Podcast 69 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 69 page.
[music]
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Welcome to InDesign Secrets episode 69. I’m Anne-Marie Concepcion, and I’m here, along with my cohost, David Blatner.
David Blatner: Bonjourno.
Anne-Marie: Bonjourno paisan.
David: Bonjourno.
Anne-Marie: Hey.
David: Welcome, welcome.
Anne-Marie:[Italian]
David: Wow.
Anne-Marie: That means shut up in Italian.
David: [laughter]
Anne-Marie: My mom’s Italian. We learned [speaks in Italian] and “mangia.” Mangia means eat.
David: I like mangia. That’s good.
Anne-Marie: Shut up and eat.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: That’s how it was growing up in my family.
Our podcast and blog at InDesignSecrets.Com are the independent resource for all things InDesign.
David: Indeed, and we’ve got some great stuff on today’s show. We’ve got some… We’ll just talk a little bit about the reactions to our New Year’s podcast. We have a special guest. That’s the big thing today. Special Guest Deke McClelland had joined us, and we did a wonderful interview just about 20 minutes ago. We’re going to splice that in, and all will be well. It’s very exciting.
And we’ll do a Quizzler at the end, and the prize will be a copy of Deke’s book. “The InDesign CS3 One on One Book.” So, if you win the Quizzler, you could walk away with a copy of his book.
And then, we’re going to do of course, the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week.
Both: Eek eek eek.
David: Which is the View Box.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, the View Box…
David: The View Box.
Anne-Marie: …is pretty obscure, I’d say.
David: Very obscure. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: So, we want to start out by thanking everybody for your wonderful responses to our New Year’s Eve podcast. We got a lot of emails about it, and if you didn’t happen to catch that, the main topic was our resolutions, as far as they related to Adobe InDesign, for ourselves and what we recommended for all users.
Things like, “I will force myself to use Quick Apply at least three times so that I understand it, and can appreciate its utility.” Things like that.
One of our… The resolution that we ended up on was, “I resolve that I will add a comment to a post on the blog, just to let David and I know that you’re out there.” And a whole bunch of people followed through on that resolution, at least. We got a lot of responses to the show notes itself. So, if you want to check out the 30 plus responses, check it out.
Some people were just commenting on the resolutions, but other people were just saying, “Yay! I’m out here! Thank you very much.”
Or, one of the gentlemen named Mark says he’s one of our many listeners. He’s listened to the podcast for the last couple years, and thanks for sharing all of your InDesign secrets. Your cutting edge tips are a real time-saver and confidence booster. That’s so nice hearing that kind of stuff.
David: Yeah, it’s nice to hear that. Thank you. Thank you all very much. We’re going to keep doing these podcasts and keep getting the good information out there.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. And I think now it’s time for the Deke segment.
David: The Deke segment. This is very funny. We had a good time, and I hope you enjoy it.
[music]
Anne-Marie: Deke… eek… eek…
David: The Deke… eek… eek…
[laughter]
Deke McClelland: I’m so delighted with that. I have to say I’m honored by your Deke… eek… eek…
David: You didn’t just happen to return from Mozambique… eek… eek, did you?
[laughter]
David: That would be ideal.
Deke: Deke does a lot of traveling, but not there.
David: There is a lot of mystique… eek… eek… about it.
Deke: [groans]
David: all right. I’m done.
Deke: Thank goodness.
David: Let’s continue with the introduction of Deke.
Deke: That’s OK, because I was racking my brains over a few, and I didn’t like either at all, so this is good.
David: Deke… eek… eek is the author of a lot of books, like 50 books or more, so depending on…
Deke: 85.
David: 85. 85 books.
Anne-Marie: Wow.
David: Some of them don’t actually have words in them.
Deke: What?
David: Some of them don’t have words in them, but…
Deke: No, no, no. Just blank pages.
David: Just blank pages.
Deke: A stealth line of blank journals.
[laughter]
David: Including some of the most…
Anne-Marie: 84 of those are blank journals, then he wrote a book on InDesign.
Deke: That’s right. That was exactly it! [laughs] Yes.
David: Including the most popular book on Photoshop in the world. “The Photoshop Bible” is…it. Is that correct?
