Podcast 064 Transcript Podcast 064 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 064 page.
Anne-Marie Concepción: Today’s show is brought to you by Audible. Please visit audiblepodcast.com/InDesign for your free audio book download.
[intro music]
David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets episode two-to-the-eighth.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: That’s 64, for you heathens out there.
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.
David: I’m David Blatner, and I’m here along with my co-host, Anne-Marie Concepción.
Anne-Marie: Konichiwa.
David: [laughs] Welcome, Anne-Marie. Our podcast and blog at InDesignSecrets.com are Independent Resource for All things InDesign.
Anne-Marie: InDesign. And today’s theme is, “You asked for it.”
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Yep. we are going to answer a whole bunch of questions that people have emailed us over the past few weeks. When we were coming up with topics, we just said, “Look at all these emails? Why don’t we just go through and answer them one by one?”
David: Yeah, instead of replying via email all the time, why don’t we just tell everybody? Tell the world the answers to these questions.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] That’s true, and then, of course, we can’t forget we have our Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week…
Anne-Marie and David: [together] Eek, eek, eek, eek, eek…
Anne-Marie: And that is “Reset Indents”.
David: Ah, “Reset Indents”.
Anne-Marie: I bet you didn’t know that there was a “Reset Indents” command.
David: Yeah, there you go.
Anne-Marie: Yep, there you go.
As I said in the beginning of this podcast, this episode is sponsored by Audible.com. Audible.com is the Internet’s leading provider of spoken audio entertainment. They have tens of thousands of books available that you can download as MP3s. And if you go to audiblepodcast.com/InDesign, that special URL, you can download a free book. So check that out. The link will be in our show notes as well, but just go to audiblepodcast.com/InDesign and download a book.
OK. First, a bit of news.
David: A bit of news, a bit of news…
Anne-Marie: David, what about this Leopard thing?
David: Yeah. Well, last episode, we talked about Mac OS 10.5, a.k.a. Leopard.
Anne-Marie: [meows]
David: Which was releasing… [laughs] This week, one of the things we heard a little bit of feedback that we spent a lot of time talking about Leopard. We didn’t talk a lot about Windows.
Anne-Marie: Windows Vista.
David: Windows Vista or XP. Basically, how do we balance out our reporting on these. So we wanted to mention something about Windows Vista.
Anne-Marie: Mm-hmm. Go ahead.
David: I guess that’s basically all we have to say about Vista…
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: That it exists. It is an operating system…
Anne-Marie: I haven’t encountered one CS3 or CS2 person using it yet, have you?
David: Me? I’ve been using Vista.
Anne-Marie: Yeah?
David: I’ve been using InDesign on Vista, under Parallels on my Mac OS 10.4.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: So it’s perfectly adequate. It works. It’s very pretty. I like it. But certainly, it has it’s own issues as well.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: It’s taking a long time for people to upgrade to Vista. I would not say anybody should jump in, but I haven’t heard that many horrible problems about Vista, for Creative Suite users.
That said, we do want to say a little bit more about Leopard, because we did start the conversation about Leopard., and we just want to report that, for the most part, people are not having problems with InDesign and Leopard. There are some other issues with like Acrobat 8, I’ve been hearing some problems, certainly with Adobe Production Studio.
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.
David: But not as much with InDesign. There have been some reports of problems. But from what I can tell–and Tim Cole at the BackChannel has been very useful in reporting this–from what I can tell, people tend to fall into one of three camps. Which is, first of all, if you just did an install of Leopard on top of your regular thing, you might have some issues. You might want to do a full backup and install.
Anne-Marie: Instead of just an upgrade to Leopard.
David: Instead of just upgrade to Leopard. That would be one thing.
Anne-Marie: Ew, I hate that.
David: Yeah. The second thing is that people have had problems with it really surprised me. A lot of people who are complaining that they are having problems with Leopard, especially with InDesign crashing, it turns out they are actually using illegal copies of InDesign, usually pre-release versions…
Anne-Marie: Mm-hmm. A beta, yeah.
David: Like betas of InDesign, and that’s a no-no. You should not be doing that. And if you’re having trouble crashing with a beta version of InDesign under Leopard, I guess you are not…
Anne-Marie: Don’t call Adobe for tech support. Let’s put it that way.
