Podcast 144 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 144 page.
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Welcome to InDesign Secrets Episode 144. 12 times 12. It’s a gross episode. We should call this the gross episode.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: I just realized that. I’m Anne-Marie Concepcion and I’m here with my cohost David Blatner.
David Blatner: Hi there! Our podcast and blog at InDesignSecrets.com are gross! No. They’re the world’s number one resource for all things InDesign. That’s right.
Anne-Marie: And coming up on today’s show we did decide on a theme actually, not the gross show.
David: You got it.
Anne-Marie: We’re going to call it the tech support show.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: Yes, we’ve been talking a lot about tech support lately. We’re going to talk about questions that have come in. And also interesting resources to get your tech support questions answered even before you ask them.
David: That’s right.
Anne-Marie: Such as InDesign tech notes. Not a lot of people know that Adobe publishes tech notes with known bugs and fixes and cures, or if they don’t know of a cure. And we’re going to talk about where to find those and what some recent ones were. We have a lovely interview with Sir Nigel French.
No he’s not really sir.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Nigel French from the UK, the author of The InDesign Topography book and a wonderful designer, and lynda.com author, and a speaker at the upcoming conference which you’ll hear in more detail later. And the obscure InDesign feature of the week…
David: Eek! Eek! Eek!
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Is adding items on page as separate objects.
David: Yes. that’s right. But before we get into any of that good stuff, I want to mention quickly that we have three. Count them, three sponsors for this pod cast. The first one is Math Magic. Math Magic is the ultimate equation editor from Info logic.
And they do this amazing Wizzywig equation editor. And it’s a plug in combo with an equation editor utility that lets you create in line. Editable EPS equations from within InDesign. So it’s very cool. One of the coolest things about Math Magic is that you can use LaTeX or MathML.
Or Math Type, you can make all of these equations and put them right into your InDesign document. If you’re doing anything with math and you have to do more than one or two equations a year, then you should definitely check out Math Magic.
We’ll put a link in the show notes about where to get information about that. And they’re also even doing a special limited time discount, 25 percent off any Math Magic product that’s over 199 bucks. That’s pretty cool. Check out the special offer in the show notes.
David: That’s right. We have said many times at the end of each podcast that if you have any questions email us at info@indesignsecrets.com. That was a big mistake. I think back when we started that a gross number of episodes ago.
[laughter]
David: That’s right!
Anne-Marie: Because like we don’t have enough to do, we get a lot of email from people with random questions. To them it’s the last resort; “All right. I can’t figure it out myself so I’m going to email InDesign Secrets.”
David: We like hearing people, it’s nice to hear questions and it gives us a little finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the InDesign community, what sort of things need to be described and explained in the podcast and on the blog. So, that’s good.
Anne-Marie: We try to get to them as soon as we can, too. And also the forum helps a lot. Because sometimes if we don’t know the answer. Or if we are just not able to get to it we suggest, “Why don’t you post this on the InDesign Secrets forum?” Where we have a whole lot of InDesign experts hanging out including Dave and I. But also many other users that will help out.
Some of the interesting tech support questions that we got recently, just as a random sample so that you can see what we see from our perspective. Here’s one that I received. “How do I select an object that’s underneath another object?”
David: Mmhm. Mmhm.
Anne-Marie: I got that just yesterday. They were trying to turn layers on and off, moving the object around, or trying to block it. And the answer is hold down the command or control key and then click on the object. Now, you’re clicking on the top object but every time you hold down the command or control key and you click it drills down one layer at time, one stacking layer at a time.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: And then when your object is selected then you can move it. Now there is a difference between how it works in CS5 and how it works in every other version, right David?
David: Yeah it’s true. I don’t want to get too much into this because we could spend ten minutes just on this. But we have 1000 different tech issues here. But, in CS5 you can simply continue to drag it. Whatever’s selected, even if it’s underneath something else you can just drag it around.
And it will move in CS4 and earlier if you just click and drag, then you will reselect the topmost object, so in order to move something that’s underneath another object then you have to drag it’s little center handle.
Anne-Marie: Little box right?
David: Yeah that’s right.
Anne-Marie: Or just use the arrow keys.
[laughter]
David: That’s right.
David: These are some of the questions that come up all the time. Little things like, “How do I select this? How do I change that?” There are some other ones that we get a lot of. It’s not just ones that get emailed to us, it’s things that we see on Twitter. A lot of time people will tweet things.