Deke: Yeah, it was when I worked on it. I don’t work on that anymore, but yes, at one time that was unbelievably popular.
Anne-Marie: I remember following that book page, by page, by page teaching myself Photoshop, Deke. I especially remember this horrible grey-scale photograph of a dinosaur skull?
Deke: Yeah.
David: Oh, yeah.
Anne-Marie: Do you still use that thing in your training, because it really scared me!
Deke: Well, I use different ones. I don’t think a book that doesn’t have a dinosaur in it!
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: The skull with a black hole in the eye. I remember, it’s like why do we have to look at those.
Deke: I actually think I have really overused that photograph. I really wasn’t trying to use it out.
Anne-Marie: OK, and many training videos too. I think I learned the Creative Suite from getting your series from Total Training.
Deke: Right. Yeah.
David: Yeah. Those were the days. Now Deke has been doing a huge amount of videos on all of the CS3 stuff for www.Lynda.com as have Anne-Marie and I and that has been a good thing.
Deke: Uh-huh.
David: They are just excellent. Excellent. I mean if you want to go really deep into Photoshop, deep into Illustrator, that is the place to go.
Deke: And they are beautiful people to work for.
David: Oh yeah.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: It’s really true. I’ve enjoyed Lynda.com.
Deke: Yeah. I love them.
Anne-Marie: So, this book is…
David: Your newest book is…
Deke: Oh, you want me to say it? [laughs]
David: Yeah, Yes. Go for it.
Deke: Because I’m ashamed. No!
[laughter]
Deke: It’s “Adobe InDesign CS3 One-On-One” Woohoo!
David: Part of the One-On-One series of books.
Deke: Part of the One-On-One series of several books.
David: And these books are very cool because it’s not just a book, it has video involved as well. Is that right?
Deke: Right. Yeah, so this book has more than three hours of video associated with it. The thing I like to stress here is that the video is produced by Lynda.com, but it is all unique to the book. It’s not like we are re-purposing stuff, because I don’t have an InDesign series for Lynda.com. You guys have that wrapped up!
[laughter]
Deke: So all the video content is unique to the book. There is a total of 13 about 15 minute videos and everyone of them introduces you to the topics. The book is mostly step-by-step with sample files and all that jazz. There are text introductions as well where I introduce you to the concepts, but in often times it helps just to be able to show you a few things.
Just like, here’s where we’re going with this, here are how these features work, I just want you to see it on the screen. I encourage people not to work with me on that, just watch it. Then we go into the step-by-steps and at that point we have a bit of a base of understanding and what I found is that it helps people out a lot. At least that is the feedback I’m getting.
David: Oh yeah. I think they are great books. I mean, it’s a great way to learn InDesign. If you are getting up to speed with it, doing that step-by-step, watch some of the videos, sit down and read some of the book, go back and forth. It is really a nice package.
Deke: I appreciate it and I hope what really comes across is that it is like a tutorial guide for tutorial haters. I’m trying to make sure that we create a really cool project. One of them is like a pirate map, a treasure map, it is actually for a pirate themed theme park.
It is a really fun piece. I actually hired a few designers to help me out on this. My book designer Dave Toddo did some really excellent work. We were really trying to raise the bar from our previous edition of the book on this one. So it’s really gorgeous I hope.
Anne-Marie: I’m curious, did you learn anything new while you were doing the book about InDesign? Did you discover anything?
Deke: Here’s the thing, what I discovered was, obviously we all know there are some amazing new features, right? Like table styles.
Anne-Marie: Right.
Deke: First of all I have to say, style sheets inside of InDesign are the most “rockinest” feature ever, right? Just as a group. Just the whole…
David: [laughs] Totally.
Deke: Yeah. They completely save your life on any number of occasions and the more you start working with them the more applications you find for them and just all of a sudden you can do this mini optimization all over the place.
Table styles, I’m going to tell you I am disappointed by table styles. If you are starting with a fresh table and you apply a table style to it, it gets all the internal formatting right, but it has no concept of row height and column width and all the other stuff. You still get this table that needs a lot of work, right?
David: A lot of work.
Deke: And so, when of the things was, and I, actually, David sent you a question once that you put in your blog about copying a figure row and pasting it into a different location.
David: Sure.
