Podcast 103 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 103 page.
[music]
David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets, Episode 103. I am David Blatner. I’m here along with my lovely cohost Anne-Marie Concepcion.
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Hi David. How are you?
David: Very well. Thank you. Our podcast and blog at indesignsecrets.com are the independent resource for all things InDesign.
Anne-Marie: InDesign. And coming up on today’s show we have a lot of things to cover.
David: Lots.
Anne-Marie: First of all, you should know about our video podcast where we just had episode 103. 103?
David: [laughs] Number 3. Number 3.
Anne-Marie: Number 3. Right.
David: Yes. This is Episode 103.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. For a brief moment of time, they’re in sync with the last numbers.
David: I know. How about that?
Anne-Marie: We have a hands-on guide for some of you that you’ll enjoy that we’ll be posting. David went to the recent Adobe Creative Suite developer’s conference up there in Seattle…
David: Very cool.
Anne-Marie: … Which I would have loved to have gone. They had a lot of the recordings available. But, he’s got a report from the developer’s conference. This is the conference where all of the plugin and developers and scripting people for InDesign they all meet and talk with each other and plan wonderful things. He’s got some great interviews too. We’re going to talk about moving pages from one document to another. And our obscure InDesign feature of the week…
David: Week, eek, eek, eek…
Anne-Marie: … Is line end.
David: End of the line.
Anne-Marie: Line end.
David: That’s right.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. That’s an actual command some place in InDesign.
David: It is. Before we talk about those things though, we should mention that this episode, number 103, is sponsored by myMacMac, which is a great name, myMacMac from down under in Australia. They’ve got this great Mac only as you can tell by the name myMacMac they’ve got this great tool called InDemand, which is a floating panel inside of InDesign that lets you automate all kinds of things.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, I was playing with it for a little bit. It’s got this really cool repeat grid feature. It’s like you set up one sample arrangement of text frames and image frames like in a catalog and then you can say here’s all the images, here’s the text, now repeat this.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And it’ll go ahead and fill it in and fill in those little frames going across. It’s really, really smart.
David: It actually has a lot of automation tools. It’s all about automation. This is for people who are doing like newspaper ads or if you work for an ad agency and you have to do the same kind of ad over and over again but like every day or every week. It changes, you know, different content comes in and goes out and you have to update like a grid of in an ad.
David: Yeah. It’s awesome because it’s very, very efficient. It’s a very efficient way to like strip out all the old content and put all new content in instead of having to do it one frame at a time. You can actually just drag it all into a panel and then just say OK take all of this and populate the ad. So, it’s pretty cool. It has just a lot of automation things. I don’t want to get too detailed but some of the things are really…
Anne-Marie: We’ll have a link to their product page.
David: Yeah. Yeah. We’ll do that.
Anne-Marie: What I thought was pretty cool is that it’s not too expensive. I mean after reading that long list of features, I thought OK this is $199. But it’s not. It’s $52.
David: Yeah. US$52.
Anne-Marie: It’s not bad.
David: Plus they’re giving us a discount. Ten percent discount for InDesign Secrets listeners. They gave us a discount code, which is so long that I cannot read it aloud.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: You’ll go crazy. So, instead go to the show notes, indesignsecrets.com, click on Podcast, go to the show notes and there’s a discount code there for 10 percent off. So yeah, I mean that’s $5 off the price. So, that’s a good deal. Definitely check out InDemand for myMacMac.
Anne-Marie: But, it does expire the 20th of July so use it up quickly.
David: Good point. For those of you listening far in the future, it expired 20th of July, 2009.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Too late. Thank you.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Thank you myMacMac.
David: But, for everybody else, if you’re listening in real time it’s still good. So that’s a good thing. Also, we have another sponsor, two other sponsors. One is our friend Harbs at InTools makers of the amazing plugin suite called InBook, which is pretty much any textbook publisher, book publisher, anyone doing long documents you must have this plug in. I mean it’s just… You got to try it out. If you’re doing…
Anne-Marie: It’s a suite of small utilities that do all sorts of amazing things that you often wish why doesn’t InDesign do this. Well, it does do this if you get the InBook suite of tools.
David: Again, there’re lots of different features. We don’t have time to get into all of them. One of them that I definitely want to point out is this mirror layout thing because a lot of people wonder why when they have a facing pages document and they’ve got some stuff on the left and some stuff on the right and then they add a page or remove one page and all of a sudden the layout is just completely messed up. It’s like why can’t InDesign be smart enough to move stuff that’s on the left side to the right side in an intelligent way, you know mirroring it over and it can’t. There’s too much manual cleanup you have to do.
