Podcast 056 Transcript Podcast 056 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 056 page.
[music]
David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets episode 56. I’m David Blatner. I’m here along with my co-host, Anne-Marie Concepción.
Anne-Marie Concepción: Hello, everybody! And welcome back, David! We missed you!
David: Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m so glad you were able to do that podcast while I was gone. But it’s good to be back, and I’m raring to go.
Anne-Marie: Good.
David: Our podcast, and the blog, at InDesign Secrets, are the independent resource for all things InDesign. Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about InDesign, you’re going to be able to find it with us.
Anne-Marie: Whether you’re afraid to ask or not.
David: That’s right.
Anne-Marie: OK, so here’s what we’ll be covering in today’s episode. First, we have some news bits, and then we have an answer to the Quizzler from the last episode.
David: Mm-hmm. That was a hard one.
Anne-Marie: Yes, it was very tough, but we still got a bunch of answers, and we chose a winner at random. So we’ll be announcing the winner’s name and also, of course, telling the answer.
The hot-button topic of the week on our blog was, why do InDesign files get so large?
David: Yeah, what’s up with that?
Anne-Marie: Yeah. So we’ll talk about the issue and how to fix it.
David: OK.
Anne-Marie: And then we’re going to talk about scaling. Our favorite topic, scaling in InDesign!
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Because, believe it or not, it is different in CS3.
David: One more time! Let’s make it different one more time.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. It’s got just a different flavor of craziness from CS2. The obscure InDesign feature of the week…
David and Anne-Marie: [together] Eek, eek, eek, eek…
Anne-Marie: …is gap color.
David: Gap color.
Anne-Marie: Mm-hmm.
David: Mind the gap.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. What color are those people who work at the Gap? That’s what I want to know.
David: Oh, good point. Good point.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. [laughs]
David: Hey, first, let’s start with a little bit of news.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: Just a couple quick things we wanted to announce one more time. The Melbourne Conference in Australia is coming up at the end of August. I think it’s the 30th, 31st. Any of our friends down under, please take a trip down to Melbourne and join the InDesign Conference. It’s going to be an awesome show with Mike McHugh. Sandee Cohen is going to be there, and Cari Jansen and a bunch of our friends.
Also, two weeks later is the Tokyo InDesign Conference. We’re doing an InDesign Conference in Tokyo, Japan, and so please come on by there. That’s going to be fun, too. And I’ll be there, as well as Diane Burns, we’ll be covering some stuff. So that’s going to be pretty cool.
Anne-Marie: She’s like the queen of foreign language setting in InDesign, yes?
David: She is. In fact, Diane has been doing work in Japan for so long that she is literally known in some circles in Japan as “the mother of DTP” of Japan.
Anne-Marie: Wow!
David: Isn’t that amazing? I think it’s “DTP no haha” or something.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: It’s great. She’s awesome. So come on by, and that’s going to be lots of fun, right, in Tokyo.
Of course, the other big news this past week was that both Harry Potter and the iPhone shipped.
Anne-Marie: Really?
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: I hadn’t heard.
David: [laughs] It has nothing to do with InDesign at all.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Uh-huh.
David: Apparently some people care about things other than InDesign.
Anne-Marie: No way!
David: Yeah, yeah, believe it or not. It’s amazing.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: Not us.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: But somebody seems to care about Harry Potter and the iPhone. So that’s a good thing.
And also, this is not really news, this is just a shameless commercial plug, so I apologize, but I just wanted to remind people that the CS2 and CS3 keyboard shortcut posters are available. We have those up on the website. If you go to InDesignSecrets.com, click on the little poster link or the store link, and check out those posters–Full-color posters. Mac on one side, Windows on the other. And they’re great. We’ve been getting lots of really good feedback from people, but every now and again, I’ve run into people who don’t know they exist…
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: So I just wanted to remind our listeners or perhaps our new listeners, check out the InDesign keyboard shortcuts poster, for either CS2 or CS3.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, they’re very handy. I was referring to the CS3 one last week during the podcast…
David: There you go…
Anne-Marie: Because I couldn’t remember the keyboard shortcut for “clear all the custom kerning.”
