Podcast 052 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast Podcast 052 page.
[music]
David Blatner: Welcome to the InDesign Secrets podcast. We’re doing this live from the InDesign conference. Is that where we are?
Anne-Marie Concepcion: That’s right.
David: In New York City.
Anne-Marie: Mmm hmm. What episode is this?
David: Episode 52.
Anne-Marie: Very good!
David: 52, like a deck of cards.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Howdy.
David: Howdy. That’s what it says she’s supposed to say. “Howdy.”
Anne-Marie: Anne-Marie says, “Howdy.”
David: So, this is normally a podcast. I just want to ask a question first. How many of you regularly listen or irregularly listen to the InDesign Secrets podcast? Oh, a few of you?
Anne-Marie: Not everybody? That’s interesting.
David: OK, that’s good. For those of you who don’t, I’m taking it personally, but it’s OK.
[audience laughs]
David: The one thing that I always like to tell people about these podcasts is you don’t have to own an iPod to listen to them. That’s the one thing. “Oh, I don’t listen to that podcast because I don’t have an iPod.”
Or, “I don’t have a cool enough iPod that I let out in public.” Because it has to be cool, right? And “I don’t have an iPhone yet, so I don’t listen to podcasts.” But you don’t need to; you can just listen to it on your computer. Just go to InDesignSecrets.com.
Anne-Marie: Right in your browser. ‘Click here to listen to the podcast.’ And then, you’ll see that all of the podcasts are listed in chronological order with show notes and places for you to add your comment. And the MP3 file is actually linked right here, so you can just click on it and listen to it in your browser if you wanted to. Or, you could save it to your hard drive and copy it to iTunes or you can subscribe to InDesign Secrets right in iTunes as well.
David: So, what we decided to do was sort of a special episode here at the InDesign conference and this is special, different, and weird. It’s an experiment. And I don’t know if any of you came the last time we did this. It was…
Anne-Marie: A nightmare.
David: Yeah, it was a nightmare, actually.
Anne-Marie: Well, we forgot the microphones. That was the big part.
David: Yeah. Yeah, apparently you need microphones to do this.
Anne-Marie: [laughs and yells] We were like, “Welcome to Episode 52!”
David: Yeah. It was a fun session and we all had a good time, but it was highly successful in the old recording thing. So we’re trying again, right? And so, what we’re trying to do here is we’re going to do a little bit of some news and stuff that we know about that’s coming up and coming out.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: And we’re going to be talking about a few tips and tricks. But a lot of what we’re going to be doing in this session is Q&A. It’s getting questions from you and trying to answer those, or we’ll edit it out.
[laughter]
David: If we could do that later.
Anne-Marie: We usually come up with some topics about what we want to talk about, but when we’re sitting down discussing which topics, we thought, ‘Well, you guys have the best topics.’ So, we’ll just take questions from you guys.
But there are some regular features of our podcasts that we are going to include.
David: Yes, we are.
Anne-Marie: Such as the Quizzler.
David: Yes. The Quizzler.
Anne-Marie: We’re going to have a live Quizzler today and you guys are going to answer the Quizzler and win a prize today. So we’re going to have the contest during this session.
David: Somebody here will walk away with a prize.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
[laughter]
David: But you’ve got to have a microphone.
Anne-Marie: But first you have to put the microphone on.
David: That’s right, you’ve got to watch here in front. Because if you don’t use the microphone, then we don’t hear it.
Anne-Marie: Hear the question. Oh yeah, and the answer.
David: And so we don’t hear the answer or the question.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: And so it’s doesn’t count. So we need to make sure you have that microphone one way or another whenever you’re talking.
Anne-Marie: Mm-hmm. And then another regular feature is our obscure InDesign feature of the week-eek-eek-eek.
David: Week-eek-eek-eek.
Anne-Marie: Have to have the echo effect.
David: You guys thought that we did that digitally.
[laughter]
David: But no, it’s really us just going, “Eek-eek-eek.” That’s right.
Anne-Marie: Now see, people can read my email, hang on a minute.
David: Now the other weird thing about this–those of you who are listeners–a number of people continue to assume that we are usually in the same room when we do this. But, notice that I’m keeping some distance from Anne-Marie.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Because it’s too weird being in the same room. We’re usually like a thousand miles apart while we’re doing this. We’re doing this over the Internet.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: And we’re trying not to talk over each other. And here, it’s like, “Wow, it’s really Anne-Marie.”
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: It’s so cool.
Anne-Marie: I know. It’s weird actually seeing you, so I feel more comfortable if I do the podcast like this.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: I’d feel most comfortable if I also had my cup of coffee and my cigarette, but I don’t mind those. It’s OK, I’ll go without those.
David: Thank you.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, people usually ask a lot about how we do the podcast because David’s in Seattle and I’m in Chicago. And if you listen to them, you know it doesn’t sound like we’re talking on the phone or anything like that. It does sound like we’re in the same room. Am I right? Yeah? Yeah.
People are really surprised to hear that we’re not recording in the same room. And, basically, we each have a headset and mic that are USB, so they’re plugged into our computers. We connect via Skype, so that we can hear each other talk. We used to record with Skype Recorder, but sometimes Skype can have glitches sometimes, and you hear really weird pops. So now we also record our side of the conversation in Audacity, which is open source.
David Blatner: Open source, free sound editor for Mac and so on. So we record those individually on our machines, and then Anne-Marie FTPs hers to my server–they’re usually these huge files–and we mix them together.
Brad asked how long does it usually take for us to do one of these things, and then edit it down. And the answer is: edit? Do we edit?
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: No, this is not a full-time job. [laughs] This is something we just happen to do for free, and we just want to try and get the information out there. So we don’t usually spend a huge amount of time on post-processing, but we try and at least make it valid. And cutting out most of the swear words, and so on.
Anne-Marie: David has such a potty mouth, it’s unbelievable.
David: [sighs] Yeah. You know…
Anne-Marie: That’s how they talk in Seattle, I guess.
[laughter]
David: It’s the coffee.
Anne-Marie: In Chicago, we never swear.
David: So, we’re going to start with some news?
Anne-Marie: Yeah, some news first.
David: Actually, one piece of news was, I mentioned to some of you who were in my session earlier. Actually, the first news is there’s an InDesign conference going on, which apparently most of you in the audience know about.
[laughter]
David: In an earlier session, I did a quick demo of a plugin called PatternMaker. It’s a free plugin, and I’ve talked about this a lot of times before because I wrote all the code for the cool patterns that show up in PatternMaker. So I have a particular interest in it. But the news today is that PatternMaker has shipped for CS3 today. PatternMaker and BarcodeMaker. If you need barcodes, barcodes are just a kind of pattern, right? So Teacup Software has what they call a pattern pack, which basically does barcodes: ISBN barcodes, and ESPN barcodes.