David: Yeah, exactly. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Or block caller ID before you call.
David: Right, right.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: I just don’t have a lot of sympathy. Use a real version of InDesign with Leopard.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: The third thing that I’ve noticed is that some people say, “Oh, I upgraded to Leopard, and I’m having all these problems.” But when I look at it more closely, my sense of the problem is, that it has something else… it’s not Leopard, per se. It’s not InDesign, per se. It’s something else going on, like permissions problems or some other typical system issue…
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Not specific to upgrading to Leopard.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: Go ahead.
Anne-Marie: We do have another post, called “Leaping to Leopard,” written by Steve Werner, on our website. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes. But it’s gotten a ton of responses, like over 40, from people who are actually running it, and I think wasn’t there one thing about keyboard shortcuts? If you switched from one keyboard set and then back to the one that you want to use, that cleared up some problems for some people.
David: Oh, that’s right.
Anne-Marie: Remember that?
David: In general, sometimes what I recommend doing is, when you have weirdness–this is a basic troubleshooting issue–going on, rebuild your preferences.
Anne-Marie: Yes. Yeah.
David: We have a post on that as well: how to rebuild your preferences by holding down pretty much every modifier key while you’re launching InDesign. It throws out a bunch of stuff, but it can clear up issues that people are having.
Anne-Marie: I haven’t heard that many issues from people with CS2 on Leopard.
David: I haven’t. But I also heard somebody else basically saying that, “We don’t recommend anyone using CS2 under Leopard.” Was it Tim who was saying that?
Anne-Marie: Did they have a little embroidered “Adobe” on their shirt?
David: Yeah, I think so.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
David: I think so.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: Of course, they want everyone to upgrade to CS3.
Anne-Marie: Oh yeah. [laughs]
David: Oh yeah. Then maybe that is the issue there.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: So I don’t know. That’s something to keep in mind, though. In general, I just want to say one more time, for the record; I do not recommend anybody who’s in a production environment upgrade to a dot-0 operating system, whether it’s Vista dot-0 or Leopard dot-0. I’m talking like 10.5.0…
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: I’m waiting for the patch. You know there is going to be patches. You know there’s going to be issues.
Anne-Marie: Right. Yes.
David: So I’m going to wait around. In two or three months, there’s going to be 10.5.1, and it will then become significantly more safe for me to upgrade.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: I just don’t understand the rush, on a production machine. On a testing machine, great. On a personal machine, great. But if you are in a production work flow…
Anne-Marie: On your neighbor’s machine.
David: Yeah, great.
Anne-Marie: A relative’s machine. Not your own.
David: Yeah, not your own.
Anne-Marie: Right. [laughs]
David: A neighbor’s is OK.
Anne-Marie: The intern’s machine.
David: Perfect.
Anne-Marie: “Let’s try Leopard on your machine.”
David: [laughs] That would be it, too.
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: All right.
Anne-Marie: Excellent advice.
David: Let’s move on to “You Asked For It!” It, it, it…
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: All right. The first one up is somebody emailed us and said, “My Command-Shift-B”–B as in “boy”–”keyboard shortcut suddenly is not quite working as it’s supposed to be.”
David: Or Control-Shift-B.
Anne-Marie: Or Control-Shift-B. Yeah, sorry about that. Command- or Control-Shift-B, which is supposed to make a world bold. all right? You double click a word that s not Bold, Command- or Control-Shift-B should make it bold. Press it again, and it should turn it off. That’s the issue I am encountering with some of my fonts.
David: Some fonts, it just doesn’t work.
Anne-Marie: It used to work. In CS2 it worked.
David: Really? On the same fonts?
Anne-Marie: Same fonts.
David: Interesting.
Anne-Marie: It’s not with every font and it’s not even just with that have multiple weights. Like I notice with Times you can double click a word and press Command- or Control-Shift-B to make it bold, press it again and it turns off the bold. But if I use…you were having problems with Garamond Pro?
David: Garamond Premiere pro is either within InDesign or maybe ts a free download.
Anne-Marie: It’s a benefit after registering.