David: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Anne-Marie: And it’s not in any of the menus, so instead of having to dig around in my sets of keyboard shortcuts, I could just look at the wall: “Uh-huh. There it is.”
David: [laughs] Look at the wall.
Anne-Marie: Don’t ask me what it is now, though. I don’t remember. [laughs]
David: Well, that’s what the poster is there for.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. So let’s talk about the Quizzler.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: In episode 55, I spent a lot of time talking about the preference settings for composition highlighting. If you go to InDesign preferences and select composition, there are five items there that InDesign can markup with a non-printing highlight to alert you to potential issues in your text flow. The one that’s on all the time is substituted fonts, the dreaded pinking that it puts behind missing fonts.
But the Quizzler was when you turn on the composition highlighting for keep violations, what color highlighting does InDesign do?
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: I covered all the other ones except for that one. And I was chortling to myself because this was an evil, evil Quizzler, because…
David: It’s hard.
Anne-Marie: First of all, it is almost impossible to force it to make a keep violation.
David: Yeah, yeah. I mean, when you set up those keep violations–that “keep with next paragraph, ” “keep with next number of lines, ” or “keep first two lines together at the beginning or end of a paragraph”–when I listened to that, I was like, “How do you force it to break that?” And it took me a long time to figure out how to break it, how to make InDesign violate those keep rules.
Anne-Marie: How did you do it? Do you remember?
David: I think you make a text frame. And you basically make a paragraph, which is supposed to stay together, keep the whole paragraph together, and then make the text frame too small to fit the paragraph.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. That’s one way. I think somebody else came up with some other way. Somebody emailed us. I can’t remember what the method was.
David: I can’t remember. If other people have figured out how to force it to fail, to violate the keep options and it’s not what I just described, email us and let us know how you did it, because it’s really a pain to figure out how to do.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: I’d love to hear other people or go to InDesignSecrets.com, go to this podcast, and leave a message in the show notes: “Here’s how I forced it to break the keep options.”
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: That would be great.
Anne-Marie: So that was one thing. First of all, how many people could figure out how to make it break the keep options…
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: …and the second thing is that the color is exactly the same as another composition highlighting.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: All right. And I made it sound like it was going to be a fifth color because I’m an evil person like that.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: But you have to make sure and turn off all the other highlighting options except for keep violations, and then force a keep violation, such as you described; make the paragraph…
David: Make the text frame too small to fit the paragraph…
Anne-Marie: Right, make the text frame too small for it and include a paragraph that you’ve turned on “keep all lines together, ” which you think would force the paragraph to the next frame, but it doesn’t. You’ll see the last line of the paragraph is colored a deep yellow.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: It’s the same deep yellow color that InDesign uses for H & J violations. That’s the one with the three levels of light yellow, medium yellow, and dark yellow. It uses that same dark yellow. A lot of people who answered actually took RGB measurements of that color and sent us the RGB breakdowns, just in case…
David: [laughs] Just in case yellow wasn’t enough.
Anne-Marie: …we wanted a more specific answer than yellow. [laughs]
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Which was I applaud them. Yes, I applaud them.
David: Yeah. But we were pretty happy just with yellow. Yellow worked.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: We did get a bunch of answers. But the winner is… Who won that? Was it randomly chosen?
Anne-Marie: The winner is Tim Gouder…
David: Tim Gouder.
Anne-Marie: …from Germany.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: City of… And I can’t pronounce this. You say it.
David: Cologne, Germany.
Anne-Marie: Cologne.
David: What we would call Cologne. Tim, you win your choice of either the “InDesign Essential Training” from lynda.com that I did, or the “InCopy Essential Training” that Anne-Marie did for lynda.com.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: Those are like $150 value packages. So congratulations, Tim.
Anne-Marie: Let us know which one you want and your mailing address.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: You know what I found was interesting was when I zipped back to my email program to quickly look up his name before the podcast, I did a search for “Gouder” in my InDesign Secrets mailbox and it came up five times. I believe Tim has entered every one of our Quizzlers.
David: Wow!
