Podcast 063 Transcript

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 063 page.

[music]

Anne-Marie Concepción: Today’s show is brought to you by Audible. Please visit Audiblepodcast.com/InDesign for your free audio book download.[music]

Anne-Marie: Welcome to InDesign Secrets episode 63. I am Anne-Marie Concepción and I’m here along with my co-host David Blatner.

David Blatner: Well, howdy-do?

Anne-Marie: Howdy-do David, how are you today?

David: I’m very well thank you, and you?

Anne-Marie: That’s wonderful!

David: I’m doing pretty good, yes.

Anne-Marie: Excellent. Our podcast and blog at InDesignsecrets.com are Independent Resource for All things InDesign. [echoes]

David: And here is what we’re going to be covering in today’s episode, we’ll be talking a little bit about Creative Suite and the Web Design Conferences in Chicago last week that we’re at. I just have to go on a little about my favorite new little tech toy that I got and I’ll tell you all about that.

We are also going to be talking about one of the most frequently asked InDesign questions at the conference.

Anne-Marie: Looks weird. Looks like a conspiracy.

David: It was! It was really fascinating. So we will talk a little bit about that and also the hot button blog post of the week, has to do with Leopard support for InDesign. Which is one of those things. Leopards and panthers and tigers and various animals seem to have a thing for InDesign, so there you go, we’ll talk about that, and the obscure InDesign feature of the week is Reset To Base. There we go, so that’s what we’re going to talk about.

Anne-Marie: All your bases will belong to us?

David: [laughs] That’s right, “All your base are belong to us.” As we mentioned earlier, this episode is sponsored by audible.com. They’re the Internet’s leading provider of spoken audio entertainment. They’ve got about 40,000 titles. All kinds of audio books you can download and listen to. What are you listening to these days, Ms. Anne-Marie?

Anne-Marie: I downloaded Enders Game by Orson Scott Card, one of my very favorite books and one of the narrators is Harlan Ellison.

David: Really? Wow!

Anne-Marie: Yes! It’s very cool! How about you?

David: I just downloaded Steven Colbert’s I am America and so can you, which I am just about to start listening to and I’m really, really curious. I’ve heard so many good things about it.

Hey listen, any of you out there InDesign Secrets land can download your own free book. If you haven’t signed up for this already, you can get any of their books free by going to audiblepodcast.com/InDesign. That will be in the show notes as well but it’s a special url audiblepodcast.com/InDesign. You can download a free audio book.

Anne-Marie: All right, so the Creative Suite Conference in Chicago last week and the Web Design Conference which followed fast on its heels, I thought it went pretty good.

David: Yes it was great! Big success and lots of people. We had over 300 people come just for the Creative Suite Conference, then a few hundred more for the other show. Big success and I learned lots of things. I learned things and the attendees seemed very happy.

Anne-Marie: Yeah they did. It was really neat to see a lot of old friends. As usual, every time I go to a conference, I’ll be talking to somebody then see somebody in the periphery giving me a funny look and I don’t recognize this person, but every time I glance over, they’ve got this funny grin and coming closer and I’ll look at them and say, “Yeah? What’s your problem?”

David: [laughs]

Anne-Marie: “I recognize your voice from the podcast! Anne-Marie, Oh my gosh! I love that podcast! You guys really rock, Oh my God!” But it’s weird having your voice being recognized.

David: It’s true. It’s true.

Anne-Marie: It is strange.

David: I think one of the highlights of the show for me, really was doing that essential InDesign tips session.

Anne-Marie: Oh was that fun or what?

David: That was. We did an hour long session on the essential tricks and tips that every InDesign user needs to know and it was hysterical.

Anne-Marie: You and I together live in front of an audience of millions. It was great!

David: It was! Ever since we realized, we could only have one microphone that we had to share between us, it just spiraled down from there.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, yeah.

David: But it was very good and they told me it was videoed. That it was recorded properly.

Anne-Marie: Oh good!

David: I’m looking forward to getting that, and if it looks or sounds good, we’ll make it available for sale here, or the website or something.

