Podcast 73 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 73 page.
[musical interlude]
David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets, Episode 73. I’m David Blatner. I’m
here along with my charming and witty co-host, Anne-Marie
Concepcion.
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Hi there David.
David: Our podcast and blog at InDesignSecrets.com are The Independent
Resource for All Things In-De-sign-ign-ign.
Anne-Marie: Ign-ign-ign.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: All right, on today’s episode.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: We’re going to, of course, go over some news and then Dave and I
are going to talk about two interesting posts that we wrote this
week, all having to do with working with color in InDesign. We’re
going to discuss em dashes versus en dashes versus hyphens. When to
use which one when.
David: I guess something like that.
Anne-Marie: And the obscure InDesign feature of the week-eek-eek.
David: Eek-eek-eek.
Anne-Marie: Is…
David: The Measure tool. All right, first the news. A little bit of news
here and there. I wanted to mention, totally selfishly, the “Beyond
the Basics” title is now available at lynda.com. This is the title:
“InDesign: Beyond the Basics for CS3.” It covers XML and long
document features and interactive PDF features and all those things
that I didn’t get to cover in the “Essential Training” title.
That’s now available, if you’re a lynda.com subscriber you can go
check that out. If you’re not, you could go check it out for a
week, you could get a free one-week subscription just by going to
lynda.com. And that’s lynda.com/idsecrets. And we’ll put a link in
the show notes to there as well.
Let’s see, what else. At InDesign Miami, in Miami, we had the
InDesign conference a few weeks ago. It was a big success. We had
several hundred people from all over the world. I mean, we had
people from Moscow, Central America, South America, Canada,
England. From all over the place. It was really incredible.
Anne-Marie: Alaska.
David: Alaska. There you go.
Anne-Marie: I met two people from Alaska.
David: People from Florida even. All around Florida.
Anne-Marie: And that was the show where the lights went out.
David: [singing] When the lights go out in Miami.
Anne-Marie: You know it was national news. Somebody said they saw it on CNN. I
don’t know if anybody listening remembers but about a month ago in
Florida, South Florida, basically lost all its power.
David: Yeah, the whole…
Anne-Marie: For about three hours. And it was in the middle of the conference.
I mean people… There were speakers at the podiums, with their
laptops open, talking. Suddenly blank, it was dark.
David: Yep, it was quite astonishing. I’ve never had that happen in a
conference before. Everybody handled it quite well. We all kept
expecting the lights to come on any minute now.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: But it took about two hours after. It was about two hours before
the lights came on.
Anne-Marie: I know.
David: And some people, you know, Colin Smith sat in this dark room with
only the glow from his laptop as lighting.
[laughter]
David: And he answered questions for 90 minutes.
Anne-Marie: Really? Wow.
David: 90 minutes about Flash and all kinds of cool stuff. So, it was
amazing, but…
Anne-Marie: Yeah. I wonder, you know. I believe that nine months from now
there’s going to be a lot more babies from all of the InDesign
conferences that’s in these…
[laughter]
David: That could be, I don’t want to think about that, but that could be.
Anne-Marie: All right, let’s not.
David: All right. Anyways, it was a good show except for the lights going
out for two hours. Good show and we had a good time. Also, if
you’re down under, you might be interested in the InDesign
conference in New Zealand. And that’s going to be…
Anne-Marie: Oh wow, cool.
David: Yeah, we’re pretty sure that’s going to happen middle of June.
We’re still nailing down the dates, so it’s coming up pretty soon
here. New Zealand InDesign conference in Auckland. Also in Seattle,
we’ll be doing the InDesign conference master class in Seattle, mid
-November. I think it’s the week of November tenth here in Seattle.
Anne-Marie: Cool.
David: And that’s going to be quite amazing. We’re going to get people
from all over the world coming for that, partly because…
Anne-Marie: That was so much fun.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: The last time we did that because we were in Adobe’s headquarters.
David: Exactly, yeah.
Anne-Marie: The Creative Suite headquarters,in Seattle.
David: Yep. So we have people from the InDesign team, engineers and all
kinds of people from the team basically sitting down with InDesign
users and there’s a lot of back and forth. You know, like how does
this feature really work. No really, really, how does it work?