Deke: No, I’m sorry, a table row which is something I’m doing all the time. I’m always creating these tables inside of tables as a result, and I don’t realize it until five versions of the book later that I have this weird thing in there and I get edited for. You solved that problem for me.
I actually wanted to ask you guys about a couple of other issues I was running into because this is so… Let me back up. This InDesign book is such a real world project for us because we really tried to put it through its paces. If you look at some of the figures in the book, there are figures that are completely integrated with the design. There is no such thing as a standard page. There are text wraps all over the place. I hope they are elegant not just super fluid.
There is this one figure that, it’s part of the pirate map thing again, where the figure just kind of fades into the text, and it really feels organic to the page. Like I’m trying to build… because one of the challenges in doing an InDesign book, right, is you’re showing InDesign inside of an InDesign page.
David: Right.
Deke: So, you have to do these mini pages all over the place inside of your larger page. I was experimenting with trying to show pieces of the pages on the page and having them blend into the part of the page you are reading. There were places where my editors said, no way, you can’t even tell where your book ends and the project begins. This is too much integration, so we backed off on some of it.
But, in the course of doing that we ran into a lot of issues. I knew about this before, but every time I start getting into InDesign and start doing a big project in it, I am reminded of it, kind of like six chapters into it or something. The only way I know to describe it is you’ve got a figure on page 17 and then you need to move it. You either let InDesign move it for you or you drag it, whatever. You move it to page 18, somehow. All of a sudden, the figure grows darker on page 18.
David: Yeah.
Deke: And it’s like – you check your color management settings; everything is fine. You check to see that you made sure and saved the profile with your original image; that’s done. But, somehow, you look and you’ll swear, wait a second I’m looking to work on an LCD screen so I need to make sure I put it on the right half of the screen so I’m saving the light correctly. All of those little tricks. All of a sudden it dawns and you know, you’re not out of your mind. There’s something going wrong, and then, the only workaround I discovered, is that you have a transparent object on that page. Like…
Anne-Marie: Well, on the page that you started with. You get that when you have a page that the transparency flattener is affecting and a page that it is not affecting. So, if you have one spread that has something transparent on it your images will look slightly different with the same images on another spread that has nothing transparent on it.
Deke: That’s exactly my experience. So, what I’m asking you is does that sound like a feature to you?
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: I know I’d pay extra for that.
David: Yeah. The feature of the inconsistent look and feel…
Deke: So, the only workaround I figured is to put a transparent object on my master, my six level deep master, the master that affects all other masters, right? And have that…I’ll just take a – whatever, who cares – transparent that way everybody, every single page has a checkerboard and then that seems to take care of the issue.
David: Yeah. I think… There’s two things to keep in mind there. One is, whenever there’s transparency affecting anything on a spread, the whole spread is forced through a different display mechanism in InDesign, and so it’s all going to look different.
It’s basically forcing it through the same kind of display mechanism that Overprint Preview uses. So one way around what you’re experiencing, I think, would be to work with Overprint Preview turned on in the view menu. Overprint Preview… It’s not really just for Overprint Preview; it’s also for… I think at one point we talked, we called it…
Anne-Marie: True page view, or something like that.
David: Yeah, it’s sort of a Make It Look More Accurate View, because when it’s off, you have this sort of optimized view which just displays faster. But whenever you have transparency on the page, or if you have Overprint Preview turned on, it takes longer to display on-screen, but in theory it should be a little more accurate.
Deke: OK, well that’s actually a really good trick for me.
David: But I agree with you that it’s totally crazy-making when an image suddenly changes. Or any color, it’s not just images, but pretty much anything changes when you suddenly have transparency on the page.
Deke: Yeah.
David: Yeah, it’s weird, so… [laughs]
Deke: Yeah.
David: Yeah, that’s another one.
Deke: OK, OK, here’s another one.
David: Oh, OK.
Deke: OK, so I make callout lines. This line, I would be grateful if you had a solution for.
David: Hold down the option key.
Deke: [laughs]
David: That’s the answer, right there.
Deke: I didn’t think of that!
David: Yeah.
Deke: I do callout lines all over the place on my… you know what I mean? For labels.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
Deke: Right, labeling… OK. And I do the typical trick where if you want to go corner, you know, you want to make the line bend, you go ahead and apply, you know, rounded corners on the fly. Just give it a little softer feel, and all that kind of…
David: Which is…
Deke: … BS.
