Podcast 75 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 75 page.
David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets Episode 75. I’m David Blatner. I’m here
along with my co-host, Ann-Marie Concepcion.
Ann-Marie Concepcion: Hi there. How are you, David?
David: I am very well.
Anne-Marie: Good.
David: Our podcast and blog at indesignsecrets.com are the independent
resource for all things, ah. What was it again?
Anne-Marie: I think it’s Venture Publisher.
David: Venture or ready, set, go.
Anne-Marie: Venture Publisher, sure, sure, sure, for all things InDesign,
c’mon.
David: InDesign, there you go, boom.
Anne-Marie: This might be the first time that somebody is listening to the
podcast.
David: Oh, good point.
Anne-Marie: You have to be kind to them. Yes, InDesign, you are at the right
place. All right. On today’s show we have a bunch of news for you,
and we are going to discuss something that everybody wants to know,
which is how to make all of your transparency printing problems go
away.
David: Period. Done.
Anne-Marie: We have the answer for you today.
David: That’s right.
Anne-Marie: Also, we are going to rant about why aren’t more people using
context menus and our Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week is
ignore optical margin.
David: That is obscure.
Anne-Marie: It seems pretty obscure.
David: Indeed. All right. Well, first, just a little bit of news. I wanted
to mention the Toronto InDesign Conference is just a few weeks
away, and we are both going to be there doing lots of fun. If you
are anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, preferably anywhere in
North America, come on up to Toronto. It is going to be lots of
fun.
Anne-Marie: Come up, eh?
David: That’s right. Hey, come to the show, eh. We are going to be doing
Canada, talking about jokes while we are in Canada. Also, Auckland
if you are in the Southern Hemisphere, you want to be aiming for
Auckland, New Zealand, and that’s in just two more months in June.
And, that’s going to be lots of fun as well.
We’ve got some discount codes that we can give you if you want to
come to the Toronto InDesign Conference. I think it will work for
Auckland; I’m not sure. I know it will also work for the Nashville
Creative Suite Conference which is in May, and if you are anywhere
near Nashville come on over to the Nashville Conference.
Anne-Marie: [sings] I’m going to Nashville, da, da, da. Johnny Cash does a
great song.
David: There you go. It is going to be $75 off of either the Toronto or
the Nashville Conference. We’ll post that on the show notes so
check that out. All right. Let’s see.
The other random piece of news is InDesign Magazine is going to be
shipping its next issue next week. If you want, you can get a
subscription now. It’s only $34. They are doing this great, great
deal. They had this amazing deal, and then they stopped it for a
little bit. And, they’ve started it for two more weeks. They are
giving us two more weeks for InDesign Secrets listeners and readers
until, I think, April 28th. They have opened it up, and it’s only
$34 for a year or $44 for two years, so that is very cool.
Anne-Marie: Sounds great.
David: You want to use the code IDS for InDesign Secrets when you get your
subscription, and then you’ll get that great discount. It’s very
cool and very nice of them for giving InDesign Secrets listeners
and readers that discount.
If you subscribe now before the issues comes out, then you will get
this last issue plus the future issues coming out so that’s very
cool. Hey, by the way, I do want to mention that even though we
kind of go on and on about the magazine and the conferences and so
on to let you know what’s going on in those worlds, those are not
our things. We don’t run the magazine. We don’t run the
conferences.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: We do work with those companies, and we want them to succeed
because it’s really good content. Every now and again somebody
emails us and says, you know, my subscription is not working or I
had a problem with such and such, and we can’t really help you with
that because that’s not our company. I just wanted to be clear that
we help publicize those things, but they’re not ours.
Anne-Marie: That’s true. If there were other InDesign Conferences or other
InDesign Magazines we would be talking about those, too.
David: We just want to get the best info out there.
Anne-Marie: Those are the only ones out there.
David: Also, random interesting news. Adobe.TV went live this past week,
and it is just a hoot. You were exploring that a lot, weren’t you,
Ann-Marie?
Anne-Marie: Yeah. Yeah. They went live Wednesday, April 9th, and I was there at
nine A.M. checking it out. Basically, it is like a TV network. They
also came up with a new product called Adobe Media Player that they
are introducing, and this is kind of like a web version of the
Adobe Media Player. So it’s all run with flash. It’s all very
smooth animation.
If you have ever seen the video workshops URL where you can watch
the people do video tutorials in CS3 stuff, it’s kind of like the
same feel except it’s a completely different site. We’ll have the
URL on our show notes, but it is tv.adobe.com.
