Podcast 100 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 100 page.
[music]
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Welcome to InDesign Secrets episode 100.
David Blatner: [cheers]
Anne-Marie: I am Anne-Marie Concepcion and I am here along with my cohost, David Blatner.
David: Happy anniversary, Anne-Marie!
Anne-Marie: All right!
David: 100 episodes. It is unbelievable.
Anne-Marie: Our podcast and blog at InDesignSecrets.com are the independent resource for all things in design.
David: It is true. And this is a very special episode today. Lots of fun features. We are going to talk about a new videocast. It is true. A videocast from InDesign Secrets, with Anne-Marie and David Blatner, whoever they are, doing some video stuff.
Anne-Marie: [cheers]
David: That will be fun for those of you who like seeing as well as hearing. It will be kind of cool. We are also going to talk about some outtakes and reminisces from previous episodes, long long ago, over the past 100 episodes. We will be giving out the awards for the winners of our annual, first annual, Eeekeekeek! Awards.
Anne-Marie: That is right.
David: That is going to be cute. And then of course, we have to do the obscure InDesign Podcast feature of the wee, eeekeekeek…
Anne-Marie: And that is font version.
David: Font version.
Anne-Marie: Yes. Actually it is a feature inside InDesign.
David: And it is a very relevant thing to talk about. You will see why.
Anne-Marie: Before we jump into all that, we want to give a shout out to our favorite people, some of our favorite people, our sponsors, who make all of this worthwhile. No. [laughs]
David: [laughs] Who do make this possible for us really to be doing this.
Anne-Marie: Who make it possible, not worthwhile, right? The first one is MOGO Media. We are doing an InDesign seminar tour with them as you have heard from previous podcasts. Those are coming up shortly in San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, and Minneapolis. Those are all happening in June with some more in the fall. And also, Deke is doing… This was just added wasn’t it?
David: Yes, our friend Deke McClelland. They just added “Photoshop Channels and Masks” in Toronto in June, so check that out if you are anywhere near Toronto. Definitely check out Deke. He is one of our favorite people and just a wonderful speaker. He is going to go deep, deep. Deep with Deke into Photoshop channels and masks. Which is something, just because we are InDesign users doesn’t mean we don’t need to know a lot about Photoshop masking. That is a really crucial thing.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Especially when you are dealing with transparency, bringing images in with transparency.
Anne-Marie: Just go to mogoseminars.com. We will have the link in our show notes and you can sign up for these. I think there are still some early bird specials. If you use the discount code “amctime09″ you will get how much off I forget?
David: Something off.
Anne-Marie: Something off. “amctime09.”
David: Next sponsor.
Anne-Marie: The other sponsor of today’s episode is InTools. They have a special deal for InDesign Secrets fans. You can get $20 off the price for either one of their InDesign plugin bundles: InBook or InSefer. But, you have to go to a special URL that we will have in our show notes. The InBook plugin pack. I don’t know how closely you have looked at this, David, but it is a collection of a whole bunch of really useful individual plugins.
David: Oh yeah.
Anne-Marie: I was intrigued by Side Heads, which allows you to create anchored side heads automatically based on a character or paragraph style.
David: These are like when you have a heading that is sitting off in a margin, but you want it to move along with the text next to it.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Those are really excellent. The InTools plugins are just great. Anyone who is doing books… I think I said this last time. Anyone who is doing books at all…
Anne-Marie: Any kind of long documents.
David: You have to have, either have these plugins, or at least take a good hard look at them, because they are really really good. Even if you are doing, like you said, long documents, catalogs, magazines. A lot of these are still going to be very very relevant for you so you should check them out. The Side Head is a great one. Another one that is in that bundle, because this $20 off thing is for one of their bundles. Another one of their plugins has to do with making running heads. You know, InDesign already has a running heads feature built into it, but it is very limited.
For example, you can’t do, in InDesign’s running head you can’t really do a two line running head. You can’t split over two lines. Well, InTools does. It is very elegant, very easy. In InDesign’s running heads, you can’t grab the formatting from on the page, like one word where it’s highlighted. You can’t copy that into the running head as well.