Anne-Marie: Mmhm.
David: One of the most common problems is a weird one. It’s when your screen has a screen redraw problem, and typically inside the panels, the swatches panel, the links panel.
One of these panels just doesn’t look right. The buttons disappear.
Anne-Marie: They open it up and it’s empty, I’ve seen that. I’ve heard of that.
David: Exactly, and then people freak out and they either email us. Or they tweet “Help, help!” And that’s a very common where the answer is, “Rebuild your preferences.” And we’re going to put a link in the show notes about how to do all these things. Rebuilding preferences is a very common thing that you need to know how to do if you are going to be efficient InDesign.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. One of my favorite ones that I’ve heard is, “How come some of my frames are blue and some are red?”
David: Yes! Exactly!
Anne-Marie: This is a beginner question. So, I tell them it’s because your computer is about to explode or you have a virus. I like to play with these people. Like to play, like a cat with a ball of yarn.
David: Aw, ouch!
Anne-Marie: No. Actually, I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about, but then I realized it’s because some of the frames were on different layers.
David: Exactly.
Anne-Marie: Somebody else had created the stack for them. And they were used to every frame is the traditional blue. And they couldn’t figure, so I gave them the lesson that it’s a visual cue. To let you know that this item is on a different layer, without you having to look at the layers panel all the time. That’s why we have multiple colored frames. They don’t print, but that’s what they look like.
David: Another problem that I find a lot of people have with InDesign is that something happens and they want to go and search for it. So, they go and search in Google or Bing. Or they come to our website and they use the search field there, but what’s happened is that they don’t know what the words are.
They don’t know the proper word. Bob Levin and I were talking about this recently. I was trying to find how to do something on Windows and I could not for the life of me figure it out. And he just sent me a quick link of where to look.
And I realized that the problem was that I had the word wrong. I was looking for one word and Windows uses a different word.
Anne-Marie: Well, what’s the word?
David: This had to do with the migration assistant. A Mac has migration assistant, Windows doesn’t. I think it has a transition assistant.
Anne-Marie: Oh.
David: It’s a different word. And InDesign this shows up a lot. People are looking for one particular thing, they are looking for boxes. But InDesign calls them frames. So, there are issues here. It’s a valid problem when you don’t know what to look for.
Something that came up recently had to do with nonprinting objects. How do you get an object not to print in InDesign?
You want to leave an instruction on the page to your printer or a work colleague, so you want to suppress the printout. And you might be looking for suppress printout, and you could look all over the place for suppress printout and you’re not going to find it.
And you’re going to drive yourself crazy because the real feature is nonprinting. It’s obvious once you see it, but it lives inside the attributes panel, which is under the window menu. Go to attributes and choose nonprinting. But that’s not immediately obvious. In fact, it’s even less obvious if you try to do it in layers.
Sometimes you want to do a nonprinting layer. I think it was Michael Brady who pointed this out recently, that if you are using layers. And you try to put stuff on a nonprinting layer, you might find yourself confused. Because you make a layer and you double click on it to open the layer options box.
And you’re looking for nonprinting and nonprinting isn’t in there.
You know that you can make a layer nonprinting, but why is it not here? It’s because they call it print layer.
Anne-Marie: That’s turned on by default.
David: It is. Because you can print your layer, but if you turn it off then you don’t print your layer. And it’s nonprinting. Looking for the right word sometimes is tricky.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. Even doing something simple like looking for text box, you’re not going to find it. It’s a text ring. There’s just all kinds of these things in there and it is tricky to get the proper tech support, when you want to put your cry for help out there. Where to go? Where to cry? What shoulder to cry on?
[laughter]
David: You mentioned the forums. I would say the InDesign Secrets forums are one of the best places you can go if you just go to indesignsecrets.com/forums. You can log in, put your question there. That’s a really good one. Adobe also has a really good forum out there.
I just want to throw this out there, this is really important to me.
One of the most important things to do when you are throwing out a cry for help is explain your question carefully. Read it over a couple of times before you hit post, because so often the questions are confusing in that nobody can help you, because they don’t know what the heck you are trying to say.
Anne-Marie: Or even the subject line.