David: Or adobe.tv.
Anne-Marie: They have, I think, about 200 different programs, and many of these
are made for Adobe TV. For example, the one I run about on the blog
was Caffe Fibonacci which is a show run by…
David: Tim Cole and Rufus Deuchler.
Anne-Marie: Rufus and Tim, our good friends and they have posted here before.
And we have linked to their sites; two Adobe staffers who talk
about Adobe InDesign with cool tricks. And, also, how they
integrate with Photoshop and Illustrator. The set is like a
kitchen. It looks like a cooking show.
David: It is so great.
Anne-Marie: Caffe Fibonacci. You know Fibonacci is, I think, a mathematical
term for that little nautilus drawing.
David: It is involved with that image. That’s true – with their little
logo.
Anne-Marie: That’s their logo.
David: Fibonacci Sequence is an important sequence, and we’re going to not
get into that here because it would take way too long.
Anne-Marie: Well, right. I shouldn’t have brought it up.
David: Exactly. One, two, three.
Anne-Marie: If you think of Adobe TV, it’s kind of like another channel on
cable. It is all Adobe related TV shows that have episodes. Some of
them are like re-purpose content from Total Training or Creative
Suite podcast or something like that, but many of them are made for
the Adobe TV channel.
There are ones on Photo Shop and Light Room. There is Ask the Adobe
ones which I also talked about in my post which is very funny. You
can submit your video question to a guy who works at Adobe, and he
will track down the answer. It’s all done like really CSI, kind of
James Bond, kind of thing. It’s very funny. So, it’s a lot of fun.
You can subscribe to the different channels with the Adobe Media
Player which is free.
David: It is cool. It is definitely cool. You should definitely check it
out and, of course, watch that Caffe Fibonacci, as Rufus would say.
Anne-Marie: Good point.
David: Let’s see. Also, we should move on to talking about transparency
issues.
Anne-Marie: All right. The answer that I mentioned about how to make all your
transparency printing problems go away…
David: Because people every now and again do have transparency printing
problems. They will do some incredibly amazing transparency effect
and the printer will say, you know, this is not coming out the way
we hoped. Sometimes it’s, or very often, the print server
provider’s problem. They don’t understand how to get this stuff to
print, but sometimes it’s the user error. Maybe, they have put text
underneath some drop shadow, and it’s some kind of complex effect
and the text is getting a little heavier.
Anne-Marie: Right. Or sometimes you get those ghosted lined, you know, where…
David: Yep. Yep.
Anne-Marie: A rip was used. It gets confused between continuous tone and line
art and puts a trap in there and kind of a thing, and all sorts of
weird things. The best of all possible worlds is that nobody thinks
about transparency. Just like we don’t think about trapping any
more.
You just do whatever you want in InDesign and send that PDF, that
InDesign file with all the transparency intact to your printer, and
out comes a beautiful print, looking exactly how you wanted it to
look. That is possible.
David: It is.
Anne-Marie: If you bypass the problem which is postscript because postscript
does not understand transparency. So, you have to flatten it. How
do you bypass postscript and still get something that’s ink on
paper? Why, you use the Adobe PDF print engine as the RIP.
David: That’s the RIP. Steve Werner posted about this past week and had
our sort of our hot post button of the week. He got a lot of nice
comments on that. The Adobe PDF print engine is awesome. It’s like
a sea change. It just changes everything with the whole printing
process, the ripping process. It is really important that people
know about this.
Anne-Marie: The Adobe PDF print engine, whose acronym is APPE, which we decided
is not going to be called ape. We’re going to call it ap-pe.
David: I like that, ap-pe.
Anne-Marie: We’re going to be happy with APPE.
David: Don’t worry, be APPE.
Anne-Marie: And I can just see the logo. That’ll be great. But, as Steve said
in his post, the APPE can natively render PDF files. All right. So
before, PDF had to be converted into postscript before you rendered
them, though with the APPE it supports live transparency as well as
device independence, meaning RGB does seem like a conversion and
screening done at printing time, support for ICC profiles and
faster speed.
This actually came out last year. Adobe released it, but printers
had to actually upgrade their RIP to it. So, Steve’s post is an
upgrade to what’s been happening the past year. According to the
project manager, over 2, 000 printers have upgraded to the APPE.
He interviewed one of those printers, our friend, James Wamser, who
is the lead trainer and sells printing in Wisconsin. They did our
posters. They got the APPE; they are one of those early kind of
adaptor kind of companies. They got it last year.
