Podcast 102 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 102 page.
[Music Intro]
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Welcome to InDesign Secrets episode 102. I’m Anne- Marie Concepcion and I’m here along with my cohost David Blatner.
David Blatner: Hey there.
Anne-Marie: Hey there David. Our podcast and blog at indesignsecrets.com are the independent resource for all things in designnnnnn.
David: It’s true and coming up on today’s show, we’ve got some news; we’re going to talk about some upcoming webinars. I hate that name webinars but that’s what you wrote here so I’m going to say webinars, I’d like eSeminars, that’s what we’re doing eSeminars. You can do a webinar, I’ll do an eSeminar.
Anne-Marie: That’s fine.
David: Then we’re going to talk about something very important to every InDesign user scaling images. What happens when you scale them in a design and why you might want to or might not want to scale them in InDesign. We’ll talk about that a little bit. And also, we’re going to talk about a new survey that we’re putting out. Very important, help InDesign Secrets move forward take our survey.
Anne-Marie: Get lots and lots of prizes too.
David: Yes big prizes, big, big prizes. And then we will finally do our obscure InDesign feature of the weekkkkk. That was…
Anne-Marie: Yes, that was pretty week.
David: Yeah, could we get a real echo here.
Anne-Marie: Of course, go ahead, go ahead.
David: The obscure InDesign feature of the weekkkkk.
Anne-Marie: kkkk.
David: Nice.
Anne-Marie: All right that was good.
David: These…
Anne-Marie: It’s a…go ahead tell them.
David: Snap to flag.
Anne-Marie: Snap to flag that’s a name that we came up with.
David: That’s true.
Anne-Marie: That’s right it’s nowhere in the documentation but we’ll talk more about that later.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: But before we jump into the news lets talk about our sponsor of today’s episode our friends at World Tools and In Tools. These are the people who do In Book and In Seffered and a bunch ofthey do the In Book plug in pack that’s whatwe’ve talked about that in past episodes. All the great plugins for Adobe and Design both for the regular version and the ME version that really automate a lot of long document publishing. And there is a special deal for InDesign Secret fans 20 dollars off the price for either one of those plug in bundles. Yes.
David: Which is great.
Anne-Marie: And we will link to the special page on their sight for you to get that 20 percent off.
David: Because you know each one of these plugins is like 29, 39 dollars or something like that but it makes a lot more sense just get the whole bundle, I mean you save a lot of money by getting the whole bundle. And then if you get the 20 bucks off the bundle then it’s even better. That’s awesome. You know they also make World Tools; I don’t want to forget World Tools. Anybody out there doing right to left publishing with InDesign CS4 you, you really owe it to yourself to make sure you’ve got World Tools. So that would be very, very, very handy. World Tools basically allows you to do right to left publishing in InDesign CS4 if you have the normal the nonME version not the Middle Eastern version but the regular…
Anne-Marie: It exposes to put it in software developers speak; it exposes the feature that’s in the regular InDesign CS4.
David: Yeah and it’s 49 bucks. It’s awesome; it’s great so check that out for sure. Good. News. Lets go back. Talk a little bit about news. We’ve mentioned our live seminar tour a couple of times here but we just want to remind you that if you’re in San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, or Chicago definitely check out our seminars that we’ll be doing in those cities. The San Francisco one is coming up. It’s just June 2nd so make sure you get your tickets to that. Register and we’ll have a link in the show notes to go there but you can always just go to mogoseminars.com that’ll take you there.
Anne-Marie: We should probably mention that the seminars are covering InDesign.
David: Oh, that’s a good idea.
Anne-Marie: I don’t think you’ve mentioned that. They’re InDesign seminars.
David: Yes InDesign seminars.
Anne-Marie: A daylong InDesign seminar with either David Blatner, full bore David Blatner. I don’t know I think people should wear like dark glasses and carry a windscreen. [laughter]
David: It’s going to be.