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: It drives me crazy people put in the subject line “Need help with InDesign”, in the InDesign help forum.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: OK. We know that, so if somebody’s in a hurry and they’re scanning through. But if you say “What’s the XML tag for a frame?” as your subject, then people will say, “Ah! I can answer that one!” Be specific in the subject line.
David: Absolutely. Say what operating system you’re using, what version of InDesign you’re using. There’s all these things that are really important.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. Bob does a lot of support in the InDesign and InCopy Adobe forums, and people post questions. And he says, “First, I need to know what version of InDesign, are you fully patched, are you on Mac or Windows?”, because it all makes a difference.
David: It does. Absolutely. Definitely fill all that stuff in, if you are trying to get tech support. And if you are relying on the kindness of strangers then please fill in as much…
Anne-Marie: Some people don’t know though. They don’t know the version of the software. One time I was doing tech support with a client who’s having a problem with Microsoft Word…
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And I said “Which version of word are you using?” And they said, “What?” I said, “Which version of Microsoft Word, the software, do you have running on your computer?” And she said “I don’t have any software on my computer.”
David: Wow.
Anne-Marie: I know. I sat there for a minute and I said “You do have software on your computer.”
“No I don’t.”
[laughter]
David: We don’t need to get into details, but the story you told recently about the person you were trying to do tech support and they were calling about an InDesign question. And you were going on and on about InDesign and it just didn’t make any sense.
Anne-Marie: Their control panel disappeared, they said.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: And they couldn’t find it. It wasn’t an option in the Windows menu. I figured they were in a work space that was hiding menu commands. And it turned out they weren’t using InDesign!
[laughter]
David: They were using InCopy, right?
Anne-Marie: Right. Yes!
David: So, you finally were reduced to saying…
Anne-Marie: It doesn’t have a control panel.
David: Does it say IC or ID?
Anne-Marie: Yeah. Exactly. Then they found it. And they felt really stupid.. And I hadn’t wanted them to feel stupid, because I’ve been in that situation. Don’t worry about it.
They look very similar, when you’re looking at a document.
David: I don’t know. You have not been in that particular situation. But, yes. Similar situations, we’ve all done things. We all get into…
Anne-Marie: I remember one time I was on the phone with Windows tech support and I was having a horrible problem. This was a number of years ago. They told me to reboot in safe mode. That is you press the F8 key, I believe.
I pressed the eight key. And I kept insisting, “It’s not working. It won’t reboot. It doesn’t reboot in safe mode.” I was on the phone with that poor woman for like two hours. Until I realized, I wasn’t pressing the right key.
David: You were pressing the key Chicago style. In Chicago, it’s not the F8. It’s the effin’ 8. “I’m pressing the effin’ eight key!”
Anne-Marie: Rahm! Mayor Emmanuel. That’s right. Mayor Rahm. That’s correct. Everything is effin’.
David: That’s correct. Listen, I do want to mention, before we go on, that we do have another sponsor, InTools. Because this is actually a quite relevant thing, Harbs runs a company InTools. InTools.com.
They make all kinds of stuff. Harbs is incredibly helpful with tech support, all over the place. Not just for his products, but for inDesign in general.
He’s constantly writing scripts for people. And, “Hey, this will work.” He’s on inDesign Secrets a lot, writing cool stuff and helping people out. We want to say thank you Harbs, not just for your great products. But also for the great work you’re doing for the inDesign community. We do want to mention that inTools makes a lot of great products as well.
Including World Tools Pro. Check out InTools.com and look at World Tools Pro. Because it lets you do all kinds of languages inside of inDesign CS4 and CS5. The CS5 one is even cooler, because you can do Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew and Arabic and all the Indic languages. So, check it out.
Very cool stuff from InTools, if you’re doing multilingual or long document publishing.
Anne-Marie: I noticed he’s got a new site, too. He just redesigned his site. It’s beautiful. It’s really nice and easy to find stuff. I looked inside the source code. It looks like it’s a WordPress theme.
David: Yeah. I think it is. And one other thing about Harbs is that he is coming out to the printing and publishing conference.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. He just decided to do that.
David: That’s right. He’s going to come out. He’s signed up as a sponsor. He’s going to be there. It will be great to see him in person. If you have questions about almost anything plugin related, he’ll be there, as well as Chris Copitters from Ruro Hico. And we’ll talk about them in just a minute.