But, with InTools’ reflective layout plugin, it does all of that automatically for you. You just sort of say look this should be mirrored. This should be a mirrored layout and it’ll figure out how to put it in the right place. It’s really cool.
Anne-Marie: And Harbs is working on a new version of one of those little plugins that comes in that suite the AutoFlow. Right?
David: Yes. AutoFlow. Well, you know, InDesign CS4 has an AutoFlow feature. If you’re using CS3, you don’t have that, but you could get it with this AutoFlow plugin from InTools. But yeah he’s working on a pro version with just way more as far as I can tell. AutoFlow is just very cool. It does a lot of things that people have been asking for like auto resize frames. You know, like if as you type into a frame it automatically gets larger or smaller. It’ll automatically add frames as you need them, add pages as you need them. It’s sweet. It’s really sweet.
Anne-Marie: So, InDesign Secrets fans you get $20 off the price for either InBook, which is the entire suite, or InSuffer, which is the same suite but it works with InDesign ME. But, the only way you can get the $20 off is if you purchase from a special page on their site and we’ll have a link to it on our show notes.
David: Yep. Yep. And our last sponsor of course is Adobe, makers of…
Anne-Marie: Yes. You’ve heard of them Adobe Incorporated.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: And unfortunately, there’s no more tiered pricing. That deal went away last month, right?
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: So, if you have CS1 or CS2 you have to pay a little bit more to upgrade to CS4 than the CS3 colleagues. But still, it’s definitely worth it. I don’t know if you’ve been watching our video cast, but we have been trying to show you some of our very favorite new features that save a lot of time in CS4. That’s their whole push for CS4 is how it saves time. And we’re going to have a link in our show notes in case you need something to show the boss about like, you know, it’ll definitely pay for itself if we upgrade now. Pfeiffer Consulting have done a little study on how much quicker CS4 is than CS3. Things like, you know, if you use the links panel in InDesign CS4, it’ll save you two hours a month or two hours a week or something crazy like that. Even just the smart guides. And not just for InDesign, but also Photoshop and Fireworks and all the other things. And that’s a pretty interesting PDF just to read. So, we’ll have a link to that PDF in our show notes or you can just go to http://tr.im/cs4time. I love those trim URLs.
David: All right, excellent. Yeah, I mean there’s no doubt that the bean counters in various businesses need to be assuaged. They need to be convinced that CS4, upgrading to CS4, really will save time and therefore money. So, it’s worth looking at that. And Andreas Pfeiffer he loves standing there with a stopwatch timing people. How long does it take to do this? How long does it take to do that? It’s a very compelling report. It’s really good so thank you Andreas and thank you Adobe for making that available to help us all convince people, the bean counters, that upgrading to CS4 is a good move. Because it really is. It’s just a very, very cool upgrade. It’s frustrating every time I have to go back to CS3 now. Where’re all the good features?
So anyway, we’re going to be talking about both CS4 and CS3 features and CS2 in large part at our MOGO seminar. So we probably should mention that AnneMarie and I are doing some seminars for MOGO events. And I’m going to be…
Anne-Marie: Yours are coming up next week?
David: Yeah. I’m going to be doing… I’ll be in San Francisco next week and then in Seattle the week after and then in Los Angeles the week after. And then you’re going to be in Minneapolis and Boston, right? End of the month?
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: End of June?
Anne-Marie: The week of June 24th. I’ll be in one city on Monday, the next city on Friday. Hopefully, I won’t have to drive in between the two.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: It’s kind of a long drive, but a pretty one in June in the upper Midwest. A one day seminar where we’re going to cover all sorts of fun stuff and you’ll see us live and we’ll try to get the other one to dial in in a connect session if we can swing that, that would be kind of fun.
David: That would be very fun. So, check those out at Mogoseminars.com.
Anne-Marie: And we’ll also have the link to that. And we have a discount, too, so we’ll include our discount code.
David: Now, what is this handson guide thing that you’ve discovered?
Anne-Marie: OK. So, this handson guide well, you know that every time that Adobe comes out with a new version of the Creative Suite they have to write up all this information for reviewers. And I’m sure this is true for other big software developers too.
David: Right, sure.