Anne-Marie: To watch you talk for eight hours straight. I don’t know if I could take it. Holey moley their brains will be exploded, they should bring like funnels to carry the grey matter coming out of their ears by the end of the day. [laughter]
David: It’s going to be intense. And you too. I mean both. It’s going to be a lot of material. It’s a little bit different, each seminar’s going to be a little bit different you know the one that you do and the one that I do but it’s going to be lots of fun. So definitely check those out and we hope to see you there. If you goby the way if you do go directly to mogosemiars.com let them know that we sent you because they’re a separate company so they don’t always know wherewhere people are coming from. So make sure they know that hey, we were listening to InDesign Secrets and we wanted to register. So that would be a big help for us as well.
Now also wanted to mention that if you can’t make it to live David and Anne-Marie then you should at least check out the virtual David and Anne-Marie. And there are a couple of ways of doing that; one is the eSeminars, which we’ll talk about in just a second but the other one is through lynda.com.
Anne-Marie: Lynda.
David: Lynda, Lynda.
Anne-Marie: lynda.com.
David: So we have been doing a bunch of new videos for lynda.com and…
Anne-Marie: Because we have nothing better to do.
David: Yeah exactly but you know these arethese are all kinds of InDesign videos. I just did the introduction to GREP; ‘Ten Things You Have to Know About GREP in InDesign’ I think it is. Something like that.
Anne-Marie: It’s kind of a new thing at Lynda. Is that they like to get more shorter titles. So instead of sitting there through 90 hours of how to learn the software program just like 10 things. Ten short videos on a particular topic and they say what do you want to do. So David you did a bunch and I did a bunch and there’s other authors doing a bunch. And one of them that you did was. What did you just say? Ten tips.
David: The ‘10 Tips For GREP in InDesign’. I did another one on basically just generally 10 tips ‘10 Tips All InDesign Users Need to Know’. I did another one on 10…
Anne-Marie: How did you limit yourself to just 10?
David: I know it was crazy. It was crazy. There are so many things. But that’s what they said. It has to be 10. I did it. The same thing happened with the scripts. ‘Ten Free Scripts’ is another one I did. And it was like you know there are dozens of scripts that people need to know about but I could only do 10. So ‘Ten Free Scripts That Every InDesign User Needs to Know About’ and ‘Ten Free Plugins’ was the last one I did. I’ve got a few more up my sleeve I’ll be doing soon but I just wanted you to know about those. And you were just down in California last week right? You were recording a bunch. What were you doing?
Anne-Marie: I recorded three bam, bam, bam and I’ll be going back for more later. I did ‘10 Habits of Highly Effective InDesign Professionals’.
David: Great, great.
Anne-Marie: You know like ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective Entrepreneurs’. “Ten Tips for Troubleshooting InDesign Files’ and ‘Ten Things that Designers Must Know About Bridge’.
David: Excellent, excellent all three of those are going to be must. Now those are not available quite yet they still need to edit them and they’ve got great editors there. They really make us sound like we know what we’re talking about.
Anne-Marie: But those should be up in like a month or so.
David: Yeah we’ll announce it.
Anne-Marie: But yours are all up now right?
David: Yes, yes all mine are up there now along with the ninehour title of InDesign and then another nine hours on Advanced InDesign. So those are all…
Anne-Marie: Like 20 hours of InDesign better than David Blatner teaches it.
David: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the bummer is that these new Ten Things titles are so short that they’re not putting them onto CDs or DVDs or whatever.
Anne-Marie: Yeah so, we can’t like give them away for prizes or anything.
David: Yeah they’re only in the online training library at lynda.com so you have to be a subscriber to get those. So the longer titles they do have, you know we’ve got some videos on DVD that you can buy, which is a problem for some users. I know that some of our listeners are in countries where it’s, you know, bandwidth is very expensive for example and it’sit’s a hassle to get really high bandwidth connections to watch videos. And so they really want the DVDs and/or CDs and that’s kind of a problem. So I’m going to keep pushing the lynda.com people toto make them available on disc but for the time being those short titles are only for on line. OK anyway, that was a longlong topic on news but we just wanted to let you know that those are available now.