David: OK, so that was the one the person was asking about, I believe. I have that problem too, and the problem is, there is no bold. There’s only semi-bold so when you do a Command-Shift-B or Control-Shift-B, It goes looking for a bold and because the font says the bold in this family is bold, it’s not semi-bold, and so InDesign says, “Well I don’t have it” so nothing happens.
So, that’s a case where it’s doing what the font tells it to do, but it’s not what we want it to do. This is one of those things that I’ve been asking for years, for a way to map those keyboard shortcuts to specific things. Like sometimes it’s bold or sometimes it’s heavy or sometimes it’s extra-heavy or whatever I want to be able to map. Command-Shift-B or Control-Shift-B to whatever I want it to be, not what the fonts tells InDesign it should be. But you can’t do that at this point. So you are at the font’s mercy.
Anne-Marie: That is not the full case, though. I think it has to with something about the construction of the font. And I’m just testing it now. The body face that we use for almost all my design studio’s materials is Office Sans.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: And that comes in book, book italic, bold and bold italic. Just plain old type one font.
David: You double click a word that’s in book. Press Command- or Control-Shift-B turns it bold. Press Command- or Control-Shift-B nothing happens. It doesn’t revert back to book. That is either a problem with the font, there might be a problem with the font itself.
Anne-Marie: But it works in CS2.
David: Or it could be a problem in CS3 that I don’t know about. That’s interesting. That’s intriguing. all right, I’m going to have to look into that a little more closely. Maybe there’s some kind of weird bug in there.
Anne-Marie: So we ended that with “We don’t know”
David: Right. I do want to throw one more thing.
Anne-Marie: And there is no fix, That’s great.
David: I do want to throw out one more thing about that practice of Control-Shift-P or B, or whatever. And that is, it’s actually really OK to do that in InDesign. There’s a lot of people who say “I never do that. I’ve always been told since 1993, people tell me don’t do the keyboard shortcuts”.
Well that’s because in QuarkXPress, you weren’t always sure you were getting the right font. So if someone told you not to use the keyboard shortcut for those, that means that they were a QuarkXPress user and they were probably right. It was dangerous to do that.
Anne-Marie: Or Word.
David: What’s that?
Anne-Marie: Word did the same thing. It would make up a screen font.
David: Yes. Right, right, right.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: But however, in InDesign it’s not dangerous. Because InDesign will not make up a random font if one does not exist. So the keyboard shortcuts; I’ve never seen anyone have any problem with using Command-Shift-B for bold. Or Control-Shift-I for italic, etc. So, I just wanted to throw that out there. It really is OK for anyone who’s been told otherwise.
But we are going to have to look into the font thing. Usually it’s the font itself which has had problems. Maybe there’s a corruption in the font, cause the fault has a sense of a family. It inheritantly knows what bold is inside and what regular is. I wonder if maybe…
Anne-Marie: So my favorite font family is dysfunctional. Is that what you’re saying?
David: Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking. I think it’s a dysfunctional family.
Anne-Marie: Been hanging around me too long. [laughs]
I’ll try… well, I’ll see if there’s any therapy around, and have it go through a few sessions. No, actually I think I’ll try running through TransType. You to convert it? Maybe convert it to true type and convert it back to type one or something like that?
David: Well my suggestion for Officina Sans–that’s an adobe font–My suggestion would be to just get the open type font and try it with the open type. So, let’s try that first.
OK, so John Smith. Let’s move on to another question here. John Smith wrote, “Is there anyway to resize an object from the center point?” He was pointing out that an Illustrator, you can grab an object an resize it from its center point, instead of from the upper left or whatever.
There’s two answers to this. One is you can select the… you can use the Free Transform tool. My favorite way of doing it is with the Free Transform tool. I hit E on the Keyboard, make a selection, hit E. Jumps to the Free Transform tool and then drag one of the corner points and hold down the Option or Alt key, and that always will transform it from the center.
The other way you could do this is simply by setting the reference point for the object. You select an object, or a group of objects, and then go up to the control panel and the far left edge of the control panel. There’s a reference point and instead of having it set to the upper left corner, you could just set it to the center. That little center proxy point in the middle. Now, any scaling you do in the control panel, or with a scale tool for that matter, will scale from the center point of those objects. So, that’s two ways you could resize from the center point in a design. So, that’s good.