[laughter]
David: A bunch of barcodes. I didn’t do the code for the barcodes. A lot of barcodes, and so those, I believe are shipping today. So that was one piece of news.
The other piece of news is, if you weren’t in the session before–the opening session, not the official conference session but–from 8:30 to 9:00 this morning–Typefi did a little breakfast session, which was pretty cool. And Typefi has a very cool set of huge enterprise level plugins for huge sums of money, that do very, very cool things and automate stuff all over the place.
So if you’re doing textbooks or encyclopedias or something, you need to push a lot of content, they automate the production of big projects like that. It’s very, very cool, and I was impressed.
But what really caught my eye was this plugin that they’re going to be releasing called AutoFit. And AutoFit is basically a piece of their technology that they said, “You know, I bet other people might be interested in using this.” They are going to release this for a huge sum of money–actually no, it’s free. It’ll be a free plugin that Typefi… They basically did the numbers and they said, “Look, it’s not worth it to us to sell this.” Because when you sell software, you have to support it.
Anne-Marie: Right. Isn’t it like TypeFitter? Aren’t they the people who do TypeFitter?
David: No, TypeFitter’s done by Teacup Software. Teacup Software does… did I mention the PatternMaker plugin?
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Twelve times.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Yeah, go ahead.
David: So, what is AutoFit? Typefi is a separate company; they’re downstairs in the area down there, you can check it out. But AutoFit will do things like you fill a text frame with a bunch of text, and then you start typing more text in it, and it’ll automatically make the text frame longer. OK?
So that’s the simplest thing. Then you start setting up rules that link relationships between objects. For years, I’ve been going on about how the key to really doing great page layout is understanding the relationship among the objects on your page. It’s all about relationships among objects. Which my mother, who’s a marriage family counselor, finds just hysterically funny: that I’m the one talking about relationships.
[laughter]
David: So all about relationships, except for on the page. So you could set relationships like, this rule, this line, which is even on a separate layer, separate objects completely, should always be the same length as the frame. So as the frame automatically gets bigger, the rule also gets bigger. Or, a rule that’s on the bottom, again a totally separate thing, it’s not the part of the text frame, but it will move. Or, you could say, these two frames, that are not necessarily even linked, they are not even threaded, if one gets bigger, then the other should automatically move down on the page.
It is basically building intelligence into these frames and objects on the page, and letting you maintain the relationships among them. So I was very impressed. Of course, I would be more impressed by the price.
Anne-Marie: It’s very cool. The news is that, they are releasing it today?
David: They are releasing it for free. It’s actually going to be–I think it will be another four to six weeks before they release the plugin, because they are doing the final testing on it for CS3. But the news is they’re releasing it. It’s free and you can go to their website.
Anne-Marie: We will have it in our show notes.
David: In the show notes. If you go to InDesignSecrets.com, click on the “Show Notes” for this episode, and we will have a link there to go directly to sign up, to get it for free. But I believe it is Typefi.com. Don’t quote me, even though I have now been quoted in a podcast as saying that. But I am pretty sure, that’s what it is. But you can sign up, and you will be on their list to get that. So that’s very cool.
Anne-Marie: It is cool. I like that.
David: Do we have more news?
Anne-Marie: More news is that there is a new user group in London.
David: Yeah!
Anne-Marie: Yeah. New InDesign user group. So we wanted to give it the shout out to our blokes.
David: [laughs] Something like that.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: … in London. Hey mates!
David: Do we have people here, anyone here from Europe? Britain? Somewhere.
Yes, Italy. But you have your own user group. We don’t…
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Marco!
David: Marco is here from…
Anne-Marie: [faux Italian accent] Marco Polo, calaziano…
David: Some of you have been doing XML stuff at the conference, and also…
Anne-Marie: [faux Italian accent] XML! That’s what he’s been doing, yes.
David: Marco, graziano, grazio…
Yes! Brazil. It’s not Europe, but it is close.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Yes. Here in southwestern Europe. Yeah, from Brazil. Welcome. Bien venido!
David: So if you want an additional trip, if you are here in New York, London is not far away. You can go to the user group there. The InDesign user groups are really wonderful. If you don’t know about the user groups, you should definitely check them out. It is one of the best ways of getting InDesign information. InDesign conference, of course, being the first best way.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: And then, after the InDesign conference, then the InDesign user groups,…
Anne-Marie: Podcast.
David: … and then the podcast.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Also InDesign Magazine, Real World InDesign, InDesign Breakthroughs, and then the user groups. But the user groups are great and they are popping up all over the place. Australia, Europe. So definitely check out indesignusergroup.com, and if you are anywhere going to be near London make sure [crosstalk].
Anne-Marie: Are there InDesign user groups in Brazil? No? Where are you from in Brazil?
David: But there will be.
There is just one blog… Oh, give her the microphone.
Anne-Marie: OK.
Woman 1: There is just one blog in Brazil, but it’s not a group.
Anne-Marie: There is only one block in Brazil? Oh, blog.
David: A Portuguese blog.
Anne-Marie: I though it was a bigger country than that.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: A Portuguese blog, and InDesign. What’s the URL? Do you know?
Woman 1: No. I don’t remember right now.
Anne-Marie: all right.
David: We will find it and put it in our show notes.
Woman 1: I can tell you later.
Anne-Marie: OK. Yes, please tell us. Where are you from in Brazil?
Woman 1: Sao Paulo.
Anne-Marie: Ah, beautiful. Cool. Did you come here just for the show?
Woman 1: Yes.
Anne-Marie: Wow! You are motivated.
Woman 1: [giggles]
Anne-Marie: That’s great! Welcome!
Woman 1: Thank you.
[clapping]
Anne-Marie: And she is in our podcast too.
Woman 1: Thank you.
Anne-Marie: all right.
David: Anyone who has come further than Brazil? It’s a contest.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: A little further.
Man 1: Finland.
Anne-Marie: FINLAND!
David: FINLAND!
David: Now is Finland further… That’s interesting. Is it actually further than Brazil? We are going to have to check Google Maps, and do a great arc. Finland! Where in Finland?
Man 1: Helsinki.
David: In Helsinki. Excellent! Welcome.
Anne-Marie: [faux Finnish accent] Yah! Yah! Finland. You like the InDesign? Yah?
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Sorry.
David: That’s Swede. That’s definitely Swedish, Anne-Marie. [laughs]
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: So, moving along.
Anne-Marie: Yes, moving along.