Anne-Marie: That’s wonderful! Yeah. If you couldn’t get to the Creative Suite Conference or the Web Design Conference you may not know that they are going to start selling recordings of each sessions.

David: Yep.

Anne-Marie: Or you could buy every single session as one whole show package. So it records what the presenter is saying and what is on their screen, which is being broadcasted on a large screen to the attendees.

David: Right. Right. Although you know you won’t get any of the site gags that came up.

Anne-Marie: That’s true. We had a lot of site gags.

[laughter]

David: There were a lot of visuals. But other than that, you will hear that we had a little bit of fun in that session. Anyway it was a good conference and Sandee Cowan was there…

Anne-Marie: Pete McLellan and who else?

David: Burtman Roy. It was great. It really was a big plus. I mean Chris Converse was doing a bunch of stuff on Flash and Dreamweaver. Brian Wood from Evolve was there doing lots of stuff, mostly for the Web Design Conference. Michael Mennis who is now the InDesign product manager. We had him talking about Photoshop.

[laughter]

David: He wasn’t even talking about design.

Anne-Marie: He is a Photoshop pro! He has been writing about Photoshop for a while.

David: I know, many years but he is now taking all his information of all his background and putting it toward InDesign. So that’s good for the future of InDesign. Anyway, that was good. Listen, one of the things that I had with me at the conference was a scanner. I actually brought my favorite new desktop scanner, my favourite new little technology.

Anne-Marie: I saw you walking around with that thing. It’s a very small scanner, it’s about the size of half of the toaster.

David: Yeah it’s like half a toaster and it’s the Fujitsu Scan Snap. You may have heard about this thing, basically it’s a document scanner. This is not for photographs, this is for scanning documents. I was using it at the show to scan all the evaluations. You know we have 1,000 pieces of paper that I needed to scan in to digitize it. So I just brought it out there, plugged it in, and it scans at about 35-36 pages a minute, double-sided. So it scans both sides of the page at the same time.

Anne-Marie: Oh, that’s cool!

David: That’s very cool. Color or black and white. If there is nothing on the back side it sees it and it just ignores it. So it actually can tell, “should I scan both sides or not” and it scans it right into a PDF. It also comes with the Read Iris software so you can OCR what it scans in. So even though, and I know this has nothing to do with InDesign, I just had to go on about it because I’m so excited about this thing. I have also been scanning, you know I write books for Peach Pit, as do you, Anne-Marie. I have this huge stack of royalty reports which are just tables. Page after page of tables of numbers.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: Showing zero, zero, zero, two dollars, one dollar. [laughs]

So [laughs] that’s sad! I just have these stacks and I can’t let myself throw them away, so now I am scanning them all. Again, it goes so fast that I can scan these things, I can scan a huge pile of them in about five minutes, ten minutes and then once I have them scanned it saves it to PDF and I can OCR it, so I can search it later. Then I just throw it all in the shredder. It’s great. It’s really helping me organize my office and get things under control which is just awesome.

Anne-Marie: Wow.

David: It’s so portable. I could just bring it anywhere I want and scan stuff. So again, this is not specifically InDesign related but anyone who… pretty much everyone I know who uses InDesign, has too much paper sitting around and this, I think is going to be really.

Anne-Marie: Everybody’s got too much paper! Maybe we should call them and be a sponsor.

David: [laughs] There you go! All right.

Anne-Marie: [laughs] We already wasted it though.

David: We should have but…

Anne-Marie: You know, ever since I saw you walking around with that, then I see all these same ads for the same scanner, it’s very cool. Does it do, can I drop business cards in there?

David: Yeah! You could put business cards in, you could put envelopes in. I have not tried it myself but I saw a demo at a show which is where I first saw this thing. I saw them put business cards in and it seemed to work.

Anne-Marie: Hmm.

David: I was putting in all kinds of different sizes in there and it seems to work OK. Again, you know, you can’t put a book in there. I wouldn’t put a photograph that I care a lot about, you know because it rolls it through. It has a document feeder.

Anne-Marie: Oh.

David: So it rolls it through. It’s really designed for papers.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: That kind of thing.