Anne-Marie: Mmm-hmm.
David: Let’s go on to another question that he asked. Asking about selecting all of the overflow text from a story.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, I hear that question a lot. In QuarkXPress, if you wanted to select all the text from where your cursor was to the end of the story, you pressed Command or Control-Shift-down arrow, and that doesn’t do the same thing in InDesign. So how are you supposed to do that in InDesign? Well, it’s just different keyboard shortcut.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Is it Command or Control-Shift-End. E-N-D. The End key on your keyboard. So if you’re using a laptop you’ll probably have to add the FN key.
[laughs]
David: The FN. I can’t get over that.
Anne-Marie: The FN-Shift-Command or -Control will select all the text from where your cursor is to the end. Of course if you use Home instead of End, you would select all of the text up. But actually..
David: There’s an easier way.
Anne-Marie: Yes, there’s an easier way. With your cursor blinking inside the story, press Command- or Control-Y or go to the Edit menu and choose Edit and Story Editor. Which opens up a second window. It’s showing you all of the text in that story, including any overset text. And overset text is demarcated by a copyfit break line. Everything with a red line to the left of it means its overset. So you can go ahead and edit it there in the story editor, even the overset text without having to cut it and paste it into another frame, or something like that.
David: That is a great tip.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: For those of you who have not heard us go on and on about story editor, you will if you keep listening, hear us go on and on about story editor. Because it’s great, you have got to get used to using story editor in InDesign.
Anne-Marie: Mm-hmm.
David: OK. Let’s see.
Anne-Marie: Here’s another one.
David: Yea go ahead.
Anne-Marie: Let me rustle through the pages. Like people actually mail us letters. That would be pretty funny.
David: That would be funny. A letter?
Anne-Marie: Yeah, in the olden days. All right. Somebody said, “I heard someone say that you can use images on a path, like text, so that photos can go around a circle, or any path, with the rainbow, skews, steps, and so on, settings in the text path options.” So is there a way to get pictures on a path, like text on a path? I can’t figure it out.
David: The answer, of course, is “absolutely!”
Anne-Marie: Absolutely, right.
David: Absolutely.
Anne-Marie: Of course. Why wouldn’t you?
David: They just have to be…
Anne-Marie: They just have to be inline with text.
David: They have to be inline. That’s the trick.
Anne-Marie: Mm-hmm.
David: A lot of people, I think, still aren’t used to the idea of inline graphics or inline objects, or the idea that you copy an object with a Selection tool, but you paste it with a Type tool. That’s how you get an inline object, or an object that is actually anchored on a path or inside of a text frame.
Anne-Marie: Right. It flows with the text.
David: Right, exactly.
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.
David: So if you have an image, let’s say, and you just copy it with the Selection tool; use the Type on a Path tool to click on the path, and then paste the image, it actually goes on the path itself.
Anne-Marie: Right, right. It probably would be good to have a small image. If you have a regular-sized path, you don’t want to put a big, monster, two-page spread Photoshop image.
David: Sure.
Anne-Marie: Otherwise, nothing would happen, or it would get overset. But yeah, you have a small image, and you can do multiple ones. You can continue copying and pasting, in the same way that David described, to add multiple images on the path, and so, as you adjust the path, you can adjust the path with the Direct Selection tool to change the curve, and the images just meld with the curve. It works really great.
David: Yeah, it’s very cool. So that’s the trick there. It all has to do with those anchored objects, and anchored objects, of course, is a huge other subject that we don’t have time to go into right now, but, definitely, you want to play around…
Anne-Marie: It would be good for another podcast, because I’ve seen lots of really cool effects. Imagine a circle.
David: Mm-hmm.
Anne-Marie: And you paste in a bunch of inline graphics, like, say, multiple copies of the same one. After you get one in, you can select it with the text tool and then paste again.
David: Yeah, sure.
Anne-Marie: All right. So you have multiple ones, and then you set the justification to Force Justify, and they’re all evenly spaced around the circle.
David: Yeah. No, there’s lots of cool Text on a Path, cool things you can do with that. No doubt about that.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: We just don’t have time today because we have more “You Asked For It!”
