information. I don’t care about exposure.

Anne-Marie: You’re absolutely right. David, you’ve taught me two things today. Thank you so much.

David: You’re very welcome.

Anne-Marie: All right. So I went to preferences and I said turn on author. And then in Bridge metadata a new panel opened up, IPTC (IIM, legacy), clear as mud. And then it says: Author, Concepción. There it is.

David: There it is right there in Bridge.

Anne-Marie: I wonder why I couldn’t find it, though. That’s weird.

David: That part is strange to me. But there you go. OK. So that’s basically what file info is. It’s all about adding data to your data.

Oh, you know what I haven’t tried yet, and it just popped into my mind, is if I have an InDesign document in InDesign CS3. If I import an InDesign document into another InDesign document in CS3, you should be able to get that file info data that you added in the one InDesign document when you’re inside the other InDesign document as well, by going to the links panel and selecting the InDesign document there and saying link file info. And it will actually give you the information, the file info…

Anne-Marie: You’re right because you can do that with images.

David: That’s right. It works for the images and it should work with InDesign documents as well. It will actually show you the metadata of the InDesign document from inside the other InDesign document. So that’s a little CS3 trick thrown in there on the side.

Anne-Marie: All right. Well, thank you very much, David.

David: You’re very welcome.

Anne-Marie: A very illuminating episode for me. I hope for other people, too.

David: It’s been a pleasure.

Anne-Marie: I’ll send you a check.

David: OK. [laughter]

Anne-Marie: That’s it for episode 51. And what did you think? 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 your emails immediately but we try, we try, to get back to you as soon as possible.

David: We do try.

Anne-Marie: Yes. So until we meet again, this is Anne-Marie and…

David: David Blatner for InDesign Secrets.

[music]

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast Podcast 051 page.