Anne-Marie: Yep, because under the subject is, “Quizzler, ” “Quizzler, ” “Quizzler, ” “Quizzler.”
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: With all different dates, throughout this year and last year.
David: Well, there you go.
Anne-Marie: So, how you get the color picker…
David: Wow.
Anne-Marie: And I don’t know, a whole bunch of Quizzler answers.
David: All the other ones. But the moral of the story is: stick with it.
Anne-Marie: Keep clicking. Yes.
David: Stick with it. Keep answering and you will win, sooner or later.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. And this time, he got a really nice, expensive package, instead of just a measly poster–I mean a beautiful poster.
David: Beautiful poster! Beautiful poster.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: A phenomenal poster. OK, we’d better talk about the hot-button topic of the week, which somebody emailed us and said, “What is the deal? I’ve got this 60-page document that is 450 megabytes, and it just keeps getting bigger. And yeah, I’ve got a lot of images in there, but it shouldn’t be THIS big.” And so we went back and forth a little bit about it, and the answer is…
Anne-Marie: I love this answer.
David: It’s the images. It’s the images, because InDesign has a funny little habit. And that is, if you import a regular, let’s say you do a 250 pixel per inch image, and you bring it in–so it’s a high-res image and you put it on your page–InDesign saves a thumbnail of that, right? Typically, like a 72 DPI thumbnail of that high-res image, and saves it in the InDesign file.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: But what happens if you import a 72 DPI image? The image itself is a 72 DPI image. And there are a lot of these out there. For example, a lot of digital cameras, when you take a digital camera snapshot, the camera itself does not put in the little metadata in the background of the image what the resolution is. And so, when you import it into InDesign, it says, “Well, I don’t know what the resolution is. I’ll just guess that it’s 72 DPI.” And so you get these HUGE images, like 40 inches large…
Anne-Marie: Yeah, because the person said “fine resolution” so that just means “capture more pixels.”
David: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Anne-Marie: And so it’s putting all the pixels that it captured, but at 72 pixels per inch.
David: Right. So you have a huge image that you scale down to the size that you want. And at that point, when you scale it down, the resolution will go up to 200, 300, 400 whatever. But InDesign remembers when you first imported that image, InDesign made a thumbnail of it.
Anne-Marie: It made a huge image.
David: And it made a HUGE thumbnail, at the same resolution as the original image, right?
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: So it’s basically embedding all of that data in the InDesign file itself, which is a problem. So your InDesign file gets much larger than it should. So that’s frustrating.
Now, what’s the solution? The solution is to go back to Photoshop, open the image in Photoshop; resample it in Photoshop. You don’t even have to resample, you could just change the resolution to something reasonable so that the actual dimensions of it get smaller, and re-import that image at a reasonable size. Instead of the 40-inch wide image, re-import it at the regular size and the dimensions will be of normal size, eight by 10 or something–not 40 inches wide, but maybe eight inches wide or five inches wide or whatever.
At that point, if you do a save as, your InDesign document will get smaller again. The save as just kind of clears out all the extra gunk that it doesn’t need anymore. So, much better to open those files in Photoshop first. Photoshop should almost always be your intermediary, for almost any image you have. Even if it looks pretty good on-screen, open it in Photoshop. You don’t even have to do much to it, but make sure the resolution is right in Photoshop, the dimensions are right in Photoshop, and then save it and bring it into InDesign, and you’ll be happier.
Anne-Marie: That’s correct.
David: Now, the thing is, some of this has been fixed in CS3. It’s one of the quiet fixes in CS3. In CS3, when you’re working with these large images, these big, 72 DPI images, when you import them, they come in at a normal size. InDesign actually has an algorithm now in the import, when you place these images, it looks to see if you have something that’s like 40 inches wide at 72 DPI, and it says, “You know what? They don’t really want this to be 40 inches wide.”
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: “Something’s wrong here.” And so it will actually scale it for you on the fly. So when you import it, it actually scales it down to a normal size. I don’t know exactly what their algorithm is.
Anne-Marie: I did not know that.