Also, there’s another big discount that Peachpit Press is doing. I wrote “Real World InDesign” with Olav Kvern, and if you want the PDF version, the online PDF version of that, you can get 40 percent off that by going to Peachpit.com and using a special code. What was the code? I’ve already forgotten. It’s “Earthday PP”, is that right?
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: We’ll have it in our show notes, as well. But it’s not just “Real World InDesign”, its all the PDF versions, all their ebooks, and videos, I think, at Peachpit.com. So, you should definitely check those out.
Anne-Marie: What else can we flog about what we’re doing? [laughter]
Anne-Marie: Our upcoming webinars.
David: The webinars, exactly.
Anne-Marie: The eSeminars, sorry. I mean, the whole world calls them webinars. Adobe and you call them eSeminars.
David: Right, right.
Anne-Marie: They’re also called, I think, screencasts, a live screencast, maybe that would…
David: Oh, that’s not so bad. I like screencasts. I could do that.
Anne-Marie: I like “online seminars”. That’s what I like calling them.
David: That’s even better.
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: Online training seminar gig thing.
Anne-Marie: Online training seminar thingies, yes.
David: But we’re going to do a couple more of them in a few weeks.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. In May, and I’m going to start out with doing InDesign troubleshooting, now that I have all the information fresh in my head from doing the training video. I have lots of great tips, other stuff that I discovered. Ways to troubleshoot flaky InDesign, or flaky InDesign files.
David: Yeah, that’s great.
Anne-Marie: And then David, you’re doing one the following week, on Thursday, the 28th, on “Introduction to Grep”.
David: “Introduction to Grep”. Basically, we’re taking a lot of the material we did for Lynda.com, but we’re sort of going into more depth or different depth than the Lynda.com title. So, some of it will be similar, but some will be completely new. I’m going to be doing “Introduction to Grep” and they’re relatively lowcost seminars. You can either watch them live as we’re doing them, or if you register, we’ll give you a URL so you can see them recorded. So, if you’re in a different time zone than we are, and you can’t log in at that time, you can still experience the seminar. You can still learn the stuff by watching the recording. So, either way, if you register for them, and it’s 29 US dollars I think, until May what?
Anne-Marie: May 15th.
David: May 15th.
Anne-Marie: Five one five.
David: Five one five. So, $29, or if it’s after that, it’s going to be $39. Definitely check that out, and we hope to see you at those online screeneseminarcasts.
Anne-Marie: We’ll have links in the show notes to more information. We’re also going to post on the blog about them, and so, you’ll find out like…They’ll be 60 minutes, and we’ll do Q and A, and all that other good stuff. All right, now. That’s about it. Well, thanks for coming to our show everybody. [laughter]
David: This has been the “Flogging Our Stuff” session…
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Holy moley. All right, the actual topic. What’s the actual topic for today?
David: Well, it’s scaling, and this was something that was suggested to us by our friend and reader/listener Eugene Tyson in Ireland. He brought up this whole question of scaling. What happens when you scale images in InDesign? So we want to talk about that a little, and thank you to Eugene for suggesting this, because it’s a very, very important topic.
Anne-Marie: Well, I thought it was interesting when I saw his question come in, and I said, “He said something about ‘What kind of resampling does InDesign do when you scale an image?’” And my immediate reaction was, “There is no resampling in InDesign.” It makes the pixels bigger, it makes the pixels smaller. Resampling is when the program has to add pixels or remove pixels out of its little puny computer brain. Right?
David: Right. That’s right.
Anne-Marie: So when it maintains the resolution, even as you’re enlarging or reducing the size of an image, but InDesign does not do that. When you make something bigger by scaling, it just makes the pixels bigger, which reduces the resolution. Fewer pixels can fit in an inch when they’re larger. Yes?