David: We have some… Anne-Marie is actually checking online at maps.google.com. So, OK. So what we’re going to do… Let’s start. While she’s doing that, I just want to see if there’s any questions, any questions? Thoughts, questions, considerations?
Things that come up at the conference that you are concerned about, worried about; things that have happened in your households, having to do with InDesign. We have a hand over here.
Woman 2: Can you briefly summarize what’s going to be the difference between files created in CS2 and CS3? Are there going to be any problems going back and forth, like there were with CS and CS2.
David: This is a good question, but having to do with… What do you do when you need to save down? I keep looking and I keep waiting for Adobe to come out with–go to File->Save as->Save as previous version. And you still, of course, cannot do that. You have to use the exports and InDesign interchange file formats, it is the INX file format.
If you do a Save as INX–InDesign Interchange–you could then open that in CS2. You could do that from CS2 also, to CS1. Some people had problems with doing that. The vast majority of people that I have worked with have very few problems going from CS2 to CS1, as long as you have the proper updates to CS1 to do that.
But CS3 to CS2 is basically the same thing. I mean, most of it is going to come across just fine. The CS3 stuff–so transparency effects–they are just going to disappear. You can’t do transparency effects in CS2, so it goes away.
What are other new, happy things in CS3? Looping, nested styles, disappear. I mentioned the table styles in CS3 would get lost. It turns out that, as you may know, the table styles feature in CS3, actually, was purchased by Adobe, licensed by Adobe, from Teacup software. Did I mention Teacup software?
So Teacup software, they did a table style plug-in for CS2, and CS1, maybe. And so, if you happen to have that for CS2, your table styles will, most of your table styles, will translate. They’ll automatically be applied again in CS1 or CS2, or CS1, I guess. So, that’s something to keep in mind in terms of, it is INX. Those plug-ins are actually INX aware, and so some of that can be saved.
OK. So, what are other problems could you run into? You could run into a lot of problems, because ultimately, the idea of exporting to INX and importing that into InDesign is still–some of you heard my comment earlier about, kludge. You know, kludge is Yiddish for duct tape. Right. It’s basically, just barely holding on. It’s not an elegant solution in many ways. It’s the best that they can do.
Anne-Marie: Wait a minute. I miss the question. What was the question?
David: How did you get stuff from CS3 down to CS2?
Anne-Marie: Well, I demoed exporting to INX. We had no problem.
David: It works most of the time quite well. I would say 98 percent of the time, seems to work quite well.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: But there are, stuff happens. Some stuff happens and there are people… I’ve heard people talk about how…. What are some of those things people heard about? Sometimes rules. I think rules get messed up. I don’t know. I’m going to have to go back in the emails. People email us all the time with various things. Have you had problems with it? No. You have a different question. OK. Do we have any other….
Has anybody having problems with going from CS3 to CS2? Or CS3 to CS1. It works perfectly if you have CS2 in the middle.
So you open in CS2 and then save, then save again out of CS2 to CS1. No. there was talk about them being able to do that. It should work. I mean, it’s just INX. It should work, but apparently it doesn’t work so that’s too bad. Yeah, that’s frustrating. You need to open in CS2 and then re-export out, I believe, as a new INX file. Any other INX questions?
Anne-Marie: All right. Wait, wait. For the purpose of the podcast, if you got a question, hang on till Brad gets to you, so that our listening audience can hear you.
David: That was fast, good. Yeah. Thank you.
Woman 2: Thank you. So, what are some of the changes that you need to do in CS2 to get it to CS1, because we have a lot of printers that are all still in CS1, and we’re in CS2, moving to CS3, and we are still having problems.
David: Why are you giving them InDesign files at all? Why won’t you just give them a PDF?
Woman 2: Because it’s China.
[laughter]
David: Oh, OK. And they…
Woman 2: Yeah.
David: And they’ll print successfully from InDesign, but they won’t print successfully from a PDF…
Woman 2: No, because they change our files.
David: Oh, they have to change your files.
Woman 2: Sometimes they do, yes.
David: Into Chinese.
Woman 2: Or Mandarin, or something.
David: I am not a fan of handing anybody my InDesign files. I will do pretty much anything I can, not to give somebody an InDesign file. But then the argument comes up, well, sometimes they need to go in and make a change. I’m like, you can change a PDF. There’s a lot of stuff you can do to a PDF using PitStop Professional from Infocus. Using… There is a bunch of these–I think, Smile PDF Happy Application, I don’t remember the name of it. There’s a bunch of applications out there…
Anne-Marie: Chinese application…
David: … that will let you go in and edit your PDFs. And it’s robust and it works great, and I would much rather do everything I could to make that happen. Now if you still have to give them an InDesign CS1 file…
Anne-Marie: Yes, we have the back saved INX.
David: Ah, I barely even remember CS1. It was a long time ago.
Anne-Marie: I don’t know. Well, do you have CS2?
Woman 2: Yeah, we’re working on CS2 right now.
Anne-Marie: Right.
Woman 2: But we are moving to CS3, and that’s the problem.
Anne-Marie: It this just like one of your minor clients?
Woman 2: No, this is our big client.
Anne-Marie: Your big client. So why are you moving up, if they need everything in CS1?
Woman 2: Well, because that’s the direction we’re going to be going. They are probably going to be eventually on CS2, while we’re on CS3. Still back saving and then we have 10-11 still on CS1.
Anne-Marie: Wow.
David: You know another reason why people are, for example, not using CS3 is, it becomes harder and harder to buy copies of CS2. So you put in 10 new machines, and well, what are you going to put on them? Well, CS3 I guess. So there’s a lot of reasons that people are off a notch.
Anne-Marie: I guess, I think that in my small design studio though, if my big clients were still on CS1, I would still stay at CS1 for their projects, and just use CS3 for other clients.
Woman 2: OK.
Anne-Marie: Instead of worrying about the back saving.
David: Again, in most cases it’s going to work fine, but if I were going to send a file to somebody else and if they had CS1, I have CS2, I would, of course, get it out as an INX and I would immediately–I would have a copy of CS1 around–open that file and proof carefully.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: Because whether going from CS3 to CS2 or CS2 to CS1, open it and you proof it because things change. Things can change. It’s not perfection. You have to understand what INX is. The InDesign interchange format is not actually an InDesign file. It’s the recipe for how to create an InDesign file.
That’s an important distinction when InDesign opens an INX file, it is literally rebuilding the InDesign file from scratch. It’s as though you wrote a script. As though you had sat down and wrote a JavaScript to, how to make my file. Make a text frame. Put this text into it. So it, when you open an INX file, it will literally, on the fly, rebuilds your InDesign file. That’s one of the reasons why, as Anne-Marie pointed out in the Zen of Repair…
Anne-Marie: Here’s an INX file. Just put it up on the screen for our live audience to see and it’s really easy to understand, as you can see.
