Podcast 108 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 108 page.
[music]
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Welcome to InDesign Secrets Episode 108. I’m Anne-Marie Concepcion and I’m here with my cohost David A. Blatner.
David A. Blatner: [laughs] “Dab.”
Anne-Marie: Hey, Anne-Marie.
David: “Dab” here, how’s “Amc” over there?
Anne-Marie: [laughs] I’m doing very well. Our podcast and blog at indesignsecrets.com are the independent resource for all things InDesign.
David: It’s true, and coming up on today’s show we’ve got all kinds of good stuff. We’re going to be talking about.
Some seminars that are happening, we’re going to talk about character styles, which is a very important topic in InDesign, and we’re going to cover the obscure InDesign feature of the week [echoes]: “Go to selected bookmark.”
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: And you can probably tell where to find “Go to selected bookmark.”
Anne-Marie: Well, I think a lot of people don’t even realize there is a bookmarks panel.
David: Oh, good point.
Anne-Marie: That in itself would be a good one.
David: That’s true, but we’re going to go even more focused and obscure than that.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: “Go to selected bookmark.”
Anne-Marie: There you go.
David: There we go.
Anne-Marie: We do have a sponsor for today’s episode, our friend Harbs at InTools. They are the makers of InBook or InSefer, the suite of very cool automated production tools for InDesign. And David, you were saying that he’s got a new one?
David: Yeah, well it’s just that he has an update to his formatting tools plugin that I just noticed had come out.
And what he did was he added a new feature to Formatting Tools. Formatting Tools is a plugin that has a bunch of different ways of formatting, applying styles throughout your document.
InDesign gives you a lot of features for adding styles to text or your document, but sometimes it’s slow, especially if you’ve got a long document like a book, textbook, or magazine and you need to apply a bunch of formatting quickly.
And so Formatting Tools is $29 just for that one plugin, although you can get it as part of the whole InBook plugin suite, but Formatting Tools is one little plugin of many that he adds which allows you to automate some of that.
So for example, let’s say some of your headlines are one line long and some of them are two lines long, and you may have a different paragraph style that you want to apply depending on whether you have oneline, twoline, threeline, or whatever paragraph headings.
Anne-Marie: Right. Like newspapers.
David: That’s a very common thing, especially in newspapers, and it’s a real hassle because you have to manually go through. Well, that’s part of formatting plugins, of Formatting Tools. You can define what style to apply for a two line headline, for example, and which one to do for a three line headline. Things like that. So he’s got…
Anne-Marie: Yeah, he’s a clever guy.
David: Yeah, he’s a very clever guy, and it’s all about automation, all about applying things, applying formatting really quickly. So, definitely check out InTools, that’s intools.com, and check out in our show notes, we’ve got a link to a discount that they’re giving. If you want to buy the whole InBook, you can get a discount.
Anne-Marie: Right. The suite of tools.
David: On that whole suite. Yeah, definitely. Very cool stuff. So, thank you Harbs thank you InTools for sponsoring.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: And everyone else, check it out.
Anne-Marie: Is that his real first name, Harbs? Is that the entire name, Harbs? I’ve never heard that name before.
David: [laughs] That’s not actually his real name. That’s not his name. But you know, is your real name really Anne-Marie?
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: I mean…
Anne-Marie: Shut up.
[laughter]
All right. Oh yeah, let’s talk about some eseminars. You know, we’ve been doing these eseminars for a few months now.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: They’ve been very successful, lots of great comments from them, and at the end of every eseminar if you’ve been to one, you know what we’re talking about we always do a little poll and we ask people, “What other topics would you like to see covered in eseminars?”
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: So, Dave and I were talking about that, and we said, “Let’s do the ones that they were requesting all the time.”
David: [laughs] How about that crazy idea?
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Yeah. Let’s actually give the people what they want. So, I’m doing two and Dave’s doing two. The two that I’m doing are in September, and they are on InCopy and InDesign, of course. Surprise, because I’m the InCopy queen, we all know that.
And one is “Getting Started with InCopy and InDesign.”
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: For those of you who are like, “Ahh, I can’t stand Word anymore, I can’t stand these horrible paper proofing rounds, ” just to see what it’s about, see if it’s for you.
And then a week later, for people who are already using InDesign and InCopy, or for people who are curious, “InDesign and InCopy Tips and Techniques.” OK?