You can with the plugins open. It fixes a lot of the problems. And that’s just one, those are just two of… I’m trying to count out here quickly. There’s like six or seven different plugins in that bundle. You should definitely check that out.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, and the InSefer Suite of plugin tools is the same thing, except it works with Hebrew publications.
David: Yeah, it’s primarily good for if you’re doing Hebrew publications. Absolutely, you have to check that out. That’s a must have.
Anne-Marie: Oh, and one other note from a previous sponsor, CertaTech, John Passant or Chris over at the training company in the UK, he emailed us last week to let us know who won the most recent free two day class from their promotion here on InDesign Secrets. So, congratulations to David Bacon, who is a course tutor at Cancer Research UK in London. So, that was good work, Mr. Bacon for hustling over to the CertaTech site in time to fill out that form.
David: Thank you again to all of our sponsors. It is a big, big help for us to be able to send this thing out free to you, our listeners. Of course, it’s not just listeners now, but also watchers, because, as I mentioned earlier, we’ve got this new videocast, or video podcast, or whatever you want to call it. We have this video thing, and we just released the very first one, Episode 1, all about GREP styles and line styles. We’re going to be doing these on a regular basis, because, for a hundred of these podcasts, and ever since we started, people have been saying ‘When are you going to get video?’
We like the audio, and a lot of people like having audio only ones that they can listen to on the bus, or the train, or whatever. But, a lot of people want to be able to sit at their desk and watch the video, or watch it on their iPod, or whatever. And, that is now all very possible with the InDesign Secrets Videocast.
Anne-Marie: It was six months in the making. We had to figure out line styles. Actually, the thing was that we couldn’t just do a regular videocast. Obviously, we know how to do video tutorials; we’ve been doing stuff for Linda.com forever. But, the trick was, how can we do it so that both of us can be not just speaking at the same time, but also dead laying stuff on the screen, recording both of our screens at the same time. We tried every single solution out there, and finally hit on one.
When you watch the videocast, you’ll see that both of us are moving the cursor, both of us are talking and selecting stuff. We’re taking turns, but always on the same screen even though we’re still recording it with me in Chicago and David in Seattle, which I think is a miracle.
David: [laughs] It is kind of amazing, and it is really fun. It’s as though we were sitting down at a conference and on stage together and just going back and forth.
Anne-Marie: And like we each had a mouse plugged into the same computer. It’s kind of like that.
David: It’s true. So, we get to sort of take turns figuring out who gets to use it first. But, I think it’s pretty successful and we will be bringing many more of those to you. Check that out. You can get it at iTunes, you can subscribe to it, and you can find us, of course, at InDesignsecrets.com. Just click on Videocast in the upper right corner and then you can see them there. There are other sources as well, so check it out.
Anne-Marie: We’ll continue doing our audio podcasts, but we are also going to be doing the videocasts on a regular basis.
David: Absolutely.
Anne-Marie: All right, so let’s go back in time, back to November 26, 2005. I was only 29 years old at the time. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: That was the date of episode number one of the InDesign Secrets Podcast. We had a couple of trial runs first, but the first one that actually got published was that one. Let’s hear a little bit of what that very first podcast sounded like.
Anne-Marie: OK. [InDesign Secrets Podcast Episode one Replay]
David: Welcome to InDesign Secrets, I’m David Blatner. I’m here along with my cohost, Anne-Marie Concepcion.
Anne-Marie: Hi there, and welcome to our first podcast. In case, you’re thinking Blatner and Concepcion, Blatner and Concepcion. Where have I heard that before? Well, it’s probably because Dave and I coauthored a book recently, Adobe InDesign CS and CS2 Breakthroughs, which was published just this summer. [audio replay ends]
Anne-Marie: Oh, man.
David: It’s like, I feel like my hair was all waved back in the 70s style…
Anne-Marie: I know, I like the big shoulder pads in the platform shoes I don’t know… I cringe when I hear it. But, I guess it sounded all right. We had a good time.