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: And all kinds of information came out there that I had never known
before. So I expect more of that this year in November, in Seattle.
So put that on your calendar. It’s going to be lots of fun.
Let’s see, just a couple other things I want to throw out here. For
those of you who go to CreativePro.com, you’ve probably already
noticed they have an whole new look and feel. If you haven’t
checked out CreativePro.com go check it out it’s a very nice
redesign.
Anne-Marie: And also, my new column debuted there.
David: There you go! Tell us about your new column.
Anne-Marie: It’s called “HerGeekness Says.”
David: Mm-hmm.
Anne-Marie: And so, I always have to come up with a title that finishes that
sentence.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: Yeah, the editor gave me a little artwork for my column and I
basically can talk about whatever the heck I want to talk about.
Anything that’s on my mind that will help designers. I think for my
debut column I talked about using screen sharing software to review
proofs online with your client. So that nobody actually has to get
off their butt and drive anywhere.
David: You know, a lot of people may not realize, they should realize, but
they may not know, that you are “HerGeekness” and you write the
“DesignGeek Newsletter.” If there are any listeners here who do not
know about “DesignGeek”–for some weird reason you may have skipped
that–you definitely need to get signed up and we’ll put a link in
the show notes for that as well. The “DesignGeek Newsletter,” which
goes out every so often…
Anne-Marie: Every month.
[laughter]
David: …is just chock-full of cool information about all kinds of design
software.
Anne-Marie: All sorts of tip and tricks for design software like what we do on
InDesign Secrets only for all the software for print and for web.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: You know, I have this huge slush-pile of ideas. When I get a day
then I sit down and write out and issue and it’s a lot of fun. I’ve
been doing it for about four years now. And yeah, anyway.
David: So you definitely need to sign up for “DesignGeek.”
Anne-Marie: Because I don’t write enough for free.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: No, because I don’t write enough, I decided to do this monthly
column for CreativePro. Well they’re really sweet, they often
request rights to reprint some of the “DesignGeek” articles.
Finally she said, “Can we just get our own unique content?” And I’m
like, “Yeah, let’s do that.”
David: That’s great. And let’s see, the only other thing that I wanted to
mention was that Anne-Marie and I both spoke at InDesign User
Groups this past week.
Anne-Marie: Oh right, yeah.
David: That was one of the things that we were up to. And Anne-Marie you
were in Chicago, yeah?
Anne-Marie: Yeah I was one of two speakers last night at the Chicago InDesign
User Group Meeting. Spoke about all sorts of cool tips for using
styles. Not just paragraph and character styles but also table
styles and object styles. I spoke for about 45 minutes. I had lots
of examples. I think it went over really well, I heard a lot of
“Oh, I didn’t know you could do that!” That kind of stuff which is
always a thrill when you’re teaching somebody.
David: Mm-hmm.
Anne-Marie: But you had a very interesting experience.
David: [sarcastically] Oh yeah, I was in Puerto Rico. Beautiful, sunny
Puerto Rico. Out on the beach, sunning myself, having a nice time.
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.
David: No, not really. I was speaking at the Puerto Rico InDesign User
Group but I was sitting in my little office at home while it rained
and was 50 degrees outside.
Anne-Marie: Really?
David: Yeah, it was kind of sad. But we did the entire thing over
Acrobat Connect. It went over quite well. Acrobat Connect plus
Skype actually.
Anne-Marie: Cool.
David: It was a wonderful e-seminar but just for the Puerto Rico InDesign
User Group. And we had a good time, about an hour, went back and
forth, and answered lots of questions. And the whole telepresence
thing–this feeling of being there without really being there–it’s
the future! The future is today.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] The future… Sort of like what my Creative Pro column was
about.
David: There you go. Exactly. Exactly.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. That’s great.
David: But we will be doing more of those sorts of things in the near
future. Check out your various InDesign User Groups. Wherever you
happen to be in the world, you should definitely be checking out
the user groups, because the InDesign User Groups are a great
source of information about InDesign. And they’re springing up
everywhere. They’re in Germany, in Switzerland, in Japan,
Australia…
Anne-Marie: Cleveland.
David: Where?
Anne-Marie: Cleveland.
David: England. Yes, of course, England.