David: [laughs]
Man: Can you read that for the podcast version?
Anne-Marie: Pardon?
Man: Yeah, read that out loud for the podcast version.
Anne-Marie: Sure, it starts out as “left bracket colr space clmnd equal underscore prss”. And that’s just the first 10 characters. There’s about a bazillion characters in the whole thing.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: It’s just a big long thing, mess of code.
David: No, some of this actually is somewhat human readable, for…
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: … example: as it’s going by. Some of this. Can you go back to the top for a second? Some of…
Anne-Marie: Mine is haunted. Can you see this?
David: I have no idea.
[laughter]
David: Yeah. That’s it. That Text Wrangler thing. Oh I see, there. Some of this, actually you can start going through and figure out what some of these means. Because its pseudo-human readable. For example, colors, like this ink thing here is the definition for black ink, process black ink. The next one down here is the c-ink for a definition for Pantone 282.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: So there’s actually pieces in there. So when you open this InDesign file. InDesign is really looking at this and it’s saying, oh, we better have one of those colors. And it puts it in the swatches palette. And then it goes to the next one. Oh, we better have one of these colors. Poop! And it puts it up on the swatches palette. It’s rebuilding your document from scratch.
So if you were to rebuild your document from scratch, how likely is it that you would do it exactly the same. It’s pretty darn good.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: And it should work.
Anne-Marie: Now actually this INX file I exported from a document that one of our podcast listeners sent in. She was trying to get rid of a spot color in this InDesign document, and we don’t care about the actual missing fonts or anything, but I wanted to show you.
David: Now, this is a perennial problem that comes up.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, it’s just that it’s a book about John Adams. Just a two-color book, and in this Swatches panel, there were some spots that would not…
David: They could not be deleted. She here today? No. She came to the show.
Anne-Marie: Somebody pretend to be her for our audience, OK?
David: [falsetto] I’m here. You guys are geniuses.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Thank you. The issue is that these colors are not used but you could not delete them, and I won’t go to that. I did this in my seminar on the Zen of InDesign Repair. But I showed how you can export that to INX, and then you did a search for the colors; deleted the colors and then you opened up that INX file and now suddenly the color is gone from the swatches palette and nothing else is changed. So let me show you that.
And actually it works pretty well. I use it for some of my real studio documents and nothing is wrong when it gets printed. Everything is fine.
David: Branislav Milic has also.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Preparing…
David: Branislav Milic also did an article for InDesign Magazine, where he goes into a lot more details of cool things that you can do with INX. You can go in there. You can do search and replaces, all kinds of search and replaces on the INX file, to do some very cool things.
Anne-Marie: OK, let’s go on to another question that has nothing to do with INX. Anybody have a question? Right, hang on a second. We have a gentleman. And you have to tell us your name and where you are from.
Shawn: Shawn and I’m from right here in New York.
Anne-Marie: Oh, hi Shawn.
Shawn: It’s a similar question, unfortunately, but we had a lot of trouble when we went from CS to CS2…
Anne-Marie: Yes.
Shawn: …with our templates and our files in terms of image links, style sheets, etc, etc. Is that going to be an issue from CS2 to CS3?
Anne-Marie: I didn’t run into that issue, moving from CS1 to CS2. So you would just go to–start up CS2 and then you go and open up your CS1 files?
Shawn: Yes.
Anne-Marie: And then it would say converted?
Shawn: Yes.
Anne-Marie: It actually does that. But you’d be missing images?
Shawn: Not missing images, but the links would disappear even though they were linked properly. We did lose style sheets. We did lose a decent amount of styling.
Anne-Marie: Wow.
Shawn: And our templates.
David: Lost, like they just weren’t in the panel anymore?
Shawn: Correct.
Anne-Marie: I haven’t run into that. I moved to CS3, in the probably–right before it was released, in the late beta. And we started–you know I have a design studio–we started opening up all of our CS2 documents into CS3 and have not seen that once. On the other hand, I never saw that with CS2 versus CS1.
Shawn: Really we saw–I work for Hearst–we saw that for all of our magazines. We ended up having our magazines take their templates and actually copy and paste them over to new documents in CS2, because that was the only way we didn’t run into this problem from CS to CS2.
David: So here’s one of the issues that comes up. Whenever I would run into–if I were to run into something like this…
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: … I would go back to the INX route, and the reason that I say that is, one of the best uses of INX is just to clean out weirdness.
Anne-Marie: It’s like giving a colonic to the InDesign file.
[laughter]
David: Thank you, Anne-Marie. In general, whenever there’s any kind of weirdness, my guess is there’s something in those templates. That is not normal. For a styles to disappear.
Shawn: Right.
David: I’ve never seen that. I would say, maybe, they were templates that were first created with QuarkXPress. One of the best… Open up something from QuarkXPress or PageMaker–the first thing that you should do is save as INX and open that INX back up in InDesign. Just clears out weirdness.
Anne-Marie: You can see that. I mean, I did this whole session, just like earlier today. All about this very issue and I’m have a handout that goes through some of the troubleshooting steps. One of them…
David: I was there.
Anne-Marie: … is to hold down the Command or Control key and choose “About InDesign” and you can see if the document that is giving you problems, was it converted from Quark or converted from PageMaker or resurrected from a mini save or when it was first invented.
David: Ultimately, and the other thing is plug-ins. These are plug-ins that you might have. I would look for something else that might have been getting in the way. But again, I do the same thing–opening old documents. One of the things that I find on that topic, that I find very frustrating, is InDesign’s whole thing about converting old documents. Now you open up an old document, and it doesn’t open the document. It converts it.
Anne-Marie: It says converted in it, yeah.
David: Which I suppose is a reasonable idea, but I really wished there were a way to simply open the document. So if I hit “Save” it just did a ‘Save as’ automatically. Because as it is, it just opens it up and…
Anne-Marie: It does do that.
David: But it always shows up as converted at the top.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: You get this converted little bopper in the title bar; which bugs me.
Anne-Marie: If I choose…
David: Can you save it over now? With CS2, it would always…
Anne-Marie: Hang on.
David: Now, I’m on the spot.
[laughter]
David: I’m standing on stage, about to be proven wrong.
Anne-Marie: I’m just opening up one of these. Generally OK. So this one says converted. Right.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And then I go to…
David: And then you can just save it.
Anne-Marie: Save…
David: Just ‘Save as’.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: That’s the point. It always goes to ‘Save as’. I just want to ‘Save’. I just want to do a save. Like normally if you open a document, you make a change, you go to Command+S, it saves it. OK, it’s safe.