David: It was episode one. What do you want? It was good. But, since then it’s gone gangbusters. And I don’t know if you…. Listeners, I don’t know if you realize, we have between 25,000 and 30,000 podcasts downloaded each month now. It’s pretty amazing. A lot of people keep listening to this and a lot of those are still going back all the way to version one, I mean, episode one. That episode has been downloaded… what did he say… 15,000 times.
Anne-Marie: 15,000 times. And I just checked our stats. Episode number one was downloaded by over 200 people in the past six days.
David: Wow!
Anne-Marie: So, over 200 people are looking at us in our wavy hair and shoulder pads and platform shoes. [laughter]
David: That’s very embarrassing.
Anne-Marie: What’s wrong with these people?
David: It’s one of those things like when you put stuff on the Internet, it never goes away.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. That’s a really long tale.
David: Yeah. So there you go. And since then, we’ve done 100 of these well, or this is number 100 of course. We’ve done 99 of them since then. And there have been some good days and some bad days. And I know this sounds completely scripted, I know that we sound perfectly organized whenever we’re doing this…
Anne-Marie: Perfectly rehearsed. Never a flub.
David: Never a flub. But, there actually are flubs and some of these things get edited. And some of them get edited a lot. So, we thought we would give you a little peak into some of the old episodes and a little glimpse into what our reality is here while we’re recording these things.
Anne-Marie: Just some of the things that have been cut out, they’re on the cutting room floor. The cutting room desktop, I guess you could call it that didn’t make it into the final one. And I guess. [crosstalk]
Anne-Marie: Go ahead.
David: No. You go ahead.
Anne-Marie: Shall we cut this out? [laughter]
Anne-Marie: I guess, what I want to say is that you should realize that we both record this podcast from our home offices. And so, David has a nice little lair that’s very distant and closed with the door from the house. Whereas I live in this open sort of floor plan kind of house and I broadcast from the end of the kitchen table. So, I have a dog and I have Sherry, my wonderful assistant, who’s here on the other end of the house, but sometimes you can hear them.
David: Right. Sherry is the person who answers the phone. If you’ve ever bought one of our keyboard shortcuts posters it was from Sherry. She sends all that stuff out. She does the accounting. She is awesome. And a great shout out to Sherry. We’ve got to say that because for 100 episodes she has been extremely useful, not just for us at Publishing Secrets, InDesign Secrets but also in keeping quiet enough in the background.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. She tiptoes around to the bathroom and things and heats up her tea while I’m recording. All right.
David: So, anyway for this first flubofest here, we should mention that this is back when we were interviewing Jessica who’s a teenage InDesign superstar. And you’ll just sort of hear what happened and what went terribly wrong as we were trying to start this podcast. So, are we ready to jump in?
Anne-Marie: yep.
David: OK. Here we go. [podcast replay starts]
[dog barking]
David: Ooops. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: Zoe! Hang on. Sher? Can we close the front door?
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Well, you got to give us a minute because the poster pick up guy is here.
Jessica: OK.
Anne-Marie: We sell InDesign Secrets posters on our InDesignSecrets.com website.
Jessica: OK.
David: Ding, dong.
Anne-Marie: And so, anytime anybody orders them, Sherry needs to roll them up in the poster tubes and the guy from the USPS picks them up and ships them off.
Jessica: OK.
David: Is this the shipment of 40 posters that’s going out?
Anne-Marie: I don’t know. Let me ask. [background conversation]
Anne-Marie: What? Who? Oh, God. OK. Can you let him in and just tell him to leave? Sorry, it’s my brother returning a table from our office.
David: Let him in and leave.
Anne-Marie: I sent out a notice that we’d be recording a 3 way podcast at this exact hour so, everybody is trouping.
David: Everybody’s trouping.
Anne-Marie: Oh, man. Oh, Paul, I’m so sorry. My brother Paul.
David: Just have him come in and leave. [podcast replay ends]
David: I love that every time I listen to that.
Anne-Marie: The nerve of him trying to return something that he borrowed. Get out of here.
