Podcast 110 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 110 page.
[intro music]
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Welcome to InDesign Secretes, episode 110. I’m Anne-Marie Concepcion I’m here along with my handsome cohost David Blatner.
David Blatner: How can that be, how can we at 110? That’s like a lot!
Anne-Marie: It’s a 110 degrees in the shade!
David: [laughs}.
Anne-Marie: one one zero. We're still binary!
David: It's that hot. It's true we're binary. Oneoneo.
Anne-Marie: Our podcast and blog at InDesignSecrets.com are the independent resource for all things InDesign.
David: That's true. And on today's show, all kinds of goodies. We're going to talk bout 6.04 and 10.6, all kinds of numbers today.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: And oneoneo.
David: That’s right. And then Word, we’ll be discussing a little about Word. Last episode we talked a lot about word and we’re going to go even more, go deeper into Word plus InDesign. And then our obscure InDesign feature week [echo].
This is obscure.
Anne-Marie: Cancel package.
David: Cancel package.
Anne-Marie: And when I suggested that, David you said, “Cancel package?”
[laughs]
Anne-Marie: HAH! Perfect obscure one.
David: I figured you meant the package command. But it’s not!
Anne-Marie: I know that’s what you thought. That’s what you thought.
David: That’s right, that’s right. It’s even more obscure, it has nothing to do with the package command. So we’ll be discussing that in just a little bit.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: But first we should mention that this episode is sponsored by InTools, maker of all kinds of great plugins. I wanted to say one plugin but lots of different plugins. But the one I want to focus on today is the AutoFlow Pro. It’s a $99 plugin. It is a very sweet plugin. it does all kinds of things that we have been wanting InDesign to do for years especially for long document publishing. You know most of the stuff that Harbs does with at InTools focuses on long document publishing; if you’re doing textbooks, books or magazines and so on.
And AutoFlow Pro just fits perfectly into that. And it all has to do with automatically flowing text throughout your document. You know InDesign CS4 has a smart text free flow kind of thing, but this is different.
Anne-Marie: It’s quite different. The auto flow that we’re talking about is you get to a bottom of a text frame and you have more text. So what happens? Do you get an over set or does it automatically increase the size of the frame or automatically or spawn a new frame that’s threaded to that frame?
So if you are on CS4, you know that it comes with the new feature called Smart Reflow that you turn on in Preferences. And when you turn it on, depending on the circumstances, whichever text thread you’re typing and you’re flowing text into or pasting into, will automatically spawn new pages and add threaded frames. I think the main difference between Smart ReFlow and AutoFlow Pro they work together, AutoFlow Pro when you installing will automatically switch off Smart Free Flow is that with AutoFlow Pro is a storybystory setting.
So it’s not a global setting which I think gives you more control. You can say like, this particularly story, the frame can resize but I never want it to add pages. Whereas this particular story it can add pages if necessary. And all sorts of different settings.
David: That I think is great. I think it’s really the way auto flow should be done, but that just scratches the surface because this AutoFlow Pro does so much more. I’ll tell you one of my favorite features about AutoFlow Pro because we don’t have time to go into everything.
One of my favorite features is the ability to change the master page and have the text reflow automatically. It’s a subtle point, but it’s a huge failing of InDesign. For years you could flow a whole story, with the chapter opener and then all the body pages, but if you change the master page then all hell breaks loose. If you actually go in and apply a different master page to your document page after you have flowed the text, it just doesn’t work.
InDesign has no easy way to do that. This is actually something that Quark Express did, although Quark Express was limited in other ways. But it was something that I really missed from those days, the ability to apply a different mater page to a document page and have the text intelligently reflows into the new text frames.
And AutoFlow Pro finally got it right. It takes a little bit of work to set it up but once you’ve set it up, it is just so sweet. So if you’re doing a book where first… you flowed the whole book in and you want to go back and say, “OK, this is a chapter opener. I need to change the master page.”
So you apply a new master page. It will just automatically reflow! All the text reflows into the proper text frames. It’s just, again it’s the way it should be. It’s you know, it’s not a huge expensive plugin but it really adds an amazing amount of functionality if you’re doing long documents.
Anne-Marie: AutoFlow Pro.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: So just go to InTools.com and we’ll have a link in the show notes to get you over there.
David: That’s right. What else do we talk about here?
Anne-Marie: Well, let’s see. Adobe release 6.04 the latest bug fitch… [laughs] Bug fitch. [laughs]
David: It’s a fitch. It’s true.
