Podcast 060 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 060 page.
Anne-Marie “HerGeekness” Concepcion: Today’s show is brought to you by Audible. Please visit audiblepodcast.com/InDesign for your free audio book download.
[music]
David “Mr. InDesign” Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets, episode 60. I am David Blatner, I am here along with my cost Anne-Marie Concepcion.
Anne-Marie: Hi David, hi everybody.
David: Our podcast and blog at InDesignsecrets.com are the independent resource for all things InDesign.
Anne-Marie: …ign …ign …ign…and here’s what we’re going to cover in episode 60, we have some bits of news and then we’re going to talk about a topic called ‘what is that’…
David: What is that?
Anne-Marie: Definitions, definitions for things that people have been emailing us and saying what is this. So we spend all afternoon looking them up and then we’ll answer them like we know everything.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Then also a topic for today ‘When indexing fails’, yikes, there is a horrible glitch in CS3.
David: Yeah, we better mention that.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, and the obscure InDesign Feature of the Week, eek eek eek…is the Erase tool.
David: Yes, the Erase tool.
Anne-Marie: So what’s in the news, David?
David: Well, lost of news. Last week I went to the InDesign Conference in beautiful Tokyo.
Anne-Marie: Oh yeah?
David: Yeah, it was a great show. We had hundreds of people show up a lot of interest in InDesign and the Japanese community, oh and they’re just doing some beautiful, amazing stuff with InDesign, really fascinating. So we’re going to be writing some of that up for InDesign Magazine actually and not in this coming issue but that one after I hope to get some good examples, really beautiful stuff.
So that was fun, it’s also particularly interesting demoing InDesign, actually training in InDesign using the Japanese version which has, it’s a totally Japanese user interface, so that was dicey but it works because you know, most of the things were in the same place and you know, you’ve worked with InDesign long enough, you know.
All right, about half way down the file menu is such and such and…
Anne-Marie: Right, one of these things is filled with placeholder text.
David: Yeah, exactly.
Anne-Marie: It’s either that or it’s unagi sushi…
David: Did have some great sushi while we were there, that was wonderful, wonderful Japanese food and my favorite thing, my favorite meal on the planet is Japanese breakfast. Sosho Ku is just amazing and it was… had great food there.
So that was good and the show went well and that and more on that in the future. Other news, there’s the PDF2ID plugin was shipped last week while we were all in Japan actually, yes and that’s a pretty cool plugin and actually lets you open PDF files in InDesign as editable objects. It actually deconstructs the PDF in terms of InDesign objects which is pretty amazing.
This company, Recosoft has been doing this for a while, like turning PDF files into Word documents or something but they, this is a big step forward because they’re actually maintaining the page geometry and so on. Its not perfect, it’s really more of a like emergency use only, like if someone sends you a PDF and they have deleted the InDesign file and you need to get that stuff out of there, it’s pretty cool but it’s not…
Anne-Marie: I played with the beta of it I think at the one of the InDesign Conferences. I sat down with a guy and I recall that there was a dialogue box that let you setup some sort of parameters for like how deeply should it deconstruct everything and…
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Because there are some things that it can recognize, it can turn to an image or should it try to, you know, extract every little bit of text as it comes out. They did a really good job.
David: Yeah, it is a surprisingly good job and it’s not perfect, I mean there’s a lot of stuff that gets lost in the translation to PDF, right? Like character styles, paragraph styles, I mean that stuff isn’t in the PDF so there’s no way to get it out again as…
Anne-Marie: And if you don’t have the fonts, obviously it’s not going to un-embed the fonts.
David: That’s right.
Anne-Marie: So it’s just going to replace it with you know, the substitute fonts.
David: Right, in fact fonts are one of those things we’ve actually had to look at that dialogue box pretty carefully and kind of hidden in there. There’s a whole font mapping thing. It tells you what fonts are in the PDF and it lets you map them to what fonts you have on your system. So yeah, you definitely have to look in that dialogue box kind of deep, pretty cool stuff thoug. So definitely check that out. We’ll put a link on our show notes for that.
On the website of course, a lot of activity on the website. Pariah Burke, one of our contributors, did a five part series on how to get cool underlines for tab leaders and all kinds of leaders.
Anne-Marie: A five part series on tabs.
David: It was pretty amazing.