David: OK. So, there have been other problems as well because, you know… Because we’re in two different places and we can’t see each other while we’re doing these podcasts we have to find some way to merge our audio. We actually each record our own audio on our own machines, and then we mix them later in a sound editing software. So, we have to find a way to mix them. In order to do that, we need a clapper, you know, like in the movies, they have the clapper boards. We don’t have clapper boards. We should probably get clapper boards. That would be cool, but we don’t have them. Instead, we just clap. One, two, three and then…
Anne-Marie: An analog clap.
David: Exactly, a clap with our hands and then we later mix it so that that visual clap spike in the audio signal is aligned. So, very low tech in some way and very high tech in others, but it all seems to work out most of the time. But, sometimes it doesn’t.
Anne-Marie: Right. The same is true for the endings. We don’t clap at the end, but sometimes at the endings we sort of forget to say what we meant to say or we sort of mess it up, anyway.
David: So, here is a little medley of some of the times when it goes wrong at the beginnings and endings. [podcast replay]
[music]
David: All right. I am recording.
Anne-Marie: One, two, three [clap]. [music]
David: Welcome to InDesign Secrets Episode 091. I’m David Blatner…
Anne-Marie: I’m recording. You’re recording?
David: I’m recording.
Anne-Marie: OK, one, two, three [clap]. [pause]
David: I lost my script [laughs].
Anne-Marie: Damn it.
David: OK, here we go. All right. Why don’t we do these in the morning?
Anne-Marie: I don’t know [laughs]. It’s crazy but we’re going to start over.
David: OK. Don’t…
Anne-Marie: Not because of the dog.
David: What’s out there? Are you still recording?
Anne-Marie: Yeah, I’m still recording. I’ll stop it.
David: No, just hit pause. I mean, just one, two, three again.
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: Don’t do that. We’re still in synch, right?
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Well, I’ve got to get ourselves set up. Sherry is trying to quietly put her dishes away before she leaves for the day.
David: All right.
Anne-Marie: So, hang on a minute. And Zoe is going crazy because she wants it and she thinks she’s got some food. All right. Don’t even talk to her anymore.
David: Are you still recording?
Anne-Marie: Thanks, Sherry. Yes, I’m still recording. OK, ready?
David: I think so.
Anne-Marie: One… Well, we don’t have to do that. Let’s just pause for awhile so you know where to pick up.
David: Ready? OK. Email us at info@indesignsecrets.com, but until that… bleb bleb. I don’t like any of that. I’m just winging it here. Let me start all of that over. I don’t have the ending text in front of me.
Anne-Marie: That’s it for Episode 053, so thank you everybody. If you have comments or suggestions…
David: It’s Episode 052.
Anne-Marie: Please email us at info@indesignsecrets.com.
David: That was Episode 052.
Anne-Marie: I’ll start again [imitates music].
David: [joins in to imitate music]. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: Oh, Lord. [podcast replay ends]
David: So, anyway, we better move on. I hope you enjoyed those little glimpses into our world here, some of the old ones. We certainly had fun with that, but what we really should be doing is talking about our first Annual InDesign Secrets Eekeekeek Awards.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, we put up, if you remember from our last podcast and also we posted it in our Twitter feed and posted it on the website that we came up with six categories of different things that are useful to InDesign users and asked our listeners and audience to vote on what were their favorites in each category.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: So, we are going to award with an actual award, a little graphic, to all of the winners and the runners up for all of these categories. I think we had hundreds of people respond with the week and a half or two weeks deadline that we gave people.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: So, it was pretty interesting how it turned out. The very first category was…
David: I should mention that we actually have placed all of these in very official looking envelopes, and Anne-Marie and I each have a giant envelope that reaches from here to Chicago.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Let me rip this open. OK. Now, let me get my reading glasses on, and it says “The best free InDesign plugin…”
David: Yes, drum roll.
Anne-Marie: First place winner was keyboard shortcuts, InDesign keyboard shortcuts, from DTP Tools.
David: I was very pleased with this, of course, because InDesign Secrets was the cosponsor of this plugin, and I helped design the thing so that we could get it out there and the keyboard shortcut from DTP Tools lets you edit your keyboard shortcuts and have different keyboard shortcuts, sets, et cetera, et cetera.