Anne-Marie: So, this stuff has to be done even before the software is released so that the reviewers can grab some sample files and follow your instructions to see what’s new and then write up their review in time for as soon as it’s released, then they’re first out of the block with their review of the software. So, I took part in helping to write up some of these reviewer’s guides last summer, then what they wanted to do was turn them into handson guides for actual endusers. So, there will be handson guides for the new features in the software.
David: Cool. So, it’s like new features guide…
Anne-Marie: New features and…
David: Getting up to speed quickly kind of thing.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. And it’s not just a PDF that you read and look at, but it comes with sample files, and there are exercises. So I’ll say, “All right, so open out this layout,” and I go to page three. “Now we’re going to turn this into a crossreference.”
David: Cool, cool.
Anne-Marie: And so you select this and then you go over there and then you choose that. And so I have a little sidebar information that takes it a little further and some cool tips and tricks and things like that. So, it’s really neat and very well puttogether, but I notice that they’re not up yet on the Adobe website. [laughter]
David: It’s only been months and months now.
Anne-Marie: I know! I wrote those forever ago. So, I got permission from the head of marketing that we can put them up on InDesignSecrets and InCopySecrets. Yay!
David: Oh, sweet.
Anne-Marie: I have the one ready to go for InCopy, so we have the InCopy handson guide will be posted on Incopysecrets.com today along with the sample files that you can download. The InCopySecrets guide is a little different. It’s not only just an introduction to the new features in InCopy CS4, but also they asked me to add more information to the introductory chapter.
David: [laughs] Chapter.
Anne-Marie: Introductory section, that sort of fills out, “What is InCopy all about?” and “What’s it for?” and things like that.
David: So really, it’s one of those, if you’ve ever had any questions about InCopy and how it works and “Do I need it,” and “Is it going to make me more efficient?” it sounds like that would be a great download, to get that and then try it out.
Anne-Marie: Right, this is a way to get started. It’s a little dense, but maybe that’s what you need. You need a lot of information.
David: Yeah, a lot of information on InCopy. That’s something…
Anne-Marie: Yeah, it’s got this really great list in the back about every single feature in InCopy, and the InDesign handson guide has the same thing.
David: Wow.
Anne-Marie: Every single cool feature in InDesign is listed in the back in this appendix.
David: Wow.
Anne-Marie: And also I was able to sneak in one more thing to the InCopy one about how it supports Word, how it works with Word.
David: Oh, cool!
Anne-Marie: Even though Adobe really doesn’t like that, to mention that, but it’s true that a lot of people can’t just kick Word out of the door when they start using InCopy. So, how does InCopy work with Word? So, we have another appendix all about that.
David: Excellent.
Anne-Marie: And I just have to check the hands-on files for the InDesign one, and once that’s put together then we’ll get that one up for InDesignSecrets.
David: Excellent.
Anne-Marie: Probably in the next couple of weeks.
David: That’s awesome.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: They’re big, though. They’re many megabytes.
Anne-Marie: Yes, they are. The files? You’re right. It’s a ZIP file, and there’s lots and lots of lit. In the InDesign one, there are three different layouts because it takes you through three different projects.
David: So, it’s dozens if not hundreds of megabytes, but it’s cool stuff, and it’s cool that Adobe is allowing us to post those for you, the InDesignSecrets listeners and readers. So thank you, Adobe, for that.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: It’s very cool.
Anne-Marie: So, tell us about the Creative Suite Developer Summit.
David: Oh, it was fun. It was just great. You know, I’m not a coder myself. I mean I can manage a little bit.
Anne-Marie: Ah, you’re kind of a coder. You’re a Perl scripter.
David: Well yeah, you know, I can manage to muddle through as they say.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: But, the people there were hardcore coders. I mean, these were people who were doing Flex and ActionScript and ExtendScript and C#, C++ I don’t know, lots of C stuff.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: They kept talking about Cs. And I realized quickly that I could tell whether or not a session would be appropriate for me by the number of dots they would use in a sentence.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: If it was like .com, I could understand it, but if it was like applicationdotdocumentdotthisdotthatdot…
Anne-Marie: DotASPdot… right, right.
David: Yeah, exactly. The more dots in a sentence, the more it just would go over my head.
Anne-Marie: .NET framework, blah blah blah…
David: Right. [laughs] Exactly. But, it was really fun, and there were things on how to work with Adobe to do marketing in their new Marketplace.