So, going back to our tech support theme…
I mentioned earlier that Adobe has this secret world of tech notes that not a lot of users know about. A lot of trainers or consultants know about it, and some users. But they’re often written for people who are emailing us questions or posting them in the forum. Like, “How come X, Y and Z won’t work.” And the answer has been posted in a tech note.
There is this group of people at Adobe. And at most software companies, when they discover a problem that lots of people are reporting, they document it. And they know of a way to fix it, or some trouble shooting steps, they’ll post it on their website as a tech note or a knowledge base article. Then you can look for recent ones.
You can do searches and keywords. We’re going to include links in our show notes to where you find these tech notes on the Adobe website. What caught my attention was that somebody tweeted that they had this obscure problem with inDesign crashing every time they started it up.
In my experience, the person who did the videos here, he’s in trouble shooting inDesign files. The answer is that you need to rebuild or delete the temp files in your cache.
That wasn’t the answer at all. It was something completely new. He said he learned this from an Adobe tech note. I’m like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” He had a link to it and I read it. It’s something to do with the sing extension or file. And Claudia McCue, who’s also going to speaking at the printing and publishing conference, she wrote a great blog post about it too.
We’ll put a link there as well. But that led me to say, “I wonder what other tech support notes have appeared here that I haven’t looked at recently.” There’s a number of them. Did you know that anchored objects lose their corner options? Did you know about that problem?
Anne-Marie: No. I didn’t know about that problem. They lose in CS5?
David: Yep. In CS5. What else? There’s a great page of inDesign CS5 release notes that a lot of people should know about. Or, if you’re using Microsoft Office 2007, 2008, there’s a number of known bugs when you’re importing files from there.
And then the issue with the anchored objects losing corner options, when you open up documents that you wrote in CS4 or earlier in inDesign CS5…
The corner options, the weird little corners that you apply to anchored rectangles, are lost. on all but the upper left hand corner.
Anne-Marie: That’s interesting. That’s a transition from CS4 to CS5 or CS3 to CS5. That’s interesting. That’s the kind of thing that can happen. There’s weird cases. One of the things I find with tech notes is that they address issues.
You alluded to this earlier. They address issues that are rare cases. This may not be a rare case. But they often address thing that happen to some people and not others.
Like the sing problem, I’ve never had that problem. The vast majority of people have never had that problem.
David: Or how about that small caps thing? They have a tech note about small caps, which we know about first hand. But the small caps issue that they talk about has nothing to do with the small caps issue that we know about.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Small caps in CS5.There’s a particular problem having to do with the document fonts folder, when you package your fonts in CS5. Anything that’s in small fonts…
David: Small caps.
Anne-Marie: Sorry. Anything that’s in small caps stops being in small caps. It just turns off. It’s bizarre. They still haven’t fixed that bug. The answer is, you get rid of the font, out of the document fonts folder.
David: Or rename the document fonts folder.
Anne-Marie: Or rename it. Just basically don’t use the document fonts folder, if you’re using small caps. But Adobe has a tech note about small caps being lost. Their tech note has nothing to do with this known problem. Their tech note has to do with old fonts, using old versions of fonts.
David: Which I can’t replicate.
Anne-Marie: I have some old versions of fonts and I can’t force it to happen.
David: So, it’s weird.
Anne-Marie: It’s what they call a corner case. In certain situations, in certain rare situations, when the moon is waxing and the…
David: When the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Exactly. In those situations, this problem can show up. It’s worth checking out the tech notes to find out if your problem has been answered. But often times you run into these really obscure things. I don’t know. I think it’s interesting. We’ll put links to a bunch of these show notes. And more that we don’t have time to get into. And also links to the general Adobe tech support page.
There could be some good information there. But before we go any farther, we need to hear from this great interview with Nigel French, who we talked to earlier today.
David: We’re on the line right now, in an international call, very expensive. We have to talk fast, right? Oh no. We don’t have to pay by the second, by the minute anymore, because we’re on Skype with Nigel French, designer extraordinaire. You’re not the actual Mr. French, from the old TV show over here, are you?
Nigel French: No. I’ve been asked that before. Unfortunately I’m not. I’ve never ever seen it.
David: Nigel doesn’t look anything like Mr. French. I’ll send you a picture, Nigel, of what this guy looks like. Actually, you are a very tall, good-looking English dude. Along the lines of Colin Firth. You know Colin Firth, right?