Anne-Marie: No, I said Cleveland.
David: Cleveland?
Anne-Marie: Cleveland, Ohio.
David: That I don’t believe.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: I was teaching in Cincinnati, and I was showing them the InDesign
User Group website. I’m like, “Look! There’s one in Cleveland.
What’s wrong with you people? Come on! You’ve got to have one for
Cincinnati, too. You can’t let Cleveland have all the fun.”
David: Good point. So check out the indesignusergroup.com website and find
out if there’s a user group near you. That’s cool.
Just a few little things. We should move on and talk about
overprinting. You wrote this incredibly long post, like everything
you ever want to know about overprinting colors.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Yes, that’s right. And it was only because somebody had
asked me. They wanted a way to make a color overprint wherever they
used it. My first thought was, “Well, just turn on overprint swatch
in the Swatch Options dialog box.” But of course, it’s not there.
There is no overprint swatch feature. I thought, “Oh, I must have
seen that in Illustrator.” But Illustrator doesn’t have one either,
as far as I can tell. You know that 100 percent black, the default
black, always overprints.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: And that’s a Preference Setting that’s turned on so that when you
have small text that’s overprinting a color, if it knocks out, that
would be a nightmare challenge for the pressman, trying to make
perfect registration of that knockout.
David: Sure.
Anne-Marie: So 100 percent black always overprints. But what if you, for some
reason, need another color to always overprint? There’s no easy way
to do it, other than to select an object and turn on overprint fill
and/or overprint stroke from the Attributes panel under the Window
menu.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: So this person said, “We have these series of books, and each book
has 600 pages. And there’s all these different elements–not just
text, but also graphics. And we really have to figure out a way. Is
there a script or something like that?” So I was fooling around
with it, and I came up with a couple workarounds, and I wrote a
post about it. So I will tell everybody to take a look at that post
on InDesign Secrets, which is called “Set a Swatch to Overprint.”
But just to summarize is that, first of all, the overprint fill and
the overprint stroke check box appears in lots of other places in
InDesign, not just in the Attributes panel. Like whenever you set a
color for text, and a Character or Paragraph style, you could also
turn on overprint fill or overprint stroke there. And in Object
Styles, too. So, if you make an Object Style for a certain color,
instead of applying a color via the Swatches panel, apply it by
choosing the Object Style.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: And then, that will automatically overprint it.
And if those don’t work, or you need a little bit more automation;
like maybe you already have a document that’s already laid out, and
you need to hunt and peck for every instance of that color being
used, you can use Find/Change. Find/Change Text and Find/Change
Object in CS3 allow you to search for a color, and then, when it
finds it, turn on overprinting.
So, I don’t know. I spent way too long on that article. [laughs]
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: I spent like three days, because some things that I thought worked
didn’t work, and other things… And I even had to send a draft to
you, David, because I was like, “Why doesn’t this work?” And he’s
like, “Oh, you forgot to turn this off.” I’m like, “Oh, OK.”
David: It’s always something.
Anne-Marie: But I was really happy with it after posting it. I talked about a
couple of those features at the InDesign User Group, and people
were like, “Oh, my gosh!” Because I guess the original email that
had asked me, they’re not the only one who’s looking for a solution
for that.
David: Absolutely.
Anne-Marie: So a lot of people were really happy to see that there’s a way to
automate that.
David: Absolutely. It’s so easy to overlook that little overprint check
box, in all those places.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: Especially the Paragraph and Character styles, because you’re not
used to thinking about overprinting there.
Anne-Marie: I know. One thing that I had forgotten about that I remembered
during all my testing for this article is that you can’t overprint
white on paper. Some people need to.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: They need to be able to alias a color to white and then have it set
to overprint so it doesn’t knock out anything behind it. You can’t
do that.
And the other interesting thing is, as far as I know, when you
select an image frame and you set overprint stroke, we know what
happens: overprint fill will just overprint the fill of the frame.
If you want to overprint the actual image, there is no way, other
than to select the image and set it to multiply in the blend mode.
David: Oh! That’s an interesting point, though. The whole multiply thing
is, I just like using multiply more than overprint anyway, most of
the time.
Anne-Marie: Really.
David: One of the main reasons is because you can see it reliably on-
screen all the time.