Anne-Marie: I think more than has been written about tabs ever in the history of humankind.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: He has covered it up, down, sideways, inside out, from the basics to the coolest techniques to automating them to… It’s unbelieveable.
David: It was pretty cool.
Anne-Marie: Lots of cool screen shots. I think we should republish that and sell it for $50.
David: Good idea. I like that.
But before we do that, you can check it out free at designsecrets.com. Go read through that. Very cool stuff.
I went berserk and starting writing all about how to do multiple outlines on text. Keeping the text editable, but then start doing multiple outlines.
Anne-Marie: Which is something that I thought you could only do in Illustrator.
David: Right, but any…
Anne-Marie: multiple strokes to an object.
David: But if you’re tweaked out enough. If you’re really geeky about it, you can do it in InDesign, too.
That was pretty cool.
Then coming up, of course, is the Chicago Creative Suite Show and the Web Design Conference. Those are two conference happening in the same week in Chicago the week of the 15th through 20th.
The Creative Suite Conference and the Web Design Conference. Basically web design for designers. Not for developers, but for the designers who want to get up on Flash, HTML, CSS, and all that kind of stuff.
It’s going to be a fun show.
Anne-Marie: Figure out what Flex is and things like that.
David: We’re both going to be there. Come hang out. We’re also working on the Miami show. If your calendar reaches into 2008, do check out/put on their calendar February 26th through the 29th is the InDesign Conference in Miami, Florida. Anne-Marie and I will also be there doing lots of cool InDesign stuff.
As we mentioned earlier, this episode is sponsored by audible.com. They’re the Internet’s leading provider of spoken audio entertainment, providing digital versions of tens of thousands of audio books for download to your computer, your iPod, mp3 player, whatever. It’s a lot like listening to the podcast that you’re listening to right now. InDesign Tips or anything like that, but it’s audiobooks. Full length audiobooks.
You can actually get a free audiobook if you go to audible.com–actually you go to audiblepodcast.com–a special url–audiblepodcast.com/InDesign and you can download a free audiobook.
I just downloaded the “America” by the Daily Show. It’s very, very funny.
Anne-Marie: I love that Jon Stewart book. I used to be an audible.com member and one of my favorite books there is Frank McCort’s “Angela’s Ashes”. If you haven’t read that yet, or maybe even if you have. He narrates it himself. He’s got such a beautiful narrative voice with his Irish accent. It’s beautiful to listen to.
David: That sounds great. They’ve got 40,000 titles–all kinds of books that you can download. Again just go to audiblepodcasts.com/InDesign for your free audio book today.
We’d better move along to interesting things…
Anne-Marie: The next topic… What is that thing?
David: What is that thing?
Anne-Marie: What is that thing? We’ve got so many questions… What is XML? We get asked that a lot. What is XML?
David: Or GREP. What is GREP?
Anne-Marie: Or I’ve been training today and I got about six questions about does InDesign do text? Does it do Quark tags? That’s a question I hear. Does it do Quark tags? What are Quark tags? Oh, yes. Tag text.
David: We can’t, we don’t have enough time, space, bandwidth to go into how to do XML in great detail here, but let’s just explain what some of these things are. Because they’re important. It’s important to know what some of these weird sounding things are. Like XML.
Anne-Marie: XML. Extensible Markup Language.
David: That’s good. The next one is… [laughter]
Anne-Marie: XML is the way to describe a file, yes? The way to associate tags with content. And the tags you can make up on your own.
David: I like to think of it in terms of… It’s the way to separate the form of something from its function. Basically, what is this thing? Well, that’s not a great example. Basically, you have, for example, a bunch of text. It could be pictures. It could be text. It could be pretty much anything. You need to describe what that thing is. So in HTML, we’re used to saying things like this is an H1. This is a heading. Make it a heading.
But in XML, we could say it could be a heading. It could be an ingredient in a recipe. It could be a name of a car. It could be anything, you are just tagging it with some label and that basically all comes…
Anne-Marie: Yeah, it is somewhat different than HTML, like HTML I think a lot of the markup is for forms, so this is, emphasis this is strong, this is H1. In XML, the markup is more for like an identifier, this is the author, this is the title, this is an ingredient.
David: What that thing is?
Anne-Marie: Yes, what that thing is and then you take that…
David: As opposed to what it looks like.
