Podcast 78 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 78 page.
[intro music]
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Welcome to InDesign Secrets episode 78. I’m Anne-Marie Concepcion, and I’m here with my co-host, David A. Blatner, esquire.
David Blatner: Hi there.
Anne-Marie: Hi there, David. How are you?
David: I am well. It’s springtime. The sun is out. The flowers are out…
Anne-Marie: Yes, it’s gorgeous here in Chicago, too.
David: It’s beautiful.
Anne-Marie: All right. Our podcast and blog at indesignsecrets.com are the independent resource for all things InDesign.
David: Indeed. And this episode is sponsored by RecoSoft, or “Reeco” Soft – it depends on how you want to say it.
Anne-Marie: I say “Reeco” Soft.
David: You say “Reeco” Soft? I say “Wreck-o” Soft.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: You probably say tom-ah-to or something.
Anne-Marie: You crazy po-tah-to.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Anyway…
David: Well, I say RecoSoft because they’re based in Japan, so I always think of it as “Wreck-o” soft.
Anne-Marie: Oh…
David: So, they are the makers of PDF2ID, which is a very cool plug-in that lets you open PDF files in InDesign – and not like placing them, but actually as editable objects. It actually converts all the pieces into editable InDesign objects, which is amazing.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. It is a very cool plug-in. After you install it, you go to the File menu and choose “Open PDF File.” It’s pretty wild.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Right underneath the Open command.
David: Just choose a PDF file, and it just opens. It’s magic. And this has all kinds of applications. For example, people will say, “I’ve got this such-and-such application, WidgetWorks, and I need to get it into InDesign.” And you could just export it out as a PDF, out of WidgetWorks, or whatever program you’re using, whatever…
Anne-Marie: FreeHand.
David: FreeHand. There you go. Great idea. Yeah. Get it out of FreeHand as a PDF, open it right in InDesign, and you’ve got all your objects – editable text, the graphics come in and so on. It’s pretty astonishing.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. Or a lot of people have a PDF that they need to make extensive edits too, and they don’t have the original InDesign file.
David: That’s true.
Anne-Marie: That’s the perfect application for opening up the PDF and converting it. It does a very good job. You could map fonts, and it does styles and all sorts of stuff. Or, what I love is that you can open up just the comments.
David: Yes. You could just grab the annotations.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Like if somebody’s done a bunch of annotations inside the PDF. Very good point.
Anne-Marie: And then, you can have them open up in a new document and they come in in their own layer. And then, as long as you have Paste Remembers Layers, you could copy and paste them onto the original InDesign document and they’re right there in the position.
David: Ooh. I haven’t tried that. That’s interesting. Excellent idea.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. I was playing with that. It works pretty well. It doesn’t bring in all the comments, like those funny cloud things and stuff.
David: [laughs] Gay.
Anne-Marie: But, any of the regular, the little yellow balloons, it brings those in.
David: Very, very cool.
Anne-Marie: But, anyway. They’re going to be our sponsor for the next few episodes. And they have generously offered something special to our listeners.
David: Mm-hmm.
Anne-Marie: We’re going to put the URL in the show notes. But, if you go to recosoft.com/pdf2id.htm, all lowercase, you’ll get 20 bucks off the normal price of $249. So, it’s $229 for InDesign Secrets users.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And that is a special, secret URL.
David: Yeah, super-secret.
Anne-Marie: So, you won’t see that if you just go to the store.
David: Yeah. Excellent.
Anne-Marie: Thank you, RecoSoft.
David: Yes. Thank you very much. And now, let’s talk a little bit about what we’re talking about today in this blog.
Anne-Marie: Right. Well, we’re going to go through some news. We have a couple hot-button posts of the week, eek, eek, eek…
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: We’re going to talk about “Stop the Transparencide.”
David: [laughs] Yeah.
Anne-Marie: A new public service announcement, a PSA, from Adobe. We’re going to include a couple tips from our essential tips session at the Nashville Creative Suite Conference.
David: Yeah. We’ll throw some of those in. That’ll be fun. Yeah.
Anne-Marie: A little bit about master pages, some basic information about master pages, because we never really go into depth about things. But, we’re going to try and talk about some basic things about master pages that we think lots of people should know about.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And then, the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week…
Anne-Marie and David: [together] Eek, eek, eek, eek, eek…
Anne-Marie: Is?
David: Place Items.
Anne-Marie: Well, everybody knows that one.
David: Well, not the Place one from the File menu, a different Place Items feature.
Anne-Marie: Oh…
David: Yeah. So, we’re going to talk about that a little bit, a kind of hidden one. OK. So, news. What happened this week?