Anne-Marie: That’s true.
David: You don’t have to have overprint fill turned on or anything. It
just works. And in most cases…
Anne-Marie: You mean Overprint preview.
David: Overprint preview, sorry. Overprint preview.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: So, like with spot colors and stuff, I just won’t even bother with
doing overprinting anymore. I’ll just set it to multiply. And you
see it immediately. It looks great. And you get the same effect,
especially with spot colors. You get the same effect whether you do
multiply or overprinting, because the multiply effect…
Anne-Marie: You can’t set just a couple words in a text frame to multiply.
David: Oh, yeah. Well, that’s a good point. That’s a good point. Do you
often need to..?
Anne-Marie: But how often does that happen? Right, right. You’re absolutely
right.
David: Interesting. Well, we’re going to have to play around with this
overprinting images thing, because that’s bugging me.
But before we do that, I’m going to get into this other topic,
which has to do with Preserve Numbers and Preserve Profiles. And
this also came from an email, from Carly down in Australia, who was
asking me about this issue with a CMYK PDF file. This was an
Illustrator file that she had imported into InDesign, and whenever
she exported it, the colors were shifting. And we went back and
forth on why the colors were shifting, when they shouldn’t shift.
Very specifically, she had Preserve Numbers turned on when she
printed. And when you have Preserve Numbers turned on when you
print or export a PDF, the CMYK values shouldn’t change. And they
were changing, and it just completely wigged me out. And I spent
way too much time trying to rip this document apart and trying to
figure out why it was happening. And so I wrote that up in a post
this morning. I don’t even remember what I called it anymore. Oh,
“Why a CMYK Vector Image Changed Colors.” And it gets a little bit
deep…
Anne-Marie: Like “Why the leopard lost its spots.” I like that. It’s a good
title.
David: [laughs] There you go.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: So it changed because of the color settings. And I just want to
very quickly put out this point, that it’s very important to
remember that if you change color settings–you go to the Edit menu
and you choose Color Settings–this only changes future documents
that you create, and it can change them in ways that are very
unpleasant. And in this case, it totally messed up this document in
a way that was very inexplicable. It was like, why were these
colors changing?
Well, they changed because whoever first created this document–and
it wasn’t her–whoever created that document had opened Color
Settings and thought, “Well, I’ll be clever.” I’ll go to the Color
Management Policies, and I’ll go to the CMYK pop-up menu and I’ll
choose Preserve Embedded Profiles because it seems like you’d want
to somehow. It seems like, “Well of course, I want to preserve
embedded profiles.” — but no. You almost certainly don’t unless
you really know what you are doing and you have full control over
your document, including printing if you are printing your own
things.
But if you are sending your documents to somebody else, it is sure
to mess them up. And that’s exactly what happened here because
Preserve Embedded Profiles means that Preserve Numbers can no
longer work.
And, Preserve Numbers is one of the coolest features in InDesign’s
Color Management setting. So, most of the time you want Preserve
Numbers. In other words, you want a 50% cyan to just pass through
as a straight 50% cyan. You want 100% black to pass through as 100%
black and not converted into, like, 4-color black where you’ve got
black, cyan, yellow and magenta mixed in with your black.
So, if you use Preserve Embedded Profiles you are going to get all
kinds of weird transformations like that. If you use Preserve
Numbers you won’t. But, the big problem is if you have your color
settings set up like this, when you make a document you could send
that document to somebody else and it’s virtually impossible for
them to see what you’ve done.
The document will just start acting weirdly, like what happened
here. The colors will be shifting when you don’t expect them to
shift because InDesign makes it extremely difficult to see that the
color settings were set up like this when the document was created.
And it makes it extremely difficult to change it, so I figured out
a way to do it and I outlined that in the post. So, you can go
ahead and read that if you are interested.
If you have documents where these CMYK colors are changing when
they are not supposed to, check out that post and you can find out
how to fix your documents.
Ann-Marie: So, did you save the day for this lady?
David: I don’t know. The time zone is such that she is probably just
waking up now in Australia. [laughs]
Ann-Marie: We’ll have to watch for her comments.
David: Exactly. I’m hoping that that will save the day.
Ann-Marie: That’s very, very interesting. It sounds like a really
valuable post.