David: Yes. We need to be really clear that we’re talking about pixel images, or bitmapped images. Scaling those kinds of images, you know, something from Photoshop that is pixilated. Those images will change resolution when you scale them.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Things that are made out of pixels. Things that are made on a path, vector images, those you can scale until you’re heart’s content. Nothing’s going to change, because they are deviceindependent file formats.
David: Of course there are a lot of hybrid images that are both vector and bitmapped.
Anne-Marie: That’s true. You add the dropped shadow to the illustrator file, then, right, the dropped shadow is a bitmap.
David: Yep, exactly. So, you need to pay attention to those, as well. But, let’s really try and focus just on bitmapped images. As you said, you scale it smaller, the pixels get smaller, more of them fit into an inch, so the resolution goes up. In general, that’s true, that there is no resampling, there’s no adding or removing when you’re in InDesign. The trouble, however, comes when you leave InDesign, and what I mean by that is, when you print or when you make a PDF.
Anne-Marie: Or when you do Swiff, or when you export to HTML.
David: That’s true, that’s true too. They could resample there. But the main times that people experience it is when printing or exporting a PDF. When you export a PDF, InDesign does, by default, try and resample to certain resolutions. Or, if your resolution is too high, I should say, then it will downsample to a lower resolution.
Anne-Marie: Well, right. Exporting to PDF, I think, is pretty obvious, because that big old compression screen in the “Export to Adobe PDF” dialogue box says “bicubic downsampling”. It actually has the word downsampling. “Which method do you want to use? What resolution should we use?” But what I wasn’t aware of, or didn’t percolate to the top of my brain, was how it resamples when you print. And you reminded me that in the print dialogue box, the default for InDesign is to automatically resample according to your printers resolution.
David: Well, it downsamples to…Typically, we’re talking about in a graphics pane of the print dialogue box, there is an option for how to send your data, and the default value is optimized…
Anne-Marie: Optimized subsampling.
David: Yeah, that’s right. Optimized subsampling. You can set that to none, and then nothing will show up at all, or you could change it to all, and then it will send all the data to your printer. But optimized subsampling makes a lot of sense, because let’s say you have taken your 300 PPI image (pixelsperinch image). You bring it in InDesign and you scale it down to 50 percent. Well, your resolution has doubled, so all of a sudden you have a 600 PPI image. Well, if you send that to your printer, you probably don’t need 600 PPI, especially if it’s a desktop laser printer or something. So, InDesign will downsample, that’s the optimized subsampling, it will downsample that to, I believe it’s twice your screen frequency.
Anne-Marie: Of your printer.
David: Of your output. So, typically, it’s going to be something like 70 or something like that. Let me see. Where is this…? AnnePrinter: My Okidata color laser writer has a line screen of 110.
David: OK. Yep, so…
Anne-Marie: So that means it would downsample it to 220.
David: That’s right. It will downsample it to…
Anne-Marie: I’ve never actually looked at it with a magnifying glass and counted the dots. How do you know it’s twice the line screen?
David: [sputtering] It’s a…
Anne-Marie: A good guess.
David: It’s a good guess, it’s a good guess. [laughter]
David: I happen to know, it’s either going to be two times or two and a half times, and I honestly don’t remember.
Anne-Marie: Really?
David: I could go look it up. It’s probably in my book.
Anne-Marie: I thought it would be one and a half or two times.
David: No, it should be one and a half, but it’s either two or two and a half. Postscript itself will downsample. You could send a huge amount of data to a printer. Let’s say you go to the graphics pane, and you set the “Send Data” to “All”, and all of a sudden, you’re getting a 1,000 PPI image sent to your printer.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Which is a total waste because it’s a lot of data to send through your little network to your printer. It’s a lot of data for your printer to chomp on. But even if you did all of that, your printer is still going to down sample it, if you have a poster printer. It’s still going to down sample it to two and a half times.
