Podcast 104 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 104 page.
[music]
Anne-Marie: Welcome to InDesign Secrets Episode 104. I’m Anne-Marie Concepcion and I’m here with my handsome cohost David Blatner.
David: Hey there, Anne-Marie, how ya doin’?
Anne-Marie: Hey there, David. I’m doing great! [laughter]
Anne-Marie: Our pod cast and blog at InDesignSecrets.com are the independent resource for all things in design.
David: Yay! Coming up on our show today is all kinds of stuff. We have a episode chock full ‘o info. Including news about webinars, and recordings, and seminars and all kinds of stuff. We’re going to talk a little bit about some cool posts that have been on the blog recently that you definitely need to check out. Including some cool interesting tips and tricks for fancy effects and also some information about playing Swifts in InDesign CS for PDF’s.
We’ll also talk a little bit about the results from our first ever InDesign Secret Survey, which was a while back, but we just sort of forget to tell you about it. And we’re going to do an obscure InDesign Feature of the Week. Arrange by columns. Hmm. Interesting.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Arrange by columns. I don’t remember that being in the table menu.
David: It’s not in the table menu. It’s a secret obscure feature!
Anne-Marie: Hmm. Interesting. OK, but first let’s…a tip of the hat to our sponsors of this episode, once again, thank you very much Harb’s at InTools. He is the developer of InTools and WorldTools. They have a special deal for InDesignSecrets fans $20 off the price for either one of their plugins bundles. And these plugin bundles are genius works of art. You know, they really…if you’re doing any kind of long document production, if you want automatic sight heads, or, you know, smart footnotes. Does it do footnotes? Yes. Yeah.
David: They go awesome kinds of things. You know one of the things he’s done, he’s just come out with the new version of AutoFlowPro. I think that’s actually officially shipped. And one of the things AutoFlowPro does is it will automatically expand a text frame so you never get overset marks. You can basically work in a text frame and it gets smaller and bigger if you need more pages, it will add more pages. It will move so the pages of the new frame automatically link. It’s very, very handy for doing long documents. Actually it does a lot more than that. He kind of crammed lots and lots of features into AutoFlowPro. That’s kind of the basic part.
Anne-Marie: In the show notes we’ll have a link to…a list of all the plugins that come in these bundles and what they do. And he sells InBook is one suite of plugins, the other is called InSepher. Is that how you pronounce that?
David: Mmhmm. Mmhmm.
Anne-Marie: That is the same suite of plugins for people who are working with Hebrew.
David: Oh, yeah. And there’s other stuff for people who do right to left publishing, definitely.
Anne-Marie: And other languages. Right to left languages. OK. But you can only get $20 off the price if you use our special link that you’ll find in the show notes on our site.
David: Excellent.
Anne-Marie: And then we’d like to welcome back our friend John Basant at Certitech Training in the UK. You remember John is the guy who runs those cool contests where you fill out a form on his website, and if you fill it out within two weeks of the date of this publication, from the date that this pod cast goes live, then he pulls a name out and you get a free two day course in any program really that he…or is it just InDesign?
David: Yeah, pretty much anything.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, pretty much anything. Though of course we expect you to take the InDesign course. He offers advanced InDesign at one of their training centers in the UK. Either in Cardeth or London.
David: Mmhmm.
Anne-Marie: All right, so if you are in the US, I’m sure that John would be happy to get your form, alright?
David: [laughs].
Anne-Marie: He’s not going to pay for you to go over on the Queen Mary to take the class.
David: Well, yeah. In general…we’ve said this before…but if there’s anybody in the UK who’s interested in…you know, if you’re in Wales, if you’re in England, you definitely need to check out the training at Certitech. And whether it’s Acrobat training, PDF stuff, InDesign stuff, check them out. They know what they’re doing. And they are, they’re good folks, for sure.
Anne-Marie: [Singing] England, England. Cross the Atlantic Sea.
David: [laughing] Now if you are in Japan, or [laughs].
Anne-Marie: [still singing in background]
David: Korea, or Australia, you might not need their training. They are a little bit far away. But if you’re in England, definitely check it out. And if you want to see Hair on Broadway, you can just listen to AnnMarie.
Anne-Marie: It’s supposed to be wonderful. And you know Adam Lambert toured with Hair in Europe. That’s how he got his start in singing.
David: You had to get Adam Lambert in there somehow.