David: Well, hopefully, it will be valuable to somebody, but I wanted to
pass it on because, like, overprinting for you – you spend way too
much time on that. I spent way too much time working on this whole
“why are these colors changing.”
Ann-Marie: Right. Right.
David: So, I thought this would be useful for somebody. OK. We should talk
about some other stuff like – oh yes, em dashes…
Ann-Marie: Em versus en dashes versus hyphens.
David: Yes, yes, yes.
Ann-Marie: Didn’t we get this from yet another email? Somebody that
wrote in.
David: Yep, yep.
Ann-Marie: And when should I use one versus the other?
David: Right.
Ann-Marie: I get that question a lot, too, especially when I am
teaching Em copy because a lot of the editors are inserting it.
Well, I think the basic rule is em dashes are longer then en
dashes. When you want a long one, use an em dash.
David: [laughs] Yeah, that’s it. That’s right.
Ann-Marie: Then mama bear is the en dash, and baby bear is the
hyphen.
David: [laughter]
Ann-Marie: OK, next topic. All right. I think of it like this.
Hyphens are something that only the program inserts. I never
actually type in a hyphen unless a name is hyphenated, like my name
Ann hyphen Marie. Or I might insert a discretionary hyphen using
the Insert Special Character command from the type menu. But,
normally I don’t insert a hyphen.
Then, the other one is en dashes are for ranges of numbers or times
- 15 to 20 would use an en dash not a hyphen.
David: This is the one that is my pet peeve. I am forever finding people
using hyphens for ranges of numbers, or January through March, and
they use a hyphen: “January-March.” And it just drives me crazy.
It’s absolutely wrong–wrong, wrong, wrong–to do that. Whenever
you have a range, of dates or numbers–any kind of range–you must
use an en dash. It’s usually half the size of an em dash, but you
want to use an en dash instead.
Anne-Marie: Visibly longer than a hyphen.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: And that’s really key. And you can get one of those by doing an
option-hyphen, or alt-hyphen on Windows. You get an en dash for a
range. And that’s really important. You want to use those. There is
no Autocorrect. It will not automatically insert one of those for
you. You just have to know to type those in yourself. So that’s
really key.
Hyphens are used. There’s actually a lot of words that need hyphens
in the middle that you actually need to type one in. But if you
have a range, you want an en dash.
An em dash, the longer one, which you can get with an option-shift-
hyphen or alt-shift-hyphen, those are for parenthetical remarks.
I’m sure there’s some proper grammatical name for those sorts of
things, but I think of them as parentheticals. So you might, in the
middle of a sentence, say, “By the way, this is such and such,” and
then you would end that with an em dash.
Anne-Marie: I often set off phrases with two em dashes.
David: There you go.
Anne-Marie: I’m a huge em dash and parentheses fan, as anybody who’s read a few
of my posts can tell. Sometimes I look at my paragraphs, and every
single paragraph has at least one instance of each, which I think
is probably wrong.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: But I write like I speak, and I guess I speak with a lot of em
dashes, she said, considering it…
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: And then she ended the sentence. [laughs]
David: Right. Right. Right.
Anne-Marie: Those are the basic rules. All right? But of course, there’s always
exceptions to the rules, and there’s way for people who understand
the basics to tweak them–to make things more understandable or to
look better. For example, in a headline, if you need to insert an
em dash, often they look way too big, those display-face em dashes.
David: That’s true.
Anne-Marie: So I’ll often use an en dash and maybe horizontally scale it a
little bit. Or the opposite of that is in very narrow columns, an
em dash can take up way too much room. They just look like a big
mistake.
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: So you have to maybe horizontally scale them smaller or use an en
dash.
David: Yeah. I would use an em dash and then scale it down. I don’t know
why. I guess you could go either way. But a lot of people, I’ve
found, will do that in some faces, where the em dash just looks
wrong; it’s just far too wide. So they’ll create a character style
which is 75 percent horizontal scale and just apply that to all the
em dashes, which you could easily do with a Find/Change, apply that
character style to the em dashes. So you get like 75 percent or 80
percent of the width, and it makes them a little bit more
manageable.