You can read in Steve’s post, his interview with James saying that
basically there are just no more worries with transparency.
David: It’s kind of interesting because a lot of people – they upgrade
their RIPs and they get both the postscript update and also the
APPE. They want the security of always being able to go back to
postscript if they need to. We have now heard this from a number of
people who they get both of them and they try out the APPE just a
little bit and it works. So, they try it a little bit more, and
pretty soon within a week or two they realize they are not doing
anything with postscript any more.
They are just making PDFs, setting the PDF to the RIP, and
postscript is a thing of the past. I think that is a real sea
change, and I had no idea there were 2,000 installations. That was
awesome news. We’ve got to get even more printers using this. I
would like to see by the end of 2008; I would like to see almost
everybody who needs transparency printing to be printing on APPE
RIPs, and I think we can make this happen.
You know, if you are printing books, just one color books and you
are not using transparency, then who cares – it’s not a factor.
But, anyone who is doing anything with transparency, including drop
shadows, including opacity and RGB CMYK work flows you really want
to be working with a printer who has an APPE. It’s great.
I just want to mention one important person with the whole APPE
work flow, and that’s Dove Vizics. Dove works at Adobe. He is a
wonderful guy, not just brilliant but just a wonderful guy anyway.
We’ve been friends for many years, and he is, I think, officially
the spiritual advisor or something like that for the Adobe PDF
print engine. He really pushed this thing through.
We all knew that it was important. We all knew that we needed a RIP
that could actually read PDF’s print transparency, but it was a
huge undertaking for Adobe to undertake. He pushed it through. He
made it happen, and I want to put a thanks out to Dove for having
done that. How do you find a printer? One of the problems is how do
you find a printer that is using an APPE?
Anne-Marie: Right. Now, Adobe’s website has a partner finder. If you go to
Adobe’s website under communities and choose partners, you will see
a link to say ‘find me a print service provider’ which will bring
you to a form that has check boxes for, you know, will the printer
take a form maker file, will they take a page maker, Photoshop,
InDesign file, but do they support Mac or Windows.
There is no check box for: are they APPE? Are they APPE equipped?
And, we would love to see that, you know.
David: I went to get a word out to Adobe: Give us a way to find APPE
printers.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. Make a little link from the acronym APPE and so people can
see what’s APPE about and why should I care. It’s a huge deal,
especially since if one of the check boxes is do they take
Illustrator files, well Illustrator has transparency as well, you
know, not just InDesign.
In the meantime, we are just going to throw it out there. Check
with your commercial printer. Ask them if they have upgraded to the
Adobe PDF print engine and if it’s working and they’re fine with
running files right through there with transparency. If they are,
let us know. Give us their contact name, phone number, that kind of
stuff, and we’ll start compiling a list and put it on a page on our
website.
David: Yep. That would be fun. I think we could do that.
Anne-Marie: From now until Adobe wakes up and adds that as a little item. I
think they are a little overtaxed right now anyway. I think the
person who updates the forms is probably a little busy.
David: Yeah, I think so, but that would be great to get something like
that out because we really want to get people working with these
printers.
Anne-Marie: I think right. I think we’ll start the list, and the first one
would be Sells Printing.
David: Of course.
Anne-Marie: That’s one. Or if you are a printer and you hear this, and you’d
like us to add your name to the list please email us at
info@indesignsecrets.com.
David: And we’ll get you on the list. Exactly.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: Now, other than using APPE printers, what should everyone else be
doing with InDesign, when you are actually in InDesign? You should
be right clicking. Right clicking. Right mouse button clicking
gives you a context menu, and if you only have a one button mouse,
as Ann-Marie has pointed out so clearly in the past, get a two
button mouse.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: I just do not believe in it.
Ann-Marie And if you have one of those Apple mighty mouse that
appears to only have one button anyway, please go to system
preferences, choose keyboard and mouse, go to mouse and make the
right side the secondary click, or if you are left-handed the left
side the secondary click, whatever you like. I think that the
computers that ship with the mighty mouse ship with both buttons
doing the same thing.
David: Which is crazy because they don’t seem to know the difference.
Anne-Marie: So, now you’ve got that straight. I actually refuse to say control
click any more but just FYI, control click, all right.
David: But, if you have a one button mouse and you can’t get a two button
mouse because you are unable to leave your residence or your work
for some reason…
Anne-Marie: And some people are just…
David: Stubborn, stubborn.