Anne-Marie: That free plugin, I think you can still download that from our site, right?
David: I tell you, it’s better just to go to DTP Tools.
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: At dtptools.com. We’ll have links to all of these in our show notes, so definitely check out the show notes for this episode.
Anne-Marie: I don’t remember exactly how many plugins we listed there for people to vote, but I thought it was pretty cool that this plugin got 30 percent of the vote.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Which was a lot, and then a very close runner up though that’s also going to get an award is Typefi AutoFit plugin.
David: Well, it’s an astonishing plugin. We’ve talked about that before, but it’s an amazing plugin and the fact that it’s free is just incredible. It does so much, and it’s so useful so definitely check that out.
Anne-Marie: Now, you should know that for many of these categories we ended up with, the very last item was ‘other’ where people could type in something. And so, we looked at all of those writein candidates and if there were any significant number of people who voted for the same thing then we will also bring that up. In this category, though there were a few different plugins mentioned, most people, and I was surprised at this, said I’ve never heard of any of these, or they wrote, I hate plugins. I only use scripts. I saw one that said my copy of InDesign didn’t come with any plugins.
David: Oh no, no, no.
Anne-Marie: So, yeah. I guess a little bit more user education is on the way.
David: Yes, definitely. OK, so that was for free plugins but there were also lots and lots of commercial plugins out there. And in the category of best commercial InDesign plugin, the winner with 26 percent of the vote was Markzware Q2ID which has obviously been very useful for people.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: People who are switching from Quark Express to InDesign, the ability to open Quark Express documents in InDesign with Q2ID.
Anne-Marie: Congratulations to Markzware.
David: Yes, but the runnerup was, again, not very far behind. It was Recosoft PDF2ID. Obviously, people like the ones that are just 2ID. In this case, it’s Recosoft’s PDF2ID, which opens PDF files right in InDesign, and it is also a pretty amazing plugin. We’ve talked about that in some detail in previous episodes. And, again, not many writeins. People didn’t just, weren’t really writing. There were some. I guess a couple people about the catalog.
[crosstalk]
Anne-Marie: … pictures. Somebody wrote in that one.
David: EZ Catalog. There were a couple of other ones, but not very many singles. So, that was intriguing.
Anne-Marie: So, the next category was best fee third party InDesign script.
David: Yes, and a lot of feedback there people using scripts in InDesign which was great to hear.
Anne-Marie: Now, there was a clear winner with 29 percent of the vote and that was Scott Selberg’s Calendar Wizard.
David: Wow.
Anne-Marie: So, congratulations, Scott. Lots of people are big fans of that. I never used that script myself, but I guess I don’t need to do a lot of calendars.
David: Oh well, if you do need to do calendars, you need that script because it’s just so, so easy. It’s great.
Anne-Marie: The runnerup was Martinho da Gloria’s Layout Zone.
David: Yay.
Anne-Marie: With 20 percent of the vote. Didn’t you just write a post today about that?
David: Well, yes. In fact, the CS4 version of Layout Zone just today was released so that too you should know about. It’s a little bit of news as well. In fact, it does more now than it did in CS3 because if you are using CS4 with Layout Zone for CS4 you can export a single page item or a whole spread or anything that selected on the page as a PDF, as a swift file. You can just select like eight objects on your page and say, make me a swift of just that or make me an XFL file of just this or make me a PDF of just this part of the page or whatever really cool. So, they add a lot of functionality for CS4.
Anne-Marie: That’s amazing. And, you know, you have to remember, when you file these links for these free scripts, that to please keep an eyeball out for the donate button. Because we really need to support our third party scriptors.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: Especially with something like Layout Zone, you could easily have charged $90 bucks or something like that for that script, don’t you think?
David: Totally.
Anne-Marie: Oh, totally. Yeah.
David: Oh, yeah. And I’m really glad you brought that up. That is really important to help support our scriptors and the people who are doing plugins and scripts out there, so absolutely. Now, there was a honorable writein there in the third party free script category.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. And I think that kind of told me that we forgot to include somebody that we should have included in the list.
David: Yes, you’re right.