Anne-Marie: Once that content is tagged with XML tags, then if you want to convert it to a website, then you’d say, “If it is an author, if the tag is author, then format it with this CSS rule and if it is body, format it with the CSS rule” and so on.
David: But all of that happens later, I mean the XML itself has no form at all. It has no, there is no description of what the stuff should look like, it only describes what it is. And then you could later put it on the web or you could put it into InDesign and you could put it into five different InDesign documents and each InDesign document could have different rules about what to do with that XML. And so when it flows into InDesign document it says, “Strip out all the authors, make all the titles, anything that has a title tag, make it look like this, put this over here and so on.” So, all of those things, all the form is handled by InDesign, none of that is in XML itself.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, pretty good.
David: So that’s just the quick version of XML. XML is all about separating stuff out, just the information itself, so that you can later figure out what to do with it.
Anne-Marie: I think we should do more in-depth maybe in the future about XML?
David: Yeah, we should.
Anne-Marie: From actual like applied things and things you can try, but also if they create a Suit Conference, I think we are going to be doing–there is a guy doing a session on XML.
David: Yeah, I think Jim Maivald, I think, is doing the XML thing, right?
Anne-Marie: Yes, that’s right, they are my good friends.
David: So, it is going to be great.
Anne-Marie: Uh-uh.
David: So, let’s talk about GREP for a second, GREP…GREP…GREP…GREP…GREP…
Anne-Marie: We used to make GREP a lot whenever we’d go camping when I was a kid.
David: Yeah, yeah, yeah and then it is very good to eat while you are on a trail.
Anne-Marie: It is like oatmeal with chocolate chips and sugar and all that kind of stuff…
David: It is Gorp.
Anne-Marie: It is Gorp.
David: Goop or Gorp? We called it Gorp.
Anne-Marie: A Gorp?
David: But GREP, GREP is something different. GREP is general…
Anne-Marie: [laughs].
David: I don’t know what it is said, you know what it is, general regular expression p–
Anne-Marie: Parsing.
David: Parsing, good, there you go.
Anne-Marie: Something like that.
David: So GREP, how do you explain GREP?
Anne-Marie: I can explain it, GREP is a way to do pattern-based searching.
David: Good, good.
Anne-Marie: So, in find and replace, you know, like you can search for the word “Anne” and replace it with “David.” But what if you have a story that has a lot of parenthetical comments that say “parenthesis Anne” or “parenthesis David.” And what you want to do is apply a character style to everything in between parenthesis regardless of what the content is in between the parenthesis.
David: Got it.
Anne-Marie: So you are telling it, you want to find change–to look for a pattern of an open and closed parenthesis and then everything inside there you want to do something to.
David: Yep, GREP is basically all about finding patterns. If you have no pattern to search for, you can’t do GREP. But as soon as you identify a pattern like it starts–I need all the words that start with “a” and end with “e” and it doesn’t matter how big they are. That is a pattern. And you can then use GREP to search for that. You could say, “Find me all of the–I want the period at the end of a story, but not the end of a sentence, ” right. So only the period at the end of the story, you could find that kind of thing. So there is a lot of patterns there that you can search for and then once you find them, then you can replace them with more GREP like you could say, you know, you could rearrange what it found. You could do all sorts of fun things with it. Like if you have a list of names, it would be very easy to search for the first word up to a coma and then anything after the coma and then reverse them. So, maybe you want all of your last names first or first names last or whatever, so you can do that kind of searching and change with a change tool. So, very very powerful.
Anne-Marie: So I guess you could say with GREP you can search for a pattern and you can replace with a different pattern?
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: That is one way of looking at it.
David: Or you could replace with formatting. I mean one of the coolest things I think about the way GREP is implemented in Design CS3 is you can search for a pattern and then like you were saying apply a character style or change the tracking of it or change the color or whatever…
Anne-Marie: To whatever it found?
David: Right. So, very very handy. You don’t have to hange what it says, you don’t actually have to change the words even with supply formatting to it. So, it’s very cool. GREP is wonderful.
Anne-Marie Concepcion: The GREP has been around for a long time. It’s usually part of… you know, programmers know GREP and like if you ever do any work in Unix like in Terminal OS and there’s GREP function built in there. Because programmers often need to search through programs which are plain text files and do things to the texts and commands. So, they needed a much more powerful find change and now that GREP has been brought into InDesign so that people can actually do GREP-based searches for the content inside stories.