Anne-Marie: …the latest bug fix update or patch. Bug fix patch. I think is where that combination comes from. And it is definitely recommended. I recommend that you install it both in InDesign and InCopy. It also came with something for InCopy. There are lots of bugs that it fixed. I had no idea 6.03 was so buggy.
David: Well there’s always, there’s bugs in 6.04. There’s always something in there that Adobe needs to fix.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. I think that one of the major ones that we’ve talked about, or at least we talk about in the blog, is that someone in InDesign CS4, something went wonky with the Word Import Options Dialogue box. You know how you can map Word styles to InDesign styles. You can save that mapping as a preset.
So if you’re constantly getting the same styles fro m the same sources the same Word document from the same source they’re probably using the same kinds of style. So this is something you don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel. Well that broke a little bit. It will still map styles but the presets forget what the style mappings are. So you can’t use the presets and that was fixed in the CS4 6.04.
David: Right. So in CS4 they broke it and now in the 6.04 update that’s now fixed, which is a good thing. But they fixed a bunch of stuff with Data Merge. They fixed stuff with PDF Export. Sometimes with PDF Export things would just kind of different.
Anne-Marie: Right, characters would drop out. I remember getting emails about that.
David: They’re the jpg stuff that they fixed. Some of the INX, IDML stuff got fixed. So they’re constantly making better. They take the bug reports that come in and Adobe makes it a little better and Adobe makes a little microupdate. So definitely I recommended go into their help menu, choose get Updates or check for Updates and update to 6.04.
Anne-Marie: That’s great. Actually it’s just Updates.
David: OK. Just Updates.
Anne-Marie: I think it use to be check Updates. Steve Warner posted a list of all of the most of the fixes in 6.04 as a comment to Bob Levine’s post about the update being there. So we’ll put a link to the post in the show notes.
David: Yeah, good. The other big thing that came out was Snow Leopard. People have been going on about, “Well CS4 works just fine. CS3 works reasonably well. Everything seems to be working well with Snow Leopard”.
And then suddenly some hubbub arose around the Snow Leopard thing. But, not around InDesign specifically, although it touches InDesign. But, primarily around Acrobat and PDF.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Well, Snow Leopard is 10.6 in case you’re keeping track. Do you have to purchase Snow Leopard to go to 10.6?
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: From Leopard?
David: It’s like $29 for the upgrade.
Anne-Marie: All right.I think the issue is that you know how you go to print? You have Acrobat installed and you go to print. Since [Inaudible 8:06], one of the printers has been Adobe PDF, right?
David: Well, if you have Acrobat Pro installed.
Anne-Marie: If you’ve installed Acrobat Pro, right. A lot of people, though they don’t need to, especially from In Design, a lot of people have been custom to printing from that printer, which essentially creates a post script file and then runs it through Distiller.
So, instead of having to go through that two step, you can just print it in an Adobe pdf printer, and it comes in handy in other circumstances. Well, that’s broken in Snow Leopard mainly because, Adobe says it’s because of some sort of change to security about OS 10 prevents that virtual printer from working.
Though, you could still try to print to it, it will just time out. It won’t work. So, what Adobe has done is they’ve updated Acrobat Pro to version 9.1 or 9.13 I think is what it said. Now, if you install the 9.1x updater, what will happen is that it will move that, it will get rid of that Adobe PDF virtual printer from the top part of your print dialogue boxes and it will move it into the OS 10 save as PDF drop down menu of the bottom of the OS 10 print down log boxes which means that in In Design, you have to know that you go to ‘file print’ and then click the ‘printer’ button and then read the little alert saying ‘are you sure you want to do this’? And click, ‘yes’ and then you’ll see the ’save as PDF’ drop down menu.
If you open that, you’ll see ’save as Adobe PDF, ‘ a new menu item. When you choose that, you’ll be able to select the PDF preset setting that you want, and you’ll be able to name it and say where you want to save it, which is something that you had to hunt for when you printed into the Adobe PDF printer.
David: Well, that’s just complex.
Anne-Marie: Did I? The problem is, what if you’re not using Acrobat 9? What if you’re using Acrobat eight and you move to Snow Leopard? Then, you’re sunk.
David: Then you’re sunk. It’s true.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, and there are some other issues that people have been talking about at length in that post and also on the Acrobat and In Design forums on the Adobe website, just things about having to deal with when you print booklet, about issues having to do with creating post script files and the missing Adobe PDF PPD. Why do we have to get rid of the printer description?