Nigel: Oh yes.
David: Right. And I know you because we have run into each other at various conferences, but also at Linda.com, recording something. You recorded a bunch of videos on using inDesign to create brochures. Can you talk about that?
Nigel: The first course I did for Linda.com was inDesign typography. I did that a few years ago, when they were a very small outfit in Ojai. They’ve grown massively since then. I’ve been along for the ride. It’s been great. I’ve done a few typography course, upgrading as inDesign itself upgrades. And I’ve done a design series, designing brochures, designing magazines.
Designing CD covers, designing book covers, business cards, logos, et cetera. I’m currently preparing some materials for my next series, which is going to be called Photoshop for Designers. The first one I’ll be doing is on layer styles.
Anne-Marie: That sounds great.
David: That’s fantastic. That’s really good.
Anne-Marie: But you also have a terrific book out, from Peach Pit Press, and Adobe Press. I believe the inDesign and typography book, which is in its second edition.
Nigel: It is. Yeah. I think at least 10 people must have bought it for it to go to a second edition.
Anne-Marie: I hope more than that, because it is very good. If you’re interested in typography and inDesign, you must have this book to really go deep in it. The last thing is, you’re going to be speaking at the printing and publishing conference in Washington DC, in a few months.
Nigel: I’m very much looking forward to that. I’ve only ever been to Washington DC once before and it was very briefly. I’m really excited about going to the conference and, more generally, going to Washington DC.
Anne-Marie: What will you be talking about, at this conference?
Nigel: My exact topic is at yet undisclosed. Which, I think, is code for I haven’t figure that out yet. But it’s something type related.
Anne-Marie: Type. You do seem to focus on goodlooking type.
Nigel: Yeah. That’s become my little niche, within the inDesign community.
Anne-Marie: It’s a huge and important topic.
Nigel: There’s always a lot to explore. It’s a very rich vein. That will keep you busy for a long time.
Anne-Marie: I love the session that you did. It was a very highly rated session at the conference last year in Seattle. You spoke about grids and creating text on a grid system. Which, I have a hard time wrapping my head around grids.
You really put it in a very succinct and easy to understand set of rules. I thought it was terrific. Certainly, it’s striking a chord for a lot of people.
Nigel: I think grids, they seem to becoming more and more popular. I don’t know. Maybe there’s just an overwhelming trend of people wanting to make order out of chaos. This may be a completely wrong perception, but it seems that that design style of the late ’50s, early ’60s, international style, is really making a comeback.
Anne-Marie: Everything is on a grid.
Nigel: Yeah. After the grunginess that we had in the late ’90s, we’re returning to a more ordered design aesthetic.
Anne-Marie: Now by grid, you mean things aligning along the tops and the sides. But you’re also talking about our favorite topic, baseline grid, right?
Nigel: Absolutely. Baseline grid. Yes.
Anne-Marie: Is there anything that you have ever designed, Nigel, that does not use a baseline grid? I’d like to know. I ask only because a lot of people don’t know that Nigel designs a lot of the sample files that David and I use. And other inDesign trainers use on Linda.com.
The fake California brochures, which are beautiful, are designed by you. And everything’s on a grid.
Nigel: Yes and they all have grids, don’t they?
Anne-Marie: I have to go through and turn them off, a lot of times. I’m trying to show something. “Why won’t it work? Oh yeah, it’s locked to the baseline grid. Nigel!” And then I shake my fist up in there.
David: It’s too perfect. Therefore, when you’re trying to show something, where it’s not perfect and how to make it perfect, we have to go and make it not perfect. Because you’ve made it too good, so that’s the problem.
Nigel: Yes. Grids certainly come with a lot of constraints. But if you like working within constraints, then they’re the perfect thing for you. But yes, you should rule them, rather than the other way around. But that can be a bit of an ongoing battle sometimes.
Anne-Marie: We would like to know, Nigel, if you have a favorite tip or keyboard shortcut that you’d like to share with us. And our InDesign Secrets podcast listeners?
Nigel: I’m not sure that it would be a favorite. I don’t have favorites. Because they’re all good. I don’t want to show preference to anyone, but one that crossed my mind was changing your unit of measurement to points and working in points. Over here, most people tend to work in millimeters.