David: Yeah. So, that’s what GREP is all about and it’s very powerful in InDesign CS3, it’s not in previous versions. In earlier versions like The InDesigner or Michael Murphy just did…this was like a year ago…did a whole thing about GREP before CS3 came out.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: He did a whole thing about GREP, at how you can export content. Export your stories out, do GREP searches on them and replaces and then import the content again. So, that’s how people used to do it.
Anne-Marie: If you export it as tag texts then you can do GREP searches like in a program like Text Wrangler, BBEdit or other programs on the PCLs. I’m sure that you can do GREP searches easily.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And then that way after it’s done when you bring it back in, it retains all the formatting.
David: Yeah. I always do on the PCLs using things and wild at it and there’s lots and lots of plug-ins. And lots of utilities out there on the PC that do GREP. But you’ve mentioned something there…tag texts? What is that? What is tag text? [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Yes. Tag texts in references to our…right, our next item–Tag text is a plain text file with codes in it that describe formatting in a layout program.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: So, a lot of people are familiar with this with QuarkXPress because it’s been around forever. If you export…if you do a save text as in a story and you choose QuarkXPress tags, then you end up with a plain text files with little tags that say: “OK, this particular body style starts here.” or “This particular character style, this particular formatting starts here.”
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: And then you can edit text in any kind of word processor and then bring it back in and when you bring in a plain text file, there has Quark tags in it in Quark then it converts these Quark tags back to Quark formatting like style sheets.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Well InDesign, it has the same capability. Yes, it can do tags. It can’t do Quark tags, it’s for Quark layout program. It has its own flavor which is similar called “InDesign Tag Texts”. So, if you want to see what it looks like, click with your type tool inside any story and then go to file export and from the export, from the format drop down menu at the bottom of the export dialog box, choose Adobe InDesign tag text.
So, you’ll see that it’s going to change the file extension to txt, it’s going to be a plain text file and then open that up in like Microsoft Word or something and you’ll see what the tags look like.
I believe there’s a whole PDF guide that comes with the program called InDesign Tag Text or something like that.
David: Yeah, it’s hidden. That did describes what all those codes mean.
Anne-Marie: Right. And you can do things like you can export stuff out of the data base and have the data base automatically add texts for you.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And people did that a lot with QuarkXPress.
David: Oh, yeah. This is a huge time saver for a lot of people.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: You create this calculation fields that basically add upon export to your hard drive. As you’re exporting the data, it automatically adds the proper formatting via these tag texts codes to the data and then you just import it in the InDesign and boom, all the texts are formatted right out of the data base.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: It’s really, really easy to do. Surprisingly easy to do and it’s built in InDesign. A lot of people don’t even know it’s there. Now, there is, if you had been using express tags from the old QuarkXPress days, if you have been using express tags, you actually can get those into InDesign.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: But in order to do that, you need a plug-in. There’s a plug-in from Em Software called inTags, is it inTags or is it Xtags? I think it’s XTags for InDesign. I think they used to call it inTags. But it’s XTags for InDesign and actually they understand XPress tags better than anybody and it lets you import those right in into InDesign.
In fact, it gives you even more tags than normal QuarkXPress or InDesign because there’s a lot of stuff that the normal tag text stuff cannot do that their plug-in can. So, it’s very powerful. Definitely check that out.
Anne-Marie: I think…right, if you already have a big work flow already built on that then it might be useful if you’re moving from Quark to InDesign to go ahead and invest in that plug-in. But I think these days, if you’re starting from scratch and you’re trying to figure out a way to do publishing from a database, then you probably going to go either with something simple like Data Merge, right?
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: …inside InDesign or you’re going to XML based work.
David: Oh, I don’t know. I would disagree. I think in some ways tag text is actually even easier than either of those systems.
Anne-Marie: I know it’s easier than XML.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: I don’t know if it’s easier than data merge.
David: Oh, I think so, especially for certain kinds of things.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: Certain kinds of layouts. And again, with Em Software’s plugin, you can even do more than you could do with data merge or anything like that. I agree that, especially in XTags for InDesign, there’s an extra cost involved and so on. But even if you were just using the free tag text thing, I think there’s a lot of stuff you can do from spreadsheets or databases that, why bother going through the data merge mishigoss, just to get stuff into InDesign?