David: So those two are going to be in September. And then in October we’re going to do two more eseminars that I’ll be doing on long document features.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: You know, table of contents and indexing, I’ll be covering some scripts and advanced techniques for doing those things. The second one I’m going to be doing is some text formatting. A lot of that will be the CS4 features like conditional text and cross references, but I’ll be showing some other layout techniques as well even if you’re using CS3.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: If that…
Anne-Marie: It’s all about automating long document production.
David: Right, yeah.
Anne-Marie: Which I know a lot of long document producers would love to see. [laughs]
David: Yes. Once again, it’s all about knocking it out quickly.
Anne-Marie: Right. You know, here’s my philosophy: it’s that you want to spend your time using your brain on what your brain does best, on designing and laying out and making decisions that only a carbon based life form can do, right?
David: [laughs] Right.
Anne-Marie: Like, what’s the most pleasing way to lay this out, how much white space, what should be the typefaces. But let the computer do the monkey work, right?
David: Yeah, right.
Anne-Marie: So you don’t want to spend four hours applying the same character style throughout the 400 page document, you want to find an automated way to do that.
David: Yeah. And there are very good ways.
Anne-Marie: So, that frees up your time to do the important stuff.
David: Yeah. There are some very good ways to do that, and that’s what I’ll be talking about in October. In the meantime, I also want to put a shout out for two live seminars we’re doing. Anne-Marie is doing one in Milwaukee, I’m doing one in Saint Louis. Two very different seminars.
Anne-Marie: In the heartland, baby.
David: [laughs] That’s right. Focusing on the heartland of America. You may not be anywhere near Milwaukee or Saint Louis, but if you are I hope you check out these seminars.
If you’re not, I hope you’ll at least help us spread the word. We really need help spreading the word about these two seminars, and we want you you mentioned quickly about the one you’re doing. It’s about InCopy flow, right?
Anne-Marie: Yeah, also September is InCopy/InDesign month over here.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And I’m doing two fullday seminars, two separate seminars. The first one is the collaborative InCopy/InDesign workflow. Basically getting started with both of them. I’m going to show how it works, I’m going to answer everybody’s questions, everybody gets a nice handout and followup support from me.
So again, it’s like that eseminar, only it’s going to be seven hours long, we’re going to get into lots of details. And then the second seminar is “InDesign/InCopy Master Class.”
David: Ahhah. There you go.
Anne-Marie: How about that? Yes. So again, we’re going to spend a long time going into a little bit more advanced topics like remote workflows using cloud computing, you know, like Dropbox or LiveSync.
We’re going to talk about creating templates, we’re going to talk about XML stuff. So, all the questions that existing InCopy and InDesign users are always asking me about, we’re going to talk about that kind of stuff; again, with the handout and the followup support.
So I’m excited about being about to do these two seminars, and they’re in the beautiful Harry Quadracci seminar space just outside of Milwaukee, in a suburb of Milwaukee.
David: That’ll be great.
Anne-Marie: So, it’s a really neat place they have up there at IGI, the Institute for Graphic Arts Imaging.
David: Great. And the one I’m doing is a fullday InDesign secrets, I’m calling it “InDesign Secrets Live.”
Anne-Marie: Woohoo!
David: It’s basically tips and tricks and all kinds of techniques for using InDesign, getting efficient with InDesign. So, it’s sort of the best of the best, the creme de la creme of InDesign tips.
Anne-Marie: Creme de la creme! You said that with a French accent!
David: [laughs] How about that?
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: And again, if you’re not near Milwaukee or St. Louis, if you’re nowhere near the heartland, please at least spread the word because we want to really try and get the word out to all InDesign users throughout the Midwest about these seminars.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. We will have links in our show notes to the event break pages or whatever for all these along with discount codes.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: You know, all sorts of good stuff.
David: Absolutely. OK.
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: Hey let’s talk about…
Anne-Marie: So, let’s go into the main topic of today.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: And that is character styles.
David: Character styles, OK.
Anne-Marie: I’m going to use that phrase again, “deep dive.” I just love that phrase, “deep dive.”
David: Yeah, the “deep dive.” Like [inaudible 08:32] deep dive.
Anne-Marie: I love deep dive pizza.