Anne-Marie: [laughs] All right. Klaus Nordby wrote…
David: Yes. Hi, Klaus.
Anne-Marie: Hey, Klaus, how are you?
David: We know Klaus is listening.
Anne-Marie: Yes. He’s a frequent poster, good friend. “Sometimes the vertical justification in the text frame options are grayed out. Sometimes they are accessible. Why? Why?” No, he didn’t say, “Why? Why?” “I have not yet been able to understand the conditions under which it becomes disabled, so the seeming erratic-ness frustrates me.”
David: Yes. And this has frustrated me, too.
Anne-Marie: Oh yeah.
David: The whole issue of why does that popup menu sometimes just gray out, when it doesn’t seem like it should be. Well, that vertical justification popup menu will gray out when it doesn’t work.
Anne-Marie: Where is it?
David: Oh, it’s inside the text frame options dialog box. So, if you select a text frame, go under the object menu and choose “text frame options, ” or press Command-B or Control-B, then you get the text frame options dialog box. And that popup menu is grayed out when you either have a non-rectangular frame, any frame that is non-rectangular, or… and this is what catches me most of the time–any frame that’s not acting rectangular; for example, if there’s rounded corners on it, or if there’s…
Anne-Marie: Object causing a text wrap.
David: Yeah, an object causing a text wrap, that’s near it, overlapping it. If there is any text wrap that’s affecting that text frame, that popup menu just grays out.
Anne-Marie: That’s true.
David: And it’s like, “Ah!” So frustrating. It’s frustrating to me, mostly because sometimes I want to set that vertical justification, even if something is causing the text wrap. And I know it’s not going to actually do anything to the text frame, because any time you have text wrap affecting a text frame, it just won’t do anything; it turns off vertical justification.
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.
David: But I still want to apply it, for the day that I move it to some other page or something.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: I don’t know. It’s a frustration of mine.
Anne-Marie: Well, if the text wrap affects the entire frame by the same amount, then the vertical justification doesn’t get grayed out. It is when it is uneven, like if you have something with a text wrap that’s only being applied to half of the text frame, it’ll be grayed out. But if that object causing a text wrap is so large that the entire left side of the frame is being pushed, then you can go ahead and set vertical justification.
David: That’s interesting. But only if it’s affecting it, in a rectangular way.
Anne-Marie: That’s correct.
David: If you have, perhaps, like an oval that affects the entire left-hand side, it wouldn’t…
Anne-Marie: That’s right. That’s right.
David: It would still be grayed out. That’s a good point.
Anne-Marie: It is exactly like you said, David, that it has to act in a rectangular fashion.
David: Right, right. Or else it gets grayed out. So that is what’s going on there.
Another question that comes up has to do with making character styles. In character styles, you don’t have to build in all of the different formatting. You can say font, style, size, color and stuff like that, horizontal scale. But sometimes, when you are making a character style, you make a selection of some text that looks like you want your style to be, then you open the “new character style” dialog box. As this person writes, “When I pick up those attributes, and then sometimes I can’t avoid a pick-up of the text color.”
Anne-Marie: Mmm-hmm.
David: So sometimes the color gets picked up into the character style, when you don’t want it to. So how do you remove that element? How do you remove the color from a character style?
Anne-Marie: Yeah. Set it to like ignore color, in other words.
David: Yeah. How do you set it to ignore color? Because all you get is a list of colors. There’s nothing in there that says…
Anne-Marie: None.
David: None. Well, there is a “none, ” actually.
Anne-Marie: Oh, well, there is “none.” Right.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: But you don’t want it to be none. When you apply your italic character style, you don’t want it to change the color of the text at all.
David: Right. Right.
Anne-Marie: Just leave the color alone. So how do you say, “Don’t even think about the color” after you have chosen a color?
David: Right. The trick there…
Anne-Marie: There is a hidden trick.
David: It is a hidden trick.
Anne-Marie: Mmm-hmm.
David: Command or Control–Command on Mac, Control on Windows–click on the color, and that turns that item off from the list.
Anne-Marie: That’s correct.
David: Basically, any time you have a list in InDesign, you can add to the list by Command- or Control-clicking on it, or remove from the list if you Command- or Control-click something that’s selected in the list. Does that make any sense? Sure.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, sort of, sort of. But I think what is critical here is that in the character style options dialog box, in the character color pane, where you see a scrolling list of all your swatches…
David: Mm-hmm.