Anne-Marie: Well, they are just opposed to the whole concept of having to use
two mouse.
David: I guess. If you have a one button mouse then hold down the control
key on your Mac, and then click. Whatever you do, the real key is
use your context menus. The context menus are all over the program.
I have been looking over people’s shoulders recently, and people
are just not using their context menus. People, don’t make me come
over there.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. So, you are working inside a text frame. You want to
inset the text. Don’t go thinking, what’s the name of that command
and what menu? Was that under layout? Is that under the object
menu? Just right click, right on the text frame with your type
tool, and you’ll see text frame options is one of the – oh, it
looks like about 20 different commands here.
The context menu – Adobe engineers spent many, many hours trying to
figure out what might a user want to do at this point with this
tool. They pull all the commands from various places in the program
and put them in one nice contextual menu.
David: Very nice of them.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. It’s very nice. And, it’s not just right there on the text
frame around the image frame. It’s also, David, as you mentioned
before, it’s in the panels and the panel menus.
David: And that’s important, like the pages panel menu. People are always
saying, how do I insert a page, or how do I move a page or
whatever. Just right click on it. Just right click on it. You get a
context menu, it shows up, and there it is. Move Pages, Insert
Pages, you know, Override All Master Page Items, all those things
are right there in the context menus. In the swatches, if you want
to edit a swatch, don’t go and double-click on it or try and…
First of all, don’t double-click on it.
Anne-Marie: Why not?
David: Well, because it makes it a default color. It changes your default
color if you do that. Or it applies the color to whatever you have
selected on your page.
Anne-Marie: Good point.
David: So instead, just right-click on it and choose swatch options, and
it changes the options for that… the options meaning the Edit
This Swatch.
Same thing with paragraph styles or character styles. There are
context menus in a lot of the panels, not all of them, but most of
the important ones, and you’ve really just got to get into the
habit of using them.
Anne-Marie: That’s absolutely right. The Pages one I use all the time, just
right-clicking right on the Page icon usually gives me a whole
bunch of choices. Another one that I use a lot is in Links, in the
Links panel, because I’ve been using this program for so many years
but I still have not memorized what those icons are at the bottom
of the Links panel.
David: Yeah. That’s kind of funny.
Anne-Marie: I can never remember which is Go to Link, and which is Edit
Original… I know Edit Original is the pencil, but Go to Link and
Unlink and Relink and Do-this-to-the-link. I just like to right-
click and choose, “Ah, there it is.” Relink, Go to Link, Edit
Original, Reveal in Finder, all of those kind of useful stuff.
And one other thing that I don’t know if people have realized, but
in CS3, under the Edit menu, if you go to Menus, you know, that’s
that new feature where you can hide and show items and colorize
items that are in the menus. You can also modify the contextual
menus.
David: That’s right! Very good point.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. So like if you are constantly right-clicking in text, and
you’re always searching for… like me, I’m constantly looking for
the Select menus from when I’m working in tables. I like to right-
click inside of the table instead of trying to remember where is
Select Row. If it’s number 15 and 16 and 17 in a list of 25 items,
it’s just annoying. So I color them light blue. All my contextual
table commands are colored light blue.
David: Great idea!
Anne-Marie: And you just do that by going to Edit, Menu Customization. You can
create a new little set, and then the Categories says, you want to
choose not Application Menus, which is the default, but Context and
Panel Menus from that same drop-down. And then you’ll see you have
the Assignment Panel Menu plus the Assignment Panel Context Menu,
the Color Spectrum Context Menu, Depth Ruler Context Menu. It’s
just really amazing to me.
David: You know, that is a great tip, because, for example, in the Color
panel, I will often want to switch from RGB to CMYK or something,
or from the tint gradient to CMYK.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: And I know I can right-click on that little gradient to switch to
RGB, LAB, or CMYK. But it’s kind of a hassle, because I never use
LAB or RGB in that panel. So I could just turn them off!
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: Just go to Edit Menus, go to the Color Spectrum Context Menu, and
then turn off LAB and RGB, and now my only option…
Anne-Marie: Just click the eyeball in the Visibility column to turn them off.
David: Yeah. And then, boom! Now I don’t have those options anymore.
Brilliant!
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: I didn’t even think about that before. And it removes it from the
Panel menu as well, so I can’t get RGB or LAB accidentally in the
Color panel. Wow!
Anne-Marie: What if you actually wanted them?