Anne-Marie: If I go to File-Save…
David: Right, so the point is, it always opens ‘Save as’ and it’s…
Anne-Marie: I guess it’s asking you if you want to keep a version in CS2.
David: Exactly. It’s definitely always asking if you want to keep a version in CS2. More questions? Questions? Thoughts? Political commentary? Concerns?
Anne-Marie: Yes.
Man 2: Let me just preface this by just saying, when referring to a co-worker, I really am referring to a co-worker. This isn’t actually about me.
Anne-Marie: It’s not a hypothetically.
David: Sure it is. I understand.
Man 2: I have a co-worker. Stay with me. She has the most persistent text wrapping bugs where text will just wrap right the hell off the screen. Like if she is using an image on top of a text box and the image, it looks like it should have the right bounding box to cause the text to wrap around it, but it doesn’t wrap right and even if she drags the image box way the hell off the bottom of the screen, the text will wrap to the next spread. It will wrap all the way down.
Anne-Marie: Wow.
David: Wow.
Man 2: She encounters some weird errors. So I was wondering if there’s any kind of broad stroke tips you can offer as to how to avoid having text wrap issues.
David: Well. Thoughts on that?
Anne-Marie: You could put a soft return before every word that you wanted to break.
[laughter]
You won’t do that.
David: Michael Murphy, from the InDesigner, some of you have seen the InDesigner podcast. Michael Murphy. Is going to, has an idea.
[applause]
Michael Murphy: I don’t know if this is your co-workers problem.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Those air quotes he did there. Yes.
Michael: What I found with weird things with things that you think have enough room to wrap around an object and then just go elsewhere, check the paragraph options to see if there are keep options on. “Keep with next paragraph” or something. I actually had someone do that. We spent about 20 minutes before we actually dug that out of the paragraph options.
It could have nothing to do with the wrap. It could have to do with a setting that might have been accidentally added to the basic paragraph style that is then being replicated across other styles in your document.
Anne-Marie: Right. This little dialog box I just pulled up.
David: What I am hearing you talk about is something much weirder than this. This is not just that it’s moving to the wrong place. It’s like, maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve actually seen some examples of text wrap where it’s really deeply, deeply wrong. It goes out, goes off, outside of the text frame. All of a sudden you’ve got a paragraph that’s outside. He’s saying, yes.
Man 2: Yes.
David: Outside the text frame, outside of reality. It’s like…it really pushes it to the wrong place.
Anne-Marie: It could be a bug. There is like a buggy thing.
David: There is a bug there. And I have no idea what to tell you about it. Because I….except that….
Anne-Marie: Export it to INX then open it up again.
David: No, I’ve tried it. It’s fascinating. You know who sent me one of these? Ben Wilmore who writes books for Peachpit Press. A well known Photoshop book author and does phenomenal books and he sent me this file. I was like, I could not figure out what to do except this strange thing is sometimes the only solution really is you nudge stuff a little bit. Select it and you hit the down arrow key and it moves it and all of a sudden it works.
And there was no logic at all to it. It was pushing stuff where it absolutely should not be and other than every now and again you just select something. If you see it you select something around it and tweak it or move the text frame a little bit and it flows where it’s supposed to flow. I honestly don’t know. It’s very, very rare. You can tell your co-worker that it is a very rare condition and she should be proud…
[laughter]
…to have accomplished such a feat in InDesign because it’s rare to get that kind of result.
Man 4: I just want to say, standing next to Michael Murphy, I can confirm that he sounds exactly the same live than he does on his podcast.
David: Isn’t that amazing?
Anne-Marie: Yes, he did a great job with his seminars too. Very good. I learned a lot with the grep thing.
David: Do you want to do a quizzler?
Anne-Marie: Yeah, lets to the quizzler.
David: So we want to do a quizzler. And this quizzler means that you guys get to come up with an answer for this. This is not the world’s hardest quizzler. We’ve had hard ones. Some of you know, we’ve had impossible ones We’ve had ones that we hardly know the answer to.
Man 4: Where’s the other menu?
[laughter]
David: And this question is…where are we going with this?
Anne-Marie: I’m just going to draw something.
David: So we are drawing a polygon. It’s a beautiful, five sided polygon. This is not part of the quizzler. The quizzler question is….it has nothing to do with five sided polygon. You could start with this, you could start with any object. Any object in InDesign.
Anne-Marie: The quizzler is: “How many ways can you duplicate an object in InDesign?”
David: We want to know who can come up with the most number of ways.
Anne-Marie: The most number of ways.
David: You know one. What’s one?
Anne-Marie: all right, wait, we have to get Brad to go… Brad, if you would like to give up your microphone duties, maybe you could get another volunteer, OK?
David: I see a hand up… is there a hand here?
Anne-Marie: OK, wait a minute, wait a minute, I’ll demo as you guys yell them out.
Audience: Option Drag.
Anne-Marie: Option, or Alt-Drag an object…
David: With the selection tool.
Anne-Marie: That’s one. all right.
Audience: Cut and Copy.
Anne-Marie: Copy, Paste, or…
Audience: Cut and Paste.
Anne-Marie: Cut and paste. That’s two and three. So, step and repeat…
David: That’s four?
Anne-Marie: Yeah. So we can do three of these… yes, that’s very good.
David: We need your name, serial number, rank, and where you’re from.
Anne-Marie: And who do you like better, David or me? [laughter] all right, no, you don’t need to say it.
Nancy: My name is Nancy. I’m from Southern Progress, in Birmingham, Alabama.
Anne-Marie: What? Southern comforts? [laughter]
Nancy: Southern Progress.
Anne-Marie: Oh, Southern Progress.
Nancy: I wish I were from Southern Comfort, but no.
Anne-Marie: Southern Progress, that’s a magazine?
Nancy: Well, we’re a division of Time Warner.
Anne-Marie: OK.
Nancy: First we had click & drag with the option key…
David: Or Alt key for Windows.
Nancy: Or Alt key for Windows, I beg your pardon. We had copy paste, we had step and repeat, we had…
Audience: Cut and paste.
Nancy: Cut and paste.
Audience: Paste in place…
Anne-Marie: Up, there’s another one…
David: Keep it sitting there, keep it sitting there on the side…
Anne-Marie: Copy that guy, and then paste in place. They had a very easy to remember shortcut.
Nancy: And paste into…
Anne-Marie: Escalator, up arrow, intersection…
David: Does it count if you’re looking at the menu while you’re saying this?
Nancy: I can read…
David: Paste into…
Nancy: What about the basic duplicate? Did we say that?