Anne-Marie: It’s going to ignore, right, it’s going to ignore the extra stuff.
David: Yeah, it just doesn’t need it. It doesn’t need it at all. In fact I just want to throw out one more thing here. I may have said this in a previous Podcast. You don’t need, even two times your half tone screen frequency. In general you rarely need more then one and a half times your, your, output, your screen frequency for printing. We’re talking specifically printing to half tones here, not printing on an ink jet printer, but printing to something that actually makes a regular half cut. AnneMarie But I to do think that you can see, I think it depends on the context or the content of the image. If it’s a landscape or somebody’s face, one and a half times is usually fine. But if you’re doing let’s say, a picture of a sailboat. Right, with these lines, a lot of straight diagonals on it.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Then you need really, then you need higher resolution or architecture, right.
David: If there’s extraordinarily small details in the image.
Anne-Marie: Small details that are not on a straight horizontal or vertical.
David: That’s right.
Anne-Marie: It it’s straight lines…
Anne-Marie: Extraordinarily.
David: Which there rarely are. In a photograph. If you have extraordinarily small details then you tend not to, then you tend to give it a little more resolution. Maybe two times the frequency would be fine. But you rarely rarely need that in 85% of the images that are out there. You just don’t need that. One and a half times is just fine, and who cares? Well who cares is, again the printing time and the processing time that the file size in general is a huge difference between one and a half times and two times. Doesn’t seem like it would be that much. But it really is a very significant difference. So keep your files smaller. Now, if you have a 10 megabyte image and you’re scaling it down to 10%, you might say, “well you know whatever, it’s 10 megabytes who cares”. But you could save an enormous amount of printing time, exporting time etc, by down sampling it in Photoshop first. But there is another even more important reason why you want to down sample in Photoshop first. If you’re scaling down to 10% of the size, and here’s the crux of everything we’ve been dancing around here.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: If you’re scaling down to 10% of the size. Yes InDesign can down sample that for you. Yes when you export the pdf it can down sample it for you. But what it does not do, and which is really important. [Anne-Marie sounding a drum roll]
Anne-Marie: I know you’re waiting for drum roll.
David: Yes thank you, thank you drum roll. [Anne-Marie making SHHHHHHHHHHHH sound]
David: Excellent! Unsharp masking. If you’re gonna be scaling an image that much, you need to sharpen it more or else it’s going to look blurry. This is a thing that for years people have been saying “Well I just import an image and I scale it to whatever I feel like, then I print it. Gosh it’s just kind of blurry it’s just not as sharp as I want”. Well you’re not sharpening. Now why Adobe has not put on sharp masking into indesign is beyond me. It’s incredibly important.
Anne-Marie: Good point.
David: It’s just not there…
Anne-Marie: Mm Hmm.
David: So.
Anne-Marie: I wonder, you don’t think optimized sub sampling word optimize means that maybe it’s doing some unsharp masking in there.
David: No. It’s down sampling.
Anne-Marie: OK, so. But does that mean then that you have to go through, and I know there are people who do this, part of their prepress check is they go through every single image in InDesign. And the ones that were scaled anything more than 100% I encountered a client that did this. Then it was some poor schmoes job to figure out what the images resolution was supposed or what the dimensions supposed to be and replicate that in Photoshop and then replace the old image with that one in Photoshop.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: A task that could take one to three days.
David: That’s right, that’s right. In fact, I think even if they’re 100%, you should go back and just do that in Photoshop and replace them with new images set to 100% just because you want to give more work. In today’s economy, we need to be giving more work to these production people.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Right. I always figured, I would leave things… I always told my students that if they’re scaled to say plus or minus 15 to 20% I don’t bother doing anything different in Photoshop. But if you’re scaling something up more than 125%, then I would usually resample and sharpen and unsharpen and all that stuff in Photoshop and then replace that.