David: Well, then you could shift-click. You shift-click on that little
tint bar on the bottom, and shift-clicking rotates through RGB,
LAB, CMYK.
Anne-Marie: That’s true, but also, if you go to the Color Panel menu and this
is true for any menu customization…
David: Oh, good point. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anne-Marie: Tip Alert, Tip Alert, is that if you go to the menu, if someone, or
you yourself and you forgot, has hidden menu items, at the bottom
of the menu it will say Show All Menu Items.
David: Great point.
Anne-Marie: And, a tip on top of a tip, if you hold down the Command or Control
key when you open a menu, it will, by default, show all menu items.
David: Really?
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: Does that work in the… I didn’t even know that one. Wow, it
works, it works! [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Yes. Score one for geekness!
David: Wow! Excellent, excellent. Good.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. I use that all the time in the regular menus. Actually, I
hadn’t tried it in the Panel menus.
David: It works! Very cool. All right. So, context menus. You want to use
them. You know you want to use them, so go and use them. Have fun.
All right.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: Now.
Anne-Marie: Time for the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week eek eek eek eek
eek eek.
David: Eek eek eek eek.
Anne-Marie: That is Ignore Optical Margin.
David: Yeah. And we’ve talked about optical margins before, and what
optical margin alignment is all about. It’s kind of like hanging
punctuation.
Anne-Marie: A lot of people call it the “hanging indent” feature.
David: Yeah. Or hanging punctuation.
Anne-Marie: Hanging punctuation feature, right. Right.
David: Different from hanging indent. But hanging punctuation kind of
moves all the lines to the left, to the right, just a little bit so
that you get a more even feel along the edge. So punctuation like a
hyphen might stick out a little bit to the side, or a capital T on
the left side might stick out a little bit to the left. Some people
like that sort of thing.
Anne-Marie: I think optical margin alignment might have been a previous Obscure
Feature.
David: In fact, it probably was. It lives in the Story panel, which is
under the Type menu, and you can turn that on for the entire story.
Everything, not just one text frame, but if you have multiple
frames that are threaded together, it turns it on for the entire
story.
Anne-Marie: That’s correct.
David: But unfortunately, some people don’t want it for every single
paragraph. Like maybe you wouldn’t want it for your headings, or, I
don’t know, if there’s various reasons why you might want to turn
it off.
Anne-Marie: More fine-tune granular control.
David: Yeah. Yeah.
Anne-Marie: I use the word “granular”, I get two points for using it.
David: Yes, you do. Very nice, very nice. Granular control, excellent.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: You can turn it off on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis with the
Ignore Optical Margin feature.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: Where is that?
Anne-Marie: That is found in Paragraph Styles, and also I think in the regular
Paragraph in the Control panel when you’re in text editing mode.
Isn’t it there as well?
David: Yeah. It is, only when you have Optical Margin Alignment turned on
because those Panel menus are context-sensitive.
Anne-Marie: Oh.
David: So if you go to the Control panel menu, for example, when Optical
Margin Alignment is turned off for a story, you won’t see it. But
if it’s turned on, then all of a sudden it appears in the Control
panel menu, or the Paragraph panel menu.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. It appears right underneath Balance Ragged Lines.
David: Exactly, yeah. So, it’ll turn it off. I use that on occasion for
things like Pull Quotes, or especially… My big beef with Optical
Margin Alignment is I often want to have it aligning on the right
side but not on the left side. For example, I want hyphens and
commas and so on to kind of stick out a little bit, but I don’t
want a quotation mark on the left side to be hanging out, because
it just looks weird to me.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: So I wish that I could kind of turn it off just at the left side.
But until they give us that feature, when I see a paragraph that
just looks weird with it turned on, I will sometimes go in there
and, for that one paragraph, turn it off. Because, you know, things
sticking out on the left, to me it’s just optically wrong. But
that’s probably because I got used to it the old way.
Anne-Marie: That’s true. Now, you know, that would be a perfect candidate for a
contextual menu item, unfortunately it’s not there.
David: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s true.
Anne-Marie: I’m going to add that as a feature request.
David: OK. I think you should do that.
Anne-Marie: All right. Well, I think that’s it for Episode 75. Be sure to check
out the Show Notes on our blog at indesignsecrets.com, where we’ll
have links to all the places we mentioned and we’d love to hear
what you thought of the show. Leave us a comment in the Show Notes
or email us at info@indesignsecrets.com. Until we meet again, this
is Anne-Marie Concepcion and…
David: David Blatner for InDesign Secrets.