David: Yeah. And if you look in the Info palette in InDesign, click on the image, it actually says, “Original resolution: 72 DPI. Effective resolution is whatever, 400 DPI…”
Anne-Marie: Oh, really?
David: Because it scaled it down for you. It’s very clever. I was very happy to see that in there. So that should reduce a lot of these kinds of problems, but not entirely. It’s much better to go through Photoshop first.
Anne-Marie: Interesting. I just tested that. It’s not working. But I must be wrong, because InDesign is always right.
David: [laughs] Always, always.
Anne-Marie: I’ll leave it for a blog post.
David: So that’s the main thing. Any time your file is getting too big, check your images; that’s one of the first things. And also, just do a “save as” every now and again. “Save as” just clears out the gunk that sometimes accumulates in the InDesign file.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Great. Let’s go on to talk about my favorite topic…
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Scaling things!
David: Eiee! Not scaling! No!
Anne-Marie: Scaling things was so bad in CS2 that the chapter of our book where we talked about scaling was entitled “Scaling Insanity.”
David: Yeah, yeah.
Anne-Marie: What happens when you scale something with the keyboard versus the mouse versus the scale field versus the scale tools? And if it’s text versus a picture? If it’s text grouped with a picture? What was the first thing you clicked on when you dragged it? Oh my God.
David: [laughs] Exactly. There’s a lot of scaling issues there.
Anne-Marie: There is. And it’s a lot knottier than you would think at first glance, once you start thinking about the difference between scaling and resizing, right? There is a subtle difference between the two, and some people, when they say, “I want to resize something” they mean scale it.
David: Mm-hmm.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. But I think the first big difference that people notice in CS3, as opposed to CS2, is this. In CS2, if you want to scale an image from the keyboard, you pressed, on the Macintosh, command, option, less than or greater than.
David: Period or comma…
Anne-Marie: Period or comma. I think of them as less than because it makes it smaller and greater than because it makes it bigger, but yes, officially, comma and period. That would scale it in five percent increments. So you had a big picture, and then you press Command-Option-comma–or Control-Alt-comma in Windows–and it would get five percent smaller, and then smaller and then smaller and then smaller, both the picture and the frame.
So you do the exact same thing in CS3, and it doesn’t happen, instead when you press the keyboard shortcut for “Scale” from the keyboard… just the frame scales, not the picture.
David: Right, right. Just the frame. You either get the frame or the picture.
Anne-Marie: So you’re cropping it in five-percent increments smaller or larger. You’re not really scaling it.
David: By the way, just to throw in one extra thing, Command-period or -comma does it in one-percent increments. So you can do even smaller ones, like Command-comma will make it smaller in a one-percent increment.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: And Command-period will make it larger.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: But in CS2, it would do both the frame and the image inside of the frame, and in CS3 it only does the frame. And that is crazy making for a lot of people, definitely.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. So if you want them both from the keyboard, what are you supposed to do?
David: I…use CS2?
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: No. I don’t know. Well, the only way to do it, really, is to go to the control panel, and do it up in the control panel. The control panel fixed scaling will still scale the object and what’s inside of it.
But even there, it’s actually different as well. They changed that subtlely in the control panel as well. Because in CS3, if you scale using the width and height fields in the control panel, it will actually just do the frame. But if you scale in the scaling fields of the control panel, which normally say, “100%”…
Anne-Marie: Mm-hmm.
David: You go up to “100%” and you say, “Scale this to 120%.” It scales the frame and the contents of the frame as well.
Anne-Marie: Right. Yeah, and that’s how CS2 worked.
David: But there’s a difference in CS3. In CS3–I’m pretty sure this is new in CS3–you can actually type a measurement in the scaling field.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, this is new.
David: So, let’s say you select five objects on your page, and you want that group of objects, all five of those objects, to be 20 picas wide. You want to fit all of those within a 20-pica width.
Anne-Marie: That is so weird. I was just testing it here, and I entered “20 picas.”
David: Really? Wow, how about that.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, wow. GMTA.
David: [laughs] You read my mind. So you go in and type, “20 picas.” Where it normally says “100%”, you can type “20p” or whatever, “50 millimeters,” or whatever you want to type in there–type a measurement, and when you hit enter, InDesign does the math for you to figure out that, “Oh, the percentage you mean is such-and-such.”