Anne-Marie: Even if only one color is selected, which it’ll only let you select one color, of course, right?
David: Yeah, yeah. Right.
Anne-Marie: Command- or Control-clicking on it will deselect that one item and leave nothing selected.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. So that you should end up with a whole bunch of little question marks in the icon of the Filler Stroke which means ignore, ignore the color specification.
David: Yes, so that is the answer to that one. That is tricky. A lot of people miss that. That’s, that’s an important one to keep in mind. All right, hey, we have time for one more, I think. One last question.
Anne-Marie: One. One last one from Melanie.
David: Yeah, Melanie.
Anne-Marie: Melanie emailed us and said, “Can you create a Gradient Swatch that is vertical? Like, dark on the bottom to light on the top?”
Everytime she makes a swatch, it reverts to the horizontal gradient. She is trying to create cell styles that have a vertical gradient that she doesn’t have to adjust manually. Please help.
David: Yeah. This is… there is a short answer for this one. that answer is no…
Anne-Marie: Forget about it. [laughs]
Well, mine is a little longer than no.
David: Yeah, forget about it, is, is, is more accurate, though.
Anne-Marie: Well, it was only to the part she talked about Tables. I was with her until then.
David: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, because you can do vertical gradients easily with most objects and then save it as an Object Style.
David: Yes, that is the trick that most people do not get. Because when you apply a gradient to an object, from the Swatches Panel, those gradients are always horizontal. In order to change it to make it diagonal or vertical, you have to use either the Gradient Panel or the Gradient tool and then you can set it to anything you want.
But, there’s no way to make–to put that into the swatch itself. Those swatches are always going to be horizontal, which I think is a huge failing. I think Adobe needs to do something about that.
But you can get around that with the work around, you just said, Anne-Marie. You make an Object Style. Object Styles can assign a Gradient Fill and assign its angle.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: Which is pretty cool. So, that’s good but, as you said, not with Tables, so…
Anne-Marie: Well, you could select a row in the table…
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: … and fill it with a Gradient…
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: OK. And then, use the the Gradient Swatch tool–I mean, the Gradient tool to change the angle.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: But that’s about it. You can’t save it.
David: Right. Exactly. You, you can do that manually with the Gradient tool, like…
Anne-Marie: even on a Table…
David: Yeah, even within a cell of a table or even one letter. You can select a letter and drag the swatch over one character in a Text Frame and apply the gradient just to that one letter…
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: So, any single object–that’s what the gradient tool is all about–whatever you have selected–whether it’s a cell in a Table or a row or text or whatever–it applies it to that.
So, it’s very cool. But, you have to do it as local formatting–you have to do it manually for each row. There is no way to save that in a Table Style or a Cell Style.
Anne-Marie: But, great Feature request…
David: Great Feature Request…
Anne-Marie: Let’s add that to the list and we’ll put the link for the Feature Request. We should put the link for Feature Request, like, on the sidebar of every page of the blog.
David: That’s a good idea.
Anne-Marie: Don’t you think so? Like, put the old target icon…
David: Sure.
Anne-Marie: …or something like that.
David: I might have to add that to my post on what InDesign cannot do. All the things InDesign cannot do. That, unfortunately, is one of them. But, but there’s always hope for CS4.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. There is. Or CS5.
David: So, let’s talk about the InDesign, obscure InDesign feature of the week, week, week…
Anne-Marie: eek, eek, eek, eek…
That is “Reset Indents”.
David: “Reset Indents”.
Anne-Marie: “Reset Indents”. You came up with this one. It is excellent. I didn’t know that it was in the program.
David: I was so proud when you told me that you didn’t even know this feature was even in there.
Anne-Marie: Nope. Did not know.
David: It’s very hidden.
Anne-Marie: It’s useful. It’s very useful. I can’t believe I had missed it.
David: Yeah. “Reset Indents”. So you have got a bunch of indents on a paragraph left line, you know, first line indents, right indent, last line indents…
Anne-Marie: Those hated indents with the negative numbers.