Anne-Marie: Aha.
David: Features on the site, on the website. You know they’re doing a Photoshop marketplace now, and an AIR Marketplace.
Anne-Marie: Yes, I read about that in InDesign Geek. [crosstalk]
David: Yeah, and I think that there is a good chance that there is going to be an InDesign marketplace before too long.
Anne-Marie: Yay!
David: So, places that you can go to download plugins and scripts and training materials and that sort of [inaudible 14:24].
Anne-Marie: The AIR one, the AIR Marketplace is very cool.
David: Oh, it’s great, yeah.
Anne-Marie: It actually has stuff that you can download and play with.
David: Yeah. And I think the other ones will be getting cooler as time goes on.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: It’s still very early right now.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: The whole marketplace thing is pretty early.
Anne-Marie: So, are they going to be canceling the Exchange?
David: Yes. Exchange, basically which we’ve all complained about for years is going to go away, and it is being replaced by Marketplace. That’s what it comes down to.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: So anyway, it was cool to not only sit down to some of these sessions, but it was also great to talk to some of these InDesign plugin developers who came in from all over the world to discuss InDesign plugin development. I interviewed a couple of them, and I wanted to let you listen to those. I thought it would be fun to hear from these folks. So, I’m going to start with a little interview I did with Mark NiemannRoss, who goes by MNR. And Mark NiemannRoss…
Anne-Marie: He’s the organizer of the whole thing, right?
David: He’s the organizer of the event, and he’s also in charge of plugin development or addon development, thirdparty development for the Adobe Creative Suite Apps.
Anne-Marie: You know, I’ve met Mark about 15 years ago at a Quark extension expo.
David: Exactly, yeah. Because he was the head of extensions for Quark starting around 1991 or something.
Anne-Marie: Yes, that’s right. He’s a great guy.
David: Yeah. But now, after all these years later, he does the same sort of thing but for the entire Adobe Creative Suite.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: So there you go, it’s rather amusing. Anyway, let’s listen to Mark, and then we’ll listen to three other plugin developers Paul Chada, Lawrence Horwitz, and Kris Coppietiers. [recording beings]
David: I’m sitting here with Mark NiemannRoss. Can I get your title?
Mark NiemannRoss: Sure.
David: What do you do?
Mark: My name is Mark NiemannRoss and I am the Creative Suite Business Unit Developer Evangelist.
David: Wow.
Mark: Whoo.
David: Yeah.
Mark: Yeah, I actually said it for you, but Developer Evangelist is fine.
David: OK, that’s close. And so you’re working with a lot of the InDesign developers, people who are doing plugins and other development.
Mark: Among others, yep.
David: And what’s going on here at the [inaudible 16:22]?
Mark: So, we’re at the 2009 CSBU Developer Summit in Seattle, Washington. Now, the Developer Summit is not just live in Seattle, Washington, but it’s also broadcast out via Connect to anyone who wants to join us, and you can find the URL on David’s website. He’ll point that to you.
David: Yep, we will.
Mark: So, you can at this point watch the sessions live, but that would have been if you were watching May 11 through the 15th. Now, it’s past May 15th.
David: [laughs] Yes, it is.
Mark: You’ll have to watch the recordings.
David: OK.
Mark: You can participate that way. And if you want to join some of the online chats, there are discussion forums and other places where you can ask questions and participate postconference.
David: So, I’m sitting here with Paul Chada, who is from Recosoft, although we’re going to get this answer once and for all, we’ve been arguing about this for a year, whether it’s Recosoft or Reecosoft. And we’re going to get the answer from the owner right here. Is it Recosoft or Reecosoft?
Paul Chada: Can I just correct you for a minute?
David: OK.
Paul: I’m part owner.
David: OK.
Paul: Now that I’ve corrected you…
David: OK…
Paul: I can say it’s Recosoft.
David: Recosoft! Excellent! Recosoft, which is based in Osaka, right? Osaka, Japan?
Paul: Osaka, Japan.
David: And you’re here at the 2009 Developer Conference and learning about what Adobe is doing with the Creative Suite and developing for this suite and so on. Can you tell us about your flagship InDesign product?
Paul: Our flagship InDesign product is PDF2ID. What it does is it takes a PDF file and converts it into a fullyeditable InDesign document by reconstructing whatever it can in terms of tables, frames, text frames, graphics, images, etc. It will try to do an extremely intelligent job on how it reconstructs the data by applying advanced object models wherever possible and maintaining layout fidelity.