Sometimes you find that useful when you’re making a post script file, so on. So, hopefully they’ll sort this all out.
David: Well, I think that you mentioned something in passing there that I think is really important and that’s for most In Design users, this is not relevant.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, that’s true.
David: Most In Design users are making PDF’s using ‘file export’ which is the way that we always recommend people make PDFs.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. That’s unchanged.
David: Yeah, that’s unchanged.
Anne-Marie: It still works.
David: Don’t worry about that. But, if you need to make a PDF via the print dialogue box, basically, that’s when you may run into troubles. So, definitely check out the post if you are in a work flow where you need to make PDF’s via the print dialogue box.
The two things that I can think of. The two reasons people need to do that, typically, are if they’re trying to make a PDF which is really small, the file size is really small because most people find that the Distiller way of making PDF’s still results in a smaller PDF. That’s typically not that big of an issue anymore.
But, the main thing that people have problems with is if they are using the print booklet feature from the file menu. If you’re trying to make a booklet, then the only way if you’re trying to make a booklet and you want a PDF of that booklet, the only way you can do that is by printing the PDF because there is no export to PDF, which I think is crazy. I really wish that Adobe would offer that option from the print booklet…
Anne-Marie: Yeah, but then you’ll add one more button there in the print dialogue box.
David: Yeah, make a PDF of this booklet and they just don’t do that. So, that’s very frustrating. Maybe in a newer version.
Anne-Marie: I print to the Adobe PDF printer when I’m printing, when I’m making PDF’s from other apps outside of the CreativeSuite.
David: Sure, good point.
Anne-Marie: Just Word and things like that. It’s interesting, we even have Leonard Rosenthall, who is one of the pdf Gods from Adobe, commenting in that thread, which I thought was pretty nice of him to do, and explaining that just because it appears in the little Apple drop down menu, doesn’t mean that you’re ending up with a low rent Apple PDF.
It actually translates the apple ports PDF stuff to Adobe PDF stuff. It actually does get run through Quartz using the Adobe PDF library. So, it’s an official Adobe PDF even using that method.
David: Yeah, if you need that definitely read through that post because there’s some incredibly useful things there. So, we’ll link to that post. Read through it. But, we probably don’t need to go into too much more detail now because the majority…
Anne-Marie: Geek level 8.5 at this point. My glasses are getting thicker just talking about it. All right. So, let’s continue. Let’s wrap up our talk about Word and InDesign. You remember last episode, we got through about half of the bullet points that we we wanted to and said Oh, my gosh. It’s been an hour and a half already. Maybe we should finish this next episode.
That’s only because it’s just so common for In Design users to have to take Word files and style them. It’s problematic. So, some of the things that we didn’t get to. Do you want to start us off, David?
David: Well, I want to mention, once again, about that 6.04 update because it’s an important thing. This whole issue of mapping styles.
Anne-Marie: That fixes it.
David: Yeah. So, 6.04. It fixes the presets. But, I just want to point out that you can map styles. It’s a really important thing. When you’re bringing a Word document into In Design, traditionally, people have always been very, very careful about making sure the style names in Word match the style names in In Design exactly.
You don’t really have to do that anymore because you can do this custom style mapping. In the ‘import options’ dialogue box, click on ’style mapping, ‘ and you can map any style in the Word document to any style in the In Design document.
Anne-Marie: Even if you just map normal to basic paragraph, that goes a long way toward fixing a whole bunch of problems.
David: It’s true. Although, we’ve also talked about people not using basic paragraph style. So, I would map normal to something else. Make your own paragraph style, like body text style or whatever and then map to that. But, yes. That is a big step forward for sure.
Anne-Marie: Or, you could map, couldn’t you map ‘normal’ to ‘no paragraph style?’ That’s always a choice.
David: I think that’s a choice. I get very nervous about switching things to ‘no paragraph style’ because then the local formatting can get wiped out even more easily. But, I think that is reasonable in many work flows.
Anne-Marie: See, one of the big problems to me with Word is that often, I think by default, every style is based on their normal style so you have to be real careful about that. And I think that if you would map ‘normal’ to ‘no paragraph style, ‘ then you’d get rid of the ‘based on’ nightmare.
David: Interesting. I’ll have to try that. I like that idea. Very interesting. So, the mapping is an important factor here. We definitely want to encourage people to set up mapping, and then with 6.04…or in CS3, it works just fine, but if you’re in CS4, make sure you upgrade to 6.04 so you can save those maps in your import presets. And you should definitely do that.