Anne-Marie: OK.

David: Anyway, I just wanted to mention it because I have been very impressed with it.

Anne-Marie: Oh yeah. Good. All right, so lets go on to something a little bit more InDesign specific.

David: OK.

Anne-Marie: That was–at the show, it’s a very family-convivial formal relationship between the speakers and the organizers and all the attendees. One of my favourite parts about the shows that Barry and Marty put on. So, the speakers as they are walking around talking with the attendees are constantly being asked questions, “Oh, it is my chance to finally ask David Blatner, a question I have been having about InDesign and everybody else.” and the question that David and I kept getting asked by various people at various times was, “Is there anyway for InDesign to create a calendar layout with a vertical spine?” So that the…

David: Right, horizontal spine.

Anne-Marie: … page one is on top and page two is underneath.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: Or fast ways to put together a calendar. Even during our dual tip session, one of the questions was how do we do a calendar and it was like, “Oh my gosh, this must be…” I guess I was thinking about doing the 2008 calendar to this time of year.

David: I think so. Because we have also gotten several emails about this as well, and you had posted something in the blog about one trick of doing this. So, why don’t you just walk through that briefly?

Anne-Marie: Sure.

David: I am also going to write up a little bit of this in InDesign Magazine, go into a little bit more detail with it there.

Anne-Marie: You are going to take my blog post and rewrite it and publish it in InDesign Magazine, is that it?

David: Well, there is more, I am going to go even more, bigger. All right, I will give you a buck or better.

Anne-Marie: [laughs] All right well, basically, all I could explain was a workaround trick, and the answer at this point, is there is no way to put a horizontal spine to have page one be on the top and then have something bleed into page two underneath it unfortunately. But what you can do is you can use–you can do it like in a two-document trick.

So, in the first document, you create a calendar that is the actual final size of an entire spread. So say, 11 inches across by 17 inches down, and you go ahead and lay that out with your pictures on the top and the dates on the bottom. Even if the picture extends into the bottom half of your calendar, that is OK. So when you are done, you save that.

Now, if you are using InDesign CS3, that is all you have to do. If you are using CS2 or earlier, you need to export that to PDF, because then the next step is you crate a second document that has a page size that is equal to either the top half or the bottom half, just a single non effacing pages document. This is going to be the one that you are going to send to your printer, to your commercial printer.

David: Right, right.

Anne-Marie: Then you import either the InDesign document, if you are using CS3 or the PDF document, if you are using something earlier, into very large image frames on each page. So page one has the top half of the first spread, page two has the bottom half of the first spread and so on. I explain how you deal with bleeds and stuff in the post, and I go into a little bit more detail. You only have to do that once, because then the thing is that from then on whenever you want to modify the design, you modify the source document, that really big document. Then in the second document, you just choose update the links and then it is updated.

David: Right. Because remember, especially in CS3, where you have actually imported the InDesign document into the new InDesign document, to update the original, you just do an edit original, right? You just option, double click on it, it opens the original InDesign file, you make your change, save it, close it, come back and then update in links panel and it just updates throughout the entire document. It is great. It was such a nice workaround. I mean still it is a pain, it is a pain to have two different documents, but it really works pretty elegantly.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, so didn’t you have something else that you wanted to add with the calendars?

David: Well, mostly just having to do with how to make calendars, because a number of people have said, where do you get these calendars and we have talked a little bit about the Exchange, the Adobe Exchange, we went on there about it…

Anne-Marie: Yes, the last episode.

David: Yeah, and we mentioned the calendar. Did we mention the calendar wizard? There is a script up there called calendar wizard, which I was playing with, and that is really the coolest way I think to make calendars, because you can just say, “What month do you want to start with? What month do you want to end on?”, and it just builds in for you. It is very very slick.

So, anyway, I just wanted to mention that having to do with the calendar part. We actually numbered a number piece of it. But really the key is, if you need to have a horizontal spine, whether it is calendars or any kind of document you want, this workaround of having two documents, the design document versus the print document, the one that you print, that is really what people need to know about.