David: And how long has PDF2ID been around?
Paul: Well, we first released it, if memory serves me correct, in 2007. September, I believe.
David: OK.
Paul: I think that was the Version one release.
David: Great.
Paul: So, we’ve been out for over, a guess, a year and a half or a year and eight months now. Nine months, something like that.
David: And you just came out, actually it wasn’t that long ago, with 2.0, which had huge performance increases. That was one of the many improvements in PDF2ID, as well as better presets and font substitution things and the ability to merge frames much better, that sort of thing. What was your favorite thing in Version 2.0 that you were dazzled by the fact that you could pull off?
Paul: There were two things that we pulled off really well, I believe. One is that we implemented a feature called the Typeface Library. PDF2ID, previously, whenever you would have to map a font that couldn’t be mapped, that was available in a PDF file but was not available on the system, you had to repeatedly do this. Now, with Typeface Library, we eliminated a lot of the mundane tasks because it keeps on recording all of the font substitutions that you have ever made and it will store it in a complete database which is fully editable, replaceable, and configurable. You can actually go and change the Typeface Library anytime you want. You can point the Typeface Library to something that is on a server, something that is on your local machine. It’s up to the user, basically.
That’s number one, and number two is what we did, especially, in terms of performance. We designed a highperformance power processing core this is with the PDF2ID Professional. It will now take PDF files it doesn’t matter what size it is, but the larger the number of pages, the better performance gain you’re going to so it will actually convert PDF files in parallel mode.
So, what it will do is, say you have a 160page PDF file. It will process on the latest Mac Pros, we just did a performance test, and it would convert 16 pages at a time. So, you’re seeing a 16x performance boost, at least from our side.
David: Wow. Well, I’m sure there is going to be much more to hear and there are many more things to do with PDF2ID translations, and thank you very much for being on the show.
Paul: Oh, thank you, David.
David: So, I’m sitting here with Lawrence Horowitz of Teacup Software, and I wanted to get some information. How did you get involved with plugin development?
Lawrence Horowitz: I got involved with plugin development because I used to work for a company that some of you may know called Quark.
David: [laughs] Ah, yes.
Lawrence: [laughs] And I got my start in software there. I started in QA there, I worked my way up to development, and when I wanted to start my own company, I decided that I wanted to go back into the business I knew, which was publishing. A lot of the people who worked on the InDesign team also used to work for Quark, so I just called up some old buddies and said, “Hey, send me the SDKs and let me get started with this.” So, they did, they were great, and everybody has been very, very supportive throughout the life of my company. They were very supportive of me getting started.
David: And do you have a particular philosophy for the kind of plugins that you’re doing or are interested in?
Lawrence: Well, the company name is Teacup, and the reason that I chose that was because teacups are things that are generally part of a set they don’t do anything on their own and they also have both a utility and an aesthetic. They do something useful, and they can look good or they can look kind of ugly. So, my goal and the goal of a teacup is always to look as elegant as possible, and that’s the same thing with my plugins. My plugins have a utility, and they also try to do it in as elegant a way as possible.
David: It’s interesting because you have a wide variety of plugins, from DataLinker where you’re dealing with a lot of data import/export, to Patterns which we worked on together, and Barcodes, and then to TypeFitter, where you’re really doing textheavy stuff, making text fit for magazines and books and newspapers and so on. It really is a wide variety of teacups in your set, as it were. Do you have a favorite, or what’s your favorite thing that you’ve worked on?
Lawrence: I wouldn’t say I have a favorite of all of them. I think there are ones that are more prominent on my mind than others at different times. I mean, TypeFitter just came out so that’s the one that I think about the most right now. That’s a great plugin because it doesn’t just do type fitting, it addresses a lot of different issues in your type, and it’s a tool that is both a great production tool for people who are in the trenches of production, trying to make a copy work, and it’s also a tool that can automatically fit type problems as well. So, it sort of reminds people of the new Preflight feature in InDesign CS4, but it does Preflight and it fixes your problem at the same time.
So, it can go in and automatically fix all your [inaudible 23:35] in the document, it can fix all your widows in the document without you having to do anything unless you have really fine control over the parameters of what’s going on. It both has a very simple interface that doesn’t get in your way and it’s very easy to use, and it also has a very deep interface for setting all the different parameters and the rules.