However, there’s another thing about mapping that I want to mention quickly here, because it’s really frustrating to me, and that is, again it has to do with importing styles, but in this case it’s more about exporting and then importing styles. So, here’s what happens. This is just a pet peeve of mine, and I really wish Adobe would fix this. It’s incredibly annoying.
If you have used Style Groups, which is the folder feature inside the Paragraph Styles and the Character Styles panels, this is an option to create a Style Group. Is that what they call it, a “Style Group?”
Anne-Marie: Yes, they do.
David: It’s just a folder. You make folder, and then you drag styles into it. It’s a great way to keep track of or to manage your styles if you have a lot of styles.
Anne-Marie: All your body styles in one folder, all your table of content styles in another folder.
David: Yes, yes. It’s a very clever thing that they added, but they screwed it up royally. It is so broken, that I cannot actually use that feature at all. And the reason is this. If you use that feature, where you’ve put styles into those folders, and then you export your text out to let’s say an RTF file that can be opened in Word….
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: If you export your text, InDesign maps the names to different names. It actually changes the names of the styles, and the way it does it is, it adds the style grouping in…I believe it puts it in parentheses, if I recall.
Anne-Marie: I think it just puts them there, and then it follows them with a colon.
David: Oh, maybe it’s a colon, I don’t know. It messes with the names. Basically screws…
Anne-Marie: Definitely messes them up, yes.
David: The style names get all screwed up. And then it gets worse, because the next time you…you’ve exported your document, your story, out to a Word file, somebody opens it in Word, they edit it, blah, blah, blah, they save it. They send it back to you.
You try and reimport it into InDesign, and all Hell breaks loose, because all those style names have been renamed. And InDesign is not smart enough to realize…you know it’s like the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand did.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: So all of a sudden, you import it, and you have all these new style names with colons, and parentheses, and so on in there.
Anne-Marie: Yes, they’re all like top level styles. None of them are going into folders, but many of them are preceded by the folder names [laughs].
David: Yes. It’s just broken. It’s just fundamentally broken. I’m so angry about it. It’s like, how could Adobe have put this feature in, this folder feature, this great ability to put styles into folders, and then totally dropped the ball when it comes to the export and import of files? So, that’s what I’m angry about.
Anne-Marie: That’s true. That’s true. That’s true. That’s not one of the fixes in 6.04. Maybe it’ll be fixed in CS5.
David: Or CS12.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: Someday they’re going to get around to fixing it. Faster…
Anne-Marie: They must not realize that there’s so much back and forth with writers outside of InDesign. Or maybe they’re trying to force everybody to use InCopy, which I highly doubt. But I think someone just didn’t think it all the way through.
David: If you’re using InCopy, great. That’s fabulous. It’ll work, but like you have said repeatedly, so many people are stuck with this InDesign plus Microsoft Word workflow.
Anne-Marie: Right. Right.
David: You’ve got to get it to work, so if you…I guess the workaround is, if you’re going to be doing that, you must be using the style mapping thing. You have to go in and map every one of those styles back to the appropriate style.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: Or, just don’t use those folder groups. Just don’t have your styles in groups, which is really unfortunate, because it’s a cool feature in CS3 and CS4. But, it’s broken, and they haven’t fixed it yet. What do you want to talk about? That’s my rant of the day.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] That’s pretty good. I think this should be a regular feature. Rant, rant rant!
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: [laughs] I want to talk about a couple of things that people are constantly asking me about, and just to give you some information. Like one thing that I get asked a lot, and I’m sure you to do, David, is, “How do I convert my InDesign file to an editable Word document?”
David: Yes, yes, yes. Oh, yes.
Anne-Marie: Right? Well, clients are asking for that. You design [laughs] a beautiful annual report for them, and they’ll be like, “OK, can I have this as a Word file, because we want to be able to edit it for next year.”
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Oh, but maybe more typically, let’s say a letterhead, or something like that, that you’ve designed for them in InDesign, or maybe even in Illustrator, and they want it as an editable Word file.
David: OK.
Anne-Marie: Or a newsletter, right? So, is that even possible? You can talk until you’re blue in the fact with the client saying, “These are completely different programs, ” and it’s like saying, “Please put the diesel engine in my gasoline car.”
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: They just don’t work that way.
David: That’s right.