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: So it’s really quite clever that way, and that’s a great thing. You can also do percentages in the other fields as well. Like, if you want the width to be 200% of what it is, double what’s there, you can just type “200%” instead of what’s there, and hit enter, and it does the math for you.
Anne-Marie: Mm-hmm.
David: That’s like all the fields in InDesign. You can always replace, I’m pretty sure, all the fields–whenever there’s a number, you can type a percentage instead of that number, and it basically says, “the percentage of the number that was just there a moment ago.” It figures that out.
But the cool thing is that typing a measurement in the scaling fields. That’s new in CS3 and it’s very, very helpful. I mean, in general, Adobe was trying really hard to make scaling consistent in CS3. The problem in CS2 and earlier, is there were all these inconsistencies. They tried really hard to make it consistent in CS3, and in some ways I think they did. I mean, they were very successful in that, but they also added these other little weird problems, like the keyboard shortcut problem.
Anne-Marie: OK, I found out a way to scale something from the keyboard in increments, but it’s kind of a pain.
David: Hmm. OK.
Anne-Marie: All right, so you need to have something selected with the selection tool.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And you press Command-Option-<, or Command-<–or Control, whatever you want to call it–and you hit it a couple times, and it makes just the frame smaller. Right?
David: Yeah. Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And then you double-click on the image, that’s all, and then press the same keyboard shortcut again. Because in CS3, double-clicking on the image switches it to the direct selection tool.
David: Well, yeah, but… [laughs] You’re still doing the keyboard shortcut two different times.
Anne-Marie: You hit the keyboard shortcut twice, then double-click, then hit the keyboard shortcut twice, and then it’s all scaled.
David: Great. That’s brilliant, brilliant…
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: That’s what they pay me for, buddy.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: You know you feel like a monkey jumping back and forth between the stupid mouse and the keyboard just to scale something from the keyboard. It’s aggravating!
David: Yeah. It is frustrating.
Anne-Marie: That’s how I really feel.
David: The reason this doesn’t bother me so much–the whole keyboard shortcut craziness –
Anne-Marie: Yes?
David: The reason it doesn’t bother me is I hate the keyboard shortcuts for scaling.
Anne-Marie: Oh.
David: In CS3, or CS2, or CS1, or anything. And the reason I hate them is because every time you hit that keyboard shortcut, it bases the size off of what it currently is.
For example, let’s say something is 100% and it is ten picas wide. And you say, “Make it go down 5%.” So, great, it goes down to nine and a half picas. It cuts off 5%. Then you hit the keyboard shortcut again, but it’s not 5% down from its original size–it doesn’t go down to nine picas then, it goes down to nine pica point, oh something. So every time you hit the keyboard shortcut, you get longer and longer decimal points at the end of your measurement.
Anne-Marie: Mm-hmm.
David: But the real problem for me is, if I hit the keyboard shortcut to go down 5%, and then hit the keyboard shortcut to go back up 5%, I expect it to go back to 100 percent, and it doesn’t. It never will. You’ll never get back to a 100 percent if you’re using those keyboard shortcuts. So I really want the keyboard shortcuts to…
Anne-Marie: Yeah, I guess that’s true. I guess it never bothered me. I know that’s how QuarkXpress works.
David: Yeah, it is.
Anne-Marie: How it still works. It does actual five percent, minus five, plus five.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And this does five percent of the current measure.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Which can drive you crazy. But I guess when I’m scaling from the keyboard, I’m not even looking at the scale field. I’m just trying to get it, visually, to how large I want it, and I don’t care how many decimal points there are. But I hear what you’re saying about getting it back to 100, I guess I would care about that.
David: I totally agree, it’s all in how you use InDesign. Some people use InDesign, you know, “Just make it look right ” but I have always wanted the precision. I always want to know exactly what I’ve got, and I want to get back to, you know, exactly 85 percent. If I want it to be 85 percent, I’d get it right there.
And the answer, I’m sure somebody’s going to say, “Well, just type in the number you want, then.” And you’re right. You’re right.