David: I’m sitting here with Kris Coppietiers from New Zealand not originally from New Zealand, originally from The Netherlands?
Kris Coppietiers: From Belgium.
David: Belgium.
Kris: Flanders in Belgium.
David: I apologize. That’s close.
Kris: It’s close. It’s as bad as telling a New Zealander he’s an Australian or viceversa.
David: Oh, that’s ever worse. Oh, I’m very sorry. But, now you’re a New Zealander.
Kris: I’m a resident. I’m a permanent resident, but I’m still a Belgian. I’m still a Belgian passport, but for all intents and purposes I’m a citizen of New Zealand.
David: And you are Rorohiko, lightningbrain.
Kris: Essentially I am Rorohiko, yeah.
David: And how did you get involved with plugin development of all things? InDesign plugins?
Kris: I’ve always been developing software in the prepress and printing areas. I’ve been involved with QuarkXPress, many many years ago. I’ve worked for Markzware for about eight years, and then about 2005, I decided to start my own company and I decided, “Well, it’s time to switch from XPress to InDesign.” And that’s how I got started.
David: And you have a lot of free plugins and commercial plugins. What’s your philosophy? It seems like you cover such a wide variety of different kinds of plugins.
Kris: Yeah. So, what actually happens is when you start out a company, you’re not very wealthy so you don’t have large amounts of money to spend on marketing. What I did have was hours, so I spent a lot of developing hours on marketing, and those are the freebies. So, the freebies are meant to attract people to my website, make myself more visible. But, in reality, the main income of Rorohiko is all about custom development. We do custom workflows, help people out, link websites to InDesign and viceversa, that kind of stuff.
David: And you have, as I mentioned, so many different kinds of plugins. What are some of your favorites? Give me one or too of your favorite, coolest plugins that you’ve created that you just really love.
Kris: One of my favorites is StoryParker, which is really like a busy layout. You can just pick a few elements, put them to the side, do some changes and then zip! put them back immediately. I think that’s a pretty nice one. I also like Magneto Guide, which is not a freebie. StoryParker is free, Magneto Guide is not, but Magneto Guide is really nice for structure and layout, where you want to almost like an accordion, stretch or shrink a layout, push things together, and it all stays nicely linked up and lined up. And so I think that’s a nice one too.
David: Because everything is paying attention to the guides. All the objects are basically magnetized to the guides.
Kris: Yes.
David: So when you move a guide, the object moves.
Kris: Yeah, the object moves or stretches, it depends. If it’s attached on both sides, it stays with both guides so it actually stretches as you move one of the guides.
David: That is very cool. Thank you very much, Kris, and we’ll be looking for more cool plugins coming out.
Kris: Sure. Thanks a lot. [recording ends]
Anne-Marie: Wow. That was so great. I wish I could have been there. That was so neat. And now we know that it is Recosoft. Not Reecosoft. Recosoft.
David: Exactly. The mystery finally solved.
Anne-Marie: I still want to say Raycosoft.
David: Raycosoft. Well, Raycosoft would be more Japanese.
Anne-Marie: Raycosoft.
David: Yeah, exactly.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Anyway, that was fun.
Anne-Marie: All right. So, I want to talk about, as far as imparting some InDesign knowledge in this episode, moving pages. I did my webinar last week which went off very well, we had a nice crowd on troubleshooting your InDesign documents. And one of the steps that I mentioned as far as troubleshooting a flaky file was trying to copy information from the bad boy document to a nice clean pristine document. So, of course you can copy and paste individual items, but faster would be to sometimes just… If you have a bad InDesign document, you think, “Well, if I recreate this from scratch, then it should be fine. Maybe there’s some corruption.”
Well, what is the compromise between recreating from scratch and just trying to solve the bad boy? Well, it would be to move pages to a clean, new document. So, how do you move pages? There are a couple of ways, and I discovered that there are some interesting little features involved in the different ways that you can do this.
For example, the way that I always move pages because you’ve been able to do this since the beginning of InDesign was by doing dragging and dropping.
I guess coming from a Quark background of doing a thumbnail drag, to drag and drop between two documents to get rid of document corruption, the closest thing that you do in InDesign would be to drag and drop. You drag from the Pages Panel of the source document to anywhere in the window of the target document.
David: That’s actually kind of tricky for exQuarkXPress users.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: Because they’re used to doing thumbnails, you can’t find thumbnails in InDesign really.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: But, in InDesign, you do it from the Pages Panel.