So I think it’s very powerful. I’m a big believer in tag text, so I definitely encourage people to look into that whenever possible.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: I guess the one other thing that came up recently–we could go on and on about what is that thing…
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: But the one other thing that came up recently in an email was discretionary line breaks. What the heck is a discretionary line break?
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: So we should just mention that quickly.
Anne-Marie: It’s a new feature in CS3, the ability to add a discretionary line break.
David: Is it?
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: No…
Anne-Marie: Yes, yes. In CS2, we did a podcast where somebody said that they wanted to be able to insert a discretionary line break, and we got a script from Dave Saunders that does that.
David: Oh! You’re right! Wow!
Anne-Marie: It’s new in CS3, the actual special character.
David: That’s funny. I’ve been using CS3 so long now that I completely forgot that that was new. So, discretionary line break, basically, you can put it in the middle of a word or a phrase, anywhere you want–middle of a URL, let’s say–and it will break with no hyphen. It’s just a way to say, “If you’re at the end of the line and you need to break, go ahead and break here. Don’t put a hyphen. Just break.”
Anne-Marie: That’s right, instead of a soft return. Because that way, if you edit the text, and now it doesn’t need to break, then you won’t get a stupid soft return still sitting there.
David: Exactly.
Anne-Marie: It’s discretionary. It means it goes away if you don’t need it, on it’s own.
David: Right, right.
Anne-Marie: Like a discretionary hyphen does.
David: Yep, yep. It’s great.
Anne-Marie: And people use it a lot in URLs because they’ll add a break like after a slash or something like that. You don’t want to add a hyphen inside a URL, because people will often just type in the hyphen, which would be incorrect.
David: Yeah. Yep. All right, those are just a few things. If there are other things that you are wondering, “What the heck is that?” do email us at info @ InDesignSecrets.com, and we’ll try and answer that in a future show.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: But in the meantime, we’d better talk about indexing.
Anne-Marie: All right. So, David, what is this indexing glitch?
David: [laughs] Well, it’s a huge, huge problem. If you do indexing in InDesign CS3, you need to know that indexing is severely broken, primarily for books. Indexing across multiple documents in a book is really broken. And Adobe knows about it, and they’re going to fix it, but they haven’t yet, and I’m sure any day now. [laughs] Now that we’re talking about, it’ll probably come out tomorrow.
Anne-Marie: Wow.
David: But any day now, they’ll fix it. But it really messes up your indexes across books. Page numbers are totally wrong, and things get dropped, and it’s a mess. So there are several workarounds for this.
I think Olav Kvern may have actually posted a script on the Adobe forums–we should go look for that–that merges all of your documents in a book into one huge InDesign file. And then you can index that, because indexing withing a single file seems to work OK. At least the times I’ve tried it, it seems to work fine. But it’s indexing across multiple books. So if they’re all merged into a single document, it should work OK. Or you could manually just put all of the documents into a single document using “move pages.”
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: And that will work as well in CS3. Or, in some situations, you could just index each document individually, and then do a merge and purge of each of those indexes into a single index.
Anne-Marie: Oy.
David: Yeah, that’s definitely an “oy.”
Anne-Marie: Sounds like a job for GREP.
[laughter]
David: It could, but there’s no patterns there.
Anne-Marie: Couldn’t you also export each of those chapters to InDesign Interchange, open them up in CS2, reassemble the book, run the index in CS2?
David: Sure. Great idea. Yep, yep. If you still have CS2 around, you could also do that. Open them in CS2.
Anne-Marie: Or just hire an indexer.
David: Which is my favorite solution.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. [laughs]
David: I indexed many books by myself over the years, and it’s horrible. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. So now, we hire indexers, and it makes everything better. [laughs] So we just want to let you know that that is a problem in CS3, and there are some solutions–none of them great, but at least they’re OK.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. And so, don’t think it’s you going crazy if you can’t get it to work in CS3 with a book.
David: Yeah, yeah.
Anne-Marie: It is an actual known bug.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And if you’ve never done an index, by the way, I just have to put another recommendation for Michael Murphy’s videocast series on long document production. He has, I think, at least two videocasts on making indexes.
David: Good point, yeah. He really goes into some great detail.
Anne-Marie: They’re very good, very well done.
David: Yeah, very well done. OK, so we better do the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week…
Anne-Marie and David: [together] Eek, eek, eek, eek, eek…
Anne-Marie: That is the Erase tool.
David: Mm-hmm.