David: [laughs] Character styles are a way to give a bunch of different formatting a name. Right? I mean, same thing with paragraph styles: a bunch of formatting, a name.
But character styles are different than paragraph styles in some pretty important ways, and the main way that it’s different is that a character style does not have to define all the formatting of a letter or word or sentence or whatever.
And that’s different than QuarkXPress, and a lot of people from the old QuarkXPress days get confused when they start using character styles in InDesign because in QuarkXPress it would have to define everything: the font, the size, the style, the color, the superscript, whatever.
In InDesign, you can target it for one specific thing. Like, you could make a character style that just makes the text red.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: And that’s incredibly useful, because you could assign that red character style to any text, and it doesn’t matter about the font, the size, the style, etc. Whatever you apply it to will turn red.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: Very interesting and very powerful feature. And character styles turn out to be the basis of a lot of the automated formatting in InDesign. For example, nested styles are based on character styles. Grep styles are based on character styles.
Anne-Marie: But I want to talk to the 15% of our audience who are still unclear on the concept of character styles.
David: OK.
Anne-Marie: I know that 85% of you are fine with this, but this is just for the 15%, so heads up, and the 85%, you can go refill your coffee. All right, so the issue is this. I see this happen 15% of the time. You open up an InDesign file…
David: Yes…
Anne-Marie: And whatever is listed there in paragraph styles is also listed in the character styles panel.
David: Ah, yeah. Yes.
Anne-Marie: So, that just makes your life a living nightmare.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: The only things that should be listed in character styles are instances when text should look different than the paragraph style. You should never have a paragraph style called I’ve seen them “Caption.”
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Right? That should be a paragraph style. If the entire paragraph style should have a certain look for its type, that should be a paragraph style. The entire paragraph.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: If one or two words of that should have a different look and you use that quite often in the document, then that should be made into a character style like “Bold Leadin” or “Red Bullet,” right?
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: So the rule is, if you find yourself applying a character style to an entire paragraph, then you’re almost certainly doing something wrong.
Anne-Marie: Then you’re doing it wrong, yeah. [laughs]
David: Probably. Now, there are some instances where you might want to assign a character style to an entire paragraph, but it’s rare. It should be the exception.
And one example of this is something I ran into on a document recently that somebody sent me. They had a very large heading at the top of each page, but in some instances that heading needed to be white, because it was instances where it was on top of a dark background.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: In most cases it was black on white, but every now and again the heading had to be changed to white. Well, they had gone and made a white character style, and they applied that white character style to the entire paragraph, the entire heading, because it made it white.
So, they wanted to use one paragraph style for all their headings, and they then assigned a character style to the entire thing when they needed it white.
It wrinkles me a little bit. Personally, I would rather have two different paragraph styles, a black version and a white version. That’s just me, but I can’t really argue too strongly against the way they did that. I think that it makes sense to have one paragraph style and two different character styles.
Anne-Marie: I suppose.
David: Well, one extra character style, the white one. Can you see any reason why you wouldn’t want to do that, AnneMarie?
Anne-Marie: I’m sure that there exists a reason, and maybe we’ll hear from somebody, but I’m sure there exists a reason insofar as being able to reuse this document for automated publishing, automated workflows later.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: It’s that they depend on character styles only formatting certain characters and paragraph styles formatting everything. I would much prefer to see two paragraph styles, like you said, one called “Headline” and one called “White Headline.” And “White Headline” is just a duplicate of “Headline,” so it’s based on headline.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And the only difference is the fill color of the characters. That’s it. So that whenever you change the typeface of “Headline,” then “White Headline” would also change.
David: Yeah. I think I would rather do it that way, with two different paragraph styles, but again it had already been set up this way with one paragraph style and the additional white character so I just left it.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: That said, I want to throw out one other thing to bounce off something you just said, which is about automated styles, automatic publishing.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Automated publishing systems. Because character styles become very important in XML workflows.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: And one of the most interesting uses of character styles is a character style that has no formatting. Because you can make a character style that doesn’t apply any change, that doesn’t change the font or the color or anything. It’s just a name.
So for example, you might make a character style called “Company Name, ” and that would be maybe “Company Name, ” and that character style would do nothing, not change anything about the text, but you can apply it to each of the company names through your document.
Later on, it’s very easy to gather an index of all your company names using a script that gathers character styles like IndexMatic, IndexMatic script, or you could also apply an XML tag to those character styles.