Anne-Marie: And that was Dan Rodney’s Proper Fraction.
David: Yes. Yep.
Anne-Marie: So, which we have talked about and written about many times on the blog. That’s the very cool script, it’s kind of like, make fraction from Quark that people are used to, but it’s even smarter, because if there is an open type version of the fraction, it’ll use those glyphs instead, so it’s a very sweet script. And…
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: One of the funny responses that people wrote in was… Some poor person wrote…
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Under other he wrote, “Just the InDesign Program has me stumped. Don’t need more frustration.”
David: [laughs] I love that.
Anne-Marie: Scripts!
David: It’s like scripts, oh, my gosh.
Anne-Marie: Exactly.
David: I’ve got to figure out how to text frame first.
Anne-Marie: Right, right. Well, it’s true. Scripts give you more functionality than InDesign, so first, focus on InDesign, and then extend that out with scripts.
David: That’s right, but…
Anne-Marie: So, congratulations, Dan, for the honorable write in winner.
David: Yes, absolutely. And then we had this idea of, why don’t we ask what the best InDesign book is? And this was kind of a hard one, because of course…
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: Anne-Marie and I wrote a book, “InDesign Breakthroughs,” together. I’ve written a book with Olav Kvern called, “Real World InDesign,” and we’ve talked about those and we’ve gotten lots of nice feedback from people over the years.
Anne-Marie: We went back and forth about whether or not to even like, exclude any books written by you and I, because we thought that would be kind of stacking the deck.
David: Right. Right. But, if we didn’t include those, then…
Anne-Marie: People would write it in.
David: Yeah, yeah. So, we decided we would put it in, but instead of saying what is the top winner, we would ask for the top three winners. What are the top three books on InDesign, instead. And we figured that would kind of even it out a little bit. And, in fact, I’m very pleased and flattered to note, that “Real World InDesign,” by Olav Kvern and I, did come in number one with 66 percent…
Anne-Marie: Sixtysix percent? I knew it.
David: … of the voters.
Anne-Marie: I knew that was going to happen.
David: It was very, very nice.
Anne-Marie: But, a surprise was second place. I was positive that second place would be Sandee’s “InDesign Visual QuickStart Guide.” Because, that’s what I usually recommend when people say, “What book should I get for InDesign?” I’m like, “Number one, get the “Real World,” number two, get the “Visual QuickStart Guide.”
David: If you’re a beginner, yeah.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, for beginners. Yeah, but what was the number two?
David: “InDesign Breakthroughs,” the book you and I did. Isn’t that amazing. And the reason…
Anne-Marie: It’s surprising, yes.
David: It’s surprising because, that book was for version CS and CS2. So, in fact it’s called, “CS and CS2 Breakthroughs.”
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: So, it’s basically you can still find it, but it has not been updated for CS3 or CS4 yet. And, so that’s great.
Anne-Marie: But, that came in second place with 39 percent of the votes.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: So, thank you everybody.
David: Yes, yes. Thank you very much.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: And, you’ll notice that these percentages don’t add up, because, remember, people were asked to pick three.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Then the third place did go to Sandee. “InDesign Visual Quick Start Guide,” from Peachpit Press, goes to Sandee, and then fourth place, I really want to throw this in as an honorable mention, which is Jim Maivald and Cathy Palmer’s “Designer’s Guide to XML in Adobe InDesign.” So, if you’re doing XML, we’ve mentioned this before, if you’re doing XML stuff, you’ve got to have that book. “The Designer’s Guide to XML in InDesign.” So, that was pretty cool.
Anne-Marie: And we got a lot of people who wrote in different books in the honorable writein category. But, I would say there were two books that each got a whole bunch of mentions each. And one of them was Peter Kahrel’s, “Using GREP in InDesign CS3,” from O’Reilly.
David: It’s a great book.
Anne-Marie: Which is a wonderful book that we’ve…
David: ebook.
Anne-Marie: The ebook, a PDF book that we’ve mentioned and linked to many times on the website that is required reading if you’re doing anything with GREP in InDesign. And also, Nigel French’s “InDesign Typography,” published by Peachpit.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: So, those two books got mentioned quite frequently in the other categories.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Congratulations.