Anne-Marie: And I think with the Erase tool, then we will be finished with obscure InDesign features having to do with the drawing tools.
David: [laughs] Maybe, I don’t know. There might be more in there.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, we did the smooth tool, right?
David: Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Anne-Marie: OK, so the Erase tool is an alternative tool. It’s grouped with the pencil tool. So if you press and hold down the pencil tool on your toolbar, you’ll see Smooth and Erase. And the Erase tool has a little tiny pink eraser at the end of it. And I personally have never, ever used it for anything.
David: Oh, really? Oh, I have!
Anne-Marie: You use it?
David: Oh yeah, yeah. It’s obscure, but it’s great.
Anne-Marie: It drives me crazy that it only works on lines that you’ve drawn with the pen or the pencil tool.
David: No, no, no.
Anne-Marie: I would like it to work with anything.
David: No, it works with anything. Anything.
Anne-Marie: OK, show me how.
David: So here’s the trick. The number one problem with the eraser tool is that you have to look at the eraser on the little icon, not the tip of the pencil.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: It’s sort of in the lower-left corner. So you have to drag the eraser part of the icon over something. So let’s say you draw a rectangle or a square or an oval or whatever, and you want to have an opening in it, right?
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: So you just draw your frame, and then drag the eraser tool over the piece that you want. You can’t click on it. You have to drag it over a chunk of it, as though you were erasing that piece of it, and it’ll actually erase part of that and turn it into a compound path. Does that work for you? Is that working?
Anne-Marie: That’s working. You know, what I was trying it on was text frames.
David: Oh. It doesn’t work on text frames?
Anne-Marie: Nuh-uh, just ignores them.
David: Well, that’s interesting.
Anne-Marie: Yes, I know.
David: I hadn’t noticed that, because I’m usually doing it on… I want to make some kind of shape, like, again, you draw a circle, and then you want to open a piece of it to make it more like a C…
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: So you can just kind of draw over a chunk of it, and that just opens that up. It erases that. Well, that’s interesting that it doesn’t work on text frames. You were right. I am trying it right now. It does not. So the trick is, you convert the text frame into a different kind, like an unassigned frame, and then erase it, and then turn it back. Of course, you’d lose all your text, any text that was in there, but…
Anne-Marie: Yeah. Well, I didn’t think there would be… I was starting with an empty text frame, trying to see, could it create a partially open text frame.
David: Right. But if you do a regular frame–not a text frame, but a graphic frame or an unassigned frame–you can cut open pieces of it, and then you could click on that with the type tool and actually fill it with text, as long as, in CS3, there’s that preference that says whether or not it’ll convert non-text frames into text frames. But if that preference is turned on, then you can just click on it with the type tool and start typing in it, and it fills.
Anne-Marie: What’s this bit about a compound path? I’m not seeing that either. When I use the eraser tool on a rectangle that I’ve drawn, and then erase little bits and pieces of it, it converts each little bits and piece into its own shape, either a line, or if I’ve got a corner in there and I click on it, I get a rectangular bounding box around it. If I click on it with the regular selection tool, I don’t get the entire rectangle that I started with.
David: Well, that’s only because you’re right. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Oh, all right.
David: I was being fooled. I was being fooled. You’re right. It does not turn into a compound path; you would have to do that manually.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: I apologize. I was disseminating bad information.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: But the rest of it works just fine.
Anne-Marie: The rest of it works…
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: And you’re right, when you start with like a circle and you want to make a C, it’s better than the Scissors tool, because as you erase stuff, it actually erases parts of subpaths.
David: Mm-hmm.
Anne-Marie: When you’re done erasing, it puts an endpoint at either end of what you didn’t erase.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Which is something the Scissors tool can’t do. And it’s kind of neat.
David: Yeah. I mean, it’s obscure. It’s not something you’re going to use every day, but it can come in handy when you want to do a little fine-tuning, a little finessing, of your objects.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. All right. Well, that’s wonderful. Thank you very much.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: And I think that is it for episode numero 60.
David: There you go!
Anne-Marie: We’d love to get your feedback about anything we talked about. You can post a comment in the show notes in the blog at InDesignSecrets.com, or email us at info @ InDesignSecrets.com, and we will try our best to get back to you. And until we meet again, this is Anne-Marie and…
David: David Blatner, for InDesign Secrets.
[music]
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 060 page.