Anne-Marie: That’s correct.
David: Using “Map Tags to Styles,” or “Match Styles to Tags.” So, there are reasons why you want to apply character styles outside of formatting as well.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, and it is pretty cool to be able to create a character style that essentially does nothing. And so I think the easiest way to do that is you can duplicate the “None” style.
David: Well, I just deselect everything on the page and OptionClick on the new character style, and you basically get it. You get a character style that has “None” style.
Anne-Marie: “None,” and based on “None,” and just call it “Company Name” and then apply that.
David: Yeah, exactly.
Anne-Marie: Or, you can temporarily color it magenta so you can make sure you’ve hit everything.
David: Ah, good point.
Anne-Marie: And then turn off the magenta. Just edit the character style setting at the end.
David: That’s a good point, yeah. I like that. So…
Anne-Marie: Mmmhmm?
David: Other stuff having to do with character styles?
Anne-Marie: Well, I know one. A big one is when people are bringing in Word files.
David: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Anne-Marie: When you’re placing Word documents into InDesign. And I know lots of people insist that it doesn’t work, but I have seen it work, ladies and gentlemen.
[laughter]
It can work, depending on how the Word file is constructed and how your style is constructed. But the issue that gets them is, they bring in the Word file and then they apply an InDesign style, and they lose all their Bolds and Italics, right?
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Or the bolds and italics turn pink, saying it doesn’t exist. So, one of the ways to help clean that up, to help fix that, to head off that problem at the pass, is to get rid of the local formatting that is causing things to be Bold and Italic in the first place and replace that with a character style.
Because when you apply a paragraph style to a paragraph, it leaves the character style intact, right?
Even if you hold down the Option or Alt key to clear out all the garbage local formatting that you don’t want, you’ll be able to retain your Bolds and Italics and Superscripts and so on.
And so you think, “OK. Well, does that mean that I have to go through and find every single instance and apply that character style by hand?” No. There are scripts that will do that. Automated publishing, right?
David: That’s right.
Anne-Marie: So, the one that we talked about a lot before, and I know that we mentioned this in blog posts, was Dave Saunders’s “Local Formatting to Styles”? I can’t remember the name of it.
David: Something. I can’t remember the name exactly. Yes?
Anne-Marie: Yeah. But I read that and I could not find I didn’t look thoroughly, but I did look I don’t think that it works with CS4. It only works with CS2 and CS3.
David: Huh.
Anne-Marie: But I did find that Jongware… what’s his name, you said? It was “Tune?”
David: Yeah. Theunis de Jong from The Netherlands is guy behind Jongware.
Anne-Marie: Ah.
David: He’s a very talented scripter. He has done a lot of cool scripts.
Anne-Marie: He’s very talented, yes. I think he has posted on our blog a few times. Comments and things. On the InDesign scripting forum on Adobe.com, he posted a CS4friendly version of that script.
David: OK.
Anne-Marie: That he wrote himself. And it’s called “preptext.zip,” and we will have a link to that script in the show notes.
David: Great, great.
Anne-Marie: And also to the thread where he talks about it.
David: So you just run this script and it will go through your whole document and find all the Italic stuff, like Dave’s did?
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: It will just find all the italicized words and apply an Italic character style to it?
Anne-Marie: That’s exactly right. It removes the local formatting and instead it applies the character style formatting.
David: Excellent.
Anne-Marie: So, you might end up with a list of character styles that say “Italic, ” “Bold, ” “Bold Italic, ” “Superscript, ” and you’ll see that all of those character styles have been applied to that kind of formatting in the document.
David: Nice.
Anne-Marie: So you it’s an end to the “+” You know, the dreaded “+” after the name of the paragraph style.
David: Yes. That is great. So, we’ll definitely put a link there to that.
Anne-Marie: What else?
David: OK, anything else that we need to talk about?
Anne-Marie: Well, I just think that people… there are, on the other of the spectrum, remember, I said that I’ve gone into places where the the “character styles” was a duplicate of paragraph styles?
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: The other end of the spectrum is there are absolutely no Character Styles.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: They’re not using any. And Character Styles are not just useful for this automated publishing but so many parts of InDesign. Like anything having to do with Grep, anything having to Nested Styles.