Anne-Marie: Right. I once used Find/Change to change the typeface of all the em
dashes, because I just couldn’t stand how the em dash looked in
that particular face.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: I don’t remember which one it was, but the em dash was so
ridiculous, it looked like some sort of ornament. It was on an
angle, and it had a little swash at each end.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: And it was like, somebody spent way too much time on that em dash.
[laughter]
David: Right. Then there’s the question of should you put space before and
after these dashes. You should never put space before or after a
hyphen. But what about an en dash or an em dash? What do you do
with that?
Anne-Marie: I really like spaces. I usually put in a thin space before and
after. When I’m being very careful, though, in some sort of
headline or display face or something, I’ll usually do some manual
kerning.
David: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I like having a little bit more space,
because the en and the em dashes often bounce into the characters
on either side of them. It really depends on the font. There’s no
hard and fast rule here. But in a lot of fonts, I find that it just
bounces into the side, and it just looks ugly. It’s too cramped. So
I like having a thin space in there.
In some cases, people put much wider spaces. And in fact, we were
just reading that in Europe, many times, instead of an em dash,
they’ll use the shorter en dash and then put a space on either side
of it. And I’ve seen that, and it looks weird to me, but whatever
flips your boat.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: Floats your boat, flips your donut. I don’t know. Something.
Anne-Marie: Flips your dash.
David: Yeah. [laughs] Yeah, whatever flips your dash.
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: But I do like the thin space thing. Especially, you know where I
use them all the time is in an index. I’m making an index for a
book, and there’s a bazillion hyphens throughout. I’m sorry, not
hyphens. I would never use hyphens.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: A bazillion en dashes, indicating the page ranges. And I want to
put a little bit of space on either side of those–just a little
bit. A thin space typically does it. And of course, you can find
those thin spaces under the Type menu. You can choose Insert White
Space and then choose a thin space…
Anne-Marie: Right. Also, if you can’t remember the keyboard shortcuts for en
dash and em dash, those are under Insert Special Character, Hyphens
and Dashes.
David: Right, right.
Anne-Marie: I usually use Find/Change to normalize all of the dashes when I’m
done with a publication, or at the first proof stage. So, search
for any em dashes, or en dashes, with a space after or before, and
change them to a thin space. Though, I’m thinking now, actually,
with GREP, I could search for any combination of a dash that I
don’t like and change it to what I want it to be.
David: The one thing that you really want to search for is two hyphens in
a row, because people forever are typing two hyphens in a row
wherever they want to have an em dash–and in some cases, an en
dash. But either way–usually an em dash–you really want to search
for those and eradicate those. That’s just ugly, ugly, ugly.
Anne-Marie: That’s true. You know, that script will do that automatically, the
Find/Change By List script that’s bundled with CS3.
David: Oh, that’s right. That’s right.
Anne-Marie: That’s one of the fixes that it does.
David: That’s one of the things it does. That’s great. So there you go.
There you go. And also in the Find/Change. I think it’s also in
Find/Change. They have that automatically for you. It’s one of the
pre-built queries.
Anne-Marie: Oh, OK.
David: In the little query pop-up menu. If you open the Find/Change dialog
box, and there’s a little query pop-up menu at the top, they have
“dash-dash to em dash.” So there you go. I guess they call it a
dash instead of a hyphen, but there you go. “Dash-dash to em dash.”
That will search for two hyphens.
Anne-Marie: They’re synonymous, sort of.
David: I guess so.
Anne-Marie: I just tried, but it won’t work. And we probably covered this in a
previous Obscure Feature, but it won’t work in Autocorrect.
David: Oh.
Anne-Marie: I thought it’d be neat to type in two hyphens, and then replace it
with an em dash, but it says, “Invalid character.”
David: It won’t even take an em dash? Ugh. How frustrating.
Anne-Marie: Yes. Yeah, I know.
David: Wow.
Anne-Marie: I don’t know which one is the invalid character.
David: Oh, the em dash.
Anne-Marie: Let me try this. No, no. It’s the hyphens that are the invalid
characters.
David: No way. No way!
Anne-Marie: Yes way. Yes way!
David: No way. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: If I put one dash, one hyphen, and then do the em dash… No, still
doesn’t like the dashes.
David: It doesn’t take it. It’s a hyphen. It won’t take a dash, a hyphen?