David: And it’s a great tip. Don’t underestimate that. The idea of applying corner effects just to lines, straight lines is an awesome tip. I love that one. Anyway, go ahead.
Deke: I do too. So the new thing I came up with, thanks to Effects, right? Thanks to the new Effects functions, which are semi-useful, right?
David: Yeah.
Deke: I’ll probably like them more and more over time, the way I did Layer Effects inside Photoshop, but right now I’m just using a few of them. One of the ways to distinguish the lines: You’ve got figures that have dark elements, that have got light elements, you know, you’ve got to traverse over all this territory; you don’t want to do some kind of weird thing where it inverts seven times, you know. So just put a little white halo around all of your lines. OK?
David: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Deke: And that way it automatically does the halo around… what I do is I end my lines with a little ball…
David: OK.
Deke: … as opposed to an arrow or anything like that. And so, in the old days, if you wanted to do a white background ball, you can’t control the size of the ball relative to the stroke of the line, so you’d have to make a ball and a line separate from each other in white, and then put black over those. Monumental pain in the neck, right?
David: Yeah.
Deke: Except much lower in my anatomy. [laughs]
David: [laughs]
Deke: So now it’s great that you can put a glow around it without any softness; I’ll just do a sharp glow to 0.5 pixels, or points, and the problem is automating that. I have no luck saving that as an object style, because if I try to apply it… If I do it as an object style, I have to apply it to each line independently, and anytime I do callout lines, I have 18 lines in a single figure. Or whatever. But you know, you have like five to 10 lines or something. You don’t want to have to do it with every single line, so group them, apply the object style to the group and it breaks down.
David: Yeah.
Deke: The glow does not survive. If you manually apply the glow to the group, it works, but the object style will not work properly.
David: Wow.
Deke: That’s my experience. And so, I don’t know. Get back to me on that one. [laughs]
David: [laughs]
Deke: Because obviously, I would give… I would give… not that much, but I would give something for that.
David: Your left mouse button. [laughter]
Deke: Left? Oh, that’s pretty big. I don’t know. [laughs]
David: It’s interesting, because it sounds like you’ve discovered… you can use the glow effect, those transparency effects in an object style. But, what you’re saying is it’ll work for one object but if you group all the objects together then it does not work?
Deke: Does not work. I don’t even have InDesign open right now. I’d actually have to play in there, but it’s basically not sensitive to what it’s trying to apply the object style to.
David: Yeah.
Deke: Does that make sense? It doesn’t know that it is applying it to the group as a whole. There’s some kind of confusion at work that just blows the effect. It just doesn’t work.
Anne-Marie: It sounds the same, you know, how Illustrator works with groups versus regular individual objects in the Appearance panel. In Illustrator when you apply an effect to a group and then you ungroup it, that effect gets removed.
Deke: Of course, that’s true. Yeah. That’s true unfortunately.
Anne-Marie: Maybe, it’s the same internally.
Deke: I don’t know – maybe. I like the way it’s handled in Illustrator a lot better, but the variety of styles that you have in InDesign is better than what you have in Illustrator. The Appearance panel controls I like better.
David: It’s an interesting point. So, here’s one random weird idea about what you are doing. You are drawing a lot of these lines, right?
Deke: I’m drawing them, yes.
David: You’re drawing them, and what you want is, for as soon as you draw the line you want it to immediately have that glow applied to it. Is that right?
Deke: Oh well, that’s another option.
David: So, one idea would be to set up the default on the line tool, and what you could do is choose the line tool or the pen tool, whatever, in the Tool panel. Then, while that’s selected and nothing else selected on your page apply the effect. I think what you’re doing is you are actually applying the effect to a default object.
Anytime you draw something like a line with a pen tool or you draw a frame, not with the frame but with the ‘x’, the drawing tools, the rectangle tool, the ellipse tool then you’d automatically get your glow on that, automatically. You are changing the way the default works on those particular kinds of objects.
Deke: That’s a heck of an idea. That’s a really great idea. I just have to be vigilant about going back to a different object style. I just have to be sure when I’m switching gears that I switch out objects. That’s it. That would have helped me a lot.
