Podcast 105 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 105 page.
[intro music]
David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets episode 105. I am David Blatner. I am here with my cohost Anne-Marie Concepcion.
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Hey, David. What’s wrong?
David: You know, we ran out of coffee…we ran out of coffee?
Anne-Marie: You ran out of coffee in Seattle?
David: We did. Well, I am sure somewhere in Seattle there’s coffee. But here at home, we ran out of coffee. I went downstairs to get some coffee, and it’s gone. There is just no coffee.
Anne-Marie: Oh, so this is how you sound without…this is decaffeinated David? Just slap yourself a couple of times, you will wake up.
David: OK. [slapping sound in the background]. OK, there we go.
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: One more time…one more time. Our podcast: Here we are at InDesign Secrets slapped around in InDesign Secrets episode 105. Our podcast and blog are the independent resource for all things InDesign…
Anne-Marie: InInIn. And coming up on today’s show, we are going to be talking about some cool stuff from the blog that Fritz’s has written about multiple place images, about Acrobat.com, about InDesign 603, and a few other interesting posts. And then we have the obscure InDesign feature of the week…
David: Eekeekeek.
Anne-Marie: This is a weird one. Oh, yeah. Sorry. InDesign feature of the week… eekeekeek, is POSIX.
David: POSIX [pronounces it differently].
Anne-Marie: POSIX?
David: POSIX.
Anne-Marie: POSIX?
David: Actually, I have no idea, if it’s POSIX or…
Anne-Marie: Kazakhstan?
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: POSIX. POLITTLESIX.
David: But we are going talk about that.
Anne-Marie: POLITTLESIX. POLITTLEFIVE, POLITTLESIX POSIX.
David: That’s right POSIX. And that’s what we are going to talk about. But before we talk about any of those things, we are going to talk about our sponsors. Coffee. Coffee is…Oh, I am sorry, coffee is not one of our…I am just fixating on coffee.
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: Even a better sponsor than coffee Certitec. Certitec out of Wales in the UK. They do training in London and Cardiff and all over the place. InDesign training, Acrobat training, very good stuff. And you can win a free training class if you go their website the URL, the link, is in our show notes and you can go there and fill out a form and win a free class. If you are anywhere in UK, definitely check out the Certitec training. Also another one of sponsors is the good folks at InTools. InTools.com. They also make World Tools. If you want to do right to left typesetting, you should definitely check out World Tools, because you can use that with the regular version of InDesign CS4, and do right to left typesetting. Very cool. InTools, as we have mentioned before, is great for anyone doing long document publishing, books, magazines, whatever. Definitely check out the good plugins at InTools.com.
And finally, the last sponsor is Adobe. Adobe is one of our sponsors. Very kind of them. They, of course, are trying to get the whole world to upgrade to the very excellent version of CS4. They are now offering $100 off, whether you are upgrading from CS3 or two or one or, whatever, I think. If you are upgrading from…
Anne-Marie: That’s right. And a year’s free rentals of movies and they will do your laundry.
David: [laughs] And they will do your laundry. There you go!
Anne-Marie: A sweet deal. Yeah, we will have the link…Seriously, it’s a $100 off if you are upgrading to CS4 from CS3 or any earlier version. There is a price differential between the earlier versions and CS3. Everybody just gets $100 off across the board and its all written out there all nice and clearly on our website. And I thought it’s pretty cool that they extended it to August 31st, 2009. So check out the URL in the show notes.
David: Check it out.
Anne-Marie: All right. So, James Fritz; my friend Fritz, my fellow MidWesterner, put up a really cool post this week about adding more images when you are multipleplacing images. So what’s a multipleplace in the first place? What would that be?
David: [laughs] Multipleplace? If you are placing more than one image at the same in CS3 or 4, you can go to the place dialogue box and choose more than one file. And I think we have talked about that in previous blogs, previous podcasts, whatever it is that we are doing here. You can basically choose more than one out that dialogue box and they all get loaded up into a place cursor, into the place cursor or the place gun, whatever you want to call it.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: The same thing happens if you drag in two or more files at the same time. You drag in, lets say, five different images or text files, or whatever, drag them all in, and they all get loaded up onto the place cursor and then you can click where you want to add them, and that’s pretty cool. But he pointed out something that a lot of people don’t realize which is that you can add more add even more.