David: You know, this is where it becomes art more than science. It depends entirely on the image content, on the quality of your publication, and so on.
Anne-Marie: True, true.
David: You know, what are you really trying to achieve? I think it’s very unlikely that you’d get any benefit from resampling in Photoshop if all you’ve scaled is maybe five or 10%, beyond 10%, I think you start getting a little bit more opportunity for bringing some of the sharpness back.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: Certainly at 20%, 15 or 20%, you’re really going to want to open that kind of stuff up in Photoshop.
Anne-Marie: Like you said, it’s more of an art, and I think it depends on the image, the impact of the image.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: If it’s like the main feature, you have like a fullbleed picture of Bob Dylan, you know, on one side of an opening feature about his latest album, you want to get that picture perfect, right?
David: Yeah, yeah.
Anne-Marie: And so you do something special to it, but if it’s just a little dingbat or illustration in a howto, you might not really care that much.
David: That’s absolutely right. And a lot of it depends on how much detail there is in the image, as we were mentioning earlier.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: You can get away with a lot of scaling up and down if it’s a relatively blurry background. Maybe it’s a picture of a sky with a couple clouds and it’s just kind of blurry. You can get away with a lot there.
Anne-Marie: That’s true. That’s right.
David: But you do want to keep track of your image resolution, and we talked about that in earlier podcasts as well, looking at the Info Panel, for example, selecting the image, looking in the Info Panel, and checking out, or the Links Panel, even better.
Anne-Marie: The Links Panel, in CS4, right? Just add that to the top of the Links Panel so you can see.
David: Absolutely.
Anne-Marie: Or set your preflight profile to flag those images whose effective resolutions are under a certain amount.
David: Yeah, yeah. I like just looking at it in the Links Panel in CS4, but if you’re in CS3 or earlier, you know, keep an eye on the Info Panel and just make sure the effective PPI, that’s the resolution that you’ll get when you output, is not too high or too low.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: And if you start seeing those go way off to, you know, 1000 PPI, then you know, we definitely need to do something to this image here, because…
Anne-Marie: Now, what is a lot cheaper than having somebody work on this for three days is purchasing an addon for InDesign, right?
David: Yeah, yeah. Right.
Anne-Marie: Something that will automatically do this for you, will take the images that have been scaled in InDesign, open them up in Photoshop, automatically resample them, resize them, apply unsharp masking, run some actions, whatever you want to do, and then even convert them from RGB to CNYK if you want, and then bring them back into InDesign at 100% with the exact same offsets and so on.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And could there be such a miracle worker around? Yes!
David: [laughs] There is!
Anne-Marie: Yes, there is.
David: There is. There are a couple options out there right now, but the main one that you need to know about is this plugin called LinkOptimizer from Zevrix.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: And it’s very cool, unfortunately it’s Maconly, which I’m just baffled at, why they haven’t released a Windows version.
Anne-Marie: Wow.
David: It’s Maconly, but they have like a light version for $100, or really you should probably just splurge and get the full version, it’s 160 U.S. dollars, and it’s really pretty nifty. It’ll go through and do all that work for you.
Anne-Marie: But you know what it won’t do, I don’t think, is this issue of you bringing in an Illustrator file that has some raster effects. You wouldn’t want to bring that Illustrator back into Photoshop and rasterize the whole thing, would you?
David: Well…
Anne-Marie: You’d want to open that up in Illustrator and change the resolution of your rasters there.
David: Yeah, I guess that’s a good point. If you’re doing raster stuff in Illustrator, which I try my best to avoid, but if you were, then you’re going to have to manage that yourself manually, I think. I don’t think LinkOptimizer will handle that. I could be wrong. We should ask them about that.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: Interesting, cool. But yes, that is a perfectly reasonable option for doing that. I actually just saw a free script that will do some of this too, on the Adobe Exchange. I have not yet tried it. I just saw it, like a day ago, and I was like, “Ooh, that looks interesting.” So I’m going to have to try that out, and we’ll put a link in the show notes about it, so people can try it out. And if anyone does, then leave us a comment and let us know what you think. It’s pretty neat, but it doesn’t do anything anywhere near as much as Link Optimizer, but for basic going and changing in Photoshop and bringing it back, it seems to be…
Anne-Marie: Hard to beat free.