David: Actually, you know, I just realized…
Anne-Marie: I’ve been following this. I’ve been trying to replicate your problem, but I can’t replicate it. I created a single line, made it glow, printed you an object style, created a couple other lines and boxes, grouped them, applied the object style, and each individual object is getting the glow. Is that not working for you?
Deke: You’re obviously not even trying.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: I’m sorry.
Deke: Work with me. Hey, I don’t know now. I’m working off of memory.
Adam: All right. That’s the worst…
Deke: You know what? I’m going to try and open one of my docs here and try to see if I can…
Adam: You know, there are certain features that only are problems on your machine.
Deke: I’ve discovered that. That’s well documented, the geek effect.
David: It’s viral in nature, but it’ll get over it by CS4.
Deke: I thought it was the same, but now it’s true. It’s a personal thing.
David: Hey, by the way, just to follow up on my random brain glitch about changing the defaults, I think actually an easier way to change those defaults would be to change the basic graphics frame’s object style.
Whenever you draw a line or draw with a pen tool or something the object style which is automatically applied to it is the basic graphics frame – which is insane, because it’s not a graphics frame at all. In fact, when you draw a graphics frame, you know one of those frames with an ‘x’ in it; you don’t get that object style. You get none objects style.
But, when you draw something like a line, which is not a graphics frame, it’s just a line; it automatically applies the graphics frame style to it. Why they do that I have no idea at all. But, you can sort of change that basic graphics frame style. Anne-Marie is going to jump all over me saying: never change your basic style.
Anne-Marie: Never change your basic style, no. But I will put a link to the post where I talked about the better way to do that.
David: Yeah. Yeah.
Anne-Marie: In the show notes. You create a second basic style, and then you change the default of InDesign to use that as the basic style. But, you never modify the one that is called basic graphics frame or basic text frame because that will get you into a world of hurt.
Deke: I would agree. Yeah, I would go along with you on that.
Anne-Marie: That’s true.
David: Anyway, we’d better move on with this podcast because, holy mackerel, time is a-flying.
Deke: Can I just ask you one more question? You can’t decide a keyboard shortcut; assign a keyboard shortcut to no style. I know you’ve got that workaround, but you can’t assign a keyboard shortcut, can you? You can do that command return thing.
David: To no style? To “none” character style?
Deke: Yeah, you want to remove the style from what’s going… We use styles for the editorial process a lot because my people get it, and we have page numbers throughout the book so the last thing we do is to confirm the page numbers. We leave them all in just this one style just so the editor hits them all, and then we want no style on them – none.
David: Yeah. You mean no character style?
Deke: I mean no character style. And I know about that workaround, but you can still talk about it if you want to. I know about the command return workaround.
David: Quick apply. You just want to have one keyboard shortcut that applies to no style.
Deke: Command-zero to go back to nothing.
David: Wow. No. You can’t do that.
Deke: You’re right. You can do a search and replace, but we’re doing it one by one; we’re looking and we’re making sure that we got them all.
David: Maybe, there’s a script. There’s a script. There’s got to be a script. Jinx. Jinx.
[laughter]
David: We’re going to get a script for that.
Anne-Marie: Whenever it’s not possible, the answer is you can do it with a script.
David: That’s right. That’s for sure. I know exactly what you mean. That would be really helpful to have. I’ve already got an idea.
Well, it sounds like you have a harrowing experience getting this book out, but it’s done. It’s out; it’s available, and that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing.
Deke: It wasn’t harrowing. I don’t want to make it sound harrowing.
David: It sounds worse if it was harrowing.
Deke: No, it was OK. It was fun. We had a good time. It was just… There was some unpleasantness, you know. Some cursing.
David: There always is. That’s a good thing.
Deke: Yeah.
David: So, what’s next? The next big thing for Mr. D?
Deke: I just got done doing a sharpening series in Photoshop CS3, sharpening images for Lynda.com. It will be about a 10-hour, 115 movie series about sharpening images.
David: [laughs]
Deke: That sounds like overkill, but I’ve got to tell you something. This is utter stupidness, but the series in general is like I really, really worked hard on it and I give very specific sharpening settings. I built off of some of the late Bruce Frazer’s ideas, right? Because he had some fantastic stuff about multi-patch opening and the different kinds of sharpening that are out there. I tried to make sure and integrate all that and built mine.