David: Yeah, you got all those indents on a paragraph, and suddenly, you realize, “I don’t want these indents. I want to reset these indents. Set them all to zero again.”
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: So, typically you’d go up and type zero four times–0, tab, zero, tab, zero, tab…
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.
David: And, that would reset the indents. But wait. There’s a feature for it.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: In one single feature, you can re-set your indents all to zero, and it makes…
Anne-Marie: But, you have to…
David: Go ahead. Take it.
Anne-Marie: I’ll let you take it.
David: No, you take it, take it, take it.
Anne-Marie: All right, well, I think logically the first place I thought of was, “Tabs.”
[laughs]
David: Really, you thought that?
Anne-Marie: No.
David: OK.
Anne-Marie: You have got to read your email five times–”Tabs,” is he kidding that must be a typo?
David: Why is it in “Tabs?”
Anne-Marie: No, seriously. It’s in “Tabs.” You select a bunch of paragraphs. You open up the Tabs palette from the Window menu or the Type menu. Its a Command- or Control-Shift-T. And, don’t even set a Tab. Don’t worry about messing up any existing Tabs.
Just go right to the Tab Flyout menu and you’ll see a friendly little command that says “Reset Indents” and you select that and all of the selected paragraphs’ indents reset to zero.
David: It is magic.
Anne-Marie: I love that. Because, you are talking about how you press zero, zero, zero, zero in the four indent fields.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Everytime I do that when I have a hanging indent–stupid InDesign yells at me saying, “You cannot reset the left indent to be negative of the first line of blah de blah…”
David: Oh Yeah. Totally.
Anne-Marie: I didn’t reset the first one–you know, the negative one first.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: I hate that.
David: Yeah, I hate that.
Anne-Marie: So, this one, you don’t have to worry about it.
David: Very, very, very good point. I love that. That use of this. Now, the problem is it’s hiding in the Tabs pane flyout menu which is obnoxious. Because you don’t want to open this every time you want this.
So if you are going to use this more than once a decade, go ahead and apply your own Keyboard Shortcut to it.
Anne-Marie: There you go!
David: You go to Edit Keyboard Shortcuts…
Anne-Marie: Or, use the Keyboard Shortcut plugin.
David: Or, even better, go download the keyboard shortcuts plugin, if you haven’t already and you can assign the right from the free Shortcuts Plugin from dptools.com.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: And that would be even better.
Anne-Marie: So, there’s the–in the Edit Keyboard Shortcuts dialog box, you look in the Product Area called Panel Menus.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: It’s hiding in there. So, Panel Menus start with the name of the Panel and then it shows all the Panel Menu items that you can assign a keyboard shortcut for. So, you scroll all the way down in alphabetical order to get to “Tabs.” And, you see “Tabs”–Reset Indent. So you can assign a keyboard shortcut, and you don’t even have to open up the “Tabs” dialog box.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: Or, Tabs Panel. I love it. It’s great. What a wonderful obscure InDesign feature it is.
David: It is obscure. Truly obscure. And yet, very, very useful, like you said. That’s great.
Anne-Marie: Cool. All right. Well, that’s it for Episode 64 or was that…?
David: Two to the eighth? I don’t even know. Is it two to the eighth? It’s not even two to the eighth. I got it wrong, didn’t I? It’s two to the fifth.
Anne-Marie: Fourth. Right.
David: Sixth.
Anne-Marie: No, fourth, I think. Two and two is four. Four times four is sixteen.
David: No, no. It’s more than two to the fourth. That’s it. We have, We have failed our geek test, right there.
Anne-Marie: Oh man. How about–it’s eight squared?
David: Oh, that’s Good.
Anne-Marie: There you go. Eight squared.
David: There you go–eight squared.
[laughs]
Anne-Marie: Be sure to check out the show notes on our blog at InDesignsecrets.com where we’ll have links to all the places we’ve mentioned.
We’d love to hear what you thought of the show. Leave a comment in the show notes or email us at info@InDesignssecrets.com.
Until we meet again–this is Anne-Marie and…
David: …David Blatner for InDesign Secrets. Oh, it’s, it’s two, two to the sixth! Two to the sixth!
[laughs]
[music fades out]
[cuts off]
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 064 page.