David: You know, it’s a tough situation right now, because there is a lot of cool, free stuff out there, but the commercial stuff almost always does more. So, when it comes down to “Do you need this feature? Do you need this feature? Do you need documentation that’s actually in English?”
Anne-Marie: Seriously, when you compare it to somebody who’s spending hours and hours, like how much their salary is, how much their benefits are, how much their computer costs, how much their workstation is, and all that kind of stuff, do you want to spend that or do you want to spend $160, on a plugin? You know what I mean?
David: Exactly. I totally agree. It’s worth that.
Anne-Marie: All right, so, we should probably go on.
David: Actually, I really want to keep talking about pixels and unsharp masking, but…
Anne-Marie: I know you do. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: Let’s go on.
David: I get excited about that stuff. We better ask our listeners something.
Anne-Marie: Yes. We want to learn more about you, people.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: We want to learn your innermost desires, and how much money you make.
David: Especially if your name is Adam Lambert. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: Stop that. Making fun of my Adam Lambert, right. This is going to be so outdated. He’s referring to my crush, my obsession with the American Idol singer.
David: Yes. Vote for Adam Lambert. We want to see more Adam Lambert.
Anne-Marie: Right. That’s right. Sometime during the month of May. Hopefully he’ll still be around, after today.
David: That’s right, who knows when you listen to this?
Anne-Marie: It’s a Tuesday, so, who knows? Right. The best singer you’ve ever heard, bar none. OK, the end. OK, I won’t say anything else.
David: Well, this is my way of derailing you. Whenever Anne-Marie is on a… [laughter]
David: All I have to say is “Adam Lambert” and it’s all over with. The next ten minutes is all about Adam Lambert. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: Oh, Lord. You know what I did yesterday? I actually spent, I think, two hours while I was in front of the TV, but still, two hours on the computer, not writing articles that are overdue for all these editors. Not writing a blog post, but making the perfect screensaver with about 25 stills that I took from Adam Lambert’s videos. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: And then, I made every corner a hot corner. [laughter]
David: Because every corner of Adam Lambert is a hot corner.
Anne-Marie: That’s right, so I could immediately see these floating images of Adam Lambert screaming and snarling and doing all the fantastic moves that he does. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: He’s just amazing, just amazing.
David: He is amazing.
Anne-Marie: [sighs]
David: Go, Adam! That’s all we can say about that.
Anne-Marie: Where were we? OK, reader survey.
David: We were going to talk about the survey. Reader survey, yes. Please.
Anne-Marie: Can you please? We actually do need to figure out who’s listening to us, and who’s reading the blog. We need to find out more about you, so we put together a very short survey, shouldn’t take you more than five minutes. I think there are 12 multiplechoice questions, and of course, we added a little comments field, if you want to tell us anything. And, it just asks like, where you’re from and what do you do and what else do we ask?
David: Where you are, who you are, what do you do.
Anne-Marie: What’s your role? Was there something else? A couple other things. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: That’s two questions. There’s a few more. You know, a general demographic survey, you’ve seen those before.
David: Yeah, it’s like 12 questions. The whole thing will take like three minutes for you to fill out. Totally easy. Please do us a favor and fill out the survey. As even more incentive for you to fill this thing out, we’re going to be giving away stuff. We have a pile of stuff here. Books, and posters, and videos, the Linda.com videos. I have the “InDesign Essential Training” and the “Advance Training”, $150 value. We’re going to be giving away those things to people.
Anne-Marie: And iTunes gift certificates.
David: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Anne-Marie: You could download Adam Lambert’s videos and his performances from “American Idol”.