Anne-Marie: And it is actually really fast to create that second document. In the blog post I explained how you can use the map and the fields to quickly position everything perfectly.

David: Yeah, actually I am going to, for this article, and Anne-Marie, maybe you can help me with that, I have to say I haven’t finished it yet.

Anne-Marie: OK.

David: But this article that we are going to put in the InDesign Magazine, I am actually going to include some INX files for InDesign, that people can actually download the template itself. So then you can open the template and just plug your calendar and it should work. It is something easier, trying it make it easier for people, make it a little faster to lay this thing out.

OK, we better move on and talk about the Hot Button blog post of the week. Leopard support, support for Apple Leopard, which is just about to release as we are recording this.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. It is supposed to come out in a few days.

David: In a few days. We are anxiously awaiting Leopard, actually no, not really, I am not [laughs], I would like to say I was anxiously awaiting, but the truth of the matter is, I always wait like multiple months, four or five months before I upgrade my OS until they get everything worked out.

Anne-Marie: Are you running Vista on anything?

David: I am running Vista in Parallels. I wish that I would be running XP on there, but right now, Vista is what I have. No, I am not keen on upgrading either Windows or Mac unless I really have to.

Anne-Marie: We should mention that Leopard is the next version of the Macintosh OS.

David: Oh that is a good idea, sure. Yeah, for those of you who don’t know about Leopard, it is OS 10.5, it is a chockfull of 300 new features, and it is going to be pretty cool in some ways, but I don’t know, I just get nervous about big changes like that. So, I am holding off.

Basically what happened was a few weeks ago, somebody recorded Bruce Chizen at Adobe saying, “Well, we really are not sure what’s going to happen, blah, blah, blah…” and everyone got very nervous about Adobe’s support for Leopard. Then they clarified at the Creative Suite Conference last week, Whitney McCleary clarified what Adobe’s support really was.

Anne-Marie: And Whitney is the…

David: What’s that?

Anne-Marie: What’s her title, Whitney?

David: She is Senior Hoo-ha of cool stuff.

Anne-Marie: Kahoona.

David: I don’t really know what her title is, she is just…

Anne-Marie: I thought she used to be Poobah and then she got a promotion to Kahoona.

David: Yeah, I think so, I think that is what it is. She just is always in the know.

Anne-Marie: Grand Kahoona. She is basically in-charge of the Creative Suite at least.

David: The Creative Suite marketing staff, she just knows. It is like when Whitney says something I trust her. So she was on stage with Adam Pratt, at the Creative Suite Conference and somebody asked about Leopard and she went on this whole thing about, “OK, this is what is going to happen with Leopard, this is what has happened, and here is what you need to know.”

What it came down to was Apple is making changes to Leopard up until the final final golden master, and they just very recently handed this off to Adobe and said, “Here, test all your software against it.” Well, it takes a long time to test software, especially rich software like it is in all these Creative Suites. It takes a lot of time to test everything against new operating system.

And so, she said, “Look, we are testing it, we are fully supporting–we are fully committed to working with Leopard, but there is a reasonably good chance that something, some of these apps are going to need to be patched at some point.” So, we will let everyone know sometime around mid November or late November as soon as we finish our testing, we will let everyone know. “Is it safe, is it not safe to use the Creative Suite apps with or which of the apps need to be patched in the Creative Suite.”

So, it seems like a very reasonable approach to me. It is like if Apple is going to spring this stuff on Adobe, it is going to take time for Adobe to test it.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, that’s true. I remember reading something about that that people at Adobe said–because regular users are like, well there has been beta testers for Leopard for months, how come Adobe isn’t beta testing it as well? They might well be, but officially they can’t because who know what might change at the very end. So, if they say, “Oh good printing, there is no problem with printing anything,” and then at the very end, Apple adds something new to the printing mix and a little bit of code, that breaks something in the print dialog boxes in CS3, so they’d have to start all over again.

So they really need to wait for that golden master which is the lock down. This is the new version that is going to ship. This is what we are going to make copies of. That’s what developers send out to people. Here’s the golden master, here is the actual final version that we are going to ship next week. That’s what they need to start testing on.