Anne-Marie: I bought my tickets for the American Idol Tour in Chicago when they come to Chicago and I am sitting up close and personal right next to Mr. Lambert.
David: I’m looking forward to hearing about that. [laughing] OK. We’ve gotta move on.
Anne-Marie: did you know they did a little video interview of all these American Idol people this past season about if you weren’t a professional singer, what would you like to do with your life? What other career would you like to be doing? And of course as anyone guesses, one wants to be a farmer, one wants to be a teacher, or a doctor. Adam said he always wanted to be a graphic designer! Yes, I kid you not!
David: Wow!
Anne-Marie: He said you know I always wanted to work with magazines and play with different layouts. Yep. What can I say?
David: We’re talking personal training. You can be a personal trainer.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. So, hello! Hello! I’m right over here! All right so, news.
David: News, yes, news. Don’t forget the news! All right we are going to…we just did a great eseminar with Lynn Burns talking all about tables. It went really well. And it went so well and we were so happy with the fact that we could record it that we have decided to keep it open, keep the registration open. So you can now register for that tables eseminar and you won’t see it live, but you’ll see it recorded and it’s just as good. It looks just the same, I mean you almost couldn’t tell that you weren’t there watching it live. So check that out.
Anne-Marie: There’s a link in the recording so to download the PDF handout that she had. And that still works. I tested it, so you can watch it right inside the comfort of your own browser.
David: So if you’re interested in tables, and you need to do table stuff in InDesign, check it out. You just go to idtables.eventright.com. We’ll put a link in the show notes to go there as well. You can sign up and check that out. It’s pretty good. Now we’ve done a bunch of other seminars, too. We’re still working on seeing if we can sell registrations for those but in the meantime, we have another…
Anne-Marie: Sell registrations for the recordings?
David: For the recordings. Exactly. But we also have another new eseminar coming up with Steve Warner. Steve Warner is an InDesign expert out of San Francisco. Actually Diane is in San Francisco too, we have a San Francisco run going here. Anyway, Steve Warner is an expert especially in the print and production and prepress side of InDesign and he’s going to be doing a seminar on sort of best practices for getting your files in shape to print. So I definitely encourage you to check that out. He’s doing it live on July 1st, but again you can watch it anytime. If you sign up now, you can watch it anytime between July 1st and the 15th.
Anne-Marie: Well if you sign up now, you get the early bird discount. Which is good for something like 10 bucks off.
David: Oooh. Even better, yeah!
Anne-Marie: June something like 24th or 25th, something like that. But until the Friday before the session, it’s going to be on a Wednesday, July 1st, if you register you get 10 bucks off. And I’m so happy that Steve’s going to be doing it, he’s the god of print, he knows all about it. He’s going to be covering, I believe, all versions of InDesign creative suite. Of course, he’s going to be talking about preflight, he’s got some great tips of the preflight feature in CS4. But he’ll also be covering about, you know, CS3 and previous, and PDF issues and all kinds of things.
David: Yeah. It’s going to be good. Speaking of best practices, I was very pleased to see that your new Linda.com title is out. 10 Tips For Creative InDesign Pros. Which is really hard to get that out in the last bit of my breath.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: Yeah, that went live and that’s pretty cool. And also your trouble shooting tips, right, both of those were…
Anne-Marie: Yeah, 10 trouble shooting tips. I did the eseminar on trouble shooting InDesign files, which went very well. But this one, I had actually more time to think about everything I wanted to say. This basically covers the ten major areas. There are sample files you can download, and all sorts of stuff. And also, “Bridge CS4: 10 Things Designers Should know.”
David: Oh, great. That’s right.
Anne-Marie: Because I just get so aggravated whenever they talk about Bridge, and it’s all about: Photoshop, Photoshop, Photoshop. How to do all your images? How to like work with HDR images? And what about designers, who, basically, are working with InDesign files and illustrator files? You know mainly some Photoshop files, once a while, like you say Photoshop and illustrator, wonderful plugins for InDesign, right?
David: [laughs] Exactly. But one of the nice things about those ten things titles is that they are short and sweet. You just go in there, you can watch 45 minutes or an hour, or whatever, and get a lot of information quickly.
Anne-Marie: Like they would cover the whole thing. Each video is about five minutes long, so I don’t think it’s long.
David: Easy in and easy out, good information. And the one last thing that we want to do in terms of like commercial plug here is these InDesign seminars that Anne-Marie and I are doing. I am just finishing up. I am actually in Los Angeles right now in a hotel room in Los Angeles, as I am talking. I am about to do my last InDesign seminar.