David: Yes. OK, then we kind of got obscure on you, and asked, “What was the best obscure InDesign feature of the week that we’ve done?” And we got a lot of people, almost 200 people answering that one. And it was very clear.
Anne-Marie: I was amazed 200 people actually went through the entire list that we made them look at.
David: I know, I know, I know.
Anne-Marie: Weird feature after weird feature.
David: Right. Here’s like 80 different obscure features, which one is your favorite? It is pretty amazing that people did that, but we did get a very clear winner there and that was a surprise to me. It is a CS4 feature ’share my screen’ and that was a relatively new one. Maybe it was because it was a relatively recent one that people logged to it.
Anne-Marie: I kind of think that it’s really fantastic feature that nobody talks about, in my opinion.
David: Absolutely.
Anne-Marie: The fact that you could just do screen sharing right from within InDesign. Number two was tied with 11 votes each, Gravity and Flattener preview. And we should say number 3, with just one less, with 10 votes, was Merged Swatches. After we did this survey, this poll, I realized that I’m not sure what we were asking, and maybe other people weren’t sure either. Were we asking for the best feature or should we give this award to Adobe for putting that feature in it or were we asking…
Anne-Marie: The most obscure one that we polled.
David: The most obscure one, or were we asking, which was the one that we actually talked about the best? Which one did we have the fewests and errrhhs? So we’re going to do another survey, no…
[laughter]
David: An even a more obscure one. We’ll figure out someone to give an award to on that one. But, before we do that, we’re going to talk about the best font that connects with it.
Anne-Marie: The last category.
David: The last category, the best font, which totally surprised me.
Anne-Marie: It comes with InDesign.
David: Yeah. That’s right it comes with InDesign, and that is Myriad Pro.
Anne-Marie: I wasn’t surprised at all, and I was surprised that you were surprised, it had 25% of the vote. [laughter]
David: Well, we’ll talk about why I was so surprised in a minute. Other then I’m more a Serif guy then a Sound Serif. Clearly there are more Sound Serif people out there answering this survey. But, it’s a very nice font, I like Myriad, 25% of the people voted for that. And number two and three, number two was Garamond Premier Pro and number three was Minion Pro. And both of those put together still didn’t get as much votes as Myriad Pro. So Myriad Pro came way ahead of everything.
Anne-Marie: When I think what is the font that I use most frequently that came with InDesign, I’d have to say it is Myriad Pro.
David: Well there you go. The main reason I don’t like Myriad Pro, and maybe it is just me, but it really bugs me that there are no small caps. There are no small caps in it. How could you do a pro font, of all things, with no small caps?
Anne-Marie: I guess that is true.
David: Am I missing them, are they hiding in there somewhere? I can’t find them.
Anne-Marie: I guess, I don’t use small caps at all. I am always using Myriad Pro when I am teaching, only because it’s got all the fractions in there, maybe that is one of the reasons. It is a really cool way to show off the gliss panel, but I guess all of these are good way to show the gliss panel.
David: That is true, they are great fonts. All of these are really great fonts and you should definitely be using them more in everything. That was very cool.
Anne-Marie: Those are the results of our first annual Eeekeekeek Awards. And for the companies, that are actual beings behind these winners, as opposed, to say ’share my screen’. We will be sending you a lovely PNG image of the award that you can put on your website, or your business card, or the side of your panel truck as you’re delivering the free scripts. You could have this big fat old web award sticking there. We’ll have a page on our site listing all of the winners and runnerups with links to sites when appropriate.
David: Yes. Congratulations to all of you. Yes, definitely.
Anne-Marie: I want to say one more thing, and this is the segue into our obscure InDesign feature of the week, Eeekeekeek. And that is… what is our obscure feature?