Anne-Marie: And to give credit where credits due, he mentioned that James Wamser was the one from Sells Printing…our friend James and our friends at Sells were the ones who sort of mentioned this to Fritz that Fritz had known. I had sort of knew it already. If you have like say five images loaded and you said, “oh wait, I want to get a few more” you can keep those images loaded in your cursor, go back to the file menu, choose place again, navigate to the folder where the other images are, shift click or control click or command click to select them all, click open or place, and then go it added to the loaded cursor instead of replacing the ones and loading.
David: That’s right. It could also work when you are dragging in more images. Like you can have a loaded place cursor, go back to Windows Explorer or Mac Finder and just grab some more images or text files or whatever, drag them back into InDesign, and those will get added to place cursor as well. But the trick there is you have to be dragging in two or more. If you just drag in one additional thing, it just gets placed. InDesign gets confused that there is stuff on the place cursor. So it has to be two or more files at a time that you are dragging in for them to be added to the place cursor.
It’s a good little trick, and thank you Fritz for pointing that out. And thank you James for putting it out first. There you go.
Anne-Marie: OK, then so, what Acrobat.com? I mean, I…
David: Well, I was really curious about this sort of very quiet announcement that Acrobat.com is out of beta.
Anne-Marie: Who knew it was in beta? I guess, I got so used to seeing a little tiny beta tag that I forgot it was in beta. That’s kind of interesting I thought.
David: That’s right.
Anne-Marie: I’m a big fan of Acrobat.com, and a big fan of Acrobat itself. And you and I use Acrobat.com’s Buzzword documents to share files back and forth, to work on the same document across the many miles.
David: I love Buzzword. I think it’s a very cool little word processor. It doesn’t do everything I want it to yet, notably styles, it doesn’t do paragraph styles yet, so I’m waiting for that, but when it gets that, it will almost replace Word for me. I’m going to be very pleased. But the other stuff that Acrobat.com is, in some ways, even cooler, the ability to share files with other people really easily, the ability to host meetings, we’ve talked about that, the ConnectNow thing, or Share My Screen thing, that’s very snazzy.
Anne-Marie: And, yeah, so what’s new, I think, as far as… To me, the biggest thing that’s new with the Acrobat.com coming out of beta is they have now increased the number of people that you can have in those shared meetings. Like if you have Creative Suite 4, and you choose Share My Screen in any one of those programs, then you are immediately brought to the ConnectNow screen of Acrobat.com where you can share what’s on your screen with up to two other people. And those two other people don’t need to have adobe.com accounts or anything like that. You just tell them the URL, you can even get a vanity URL, and they are suddenly sharing your screen, they can see what’s on your screen, you see, they get little avatars. It’s a really cool, slick little thing.
It doesn’t look much at all like Connect. If you’re accustomed to the webinars that David and I do or that Adobe does, it doesn’t look like Connect. It looks like a later version.
David: It’s cooler, yeah.
Anne-Marie: I wish Connect would look like it, yeah. But here, like in my training company, we always paid the extra $40 a month for the Connect standard accounts which let you have up to 15 people in a room, and we did a lot of offsite training, remote training that way, with people like in a different state. There are 10 people over there who want to learn InDesign, we teach them that way by just getting on a browser and me sharing my screen and me being able to see their screens. But now, for that same $39 a month, you can get the superduper Acrobat.com Premium Plus account, which lets you have up to 20 people using a very slick ConnectNow interface, which is very cool. Unfortunately they’re not; nobody knows what’s happening to those people with the oldschool Connect Standard accounts.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Everybody that I’ve asked. I mean, they’re still billing me, that’s for sure. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: Because I don’t want to lose my vanity URL, you know.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: I mean, it’s on all my brochures and stuff, so I’m still trying to figure out how to transition. But there’s a medium level, you can have up to five people in a meeting for $14.99 a month. With those costs, you also get, like you can get more PDFs converted for free, and you can get more people downloading files. Like you can put up a file and then send people the URL to download it.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: So usually you’re limited to 100 downloads with the free service, because there’s still an Acrobat.com free service that lets you have up to two people in the meeting. That’s what all the CS4 users should be using.
David: Yeah. To me, that’s the really important thing, is that the free version is going to remain free, you still have basically limited use of Acrobat.com functionality, and then it’s the premium stuff, the basic premium and the superduper premium, whatever they’re calling it, is, rather, for $50 or $30 a month, you get more. They’re just saying, OK, you can have even more, so check it out.
Anne-Marie: And if you think you’re going to be interested in either that Premium Basic or Premium Plus plan, you should upgrade by July 16 because they’re running a promo where you save $50 if you buy a year’s worth.