David: Yeah, I mentioned that.
Anne-Marie: They need you to have a Character Style, right?
David: You really need to be using Character Styles.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: You’ve just got to. And it’s one of those things that you just force yourself to use if a few times, and all of a sudden you’ll be hooked. It’s like, “This is so great. Character Styles are so great!”
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: You have to take a little bit of time to set it up, but you’ll save so much time down the line.
Anne-Marie: Automatic bullets, automatic numbers?
David: Yeah, oh yeah. You’ve just got to do it. OK, we had better move on to the obscure… What do they call that thing again?
[theme music]
The Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week [reverb]: Go to Selected Bookmark.
Anne-Marie: Yes, Selected Bookmark.
David: Selected bookmark.
Anne-Marie: And I’m looking under the window panel, David. I’m not seeing “Bookmark.” Where is “Bookmark?”
David: [laughs] Where is it? Where is the Bookmark Panel? The Bookmark Panel lives inside the…
Anne-Marie: Automation?
David: Interactive submenu.
Anne-Marie: Interactive…
David: Because Bookmarks tend to be involved with interactive PDF documents. Because when you have Bookmarks and you export a PDF, you have an option of including your Bookmarks, and then they show up in Acrobat along the left side, these little Bookmarks that you can use to jump to sections within your document.
Very, very handy, I don’t want to get into all the details about how to make bookmarks, but the really quick version is you just go to a page and click “New Bookmark,” and boom, you’ve got a bookmark for that page.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: It’s a simple as that. Also, another way to make Bookmarks is with the Table of Contents feature. If you’re making a Table of Contents, it will automatically make all your Bookmarks for you, so it’s really, really cool.
Anne-Marie: The only time that Bookmarks are useful, though, is when you export it to PDF and you include Bookmarks so people can navigate along the document with Bookmarks, right? Because that’s the only reason to use Bookmarks?
David: That’s what people think. That’s what it seems to be at first glance.
Anne-Marie: Ah, OK.
David: It seems that Bookmarks are really only for your exported PDFs. But it’s not true, because you can actually use the Bookmarks Panel as a navigation tool inside InDesign.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: So, let’s say you have a 100page document and you want to jump right to Section 25B. If you have made a Bookmark for that Section 25B, you can simply go to that selected Bookmark from the Bookmarks Panel.
One way to do that would be to select the Bookmark in the Bookmarks Panel and then go to the Flyout Menu in the Bookmarks Panel and choose our Obscure InDesign Feature of the Weekeekeekekk: Go to Selected Bookmark.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: So it’s as easy as that. You click once on the Bookmark, and then you go to the Flyout Menu and you choose Go To Selected Bookmark.
Anne-Marie: But nobody would actually do that.
David: No, because it’s totally insane. It’s like the world’s slowest way to do it. Because the faster way is just to doubleclick on the Bookmark. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: That’s right. [laughs]
David: When you doubleclick on a Bookmark in the Panel it takes you to that Bookmark page. So, it basically does the Go to Selected Bookmark, but it’s a lot faster than pulling it out of a Flyout Menu.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: So, nobody would ever use that feature. Instead, just doubleclick on the Bookmark.
Anne-Marie: Now, if you’re not going to create a PDF with Bookmarks, then you don’t have to worry about things like the hierarchy that’s it creating the Bookmarks in or the order that it’s creating the Bookmarks.
David: True.
Anne-Marie: Because I’ve noticed that if you happen to have a Bookmark selected and then you create another Bookmark, the new Bookmark appears indented and to the right underneath the selected Bookmark.
David: Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, good point.
Anne-Marie: Which is how it’s going to end up in the PDF. So you have Chapter 1, or Section 1, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3. Those chapters should all be indented under a section.
You can set that up beforehand in Bookmarks in InDesign. Or you could do it in Acrobat if you want, but if you’re not going to use it in a PDF, don’t even worry about it. If they become indented, they still work perfectly fine just by doubleclicking them in the Bookmarks Panel in InDesign.
David: That’s true. Or, if they do become indented you can always just grab them and drag them a little bit to the left and they pop out. So you can drag those in and out of Bookmark groups or whatever you want to call them pretty easily.
Anne-Marie: That’s true.
David: You can just drag them. Drag them to the left or right or up or down.
Anne-Marie: And they have very cute little anchor marks.