Anne-Marie: Oh, yeah, duplicate.
David: No, duplicate, duplicate, from the edit menu. Edit -> Duplicate.
Anne-Marie: That’s right, so I won’t even bother trying to… what are we up to… seven? eight? Oh, he’s over there holding his finger.
Now we have somebody over here against the wall who’s got a way that you haven’t mentioned yet, so hang on…
David: It seemed like such a good idea at the time…
Anne-Marie: Name?
Carmen Scott: Carmen Scott, and I live here in New York.
Anne-Marie: Hi Carmen.
Carmen: Arrange, Move? Under the Transform…
Anne-Marie: Arrange, Move. So this would be Object -> Arrange… not Arrange, I think you mean Transform. Object -> Transform -> Move, and…
David: And then copy.
Anne-Marie: Click the copy button, instead of just moving. Very good!
David: There we go. That’s good.
Anne-Marie: Very good.
David: Do we know another way to get to the same dialog box? I don’t think it counts as a separate way, because it’s the same dialog box… how do you get to the Move dialog box?
Anne-Marie: I think you can get there from here too, yes? I thought there was a button up here, now.
David: On the selection tool?
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: So it’s just double click?
Anne-Marie: Right, you had to have something selected first, and then double clicking on the selection tool works.
David: Yeah, it’s funny that way, yeah. So you select it, then double click on the selection tool like that. I thought that’s what it was. So that’s eight? So Carmen, another one?
Anne-Marie: Wait, wait, wait, do we have somebody else?
David: No, let’s see how many she can get here.
Carmen: Duplicate -> Layer.
David: Duplicate a layer! That would duplicate the object… yep, how do you duplicate a layer?
Carmen: I don’t know CS3… I’m back in CS2…
David/
Anne-Marie: It’s OK, it’s the same thing as CS2.
Carmen: The fly-out menu, or you can go down to the bottom and duplicate, as well.
David: So duplicate layer from the layers panel fly-out menu, or by dragging the layer down onto the new layer button would also duplicate the layer. So if you duplicate the layer it’s on, it will also duplicate that object as well.
Anne-Marie: Excellent. So what are we up to now?
David: I think that was nine. Ninish.
Anne-Marie: How about anybody back there in the peanut gallery? Brad, you have to run up about nine flights.
WW: Leader character.
David: What was that?
WW: Leader character.
David: A leader character. Well, it repeats a character, but not an object, and you can’t use an object. That’s very clever, and you get extra bonus points for being clever [laughter], but it’s not duplicating an object. It’s duplicating a character in a font, and fonts are actually, as we know, software, which are patentable and copyrightable, so they’re not objects.
Anne-Marie: Yes?
Scott: I’m Scott, from Barnegat, New Jersey.
Anne-Marie: Hi Scott.
Scott: Hi. You can click on the object, and then alt-click on the blue icon on the layers palette, and move it to a new layer.
Anne-Marie: That’s correct.
David: That’s a good one!
Anne-Marie: You can Option drag, or Alt drag right on the little proxy guy to duplicate.
David: Well this is… your layers are not…
Scott: You have to show that…
Anne-Marie: But I thought that…
David: What happens when your layers are hidden or locked, what do you do?
Anne-Marie: Look I didn’t turn it on and it’s doing it anyway. Think you know everything?
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: If you also hold down the command key you can drag into hidden or locked layer.
David: That’s right. So command, option, drag then I can move it and copy it to a hidden or locked layer which does not count as the next one. So is that 11?
Anne-Marie: I think so. That was a good one. That’s very good.
David: I know pi, but I’m not the one who’s supposed to be counting. That’s way beyond me.
Anne-Marie: What’s this, let me delete some of these?
Daniel: I’m Daniel from Orlando, Florida.
Anne-Marie: Hi, Daniel.
Daniel: Doing a snippet?
David: Do snippet? Take an object, make a snippet of it so you can go to the file menu and say export, file export and then choose a snippet or just drag it off to the desktop, or on the bridge, and then bring it back again.
Anne-Marie: It’s a lot of work.
Daniel: Or you can put it in your library and then drag it from the library onto a clipboard.
David: Put it into a library and bring it back. We’ll give you that one as an extra, number 12. But, technically, it’s actually the same thing because libraries in CS2 and CS3 and actually built of snippets. Most people don’t know that and it’s not actually relevant to anybody, but it’s an interesting point that snippets libraries are actually snippets items.
But that’s very good. Libraries are another great UI way to duplicate an object. More? There’s always more.
Daniel: Yeah, you can duplicate a document.
David: Duplicate a document?
[laughter]
David: I’m going to have to draw the line there.
Anne-Marie: Restore, backup with two copies.
David: Duplicate the document.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: We got more, more…
Pierre: I’m Pierre from Canada.
Anne-Marie: Hi Pierre.
Anne-Marie and David: Where in Canada?
Pierre: Nova Scotia.
David: From Nova Scotia, wow.
Anne-Marie: Great.
Pierre: Yes.
David: OK.
Pierre: We might have covered this earlier today, but isn’t there a new plug-in called Pattern Maker?
David: The Pattern Maker plug-in.
Anne-Marie: Who makes it?
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Is that some secret password?
David: You do actually get bonus points for mentioning Pattern Maker in the sentence.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
[laughter]
David: But I actually don’t think you got a way to use Pattern Maker to duplicate an object.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Who would actually…Who would use…
David: Any other ways to duplicate an object? Oh Michael, you can play.
Anne-Marie: all right, we can’t win.
David: But you have to use the microphone.
Michael: OK. Duplicate page or spread.
Anne-Marie: Yes…
Michael: You can get page or spread.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. So we go to the pages panel and then option or alt drag the page over.
David: People don’t think you can do that? Option drag an object will duplicate the object, right? But option drag a page will duplicate the page or spread. That’s a good one. Oh we’ve got…
Anne-Marie: That’s a good one. Lady in black?
Jeannie: Jeannie from Orlando.
Anne-Marie: Hi, Jeannie.
Jeannie: If you put your object on your master pages then you just apply your master pages.
Anne-Marie: OK, so, yes? I don’t know if it’s actually duplicating. It’s showing up in multiple places.
David: That’s very…I would say yes. I think that is technically, I think you are creating a duplicate. I like that, I like that.
Jeannie: …release it on the photo, just so you can…
David: And then release it. That’s the corollary.
Anne-Marie: If you override it, yes it’s true.
David: You go to those pages and then you do an override, either detach or override objects which were taken off. Those are definitely duplicates. They’re clones of those.
Jeannie: OK.
David: That’s very good. Anybody else, anybody else?