David: Oh, I didn’t know that. That’s great. Oh, that’s really good to know.
Anne-Marie: But you have to do it by July 16.
David: The Acrobat.com stuff is also, it’s funny that they’re saying that it’s out of beta, and I think they’re just trying to figure out a way to make some money from it in the short term.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: But basically, you know, it’s still a work in progress, and when I say that, I mean that they’re going to be adding more features to it, even more programs to it. For example, if you look at Labs right now, labs.adobe.com, they’re working on presentations. They’ve got this new thing called Acrobat.com Presentations, which, as far as I can tell, is basically like a slideshow program to, you know, if you’re tired of… Just like Buzzword.
Anne-Marie: And don’t they also have tables?
David: Yeah, there are tables as well. Acrobat, just went up, the preview of Acrobat.com Tables is up there.
Anne-Marie: You can see they’ve laid off the branding manager.
David: Yeah. I think so. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: They can’t come up with names.
David: It’s just “Presentation”.
Anne-Marie: The whole department’s gone, so now it’s… [laughter]
David: “Buzzword” is still cool, right? They’re still calling it “Buzzword”.
Anne-Marie: “Buzzword” is cool. Yeah.
David: But “Tables”…
Anne-Marie: That was his legacy, “Buzzword”. Otherwise they would have just called it “Words”, “Acrobat Words”. [laughter]
David: So basically, you know, they’re adding all this functionality. It’s kind of like Google Docs, but they’re adding all this functionality for doing spreadsheets, doing presentation, doing word processing, right within Adobe, and it’s all based on Flash. So it’s really nice, it’s a really nice interface, and I like it. I’m very pleased with the direction that Acrobat.com is going, and it’s nice to see Adobe’s pushing that. This whole services thing is definitely going to take off.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. You can bet, if you want to see where software companies are going in the future, you might as well get your foot in the door now with Acrobat.com.
David: I think so. Yeah, yeah. Hey, you know, there’s another piece of news that came out in the past couple weeks, and that was InDesign 6.03 came out, another free update on InDesign. Unfortunately, we have no idea what it does. We looked at the upgrade, the little notes that say what’s new.
Anne-Marie: What’s fixed?
David: What’s fixed, and a lot of it…
Anne-Marie: It’s not really an upgrade.
David: It’s an update. Updater, sorry. I should say update, not upgrade. A lot of the stuff that is in there was already fixed in 6.02, so I’m not sure exactly what it does, but I’m sure it’s better.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: It’s definitely better, and they fixed stuff that was wrong about…
Anne-Marie: Get 6.02. If you’re using InCopy, also make sure those guys are downloading… I mean, get 6.03, and if you’re using InCopy, also get 6.03. Got to get them both at the same time.
David: Yeah, definitely. Keep everyone in synch and upgrade to 6.03. It is better, that’s all I can say about that. [laughter]
David: OK. We should talk about… Oh, you know, I do want to say one other thing before we talk about the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Weekeekeek.
Anne-Marie: Yes. OK.
David: And that is, I just want to put a little shout out to the folks at Design Tools Monthly.
Anne-Marie: Oh, yeah.
David: You know, Jay Nelson, Jeff Gamet, those folks. And the reason I’m thinking about this is I have this stack of Design Tools Monthly’s newsletters here, and I’ve been going through them because I got behind in my reading, and there’s just such amazingly great stuff in there that I never knew. And basically what they do is they go through, they comb all of the magazines and the websites and this and that, and they pool together a bunch of tips and tricks and also where you can find cool software and free stuff and free this and that, and they put it all together. They also have a podcast, by the way, the Design Tools Weekly Podcast, I think, is what it’s called. I can’t remember.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. I listen to it religiously.
David: Yeah, it’s very good. But I really like this newsletter, so just a little shout out to people saying, you know, check it out. We’ll put the links in the show notes to check out that newsletter and their podcast, too.
Anne-Marie: He’s been publishing that, I think, for 20 years or something.
David: Something like that.
Anne-Marie: I got that from the very beginning.
David: Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. Anyway, they’re not sponsors or anything, I just was so pleased going through these things, and what I do is I go through the newsletters and then I circle the stuff that I want, and sometimes I’m circling like half the stuff on a page, like OK, get this, get this, get this, OK, I need that, and otherwise I’d never know about this stuff, you know? I’d never know about these files.