And over there, in inches or in picas. And picas…
Anne-Marie: I like to work in feet and yards and fathoms, myself.
Nigel: What about ciceros? They’re always good for a laugh, aren’t they?
David: I prefer femtometers and picometers. Anybody? A femtometer?
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Cue sound of the tumbleweeds going down the street.
David: A femtometer. The nucleus of an atom, the protons and neutrons are about 100 femtometers across. It’s about what we would call a quadrillionth of a meter. And it turns out you can use those in InDesign. But the numbers are very big.
Anne-Marie: That’s in version six, definitely. They have it. Maybe you could add it to Blatner tools.
[laughter]
David: Yes, we should. We definitely should. The new femtometer.
Anne-Marie: OK, Nigel.
[laughter]
David: I’m just kind of in shock here that you would use points. Instead of using millimeters or picas or inches, you tend to switch your units to points?
Nigel: I use them all. Having spent so many years in the US, I got accustomed to using inches. And then picas and then I moved back here and I now use millimeters, because that’s what people use.
But points are my favorite. And they’re my favorite because type is always in points. You don’t get type in anything else. For me, it all starts with the type.
Having your type in points. Your letting is in points. Your baseline grid is in points. And then you want to calculate everything around the increment of your baseline grid. That’s easier to do or increment if your unit is points. Your paragraph spacing before and after, if you’re using after, any distance of offsets from the text wraps, all tends to work better.
All syncs better if you’re working in points.
David: Interesting. So, you would go into the preferences dialogue box to change that?
Nigel: Well, I had that set as an application preference. But if I do switch around, then I’ll always just use the shortcut of going to the ruler intersection in the top left hand corner. Right clicking on that and then switch it to points there.
But there are certain things that just make more sense in inches or in millimeters. If I’m measuring a rectangle, I have no idea how big it should be in points.
For that, I’ll switch to millimeters or…
Anne-Marie: Oh, how I hate inches. Whoa! I’m a picas, points gal.
Nigel: Yeah, I don’t like them either. I was the generation that was getting rid of inches, because Britain went metric. But then I moved to the US and I had to adopt them. So they followed me.
David: The other thing interesting though, is that when you’re working in points, it’s also a very easy conversion to pixels. Because if you’re doing documents that are both for print and epublishing…
Nice little tie-in for the print and epublishing conference. If you’re working with print and epublishing you want to be working in both real measurements and also pixel measurements.
And points and pixels are basically the same thing. So, that’s another interesting reason to use both.
Nigel: Yes, absolutely. But I used to be quite tyrannical about pointillism. Because I train InDesign quite a lot and I would insist that people use potions. But I’m mellowing as I get older. Use whatever you want.
Anne-Marie: I think it’s a very metaphysical unit of measurement. How big is a point? Because a point just exists in space.
Nigel: That’s true.
David: It’s very Buddhist as well. Because when you’re dealing with points, you’re dealing with singlepointedness. And you can meditate on the singlepointedness of your InDesign document. I like this.
[laughter]
Nigel: I’m not sure I’ve considered this measurement as much as you guys have.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: I do have a quick, type related question having to do with points, something that’s actually on topic. When you said that you like to use points because type is measured in points…
I always thought that type was a lie about its points measuring. You can have two typefaces both at 12 points and one is much bigger than the other.
Right? When we say, “type is 12 points,” can we say for sure that it’s taking up the same amount of vertical space as every other typeface that’s at 12 points?
Nigel: No, not at all. When we say it’s 12 points, the size of the block that the letter is made within, that is 12 points. But the amount of vertical space that it occupies within that block is going to vary. Absolutely.
Anne-Marie: OK. So, the block is 12 points. That is the same, between two that are the same points?
Nigel: Yeah. But the size its ascender heights and how far the descender goes beneath the baseline, that’s going to vary from typeface to typeface. As will the perception of its height, caused by its X heights, the relative size of its lower case letters.
David: Right. That makes sense. We actually have a script around here somewhere. I can’t find it on the website. We’re going to have to find that. We actually have a script around here that somebody wrote that lets you define a point size based on the actual size of the text.
If you say you want it to be exactly eight millimeters high, that the ascender would be exactly eight millimeters high.
It figures out what point size the text should be to make that happen. I can’t find it, but I will. I will before the end of this podcast. I absolutely will and we can put it in the show notes and then send that off to you, Nigel.