Anne-Marie: Or you would think that you’d drag from the Pages Panel of one document to the Pages Panel of the other document, but that’s impossible.
David: [laughs] Exactly.
Anne-Marie: Because when you’re dragging with the Pages Panel of one document, you’re not going to see the Pages Panel of the other document until you let go of that mouse and make the other document active.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: But, you drag and drop it into the window. It is easier if you have ever done this is Photoshop, because that is how you move a layer from one Photoshop file to the other. You drag from the layers panel and drop it into the window of the Photoshop file, right?
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: So, when you do that, you are actually bringing over everything on the page, you have stuff on layers. All that stuff on layers will come through to the targeted document and will add layers to the target document. The master page will also come along for the ride. There is no one to say, “just these document items and not the master page.” Of course, if you want to do that, you would have to hide master page items and select all, then copy, then paste, but normally you do want to bring over the master page, right? The thing is though that is that if you are the kind of person that just accepts the default master page names, then you might be unpleasantly surprised.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Just like with styles, if you have a style called body in a document and you select text, copy it and you paste it into another document, and there is a style called body. When you paste it, it is going to take on the styling of the receiving document, right?
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: So, the same thing for master page, if you are dragging a page over that is based on master page A, Amaster, and you drag it and drop it onto a document that has the default Amaster, it is going to take on the look of that master page.
David: So, you lose the look of the original document.
Anne-Marie: That’s absolutely right.
David: It’s really frustrating.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. So, what you need to do if you are going to be dragging and dropping that way, is to rename the master page to something unique first, do that and then they will come over fine. Now, the other way to move pages, and I think they didn’t introduce this until CS3, am I wrong?
David: Yeah, somewhere around there.
Anne-Marie: Is the actual “move pages” command. And, you will see the “move pages” command in two places, you will see it under the layout menu pages, fly out menu, you see “move pages” and also in the pages panel menu of pages. Now interestingly, if you have a master page selected, it doesn’t say “move pages.” It says “move master,” and you will never be able to find “move pages.”
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Which got me stuck for about a half an hour one day. “I know I have seen it here. Where is that command,” you know?
David: “It’s got to be there.”
Anne-Marie: Or vice versa, “I know there is a “move master” command in here some place.”
David: So, it all has to do with what is actually selected in the pages panel.
Anne-Marie: That’s right, that’s right. So, make sure that you have the right thing selected. So, if you choose “move pages,” the same thing is true as far as what happens to master pages, right? You are still going to end up with the same conflict of… the receiving document will trump… its definition of that master page will trump the one that is coming in.
David: OK.
Anne-Marie: All right, so if you select the master and you choose “move master,” and then you are able to select which document you want to bring it to, it will automatically rename it. So, if you are moving… if you choose to move master, and you choose Amaster and you say, “move it over to this other document, the receiving document,” if there is already an Amaster, it will rename it to Bmaster; it just increments the letter.
David: Well, that’s cool. So, it will automatically rename it, if you choose “move master” but not if you say, “move page?”
Anne-Marie: Correct, alright. That’s right.
David: Alright.
Anne-Marie: And, so it gets a little tricky there as you can imagine, because then if you move the page, if you say, “OK, well master first so it renames it,” then I will go back and then I will move the page.
David: Yeah, that won’t work.
Anne-Marie: That won’t work because your page is still based on master page A.
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: Right?
David: So, it is much better just to really be clear about… If you are going to move a page from one document to another and the master pages really are different, then make sure, once again, make sure the master page names are different first.
Anne-Marie: That’s right, yea right, that is the moral of the story.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Rename the master pages first. The other cool feature by the way of using “move pages” is that you get to say where the new pages should be inserted.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Which is always a pain with dragging and dropping pages, like if you are dragging page one into a new document, it is going to end up as page two.
David: Well, then it will end up on the last… it always puts it at the end of a document.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. So, then page one ends up… a right facing page ends up being a left facing page which could be nightmarish.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: So, if you use “move pages” instead, you could say “under destination,” you can say, “at start of document.”
David: We better move on before we run out of time here to the obscure InDesign feature of the week, eek, eek, eek…
Anne-Marie: Eek, eek, eek…
David: Line end.
Anne-Marie: The end of the line.
David: That’s right.
Anne-Marie: All right, so.
David: You have come to line end. Where is that first of all?
Anne-Marie: I found this little sucker in the “object menu,” go down to “paths.”