David: It is the font version. And here is my segue. I was not that impressed with Myriad Pro for the past few years because it didn’t have automatic fractions. AnneMarie and I are talking about this and she brings up the thing about fractions. I am like, “Mine doesn’t have fractions.” And she says “AughOh, what version are you using?” And I thought,” Oh no, oh geese, I have an old version of Myriad.” That has been my problem with fractions. For years now, I have had the wrong version of Myriad on my machine. The reason I was so in tune with versions, especially with Myriad, is because when I pulled together that guide to InDesign fractions for our website a couple of years ago I learned that Myriad Pro actually had two different versions. And a lot of the fonts that come with InDesign, not a lot of them, but some of them do get them upgraded. The version of Myriad Pro that came with CS2 is older one that came with CS3.
And I had had to put in the footnotes of this little guide, “If you had Myriad Pro version 1.0, then you don’t get these kind of very smart automatic fractions. What else I learned is that if you have a version of, let’s say that you have InDesign CS1 installed and then you upgrade to CS2 and upgrade to CS3, you are still stuck with the original version of Myriad.
David: And that has been my problem.
Anne-Marie: It is only if you take a fresh brand new computer and install CS3 or CS4 from the start that you get the new version of Myriad, which I think is a bug. They should upgrade the fonts when they install it.
David: I agree, and my guess the reason they don’t is because there maybe some tiny tiny reflow problems in very obscure corner cases. They probably don’t want anyone to have any kind of problems like that. That said, I wish they at least gave you the option of doing it. So, that has been my problem and I knew there were different versions.
Anne-Marie: But, we haven’t gotten yet to the feature how did we discover which version of Myriad that we are using?
David: Exactly. I knew that there were different versions but I never really took the time to look at which one I was using. So, Ann Maria says, “Go look at the version.” So where do you find the version?
Anne-Marie: You go to type and choose ‘find font.’ You have to select the name of the font. Remember, ‘find font’ lists all the fonts that you use in the document. Select the name of the font at the top, make sure that you are viewing ‘more info,’ if you see a button that says ‘more info’ click that in this dialog box and a new panel will be revealed at the bottom that gives you info on the selected fonts. Its font name, it’s post script name, the type, the version, I am looking at it right now, Myriad Pro regular, I had version 2.037 and you had 1.0 something.
David: Yes I did, until just now, it is updated now.
Anne-Marie: The other thing that it shows you there is what the path is.
David: Yeah, that is so useful.
Anne-Marie: It shows you which version, because the first thing I did was a search on my machine ‘where is,’ what versions do I have on my machine? I discovered, not two or three or four different versions or Myriad, I had 28 different Myriad Pros on my machine. I had to go through figure out which one is it, which one should I be using? On Windows, you could do a properties on the font, once you can find it. On Mac you could say ‘get info from the file menu.’
Anne-Marie: Actually you can just select it on the Mac. If you are in column view you can just select it. And the preview, it previews the font and then on the right it tells you the version.
David: That’s great. I don’t use column view, I hate it. I don’t know, it is just me. But, that is an obscure feature for a different day. For today, we are just going to focus on the ‘find font’ dialogue box. Type menu, ‘find font,’ make sure you click the more info.
Anne-Marie: Another interesting use for this ‘find font’ dialogue box, this just happened, I had a client on Monday, they were going insane because she said, “Futura Condensed Medium is not available to InDesign,” but it is listed here. They are using suitcase fusion, it says it’s active but they cannot select it. They said they can get Futura condensed but not Futura Condensed Medium. So I said, “I think that’s the same file.” She said, “No, they are not.” I said, “Go ahead and select ‘Futura Condensed’ in your ‘find font’ and look at ‘more info.’” And she saw that the postscript name was ‘Futura Condensed medium’, but it was showing in the menu that it was just ‘Futura Condensed,’ and that happens a lot. So, that is another, they are the same fonts. That is just some different naming that is happening in same background.
David: That’s a bonus obscure InDesign feature, Eeekeekeek. There you go. All right that is it for episode 100. Be sure to check out the show notes on our blog at indesignsecrtes.com, where we’re going to have links to all the places that we’ve mentioned, and including all of those plugins and scripts.
We would love to hear what you thought of this show. Please leave a comment in the show notes or email us at info@indesignsecrets.com. And until we meet again this is David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion for InDesign secrets.
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