Nigel: Yeah, I’d be curious to see that.
Anne-Marie: Thank you so much, Nigel. It was wonderful talking to you this evening, slash this morning.
Nigel: Yeah, good to talk to you too. I look forward to seeing you both at the conference.
David: Indeed. That’s going to be terrific. Thanks so much, Nigel.
Anne-Marie: That was wonderful.
David: That was great. Good to hear from Nigel. We should also mention sponsor number three. Three! Three! Three! Three!
[laughter]
RoroHiko, our friends at RoroHiko. Chris Coppiter, at RoroHiko creates some amazing products. He and his son, actually, create all kinds of cool stuff, including Socksy and a Sudoku generator.
But we’re going to mention, today, Story Parker. Story Parker is one of their commercial plugins that is really nifty. It actually lets you cope with a very cluttered layout. If you have a bunch of text frames and image frames and everything’s overlapping everything. And you need to work on just some individual items…
Sometimes it would be helpful just to grab a piece, a frame or a bunch of frames, and move it off to the pasteboard. You can work with an uncluttered layout. And then, later, move that stuff from the pasteboard back into place. And that’s what Story Parker is all about.
Anne-Marie: Without you having to drag out guidelines or remember where things go. It’ll just put them. It remembers where home was, in other words.
David: Right. It moves it off and then it puts it back in exactly the same place. It’s pretty cool. It’s a really nifty little plugin. You can get 20 percent off by using the code, InDesign Secrets 144. Because this is Episode 144, InDesign Secrets 144.
You get 20 percent off Story Parker when you get it from the RoroHiko website. RoroHiko.com.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: You sound like you should go into radio.
David: I should. Be there!
Anne-Marie: Blatner in the morning! That would be good. So, it’s time for the obscure InDesign feature of the week. Geek, geek, geek!
That is, add items on page as separate objects. I was positive that we had covered this before. But we looked and we didn’t.
David: I can’t find it anywhere. I don’t know.
Anne-Marie: Just sounds familiar.
David: Out of 144 obscure features, you’d think we would have covered this one.
Anne-Marie: I guess so. It’s actually 141 obscure features, because we didn’t start until Episode 3 or 4.
David: Well, there you go.
Anne-Marie: There we go. So that feature, some people, they’ll be like, “What?” But other people, if you use libraries, you’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s not obscure.” It has to do with libraries. You go under the file menu, choose “new” and then choose “library.” It makes a little panel with the name of your library. It’s an actual file and it holds objects.
It holds snippets of InDesign objects. So things like, you can put a single image into the library, it makes a copy of what’s on your document, puts it in the library. Or you could put a whole sidebar with a collection of frames, offsets, pictures and captions.
And add that entire sidebar as a library item. It retains the spacing and the styles of everything in there.
You can reuse that item in other publications, is the point. By just dragging it out of the library and putting it on your document, it all comes in intact. It’s not linked to the original. It’s just like a copy. It’s like making a whole bunch of copies.
David: What’s cool is that you can actually take. If you have a bunch of objects on your page, you can add them all into a single library item by going to the library panel menu, little fly out menu there.
And choose, “add items on this page.” Typically, you’ll say one page one or page five.
Anne-Marie: It makes one single library item, in that case. It makes one single library item.
David: It makes one single library item of all of those objects on your page. Which could be cool. But what if you want a whole bunch of different library items? Each text frame, each picture should show up as a separate library item. That is what add items on page as separate objects, is all about. That’s what this obscure feature is about.
Add each item as a separate object into the library. And that’s it.
Anne-Marie: I have used that first one a lot. I haven’t used our obscure feature a lot.
David: No. Me neither. But isn’t it wonderful that it’s there?
Anne-Marie: Yes it is. If anybody here has used it, if they rely on it, please add your comment to the show notes. That would be good to know. That is it for the gross episode, Episode 144. Check out the show notes.
Man, there’s going to be a lot of links I have to do. Check out the show notes on our blog, at InDesignSecrets.com, where I’ll have links to all the places we mentioned.
And we’d love to hear what you thought of that show. Leave a comment on the show notes, start a topic in the forums or email us, everybody knows the email address now, at info@indesignsecrets.com. Until we meet again, this is Anne-Marie Concepcion and…
David: David Blatner, for InDesign Secrets.
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