David: Yeah and to be clear, they have been testing with the betas. They have been working on it, but they can’t be sure until this point. Anyway, we will know in the meantime.

Anne-Marie: So you wrote about. You wrote about it in the blog, and you got a whole lot of traffic that’s why it’s the hot button post of the week.

David: That’s true. For a lot of people, it’s one of those things. Do you want to upgrade? Do you not want to upgrade? I wrote about it. I was in that session and Sandee Cowen was in the session and she was blogging about it at exactly the same time I was blogging about it.

Anne-Marie: That’s pretty funny.

David: Yeah. It’s like we both hit send and post at the same time without the other knowing about it, while we were in the session so it was ridiculous. So we merged them together into one blog post and that’s what people are reading.

But really, it came down to an argument of, “Should you upgrade to Leopard or not.” I think everyone was in agreement to hold off for a little while. Set it up on a separate machine. If you want to, put it on a different partition if you want to, but don’t upgrade your primary production machine to Leopard yet, until we really are sure.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. I think most print people are pretty, cautious as far as those kinds of upgrades are concerned anyway. I think one of the big concerns is that, what if you are buying a new Mac? If you are buying a new Mac, it’s coming with Leopard and so then what are you suppose to do?

So if you have a graphic design department that’s slated to get a whole bunch of new Macs before the end of the year, (which a lot of people do). They buy a lot of equipment before the end of the year to get that write off, then they are stuck. So I would say don’t toss out your old Macs.

David: Exactly.

Anne-Marie: Keep running on the old systems until Adobe gives the all clear. Do you know what I was trying to find out after I was reading all those responses they post? I have Parallels too and that’s the software that runs in Mac, Intel machines and lets you run Windows in one section and Mac in the other section. Bounce back and forth at the same time.

If you can install Windows in Parallels, can’t you install another OS X in Parallels? Couldn’t you install Leopard in one and Panther in another? Don’t you think that would make sense?

David: Yeah. I can see the tortured logic there, but…

Anne-Marie: How is that tortured logic?

David: You can’t run… Because Parallel is setup to run Windows or Linux. I don’t think you can run Mac in each Parallels.

Anne-Marie: I thought it was suppose to be a guest OS runs in whatever Parallels does. Anyway, I could not find anybody else asking this question so I guess it is strange.

David: But I would love that.

Anne-Marie: Well, because not everybody has two machines to test.

David: Somebody mentioned that, I don’t know if it was Peter Truske or Dave Saunders. Somebody mentioned that on the blog post, so I thought it is a clever way to test a machine. You run Parallels on your Mac, then you install the Windows version of CS3 and then you can actually test that. When you are done, you just wipe off that OS and you are done. But in this case it wouldn’t work for Leopard, but it is an interesting idea.

Anne-Marie: You could make a partition on your Mac, but the thing is, you always have to restart to boot up from Leopard and then do your testing so with Parallels you don’t need to restart.

David: So you want an emulator, so you can run Leopard inside Leopard. Or Leopard inside…

Anne-Marie: No, I want to write Panther to get my work done and then I want to switch to Leopard to test InDesign’s CS3.

David: I think that’s a good idea. I don’t think…

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: I don’t think it’s possible, but it’s a great idea and I think you should get right on that and develop that software.

Anne-Marie: All right, I’ll see you in a year.

David: OK sounds good. Excellent.

Anne-Marie: All right let’s go on to our obscure InDesign feature of the week…eek…eek…eek.

David: …eek…eek…eek…eek…eek…eek.

Anne-Marie: And that is…

David: [laughs] Sorry it was the extra echo. I had that extra echo effect on. I’ll turn that off.

Anne-Marie: Yeah you’re very far away. It’s “reset to base.”

David: Reset to base.

Anne-Marie: Reset to base. Where would you find Reset To Base?

David: I find it when I’m doing chemistry experiments, because you want to keep a neutral PH like just around 7 or 7.0. If it is a little bit too acidic you want to add a little bit more basic compound to Reset To Base

Anne-Marie: Yeah. I thought it had something to do with make up.