Anne-Marie: Here’s one welcome CS3 feature–that I cannot remember, for the life of me, if it’s turned on by default or not–and that is: You place an image; you resize it by dragging on it with the selection tool, holding down the Control or Command key and the Shift key to keep it proportional; and, lo and behold, the scale field tells you what is the scale of that image.
David: Even after you let go of…?
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.
David: Even after you let go? Are you sure?
Anne-Marie: That’s correct. Yes,sir. I’ll send you a screenshot.
David: OK, you send me a screenshot. I’m going to try that right now.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] The setting is in “General Preferences”. “When Scaling”–there are two radio buttons under “When Scaling”. The first one is “Apply to Content”, and the second one is “Adjust Scaling Percentage”.
David: Yeah, you have it set to “Adjust Scaling Percentage”.
Anne-Marie: That’s correct.
David: Right. That is not the default setting. You changed that to “Adjust Scaling Percentage”, and that will make you crazy in other ways.
Anne-Marie: Huh? How?
David: Because what “Adjust Scaling Percentage” does, when you choose “Adjust Scaling Percentage”–the naming of this is terrible–when you choose that, you’re actually telling InDesign that, “Every object, when you scale it, remember the scaling.”
For example, you have a frame that has a two-point rule and you’ve got some text in it, that’s 12-point text. Then you scale it up 300 percent. What you then get is that the stroke will get bigger if that’s turned on (if the scale stroke thing is turned on) but it won’t show that to you, I don’t think. But what will really drive you crazy is when you select the text inside of that frame, it’ll say 12-point text and then 36-point in parenthesis. You’re back to that parenthesis thing.
Anne-Marie: Oh, this was favorite thing in the CS2.
David: Yeah, the whole parenthesis thing–when you turn the General Preferences on to adjust scaling percentage, you are turning on, you’re saying: “I love those percent, I love those parentheses.”
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: “I love being able to go back to 100 percent.”, which is insane. I mean, yes I know there are some people out there who would like that but you’re a minority. The majority of us want it to actually always resolve and see what the real text size is.
Anne-Marie: But it’s the lady you’re the tiger or some other kind of difficult choice because I love being able to click on an image and seeing what is it’s scaling percentage without having to jump through any hoops.
David: You know what you’re talking about.
Anne-Marie: And if I seldom scale text frames, which I actually seldom do, when will I ever scale a text frame during display at and I’m resizing text frames but that I don’t want to scale them, I’m only scaling images? Right?
David: Well, it depends on what you’re doing. I scale text frames all the time. OK. Yet, in that case I see your point. If you’re only scaling images and their frames, then turning on that preference might be very reasonable because you do get the benefit that you’re talking about. You can actually see what the percentage is without using the direct selection tool. That’s very intriguing, that’s a good point. It can still…
Anne-Marie: Like right here, I just found another bit of insanity. OK, so, as I’m flipping back and forth between this radio buttons, now my picture will not let go of 129.5 percent. I swipe inside the field and type 100 percent, hit return and it says 129.5 percent even though it actually did scale something in the image.
David: Well…
Anne-Marie: It’s remembering the last setting that I had.
David: Oh, wow that’s weird. I will have to play with that. That sounds it might be a bug. But again, even if you have that preference turned on, all it is doing is that remembering scaling of the frame but you still have two different scalings. You have the scaling of the image and you got the scaling of the frame.
Anne-Marie: Ahh…
David: So, it’s still two different things that you have to keep track of. I really don’t like that Adjust Scaling percentage, I think is really problematic. Here’s the thing and I think it was Sandee Cohen who pointed this out who got upset about this issue. When you have–remember that two-point frame around it? Let’s say you scale it up but you scale it disproportionately.
Anne-Marie: Yes! Yes, exactly.
David: You scale it 300 percent in one direction and 100 percent in the other direction. Well, your stroke ends up being scaled disproportionately. So, your stroke is actually thicker on two sides of your frame and thinner on two sides of the frame and that will drive you insane.
Anne-Marie: Or it could make a great Quizzler.
David: Oh, yeah.