Anne-Marie: You know Adam Lambert lives in Los Angeles.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: I don’t know if you know, but you should keep an eye out. He is 6′ 1”, 185 pounds, black spiky hair, hard to miss.
David: That’s funny. That’s about what I look like.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: Except, I am blond. But other than that very…that’s impressive. I will keep my eye out for him. Don’t worry.
Anne-Marie: Thank you.
David: Also you are going to be doing a couple in a week, right?
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: You are doing Minneapolis and Boston.
Anne-Marie: …and Boston. Well, I am leaving in a few days for Boston. Boston: “It’s going to be a wicked cool seminar” so Mike Rankin [Indistinct] It’s going to be wicked cool. And then Minneapolis, next Friday. I am really looking forward there. It’s going to be about 100 people, each one I hear, as of this point.
David: That’s great.
Anne-Marie: So an all day seminar, just me jabbering away madly.
David: So check those out: Mogoseminars.com MOGO. Mogoseminars.com. That will be good. You know, you just mentioned Mike Rankin. So we better also tell you about his giant five part InDesign Eye Candy series, which he just finished on the blog, which is pretty cool. Very, very cool.
Anne-Marie: And something free. Something people don’t have to pay for.
David: That’s true! Even better.
Anne-Marie: He just went crazy. I couldn’t believe there is part four, and then he came out with part five.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: There basically all about special effects that you can do in InDesign.
David: Yup, yup.
Anne-Marie: So it’s all sorts of things you can do with the blend modes, you can create Pattern Swatches. When I saw that one about Pattern Swatches, David, I was like he better be mentioning the Pattern Plugin he better some place in there, and he does.
David: That’s right. He does. He mentioned PatternMaker Plugin as well.
Anne-Marie: You [are a] PatternMaker Plugin, right?
David: The PatternMaker Plugin from Teacup Software. But he shows how you can make really cool patterns in InDesign. It’s very, very clever. You know simple, easy, but a very effective way of making very cool patterns.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, he makes them out of like live text frames. He groups them. He makes them overlap, then he nests them inside other text frames. He has all sorts of really cool effects that he shows.
David: Actually, the one that I like most is his sticker’s one. Making things look like stickers. I don’t why, it’s so cute. It’s great.
Anne-Marie: The very first one is about shiny things.
David: Yeah, shinny things how to make buttons. And that’s actually very relevant. That’s almost the most relevant one, most useful one, because if you are doing any kind of interactive work, you know, if you want to make something real look like a button anyway you know shiny buttons are the all the rage here’s how you do it. So definitely check those out. We will have links. You can go to the blog, click on Mike’s picture, and it will take you right to all of his blog posts at InDesign Secrets. They are really nice.
Anne-Marie: Now I heard…a little birdie told me, David, that you have discovered something having to do with interactive documents in InDesigns. That you have made a discovery this past week that shook the foundation of Abode central.
David: [laughs] It did.
Anne-Marie: Is that correct?
David: Well, I also blogged about this as well. So if you are following the blog, you know that I was very excited to find out that I finally figured out why one of my computers could play SWF files in PDF. I took a SWF file. I put it into InDesign. I exported a PDF. And I could play it inside Acrobat 9. Now, I have never been able to do that before, because there’s been all these problems with Quick Time and this and that. And I guess its buffering…
Anne-Marie: Yeah, you are supposed to bring the SWF file into the PDF in Acrobat, right?
David: In Acrobat. That’s right. That’s more reliable. And, in fact, it is still more reliable to do it that way. If you want a SWF inside of a PDF: open in Acrobat and place the SWF using Acrobat Pro instead of InDesign. But really bothered me that I couldn’t figure out why all of a sudden one of my machines started being able to do it. Why I could actually put a SWF in InDesign and export the PDF and would work? And the answer finally…
Anne-Marie: [BRRR...PSSHHH!!]
David: That was kind of lame. But still…
Anne-Marie: I think it’s fair.
David: Good try…good try. The answer is Safari 4. On the Mac if you have Safari four installed, all of a sudden it will work. And it has something to do with the version of Webkit that Safari four installs. Or if you use Webkit nightly build, it would do the same thing.
Anne-Marie: What the heck are you talking about?