Anne-Marie: Yeah, that’s a lot of ways. Could we have more ways?
David: That’s a lot of ways to duplicate an object.
Anne-Marie: all right.
David: Nobody has mentioned my favorite. Isn’t it obvious? File, export, INX, open the INX on a text editor, you find the definition of the object, you copy the object and you paste it and then save and reopen the INX. It’s very simple.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: I know of a way to duplicate it.
David: Really?
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: OK.
Anne-Marie: I just thought of this one the other day when I was watching…
David: Actually I too have another one.
Anne-Marie: OK. I was watching Michael Murphy’s thing on tables so I’m going to make a table. I’m making a text frame and inserting a table and then I’m going to take this first row and merge the cells and then I’m going to paste the star inside and then I’m going to select that and then convert the row to a header row. And then, I’m going to…
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: …header row. I love saying, “Convert to a header row.” You will convert to a header row…
[laughter]
David: I would like to submit…
[laughter]
David: This is pushing it.
Anne-Marie: Oh no, wait. Now when the header continues…
David: Yeah, yeah.
Anne-Marie: OK. So now we continue on to another frame.
David: Header rows do duplicate objects. Wow, wow, wow…
[applause]
Man: It’s much easier than cut and paste.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: all right, your turn.
David: This is so much easier than cut and paste. I go to the control panel and, do you have the keyboard shortcuts near you? Oh you got this crazy thing.
X field is currently whatever it is and I say plus 10 picas or whatever amount you want and hold down the–this is called the official Scott Citron trick–pull down the “make better” key. What is the “make better” key?
Man: Option.
David: Option or alt on windows; option, enter. Duplicates. In fact, any transform whether it’s the positioning of it.
Anne-Marie: Or the scaling.
David: When I say “transform” I mean the position of it or the scaling of it, right?
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: So if I can say, I want this to be 140 percent, option enter. Looks like it just changes there, right? But it duplicated that. It’s scaling the duplicate of that object. So any transform you do, rotating it, same thing. So we can say, let’s do this 15 degrees, option enter, right? Then you get…
Woman: No.
Anne-Marie: Do we have more?
Woman: Yeah, you could use the option with the down or up arrow key or any other arrow keys.
David: Yes!
Anne-Marie: Very good.
Woman: …and if you just drew the object, and you just want another one to go you can still use the same tool and just keep hitting just once and then the enter key.
So if you just drew it…
Anne-Marie: We just drew the star, still in the polygon tool…
Woman: …still in the polygon tool, just click it will get you the little menu come up and then just hit OK again.
Anne-Marie: Is this something new?
David: It’s not duplicating an object. It’s just making another object which has the same specifications, but I will definitely give you the option arrow key because I use that all the time.
For example, if I want something in exactly the same place I know I can copy and then paste it in place. But, for me, it’s easier to do an option arrow key and then let go of the option key and hit the opposite arrow key which puts it back. So it copies it not just at the point like all the option and just move it back into place. It puts exactly in the same place.
Anne-Marie: I think that…this is it.
David: This is it?
Anne-Marie: We have to award the prize.
Ben: I don’t know. I’m not even convinced this is right. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: What’s your name?
Ben: Ben from Brooklyn, New York.
Anne-Marie: Hi, Ben.
Ben: Object find and change.
Anne-Marie: Object find and change. How would that make a duplicate?
Ben: Well, if you change the object you’ll have to have an existing object, right?
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
Ben: And then you change it into this…
Anne-Marie: Into a…?
David: You know how it’ll work? Here’s how it’ll work. We take our object; I’m going to make it relatively small now. I’m going to take that object and I’m going to cut it.
Find and change is tricky because find and change…You can find and change object properties, but you can’t really find and change objects.
For example, if I open up the find and change dialog box, I can’t paste this object into one of these things, right? You can do object properties, but not the object itself.
The funny thing is, what we can do is, say find all my Es and replace with “other”–remember “other”–clipboard contents. I have copied the objects to the clipboard and now I can say clipboard contents, format or unformatted, change all.
Anne-Marie: All right.
[laughter]
David: And the stars come out tonight.
Anne-Marie: Right, very good. Yes, so find and change can count. I think we need to decide on who gets the prize.
David: I think we need a winner. I think we need someone to be a winner and the winner, by the way, is going to receive a poster. One of the things we have in InDesign Secrets is a poster of keyboard shortcuts, which I brought one here. It’s a keyboard shortcut, sorry about the…
Anne-Marie: We laid this out in cork express.
David: It’s a commercial…
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: InDesign [inaudible].
David: That’s not true. We used Ventura Publisher for this and it has a lot of tables so we figure Friend Maker would be the thing to do. It’s Mac–all the keyboard shortcuts you’d ever want to know for InDesign on one side–Mac on onside, Windows on the other side, and it’s lovely fabulous quality and…
Anne-Marie: The colors are supposed to match the new CS3 logo.
David: It matches.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, OK. More or less.
David: That’s how we did color matching.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: [Acknowledges]
David: So we need to figure out whose going to win this and I think Anne-Marie. I think you and I should decide.
Anne-Marie: Yes, all right.
David: Out of all the people who contributed to this discussion.
Anne-Marie: I would say.
David: I think, you know that I think.
Anne-Marie: I think all of the women in the room should win.
[applause]
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: I would like to note for the audience at home.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: The incredulous look on my face.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: Because it’s obvious, obvious, that’s it the men who really contributed to most in this discussion.
Anne-Marie: Oh, no.
[jeers]
Anne-Marie: No, no, no. The men had too many goodies. Women need this.
David: We could compromise.
Anne-Marie: all right. Turn in your half the bin site.
David: Yeah, that’s a good idea. We’ve got only have one. I should leave a couple more than one.
Anne-Marie: And we’ll see who actually gives away. Right.
David: I think what we should compromise is we’re give one of these to everyone.
Anne-Marie: Yes, everyone here!
[applause]
David: Why don’t we… And the crowd goes wild. Anyone who wants one. I mean you don’t have to.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, you don’t have to have one.
[laughter]
David: These are normally. They’re $15 and but you can get them at the discount at the website if you’re listening at home. And we have a bunch here. Please only take one with you and come up at the end. Are we going to end?
Anne-Marie: Women.
David: That’s before we end. Before you come up… I definitely want to thank.
[pop noise]
[whoa]
Anne-Marie: David, stop hitting me! Ow, ow!
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Ow, ow, ow, ow. He’s got when you see us. We’ve got witnesses! We’ve got witnesses! The whole world is watching.
[laughter]
David: I want to thank. Oh man. We’re going to just move it along. I [laughs] I would really like to thank Brad Walworth for running, literally running.