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Go down to “convert point” which is…
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: I think that most people are familiar with what convert point is and you will see line end there.
David: That’s right, and this… you will only find that in CS4, right?
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: I mean, you will find that convert point submenu in CS4 and line end only shows up as part of the user interface in CS4, but line end actually does live in CS3 as well, but we will explain that in a minute.
Anne-Marie: That’s true. In both places I would assume, it is broken, yes?
David: It doesn’t work.
Anne-Marie: It doesn’t make a line end.
David: Well…
Anne-Marie: It does not make a line end. It should not be called line end.
David: It’s a magic issue.
Anne-Marie: OK, imagine all of our listeners that you have an S curve, and in that S curve there is a point in the middle of the S, right?
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: So, you have a smooth point? You select that smooth point with a direct selection tool, you go to object, paths, convert point, line end, what do you think is going to happen?
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Alright, so what I would think, I don’t know you would split the line there; you would delete the rest of the line and turn it into a line end.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: Somehow, is what I would think.
David: It does seem… with that name, you would expect it to turn into a line end.
Anne-Marie: But, no it doesn’t.
David: It does not.
Anne-Marie: It turns it into a corner point with no handles.
David: That’s right. What it really is, is a segment end.
Anne-Marie: Or a straight end.
David: It is a straight line segment end. So, basically if it were a smooth point that had handles that had been pulled out, [inaudible 35:15] handles pulled out, it changes it into a corner that is at the end of a straight line segment. In other words, the handles are completely snapped in. I don’t know if there is a good way to express what that is. But, I see your point, line end is confusing. But, the key to that feature is all it is doing is snapping the line handles into the same places as the line, so you get a sharp corner, even more confusing about that is that there is a corner point, convert point to corner as well and that does not turn it into a corner, that does not do the same thing. That turns it into what is called a cusp point, so basically it leaves the corner handles where they are, but it detaches them so they no longer have to be smooth. Does that make any sense? So, you can actually grab a handle and move it and drag it around independently of the other handle. So, that is what they are calling a corner point.
Anne-Marie: You call that a cusp?
David: I call that a cusp point.
Anne-Marie: Huh.
David: Yep, there you go.
Anne-Marie: I call that a corner point.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: What is this cusp point?
David: A corner to me is a sharp corner. But, it does not have to be a sharp, corner. You can have a corner point and if you take a smooth point…
Anne-Marie: It is a sharp corner, it is just that the handles happen to be… it doesn’t move the handles. So, the handles happen to make it look smooth, but it is a corner.
David: Exactly, but if you take a smooth point and choose covert…
Anne-Marie: Point.
David: … Convert point to corner, nothing changes. The point looks exactly the same.
Anne-Marie: Something does change. It breaks the symmetry of the two handles.
David: That’s right. It looks the same until you drag a handle.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: And, as soon as you drag a handle you realize, “Oh, yea it actually is a cusp point.”
Anne-Marie: Right, but the difference here between this and line end is that like you said, this kind of point you have two handles coming out.
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: Say you draw a heart, this is something I always teach when I am a teaching illustrator. You know, make a heart and so the point at the bottom of the heart is what you are calling a cusp point. It is a corner point with two handles that come out that define the curve and as it leaves and as it enter that corner point.
David: Right, right.
Anne-Marie: But, the line end is just the plain old corner point. There are no handles coming out of that sucker, so line end.
David: Like an edge of a square or rectangle or triangle is a line end.
Anne-Marie: Exactly.
David: There we go.
Anne-Marie: So, that is the obscure InDesign feature of the week. I thought that was a good one, very obscure.
David: [laughs] It’s very obscure. Oh, and we didn’t say how to find it in CS3. Yes, in CS3, it is hidden. It is hidden as a keyboard shortcut only. You can still get to it, but you have to get to it through a keyboard shortcut. So, when you are inside the edit/keyboard shortcuts dialogue box, you can find it inside the product area called “object menu.” It is inside “object menu,” and it is called “convert point, line end.” So, there you go, now you know.
Anne-Marie: That’s it for Episode 103. Be sure to check out the show notes. We have a lot of links to all these things we have been talking about today at indesignsecrets.com. We would love to hear your comments, you can put them in the show notes, or you can email us at info@indesignsecrets.com. And, until we meet again, this is AnneMarie Concepcion and…
David: David Blatner, for InDesign Secrets. [music]