David: Oh, the Webkit Nightly is like the beta version of Safari from the [site]…they call it Webkit Nightly. Anyway, Safari 4: if you install Safari 4, which is released now, it will suddenly start working, and that’s very exciting. The other cool thing in fact, I think it’s even cooler than that, that I discovered this past week…
Anne-Marie: Wait, wait, wait. So if you install Safari 4, which has nothing to do with InDesign, suddenly InDesign is able import SWF files?
David: No, no. InDesign has always been able to import them.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: It’s just that when you exported a PDF and opened them in Acrobat on the Mac, it wouldn’t work. You get a buffering message typically, or you get some kind of problem message.
Anne-Marie: Oh…OK.
David: So on Windows, it generally worked. But on the Mac, it did not. And that was what we overcame with the Safari 4.
Anne-Marie: It had to do with Quick Time or something like that, right…
David: It did.
Anne-Marie: …the internal workings of the Mac OS?
David: It does, somehow. I don’t know what it is because, as you said, Webkit doesn’t really have anything to do with…it shouldn’t have anything to do with it. But somehow it does. It works. So I am happy.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: But the other thing that I wanted to mention, I think its even cooler, is the play SWF script. Technically, it’s a script, but it kind of works as a plugin. It adds a play SWF panel. So you go to the Window menu, you choose play SWF out of the Window menu, and you get a play SWF panel which floats around. And anytime you click on a SWF, you can play it inside of InDesign, play it in that panel. Very, very cool. Or, you can even just click on it. You can say, “open a SWF off your hard drive” and it will open the SWF inside the panel and play it.
So like I had a SWF game that was sitting in my hard drive, and I just clicked on it, and I was playing this Flash game inside of InDesign in that panel. It was sweet. And it’s free…it’s free! Did I mention it’s free?
Anne-Marie: That’s amazing.
David: It’s a free plugin, or, you know, its donationware. Its written by the same guy who did the Layout Zone the awesome Layout Zone.
Anne-Marie: Oh, a genius!
David: Martino da Gloria from Automatication.com will have a link. You can find this play SWF thing on his website. It’s sweet. So if you really like it, if you use it, go ahead and donate some money to him to encourage him to do even more cooler things. Or, if you have big scripting jobs, he is a good person to talk to. That’s what he really is trying to do is trying to do get some scripting work out of it. But he is amazing.
Anne-Marie: That’s makes sense. Yeah, it’s kind of like how scripters do pro bono work for the benefit of the masses, it’s like designers will often design annual reports for nonprofits. Right?
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Just to, sort of, show off their style and have something for their book and get more business.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: We appreciate it Martino. Very much.
David: We sure do because these are amazing.
Anne-Marie: And all the other wonderful scripters. OK, that’s great. Congratulations on that discovery.
David: Thank you.
Anne-Marie: Amazing.
David: I was very happy. Very happy, for both of those things.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Let’s talk about, do you remember, way back about a month ago.
David: That was a long time ago.
Anne-Marie: We did the InDesign Secrets, first ever, user survey.
David: I do remember that.
Anne-Marie: We talked about in in the blog and on the podcast.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: We asked people to fill out the survey. We gave them a week and a half to fill it out. We asked just a few questions like: how old are you and how much do you make every month and why don’t you send us more money? [laughter]
Anne-Marie: Then we also asked do you use any plugins and give us any feedback, positive or negative. What would you like to see InDesign Secrets do and so on. We finally remembered that the survey was going and we went over there to turn it off. Lo and behold, hundreds and hundreds of users had filled it out. So, thank you so much. We are going to read over all of the information. A few things, we don’t want to go over everything here in the podcast, but a few things I thought were very interesting. One of them was, when we said how big is the company that you work for; just me. Almost 30 percent of the respondents said, just me.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: But also, the top two were 100 to 1,000 and over 1,000. If you add those two together it was also 30 percent.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Then, of course, in the middle is another 33 percent. In other words, I thought that most people would be in companies; let’s say up to 10 people. But no, it’s not true. We have a lot of people from very large companies, so it is spread all the way across the board. I thought that was interesting.
David: That is intriguing. It is also more Mac than Windows, although our stats keep telling us that we have a pretty even split between Mac and Windows. I guess Mac users answer surveys more or something. I don’t know. We have a lot more Mac users on here. That was interesting. All kinds of cool in terms of the people who use plugins, a lot of you are using plugins and scripts, which I thought was just really cool. You are all the people who are trying to be really efficient and using plugins and scripts is a great was to get really efficient. You know what was fascinating?
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: The version number CS4.