Weird. Well, there you go. That Autocorrect thing is just the pits.
I got so excited about Autocorrect for a while. It does very basic
things, but they just limit it like that.
Anne-Marie: Mm-hmm.
David: Why would you limit a hyphen?
Anne-Marie: It won’t take a dash by itself but it will take if it’s within a
word, under the misspelled word field. Maybe this is a subject for
a future.
David: I guess so.
[laughter]
David: You’re really getting off topic here.
Anne-Marie: And now I have to find all the correctly spelled words that I
entered in my Autocorrect and delete them.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: All right. In my testing.
David: You know what we better do? We better move on to the Obscure
InDesign Feature of the Week-eek-eek.
Anne-Marie: Eek-eek-eek.
David: Which is the Measure tool. The Measure tool.
Anne- Marie: The Measure tool.
David: First of all, where is the Measure tool?
Anne-Marie: Why, it’s, Mr. Hand is pointing to it.
David: Oh I like that.
Anne-Marie: huh.
David: Mr. Hand is pointing right to it. It’s right above Mr. Hand.
Anne-Marie: Also known as Mr. Sprinky.
David: Underneath the Eye Dropper tool.
Anne-Marie: The keyboard shortcut for the Measure tool, is of course, ‘K.’
David: Yes.
[laughter]
David: Of course. ‘K.’
[laughter]
David: So…
Anne-Marie: huh.
David: The Measure tool lets you measure stuff right. You just click on it
in one place and just drag to the other side. Let’s say you want to
see how far it is from one point on your page to another. You
click, starting on the start point, and drag to the end point and
it will measure that distance. And not just the length, also the
angle. It shows up in the Info Panel. You want to open your Info
Panel, make sure that’s open and that shows you the width and the
height of where you’re dragging.
It’s also useful to know that if something is selected on the page,
let’s say an object is selected, it will snap to that point. So
let’s say you want to do from one object to the edge of another
object, make sure both of them are selected, (so you actually get
those little handles) and then you can drag from one handle to
another and it snaps to those handles.
Anne-Marie: Isn’t there a way to measure a custom angle?
David: Oh yeah, actually.
Anne-Marie: With the Measurement tool.
David: Basically you turn…
Anne-Marie: I think you have to do it twice.
David: Well kind of. You draw out the first angle. Let’s say, it’s
basically turning the measurement tool into a protractor.
Anne-Marie: Mm-hmm.
David: That let’s you measure any kind of angle. So you drag out one angle
and then let go and then hold down the Option and the Alt key and
drag out the second angle. Again, in the Info Panel, it will show
what the angle is between those two lines, between those two areas
that you dragged out.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: That works in Photoshop too. Very, very handy in both programs.
Anne-Marie: And it’s nice that the lines stay there until you actually choose
another tool and start doing something.
David: Yes, yes, they do. And in fact they’ll stay there if you come back
to the Measurement tool, sorry the Measure tool.
Anne-Marie: Mm-hmm.
David: I keep calling it the Measurement tool. The Measure tool. If you
come back to that tool…
Anne-Marie: Oh right.
David: It shows up again so it’s basically just waiting there for you. So,
I’m sure there’s some tip that could use that. Kind of like a
guide.
Anne-Marie: If you know of such a tip, please email us at info.
[laughter]
David: Do, do. No, that’s a good idea.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: If you can think of any really cool measure tool tips, definitely
email us at info@indesignsecrets.com.
Anne-Marie: No, better, add it as a comment to the show notes.
David: Even better. Show notes.
Anne-Marie: Even better because we get so much email. Yes.
David: Yeah.
Anne- Marie: That tip deserves to be seen by everybody rather than
sitting there in our mail box, waiting for us to get to it.
David: Definitely. So definitely do that. Go to the show notes for Episode
73 and type in your tips or your comments about this podcast, this
episode or about whatever comes to mind at the time. That would be
terrific. Or if you do have other questions or concerns, comments,
political rants, whatever. Go ahead and email us at
info@indesignsecrets.com. We’d love to hear what you are thinking
about.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: And until we meet again, this is David Blatner and…
Anne-Marie: Anne-Marie Concepcion for IndesignSecrets.
[musical interlude]