But, one of the things I figured out, OK, so you guys know – you know Unsure Mask, right?
David: Sure.
Deke: Good. Every Halloween we wear them. I needed to make sure. I knew that Unsure Mask uses Gaussian Blur. It uses the Gaussian Blur algorithm in order to generate its halos.
David: Right.
Deke: And you know that you can kind of create an unsure mask effect using High Pass. Somebody somewhere at Adobe once told me that Gaussian Blur was like the grandfather of Unsure Mask and that High Pass was the parent in between.
So, I started thinking… This was a week ago. I don’t have any idea who even told me that. It made me think I wonder if you could exactly duplicate the effects of Unsure Mask using only Gaussian Blur. I figured out how to do it.
If you got stuck on a desert island and all you had was one filter…
David: Which filter would you take?
Deke: It would have to be Gaussian Blur because you can make Aventure Mass out of Gaussian Blur down to the pixel. It is completely identical.
David: Seriously. Wow. That’s very cool. Hey, wait…
Deke: There’s no reason for it, by the way. You did not have a technique. You want everyone to do that, don’t you?
David: Right, but it’s the ultimate geek effect there.
Anne-Marie: I figured out by the way while you were rambling about crazy and short math [laughter], how to get your keyboard shortcut for a “none” character style.
David: Oh, whoa.
Deke: You are kidding me.
David: No way.
Deke: Really.
Anne-Marie: I’m not kidding. What you do…
David: Use Gaussian Blur.
[laughter]
David: That’s what it is.
Anne-Marie: All right. Stop. Here’s what you do. Select some text that has a “none” character style.
David: OK.
Deke: That has the “none” character style.
Anne-Marie: That has the “none” character style. Option or all, click on the new style button on the bottom of the Character Style panel so that you create your own none style. I call it my none or none two or something. You get a shortcut at the end.
Deke: I so hate you. That is awesome.
[laughter]
Deke: You totally out-geeked me.
[crosstalk]
David: That’s perfect.
Deke: That is amazing. That is an awesome trick. Good job.
David: Nicely done. Wow. OK. We don’t need a script. All you scripters can put away your code and tools.
Anne-Marie: Thank you so much, Deke, for coming and visiting us on our show.
Deke: Thanks for letting me waste your time and stuff. It’s a great show. I like it, by the way. I think it’s really great.
David: Thank you.
Anne-Marie: Thanks.
David: It was a pleasure having you on. Good luck with the book. Good luck with your Gaussian Blur exploits.
[laughter]
Deke: Oh, it’s just the beginning.
[crosstalk]
Deke: You, me, our Gaussian Blur and our sad little lives.
David: That’s excellent.
Anne-Marie: All right. See you, Deke.
Deke: OK. Thanks, guys.
David: Thanks. Bye, bye.
Deke: Bye.
[music]
Anne-Marie: That was great.
David: It was so much fun talking to Deke. That was great. Thank you, Deke, for being on the show, and thank you for a good book. As I mentioned earlier, we should give away a copy of that book.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. Let’s do that.
David: The InDesign CS3 one-on-one book and video combo deal. Yeah, let’s do that. Let’s see. So, what is the Quizzler? What are we going to do for that Quizzler?
Anne-Marie: This Quizzler is, and I think it’s a fairly simple one, and should keep a lot of InDesign users busy. You don’t have to an advanced user to enter this so… The question is how many ways can you add a CMYK swatch to the Swatches panel without opening up the panel itself, or the pallet, as Steve would say?
This is fine for whether you are using CS1, CS2 or CS3. Go ahead and try. Look around the program. There are a couple of ways that might come to you quickly about how to add a swatch to the Swatches panel or pallet without actually opening up the pallet and choosing a new color swatch from the File menu. But, there are also a couple of kinds of sneaky ways, at least.
David: Oh, yeah.
Anne-Marie: Some people, I assume, are going to come up with ways that you and I haven’t even thought of yet.