Anne-Marie: We haven’t done the Obscure Feature of the Week eek eek.
David: Oh, man we didn’t.
Anne-Marie: No.
David: We didn’t do the Obscure Feature of the Week eek eek. You know, what we’re going to do is that we’re going to edit in.
Anne-Marie: All right we’ll add it.
David: Yes, because we do sometimes edit it in and we have to end this session. So we’re going to edit in and all of you can go to InDesignSecrets.com and listen to podcast 52 and find out what the Obscure Feature of the Week eek eek eek it is.
Anne-Marie: It should be up probably in the next few days.
David: So thank you all very much for coming. I hope you got a few tips. We’ll stick around afterward for some of this stuff. Thank you very much.
Anne-Marie: Thank you everybody.
[applause]
[segment break]
Anne-Marie: Oh that was so much fun.
David: Oh, that was great. We had a great time there in New York City. We’re now back in our respective offices and we better do what we said we going to do, which is sneak in that Obscure Feature of the Week eek eek eek. Yes.
Anne-Marie: But I think we should do every single episode in front of a live audience.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: What I was thinking was that like for the odd number episodes, people could come to my studio.
David: Oh.
Anne-Marie: And the even number episodes, people will go to your place.
David: Great, great great. I, I no. I think that’s a very bad idea. It was fun to see everybody’s face there.
Anne-Marie: Oh yeah.
David: I mean, it was great and have do it in front of a group of people but a. I’m pretty happy sitting here looking out at the birds in the trees and the little deer scampering across that lawn.
Anne-Marie: Oh, yes. So nice.
David: Just like that.
Anne-Marie: [giggles]. I don’t have any deer here in Chicago but there’s a gang banger walking down the sidewalk.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: [laughs] What’s he doing up this early? Oh my god. [laughs] Must be spring. All right, the obscure Indesign feature of the week eek eek eek is “Convert to Text.”
David: “Convert to Text.”
Anne-Marie: “Convert to Text.”
David: Yeah. But doesn’t that show up in various places, doesn’t it?
Anne-Marie: Yeah, lots of different places, like you select some auto bulleted or auto numbered paragraphs and then right click and choose convert bullets to text or convert numbers to text. And where else? There’s a couple of places.
David: There’s “Convert a Variable to Text,” I believe, is that you may stick that in CS3.
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: In CS3.
Anne-Marie: Right, select the variable and choose convert to text. But the convert to text that we’re talking about is just plain “convert to text” and you find it in the “Notes Menu.”
David: The notes menu.
Anne-Marie: The Notes menu. The Notes is a very interesting little free plug-in. It comes installed automatically with Indesign CS3. If you are using CS2. You can install it yourself from the installation CD. You have to find the InCopy workflow plug-ins folder in the Indesign installation CD and grab I think there’s three notes plug-ins altogether that you stick into your Indesign plug-ins folder. We have a blog post that describes how to do this. We’ll link to it in the show notes.
But the deal is this. A note is a non-printing note that you can embed in the text flow. So you just click in sides of text and then go to the notes menu and choose new note and if you’re in layout view which is the main view in Indesign. A little note’s panel opens up. And a little icon appears in the text flow and then as you type inside the notes panel. That note becomes embedded in the text. You can’t see it. You can’t print it. The only time you can see it is actually when you open up the notes panel and you click on that little note icon.
David: It looks like a little barbell thing. [?] notes or.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: Or hourglass.
Anne-Marie: When you’re text cursor hovers over the top half of that barbell thing it turns into a pointing finger. So you can click on it like a web link. And the notes panel will open if its not already open. So you add notes to text to notes to each other in a design workflow like, “Are you sure this is correct?” or “We need a new image for this story. That kind of thing.
David: Or notes to yourself, or notes to your other personalities. If you have multiple.
Anne-Marie: [giggles]
David: That could be an option.
Anne-Marie: Or dirty notes to surprise the printer with.
David: [laughs] But the printer will never see them right? Cause these are non printing.
Anne-Marie: This here, right. If you export it to PDF. Then you wont see the note either. But the notes are interesting because they include the author name, when it was created, when it was modified. What’s story’s in. What page is it in. Even how many words the note has. There’s lots of interesting uses for notes and its very useful in an InCopy Indesign workflow because both the InCopy users have the notes feature as well. And this is a way for the editors and designers to communicate with each other.
But, by the way, if you’re in Indesign. If you open up the story in story editor, from the edit menu, then you can see the note in line, and a cool little clasping and expanding rectangle. They’re a lot easier to see.
David: Yeah, much easier.
Anne-Marie: But the deal with convert to text is that, let’s say, you have a note and you would like that note not to be a note. You want it to be actual text. That appears in the story, you can just click anywhere inside the note text and go the notes menu and choose “Convert to Text.”
David: Ah. “Convert to Text.”
Anne-Marie: You don’t even have to select the text in the note. Just click anywhere inside the note text and choose convert to note. I mean convert to text.
David: The whole note, the whole note changes into regular text. In the same location.
Anne-Marie: The note itself disappears.
David: So it could be useful if you lets say an editor said, “What if we might add this one or two sentences here–like if we wanted to end that?” “Yeah, sure, let’s go ahead and add those one or two sentences and they just convert the note,” which has those suggested sentences.
Anne-Marie: [Acknowledges]
David: And converts it to text. That would be really helpful. That should be good. It is obscure. That is why its in Obscure Feature of the Week but it could be very, very useful.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, there’s one other use for it that I’ve seen is that people will take, when a story is overset, and they’re trying to delete what to cut in the story to get it to fit. You can select text and choose from the notes menu “Convert to Note.”
David: OK.
Anne-Marie: So takes the selected text and converts it to note. Now that the note text is not included in the word count. So now the story might actually fit after you have converted a hunk of text to a note.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And then later if you edit the story even shorter, then you can go back to the note and say, “Convert to Text,” and you have your original text there.
David: Wow.
Anne-Marie: So now you, instead of stashing it in the pasteboard or something.
David: Great, great tip. I like that. That could be very useful and that’s installed automatically on CS3 and then, CS2, you have to get those plug-ins and.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: We’ll have to do that. Very, very cool. Well that is the Obscure Feature of the Week eek eek eek and we’re finally going to wrap up episode 52.
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh. The largest episode ever.
David: Ever.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: So that’s pretty exciting.
Anne-Marie: If you have any comments or suggestions, please email us at info @ InDesignSecrets.com or got to our website and add a comment in the show notes, and until we meet again, this is Anne-Marie and…
David: David Blatner for Indesign Secrets.
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To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast Podcast 052 page.