Anne-Marie: “You should have told me in the beginning that you wanted it to be editable. I would have designed it in Word.” No, it won’t work.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: The clients are clients, and in this economy, you want to keep everybody happy. So, you’ve just got to try your best. A couple of solutions that I’ve recommended to people that they try…first of all, you can always export your InDesign file to a PDF, and then in Acrobat Pro, they have a command that says, “Save as a Word file.”
David: Cool.
Anne-Marie: And you can get kind of close. It’ll embed some graphics and things. You’re going to have to definitely massage that file if you wanted things like…if you had repeating graphics from a master, or something like that, there, but you might try that. If they just want to be able to get to the text, you know, as one long text file, they want to be able to use the formatted text in something else, then that’s one way.
Otherwise, you’re going to have to do it piece by piece, and instead of explaining it in this podcast, we’ll have a link to this article that I wrote on “Creative Pro” last year, about converting a letterhead to Word, using words like “header” and “footer.” It’s pretty well hidden wrapping features, and you can overlap text with graphics, and all sorts of interesting things in Word.
You can get kind of close. You can do a letterhead that has one graphic on page one, and then different graphics on additional pages if the letter goes longer.
David: Yes, yes.
Anne-Marie: It was actually voted the most popular article of all year 2008.
David: Oh, yes. It’s an awesome article. If you’ve got…anybody who needs to get stuff out of InDesign into Word needs that article.
Anne-Marie: It kind of makes my heart cry, though.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: So many people need that information. It’s sad.
David: Yes. It is very sad, actually.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: But what are you doing to do? Not everybody has InDesign, so…
Anne-Marie: I guess.
David: There you go.
Anne-Marie: All right, then another issue that I hear a lot…especially with a lot of my long document clients or textbook publishing client is, “How do we get endnotes into InDesign?”
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: You know, I don’t understand, what is the big deal with endnotes. How come InDesign can’t do endnotes?
David: It’s weird.
Anne-Marie: That’s my rant. It does all sorts of fun things with footnotes, but nothing with endnotes. I would think endnotes would be easier.
David: InDesign is “endnoteist.” It has an antiendnote bias.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: It’s…I think it’s time…
Anne-Marie: It’s “antiendnoteite.”
David: Exactly. It’s time to stand up for our endnote rights.
Anne-Marie: I know. What is the deal? Well, I do have…you can…in Word…you can open up the footnote…you know, “Show Footnotes, ” and “Select All, ” and convert them to endnotes in Word. I think InDesign magazine had a one or twopart article all about this a couple years ago. Do you remember that, David?
David: It’s all blurred, I can’t remember.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. There is this article that, you know, about like there are 40 different steps to convert footnotes to endnotes. But there is actually a great script available. So if you have something with footnotes, I think that first of all, I think it’s pretty easy in Word, as long as you have Word, to take footnotes and convert them endnotes or to take endnotes and convert them to footnotes. It’s a matter of, like, selecting all, copying, and pasting it to different panels all right.
But so, you bring them in as footnotes, or maybe you have a document that’s all full of footnotes and you want to make those into endnotes. There is a great script that we’ll link to, and it’s called Footnotes to Endnotes. Believe it or not a free script that works with CS2, 3, and four that got like five stars from everybody who rated this script and it’ll automatically convert them all. You can even on the way while it converts them, you can have it apply certain character styles to the footnote reference in the text and in the actual endnotes.
David: Yeah, but I think that, if I recall, there’s actually even a cooler script. Didn’t, I’m having difficulty, having to go, here we go, Peter Corel wrote another script as well here. We’re going to link to this well, because it doesn’t just move everything to the end. If you’re using CS4, this script will actually convert the footnotes into cross references, if I’m not mistaken.
Anne-Marie: All right. Right. So that you could like add another endnote in the middle of the text and everything will automatically number off.
David: Right, right, exactly.
Anne-Marie: I think that wraps up all of our information about Word and InDesign.
David: Yeah. Well, there’s always more to talk about but…
Anne-Marie: There’s more.
David: …but that’s all we have here. But we should talk about a couple of other things, other places you can learn some cool things for example some upcoming seminars and webinars that we have going. You’re talking about InDesign in Chicago right and I think next week on the 6th, October 6th…
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: …October 6th?
Anne-Marie: That’s on Tuesday, it’s an all day seminar. Anne-Marie, eight hours, unfiltered, acoustic.
David: Excellent. So if you are anywhere near Chicago, go check that out. We’ve have a link in the show notes along with the coupon code to get a discount on that. That’s from MOGO, that’s a MOGO event?