David: Yeah, maybe. So, list them out. List all the ways out, all the ways you can add a CMYK swatch to the Swatches panel, and I am looking forward to reading those. Email those to us. You want to email them to info@indesignsecrets.com. Put the word Quizzler in the subject line because we get a lot of different emails. Just make Quizzler is in the subject line. Send it before midnight Friday, January 17th, and we will go through them. If we have more than one person who has the most then we will randomly select it. If 10 different people give us 10 different answers, then we will pick randomly from among one of those, but hopefully there will be one person who came up with the number one top number of ways to do it. So, looking forward to reading those.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, me too. OK, so it’s time for the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week eek… eek… eek…
David: … eek… eek… eek… eek… eek…
Anne-Marie: Eek… eek… [laughs]
David: … eek… eek… eek… [laughs]
David: The view box. This was so obscure that Anne-Marie had never even heard of this feature.
Anne-Marie: No. That’s correct.
David: So I feel good about that.
Anne-Marie: Right. And I really appreciated your hint. The hint was look in the Navigator Panel, which I never look at. The Navigator Panel is hidden inside the Window Menu, go to Object and Layout and choose Navigator. Now, I know some people cannot work without the Navigator Panel, and it can be really handy for zooming around your document. I just never got into that habit.
David: Well…
Anne-Marie: But even in the Navigator Panel, it’s not obvious what the View Box is. There’s no label here that says View Box.
David: Right. The View Box is the little red rectangle, that when you drag that little red rectangle around, it moves around on your page. You’re actually navigating around your spread by dragging that little red rectangle. And that is the View Box.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: And the reason I know it’s the View Box is that it says so inside Panel Options. You open the Navigator Panel, you go to the little fly-out menu off the side and choose Panel Options, and there’s a feature called View Box. And the only feature… the only thing you can do with the View Box is change its color. So if you don’t like red for some reason, maybe you’re working on a document where everything’s already red, you can change the color to teal or blue or something like that, click OK, and your View Box color will change. It’s as simple as that.
And you know, the Navigator Panel is not all bad. Certainly a lot of people do use it. I got out of the habit of using it when someone told me way back in like, the InDesign 1.0 days that it really slowed InDesign down.
Anne-Marie: That’s right, I remember that too.
David: Yeah, and everyone would say, “Oh, no, never have that open, it’ll slow everything down.” And I just said, “Well, OK, I don’t need to take the speed hit; I’ll just keep it closed.” Somebody, more recently, on the InDesign engineering team… I mentioned that and they said, “No way, no, it’s great, it won’t slow you down at all.” So now we’re going to have to do some speed tests and figure out, does it really slow you down or doesn’t it? If you have any thoughts on that matter, go ahead and leave it in the show notes for this podcast. I’d be interested in hearing your sense of that. That may have been a thing of the past, who knows? Maybe they’ve changed the…
Anne-Marie: You know what’s interesting about the navigator palate is that in previous… like, if you’re using CS2 or CS1, an earlier version, the navigator palate gives you a preview of the pages.
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: In CS3, you can see a preview in the links palate, but not… You know, in CS2 and CS1 you can’t. So I know some people use it that way because they found out it was easier to navigate among their pages if they could see what was on the different tiny little icon of the pages.
David: You’re saying, in CS3 it shows it in the Pages Panel. You said the Links Panel.
Anne-Marie: Oh, I’m sorry, yeah, Pages Panel.
David: Yeah, in the Pages Panel you now get those little thumbnails, so it’s really easy for navigating. That’s a good point; you just sort of don’t need the Navigator Panel as much in CS3 because of that. On the other hand, I also know, my co-author Ole Kvern says he always turns the thumbnails off in the Pages Panel too, because he also thinks that slows things down. So who knows? We’re going to have to test that out.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: Because he could be running on, like, a 286 or something.
Anne-Marie: [laughter]
David: Maybe that’s why it’s slow for him.
Anne-Marie: That Olay.
David: We’re going to have to ask. We’re going to have to ask.
Anne-Marie: OK. all right, well that’s it for Episode 69. Be sure to check out the show notes on our blog at indesignsecrets.com where we’ll have links to the places that we mentioned, and Deke’s book, and things like that. And don’t forget to submit your answer to the Quizzler…
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: … by emailing us at info@indesignsecrets.com; don’t post it as a comment. We’d love to hear what you thought of the show and until we meet again, this is Anne-Marie Concepcion and…
David: David Blatner for InDesign Secrets.