David: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Put some more base.

Anne-Marie: Putting on the base on and then I put some stuff on the top of the base and if I want to get rid of it, I want to reset to the base.

David: [laughs] Actually…

Anne-Marie: That’s a tiff of female thing.

David: [laughs] Curiously enough, yours is actually more accurate than mine. That’s very close to what it is.

Anne-Marie: [laughs]

David: The Reset To Base is a button. You find this button inside the paragraph style’s dialog box–like the edit when you are editing a paragraph style or creating a new paragraph style or doing the same thing with character styles. So, you can find it in there. But what does it do? How do you get back–when you click on Reset To Base, what do you get?

Anne-Marie: You get the base character style or paragraph style.

Well, I use Reset To Base like this; When I’m creating a paragraph style that’s based on a different paragraph style…

David: Yeah?

Anne-Marie: Let’s say that I have a body style…

David: Yup.

Anne-Marie: … and now I want to create another paragraph style that I’ll be using in body except that it has an initial drop cap. So, “Body First Paragraph”.

So, I create another style and under “Based On” in the General Options, I choose “Body” but I call this one “Body First Paragraph.” Then I tweak it a little bit so that I’ve turned on the drop cap.

David: OK.

Anne-Marie: Yes. All right. So, I’m looking–it’s working perfectly and then later on I decide: “You know, I’ve had too much…”–and then later on, I’ll be adding too many things to my “Body First Paragraph”, maybe I made the first line magenta or something like that and I just want to start all over…

David: A-huh.

Anne-Marie: …with my “Body First Style.” So, I can click the “Resets Of Base” which gets rid of everything that’s different in this style compared to the one that its based on.

David: Exactly. Right. It resets it to whatever the style is that the paragraph or character style is based on.

Anne-Marie: It turns it into essentially a duplicate of the style.

David: Exactly. Here’s how I usually use this…

Anne-Marie: OK.

David: How I use to define myself using this; I’ll be making a new character style let’s say or new paragraph style–and maybe I have my cursor in the text already, when I do that and all of a sudden I realize that some of the formatting where the cursor is, in the text has been picked up.

If a cursor is in the text–it’s flashing the text–when you create a new character or paragraph style, that formatting is picked up like as local formatting on top of the paragraph style. So, even if you have a based on none or based on no paragraph style, that formatting still get sucked into the dialog box.

So, sometimes I just want to… I say, “I don’t really want any of that. I didn’t mean to pick up the formatting in the text frame.” And that’s when I click on Reset To Base because it just wipes out the formatting–sets it all the way back to nothing–to nice neutral space. So, that’s another way you could use Reset To Base.

Anne-Marie: That’s true.

David: The Reset To Base also shows up in the object styles paragraph.

Anne-Marie: It’s the same basic concept.

David: The dialog box as well.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. It’s the same basic concept.

David: Yeah. It it does the same thing. It just removes all the “local formatting” that’s on top of the standard formatting and resets it to that base style. I find it very, very useful. To be honest, I’m completely spacing out if this is new in CS3. I thought, “Is this new in CS3? Did they add this?”

Anne-Marie: You know, I don’t know.

David: We better get CS2 loaded here somewhere, and try that out.

Anne-Marie: [laughs]

David: I just have a vague memory that it’s a-new-in-CS3 thing, but I find it so useful that I feel like it’s been there forever. Well, somebody should mention that in the post. Someone should go on to check it out in CS2 and then go to InDesignSecrets.com and check–let us know. Let us know for goodness sakes, let us know.

Anne-Marie: OK.

David: But for now, that’s it for episode 63. Thank you for listening. Be sure to check out our show notes on the blog and you can leave us comments on the blog as well at InDesignSecrets.com.

We also have all the links to the things that we mentioned, and we’d love to hear what you thought of the show or about InDesign in general. Go ahead and leave a reply or email us at info @ InDesignSecrets.com.

Until we meet again. This is David Blatner.

Anne-Marie: And Anne-Marie Concepción for InDesignSecrets.[music]

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 063 page.