Anne-Marie: Oh, right.
David: We have almost over 40 percent of people using CS4 and about the same number of people using CS3. That was interesting. About half and half between CS3 and CS4, but about one out of every 10 people, about 10 percent were using CS2 or earlier. So, we had respondents from InDesign two and InDesign CS. That was pretty whacky.
Anne-Marie: InDesign BC. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: It came with a stylus and the pallets weighed 900 pounds, each.
David: That’s right. Anyway, I really appreciate anyone who took the time to fill out that survey and give us information. We got lots of good comments and we will be acting…
Anne-Marie: Right, right. The survey comments were wonderful. There were also some good, constructive comments. One of the first ones that my eyes landed on started in all caps you guys are “the bomb diggity.” [laughter]
Anne-Marie: Seriously. “I get a ton of useful info from the podcast and the website. I have no idea how we ever did this stuff in the old days without a place like this to go to and get practical info. Keep up the fantastic work. Wasn’t that nice?”
David: I love that. I love that, that is awesome.
Anne-Marie: A lot of very nice comments and also some hey, I can’t read the type that is over here. It’s too small and some other ideas for what we should be doing in our podcasts and video casts. Just as many people love the podcasts as love the video casts which is good to see.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: We love doing both kinds.
David: Don’t forget that video cast. We will be talking about that in a moment as well. We will also be pulling, actually we have already drawn, eight winners from all those surveys. We are going to be sending out copies of Real World InDesign, copies of some of my linda.com videos, the InDesign Essential Training, and InDesign Beyond the Basics. We’ve got the InDesign Secrets keyboard shortcuts poster. Actually a couple of you, we are sending iTunes gift certificates even. We have gone all out here.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: Trying to get you things.
Anne-Marie: We have a True Match color match book.
David: That’s right.
Anne-Marie: Left over from an old quizzler. We have one left over.
David: Great. We will contact you and get your address and send those things to you. Thank you all very much for filling that survey out.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: Very helpful. We should probably move on.
Anne-Marie: All right. To the obscure InDesign feature of the Week. This is arranged by columns and if any of you watched the most recent video cast.
David: Number 4.
Anne-Marie: Yes, number 4. Then you will already know what arrange by columns is, but I thought it was very obscure. It was another one of these cool discoveries by David, so I will let you explain what this is about. It does have to do with tables but it’s not something that you would see in the table menu.
David: It’s not. It does have to do with tables, though. It’s inside Story Editor. As I’m sure you are all aware, we love Story Editor. We want to encourage everyone to use Story Editor. Story Editor is one of those things that you really have to force yourself to use. If you aren’t used to using it, you have to force yourself to use Story Editor, like, three times.
Anne-Marie: Right, the first three times. Then you will be jumping to that command and control Y few seconds because it’s very useful.
David: It’s so helpful, you’ll be hooked on it. It is so great. Once you are inside Story Editor, if you are using version CS4 Story Editor has been around forever in CS4 you can actually see tables inside Story Editor and that’s one of the things we talked about in the video cast.
Anne-Marie: You can see a table in CS3 but you just see a little icon.
David: Yes. Good point. Hardly worth it in CS3 but in CS4, you can actually see the content of the cells of the table. What a lot of people don’t realize, that content, which is typically set up to display by row; it will show all the rows and then column, column, column. Then the next row and column, column, column. You can swap that around to display that in columns, instead of rows which I actually like much more. It is much more intuitive to me.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: When I am looking at something in Story Editor. You can do that by rightclicking or controlclicking with a onebutton mouse on the little table icon in Story Editor. When you do that, of course, you get your context menu. Way down at the bottom of the context menu there is an option for arrange by column or arrange by row. Arrange by columns is what we are supposed to be talking about. That will change the arrangement of that cell data in Story Editor.
Anne-Marie: You see all the information from the first column, then all the information from the second column and so on.
David: Correct.
Anne-Marie: Like you said, it’s often easier to locate text that you want to edit so it’s nice to have the choice between the two.
David: Yeah. It’s obscure, but it’s very, very handy I think.
Anne-Marie: I like it. That was good. That is it for Episode 104. Be sure to check out the show notes on our blog at InDesignSecrets.com, where we will have links to all of the fun things and places that we mentioned. We would love to hear what you thought of the show. Leave a comment in the notes or email us at info@indesignsecrets.com and until we meet again, this is Anne-Marie Concepcion and…
David: David Blatner for InDesign Secrets. [music]