David: Cute anchor marks?
Anne-Marie: They have very cute little anchor icons in CS4. In front of the name of the bookmark.
David: Yes?
Anne-Marie: There’s a cute little anchor thing that appears.
David: I don’t see it. That’s funny. Are you looking in the Bookmarks Panel?
Anne-Marie: Yes, I am.
David: Oh, you know what? I don’t have the cute icon plugin installed.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Did you make a Bookmark by selecting some characters first and then clicking “Create Bookmark?”
David: No. I wouldn’t do that kind of thing. Oh. I see what you’re saying. When you do that, if you select some characters on the page and make a Bookmark, yes, you get a cute little anchor. Anchors away.
Anne-Marie: I’m getting it even if I don’t have that. Wait a minute, are you making a bookmark with something other than the Type tool?
David: [laughs] Wait a minute!
Anne-Marie: Oh, look at that!
David: Are you making a Bookmark using mental telepathy?
Anne-Marie: I didn’t know you could make Bookmarks without your Type tool being inside of a text frame.
David: Sure! You just go to… because Bookmarks are not text anchors.
Anne-Marie: Oh, I see. So then you get a cute little page icon.
David: Page icon. It goes directly to the page. Yes.
Anne-Marie: Well, you know, that’s interesting because when you make one with your type cursor… I always make bookmarks by selecting some text first, I guess.
David: Ah, OK.
Anne-Marie: Because that’s how I remember what the Bookmark is for. Section 1, you know?
David: OK, yes.
Anne-Marie: That kind of thing. And then I get this cute little anchor icon. But what I wanted to mention is that then if you look at it in Story Editor, you’ll see a little target icon, which indicates this is a bookmark.
David: [laughs] It’s always something.
Anne-Marie: It’s always something with the Story Editor.
David: How interesting.
Anne-Marie: And I believe if you delete that that it deletes does it delete the bookmark?
David: No, I…
Anne-Marie: It deletes the Bookmark. There you go.
David: You know what’s interesting about this? You just discovered an excellent tip that I did not know. This is great!
Anne-Marie: Oh, I love it! My day is made.
David: This is great, because here’s the problem: when you’re making interactive documents, for example a SWF or PDF or something, especially interactive PDFs, and you want to go to a particular page
Anne-Marie: Yes
David: And this is something I talked about in my Lynda.com title on “Ten Things You Need to Know About Making Interactive PDFs,” which is an excellent title.
Anne-Marie: Yes it is.
David: I encourage everybody to check out the Lynda.com title. Anyway, in that title I’m talking about if you want to go to a specific page in a PDF, you have to make a text anchor first. Well, how do you make a text anchor? You use the Hyperlinks Panel, and the Hyperlinks Panel does not make it easy to make text anchors.
Anne-Marie: No, it does not.
David: It’s really obscure and convoluted.
Anne-Marie: Interesting.
David: But you know what you just pointed out? You can make a text anchor in the Bookmarks Panel, because when you select text with the Type tool, you just grab some text with the Type tool and make a Bookmark out of it, it automatically makes a
Anne-Marie: A text anchor!
David: It makes a text anchor.
Anne-Marie: So, that’s the generic text anchor. Like, for example, cross references. Can’t you link to an anchor?
David: As long as you have an anchor, anchored text, you can link to it, you can point to it, yes.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Yeah. But the problem is I’ve always thought you had to use the Hyperlinks Panel to do it, and you just pointed out you can do it with the Bookmarks Panel, which is far easier than the Hyperlinks Panel. Wow.
Anne-Marie: Interesting.
David: That’s awesome.
Anne-Marie: Why don’t they just call this the Anchors Panel instead of Bookmarks?
David: That’s far too easy.
Anne-Marie: They should call it Text Anchors and Page Anchors. That’s what these things should be.
David: OK.
Anne-Marie: Not Bookmarks.
David: All right. We’re going to submit that to Adobe.
Anne-Marie: Yes we will.
David: And they’re going to ignore us.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] All right. Well we both learned something new today. Love it. That is it, ladies and gentlemen, for Episode 108. 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 discount codes, etc.
We would love to here what you thought of the show. Leave a comment in our notes or email us at info@indesignsecrets.com. And until we meet again, this is Anne-Marie and…
David: David Blatner for InDesign Secrets.
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