Anne-Marie: You know, sometimes he quotes us, too. I mean, I also get the newsletter, and I read through it, and I’ll be like, oh, I said that? [laughter]
Anne-Marie: That’s right, I did, in InDesign Geeker Rights, or something you said, or one of our contributors said in a post.
David: Right, right.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: Or they do a lot of tips and tricks, and he always gives credit.
Anne-Marie: Right, right. He just basically pulls everything and then gives attributions about where he’s pulling stuff from, to save people time from having to go through all the different magazines and websites and blogs.
David: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so we’ll tell you where to get that. Hey, OK.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: Now, before we forget, the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Weekeekeekeek.
Anne-Marie: Eekeekeekeek. It’s POSIX, but before we get into it, in our surveys, I keep thinking about all those comments that people wrote, and a few people said, don’t you think you could afford a better echo effect?
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: More than a few said that. Something we should think about, David.
David: We should, we should.
Anne-Marie: I suppose, though a couple of people said they liked the oldschool approach.
David: Of course, those people who are complaining about it probably think that we’re not using an echo effect when we do that.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: And what most people don’t realize about this is that that’s actually an audio filter that is, you know, it’s just not a very good one.
Anne-Marie: Right. I’m actually standing out, looking out my back porch and aiming at the grocery store four blocks down, and getting the echo back.
David: Cool. That’s very hightech of you.
Anne-Marie: All right. So, what is POSIX? POSIX?
David: POSIX. POSIX. POSIX?
Anne-Marie: Where would you see it?
David: I honestly don’t know if it’s POSIX (poesix) or POSIX (pawsix), but I will say that it stands for portable operating system interface for UNIX. Nobody needs to know that, that will not be on the test, but it is interesting.
Anne-Marie: So, like, people who are castrated, and they need a portable operating system based in…
David: [laughs] I don’t even know where you’re going with that.
Anne-Marie: You said UNIX (eunuchs).
David: I got it. I just got it.
Anne-Marie: Took a while.
David: It took me a moment for Eunuchs. We’re just going to skip right over that, Anne-Marie, and move on to discussing where POSIX exists in InDesign, and that is GREP. Yes, it’s true; once again, we’re talking about GREP. We just can’t get away from GREP somehow. It’s not just fun to say, it’s fun to use, too. And POSIX lives inside the GREP popout menu, flyout menu, whatever you want to call that thing, inside the “Find/Change” dialogue box, if you go to the GREP tab, or inside, in CS4, you can go to the “GREP Styles” dialogue box, there’s that little flyout menu, it looks like an @ sign, and if you click on that @ sign, you get a menu, and at the bottom of that menu, you’ll see POSIX. There it is.
And inside that flyout menu, inside the POSIX submenu, there’s a bunch of weird stuff like punctuation. So we need to describe what those things are. We’re not going to go through all of them, but basically it’s a way to define a set of different characters, and we know it’s a set because it’s inside those square brackets, at least that’s the way I think of it. And the square brackets in GREP always mean a set, meaning this or this or this or this or this, or whatever.
But these particular POSIX codes, for example, two square brackets, then a colon, and then PUNCT, PUNCT, colon, then close square bracket, that means a set of any kind of punctuation. It just means punctuation. So instead of having to write out your own, comma, it could be a comma, period, exclamation mark, you know, question mark, semicolon, whatever, just look for anything that’s any kind of punctuation.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Or even letters with diacritics. So if you have a square bracket equals A equals square bracket, that would find A and all equivalents of A, like A with an accent, A with umlaut, A with a tilde, all sorts of As. Every A.
David: That’s right. Yeah, so basically it’s that last one at the bottom of the POSIX list, the bracketbracket equals A equal. And that will give you a POSIX code that you can type in your own character.
Anne-Marie: Right, right. It doesn’t insert the A, it just inserts the equalequal.
David: Exactly.
Anne-Marie: You have to click in between there and type in the character, and then it’ll find that character and all unicode permutations of that character, every glyph that’s related to that character.
David: Exactly. Right. So basically like E, like you were saying, if you put an E in there, it’ll find E or E with an accent, or if you put a C, you’ll find C or C with an accent, or whatever.
Anne-Marie: OK. And now you know what POSIX is all about. Thank you very much. And that’s it for episode 105. Be sure to check out the show notes on our blog at indesignsecrets.com where we’ll have links to all the places we mentioned and all the sponsor deals. We’d 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, without coffee, for InDesign Secrets. [music]