Anne-Marie: Yeah, that’s correct.
David: And we also have some upcoming webinars. I’m going to be doing two webinars in …Do you get a huge crash right there?
Anne-Marie: No.
David: I just have to apologize, if you’ve been hearing out there in podcast listener’s land, if you’ve been hearing banging and smashing and who knows what else in the background I have to apologize. We’re having a roof replaced. Currently, our roof is ripped off and they’re putting a new roof on the house, and I’m sitting here…
Anne-Marie: Nothing like recording audio when they are replacing the roof.
David: It’s insane! And my wife is in the other room running the blender, so there are some amazing sounds. So this is the biggest, this is the world’s best test on how good the quality of this microphone, the noise cancellation feature in this microphone is.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. I’m not hearing anything. It sounds great.
David: That’s good.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. So hopefully that will be how it is in the recording.
David: So anyways, it’s a little distracting here.
Anne-Marie: So you’re webinars.
I’m going to be doing a couple of webinars in October on long document features, and so I hope you’ll join me for those. I’ll tell about all kinds of long document things: books and table of contents and indexes and cross references and all kinds of cool things. We also have a wide variety of eseminars that have been recorded. These are webinars that have been running over the past few months on everything from tables to typography to graph, to troubleshooting. You did a wonderful thing on troubleshooting. And we’ve made these recordings available now, and on several of them, we’ve dropped the cost, it’s like $10, so they’re really cheap to watch the recording.
Check it out. We’ll put a link in the show notes. But if you go to the website, if you go to InDesignSecrets.com and click on events at the top, you will see a blog post there that has a list to all of those different recordings. So check it out, see if any of those appeal to you, because again, they’re pretty inexpensive right now. So that’s pretty good.
Anne-Marie: All right. I think it is time for the Obscure InDesign feature of the week. Eke, eke, eke.
David: The Cancel Package.
Anne-Marie: Yes. Cancel Package, just like we said earlier. So if you look for Cancel Package, it is not a wonderful new command from the File menu, no. It has nothing to do with packaging the InDesign document and all of its linked images for a printer or for hand off to somebody else. Instead, it has to do with the other package. You know Adobe’s engineering team they keep running out of words, so they thought, “Oh, this is a package let’s call this “package.”
David: That’s hilarious.
Anne-Marie: And it’s something that not everybody uses for an in copy work flow, and it is actually command in the assignments panel. And if you look under your Window menu, in CS3 or CS4, you’ll see that assignments are the very first panel, under the Window menu. All right and then if you open up the assignment panel menu, you’ll see great out there, twothirds away down, Cancel Package. So right above it there is two commands, package or in copy and package and in copy email.
It’s a cousin of the big package command. What this command does is it packs up a subset of the layout that an off site editor needs to work on, along with all of the linked in copy stories so they can actually edit the contents inside the layout, and optionally any images as well. And it packages it all up into a neat little zip file, which the regular package command doesn’t do. I might add.
David: That’s true, that will be nice.
Anne-Marie: And it’s not a zip files, it actually ends with the I cap so that it can be emailed. You know, zip files, you can’t email zip files to clients anymore because often their mail service won’t allow that.
David: That’s right they get striped out.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. Which, I thought was pretty clever, and that’s all. So if you have sent the package off to an off site editor and then you find out, you know, they won the lottery and they’ve left the company. Well when you package an assignment it locks everybody else out from being able to edit the stories that were in the assignment. That’s a feature right? So then, what are you supposed to do? Well, if you choose “Cancel Package, ” then it opens them up again for local editing.
David: Excellent, excellent.
Anne-Marie: And this is what it’s all about.
David: That’s great. So this is the “if the editor has won the lottery” feature.
Anne-Marie: Yes, that is correct.
David: I like it.
David: It’s excellent. Thank you. That was as obscure as they come. That was excellent.
Anne-Marie: It’s always great when I can leave you speechless.
David: Rare, rare. But it could happen.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. It’s a good one. Where is the “Cancel Package” command all right?
David: That is it for episode 110, and be sure to check out the show notes on our blog in InDesignSecrets.com. We’re going to have links to all of the places we’ve mentioned in this podcast. We would love to hear what you thought about this show. Go ahead and go to InDesignSecrets.com, find our podcast, find these show notes, write your own comments at the end or you could email us at info@InDesignSecrets.com. Until we meet again, this is David Blatner and…
Anne-Marie: Anne-Marie Concepcion for InDesign Secrets.