Anne-Marie: How do you end up with a stroke that’s thick on top and bottom…
David: Well, we’re not going to do that Quizzler today. We’ll wait a few to…
Anne-Marie: [laughs] We’ll save it for like a few episodes when everybody forgets about this one.
David: Right. It’s really problematic in a lot of ways but they’re getting closer. They’re getting closer–CS4, I’m absolutely convinced CS4, they’ll figure out the scaling thing. But for right now, there’s still insanity; you just have to understand the insanity.
Anne-Marie: They’re trying. It’s good to see that they’re trying.
David: They really are. They want it to work and they did for the majority of people that gotten rid of that text size and parenthesis thing.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Which is great, I’m very happy about that. If you only get that text size and parenthesis thing now, when you have changed your preferences to adjust scaling percentage.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. OK.
David: OK. Well, that was a lot of stuff about scaling.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. All right the obscure InDesign feature of the week -
Anne-Marie and David: Eek-eek. Eek.
Anne-Marie: Gap Color.
David: THE Gap Color.
Anne-Marie: All right so I have created…I know it has to do with strokes.
David: Yeah, you make a line or stroke or something around something and you go to the strokes panel or palette or whatever you want to call it and there is an option for gap color. But it’s grayed out, it’s always grayed out. Why is that grayed out?
Anne-Marie: It’s grayed out because dumkoff, you have chosen a stroke that doesn’t have a gap.
David: Maaahh, that’s what it is.
Anne-Marie: Undo it right this, the default solid stroke is gapless,
David: That poor thing. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: But if you click on the drop down menu, you can see there are tons of other strokes that have some black and some nothing, that’s the gap and nothing is the gap.
David: And nothing is the gap.
Anne-Marie: So, if you choose thick, thin or triple or even dash or dotted, those all have gaps.
David: Yup.
Anne-Marie: That means that you can make a two-color stroke.
David: Exactly.
Anne-Marie: So, once you choose one of those as a type then the gap color field becomes enabled and you can see by default that it’s none. So, if you put that stroke on top of a colored background or an image you could see through the gap. Some people don’t like that and so they’ll change it to field with paper because they want it to be just white and black stroke or you can go crazy and choose any kind of color that you’d like for the second color.
David: You know, there are all sorts of things that you can you with that gap color. One of the things that we use in Real World InDesign (we’re trying to get Real World InDesign CS3 out the door, we’re almost done) and in that book we use a lot of call outs and we’ve got a little caption for an illustration and then we have a line that’s a call out to something in the illustration.
But if we just use the regular black line, like 0.25 point line, you wouldn’t be able to see it on top of the illustration, right? So, we want something that has a black line that actually knocks out to white a little bit so you can actually see it.
So, we use this gap color feature all the time. We draw a one-point line, we set the stroke type, it’s actually a custom, what we made, but it’s basically thick. It’s basically two black lines in parallel and then we set the stroke color to white (the paper) and…
Anne-Marie: Ah.
David: …we set the gap color to black.
Anne-Marie: Interesting.
David: We turned it around. So, basically what we end up with is a line that looks like a one-third point line, it’s about 0.3 thickness line wherever we’ve drawn the line and it has a white push back. It actually knocks out to white…
Anne-Marie: That’s excellent! That is a great tip. You should send that into InDesign Magazine, they might publish it and send you 25 bucks.
David: Oooh, maybe I’ll do that.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: That’s a good idea. That would be an awesome idea or maybe we’d put it on the website even. But then I wouldn’t get my 25 bucks.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: [laughs] So there you go.
Anne-Marie: That is a great tip. I have never heard of using that yet.
David: That makes perfect sense. So, that’s how I like using gap color.
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: So, that’s it for episode #56. We’d love to get your feedback about anything we talked about in the episode, even gap color. You can post a comment in a show note. That’s the best way to do it. Just go to InDesignSecrets.com and click on the show and then reply in the show notes there or email us at info @ InDesignSecrets.com. We can’t always respond to the emails immediately but we definitely try and get back to you as soon as we can.
Anne-Marie: That’s right and until we meet again, people. 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 056 page.