David: [laughs] That’s right. We’re going to be giving away like $25 iTunes gift certificates, a bunch of stuff to the people who fill out. Not everybody, but we’re going to randomly draw people’s names and email addresses out of that survey. So that’s optional. I want to point out there that we do have a field there for your email address, your name and email address. You do not have to fill that out, but if you don’t it out, then we can’t contact you, you can’t win anything. But I do want to point out that if you do fill that out, we are not going to spam you. We’re not going to send you emails. We’re not even adding you to our email list or anything. That’s just for getting information.
Anne-Marie: Just for the prizes.
David: It’s just for the prizes, prize information, so, yeah. Exactly.
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: We had to put something there, so, good.
Anne-Marie: That’s good. Oh, the URL is http://tr.im/idssurvey.
David: Yep. That’s it.
Anne-Marie: And that’s all you have to do. And we’ll also, of course, include a link, but I know there are people who are listening right now like, ‘oh, I must go fill this out right away’.
David: Right. Now, the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Weekeekeekeek.
Anne-Marie: Eekeekeekeek. It’s the snapto flag.
David: Woohoo! Snapto!
Anne-Marie: It was Mike Witheral, right?
David: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Anne-Marie: He called it the Imperial Cruiser. [laughs]
David: Right. It’s just a little Imperial Cruiser thing that kind of attacks…
Anne-Marie: I love that name.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Yeah, it’s like the little triangle from that game from the olden days.
David: Right. Or “Star Wars”, it’s a little “Star Wars” Imperial Cruiser that’s attached to your cursor. You’re moving around the screen, you’ve got the pen tool or the frame tool or the place tool or something.
Anne-Marie: Or the type tool, when you’re in text frame drawing mode.
David: There you go. And you’re moving it around the screen, and all of a sudden, you get this little kind of white triangular arrow thing that shows up at the bottom right corner of the cursor.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: That is… what is that thing?
Anne-Marie: Well, we’re going to call it the snapto flag.
David: Snapto flag.
Anne-Marie: It’s like a little flag, like a little banner. And it only appears, we thought that it had something to do with smart guides, that it’s kind of obvious when you have smart guides going on, that new CS4 feature that has these guides that automatically appear when you’re aligning something with another object, that it would light up, the flag would appear, as well as the smart guide would appear, because they seem to happen at the same time. When the object that you’re dragging…
David: Right. When you’re dragging, you get the guide.
Anne-Marie: Right, when you’re dragging, you get the guide, but when you’re not dragging, when you’re just moving the cursor around, that little flag appears on the cursor letting you know, hey, if you clicked here, a smart guide would appear.
David: Right. And even more importantly, it’s not just the guide would appear, but you are actually snapping to some other object or guide on the page.
Anne-Marie: That’s right, right. That is the crux of it, that even if you have smart guides turned off, if you have snapto in general turned on under View, Grids and Guides, you have like Snapto Guides turned on, then you’re going to get that little flag on your cursor when you are near a guide or when you’re near a margin or column guide too, not just a ruler guide.
David: Yeah. It’s awesome. I mean, it’s really handy. Always pay attention to those cursors, because the cursors tell you what’s going to happen when you click. And that little Imperial Cruiser is an important one; it says it’s going to snap. That’s good.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: So that’s it for Episode 102.
Anne-Marie: Ciento y dos.
David: Ooh, good, bilingual, that’s excellent.
Anne-Marie: Si, senor.
David: Be sure to check out the shownotes on our blog at indesignsecrets.com. We’re going to have links to all of the places that we’ve been talking about. Also, please fill out that readers’ survey so you can win lots of cool stuff. And also, you can always email us at info@indesignsecrets or go to the shownotes and put a comment there in the shownotes for Episode 102.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: We would love to hear from you, and until we meet again, this is David Blatner and…
Anne-Marie: Anne-Marie Concepcion for InDesignSecrets. [music]