Oh, I do want to point out, our two new contributors at indesignsecrets.com, the blog post, we’ve got two new contributors: Bob Levine. I always want to say Le-”vine.” Does Bob go by Le-”vine”?
Anne-Marie: I always get it wrong, however I pronounce it. Bob L.
David: Bob L. is coming. And Ted LoCascio. Two new contributors – mouth’s not working today – at indesignsecrets.com. Welcome. They’re doing all kinds of cool poosts… Cool poosts… [laughs]
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Let me take over here, David.
David: Cool posts. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice…
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: No. Bob and Ted, our two new contributors. Bob Levine, or Le-”Vine,” however you want to say it, a lot of people may recognize that name because he is the main host on the InDesign and InCopy user-to-user forums at adobe.com.
David: He is.
Anne-Marie: He’s constantly posting there. And Ted is well-known in our industry for his expertise in all sorts of Creative Suite programs, right? He’s based in Florida, and he used to do all sorts of stuff for Kelby. He wrote a couple books on InDesign, Photoshop…
David: He did. He actually wrote a really cool book, and it’s called “InDesign Effects.” All kinds of interesting, cool effects you can create in InDesign, like smoke coming out of InDesign cups. I don’t know. There’s all kinds of really cool things in that book. He’s a very, very creative guy.
Anne-Marie: And both Bob and Ted have already written up a post on their own…
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: So, you should take a look. They’re great. And I love the fact that Bob’s contributing, because now we get screen shots showing Vista.
David: [laughs] There you go.
Anne-Marie: They’re beautiful.
David: Exactly.
Anne-Marie: I had no idea Vista was so beautiful. He’s got it running, and he says like a top, and as long as you have the right hardware, it runs fine.
David: It is. Vista’s fine.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. Check that out. Other news. Well, I think, we already talked about Nashville, right, that we had a great time in Nashville? Did we say that?
David: [laughs] We did. Had a great time in Nashville. It’s true. And we’ve got a couple tips from Nashville that we’re going to be playing later on in this episode.
Anne-Marie: From our essential tips for InDesign users session, which was very well attended and got a lot of laughs. I don’t know why they laugh so much when you and I speak.
David: I don’t know. I just don’t know. We’re very serious presenters.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: But they keep laughing at us, over and over again! The torment of the laughter! It’s terrible.
Anne-Marie: And I want to let people know that, remember, we have this 5010 discount going on for our posters, for the first 10 people who order posters.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: First 10 orders using this discount code get 50 percent off of the entire order.
David: Cool.
Anne-Marie: So far – I just checked – seven out of the 10 have been used up, so there are still three available slots. If you want to buy our InDesign Secrets keyboard shortcuts posters, for CS2 or CS3, hi thee over to the show note link or to the store on our website and enter 5010 in the discount code area, and you’ll get 50 percent off.
David: Right. This is your big chance for 50 off. Half off! Two for one!
Anne-Marie: [laughs] We’ve got people buying like tons of them. I’m afraid they’re reselling them somewhere. Well, we don’t care, do we?
David: No. I don’t care. Go ahead and resell them. We just want them off our shelves.
Anne-Marie: Let’s bring in your tip about New Window.
David: Yeah. We were doing a bunch of essential tips, all kinds of things that InDesign users need to know. And I was bringing this thing in, a little piece about using the New Window feature.
And there’s a lot of little, little tips in InDesign that are like that. They’re little things, but you have to force yourself to use them.
Here’s another one of my favorites: Arrange New Window. New Window is a great, great feature. Word has had it for 28 years or something. But, QuarkXPress users are not familiar with this at all. So, people switch over to InDesign, and they’re like, “I don’t know what it does. I won’t use it.” You have to force yourself to use New Window three times on a project – three times. That’s the rule. Three times. And the third time you use it, you will be absolutely hooked. You’ll like, “Oh! This is life changing. Absolutely changing.”
Anne-Marie: Or you’ll know, “I’ll never need this.” You have to give it three chances.
David: Three chances.
Anne-Marie: To work. Right.
David: So, New Window opens a new window of the same document. So you could have one window zoomed in and one window zoomed out and you can be making little tiny edits on zoomed in and see what it looks like as the whole. You could have one window on page one and one window on page 84 and you want to see – I’m typing on page one, is it bottoming out on page 84? So type, type, type, boom! Done. So, no more jumping back and forth between pages.
You could one showing a CMYK view and one showing an RGB view. If you’re doing an RGB workflow, you’ve got RGB images in your file, very bright saturated color it’s wonderful, you could have one in the regular view and come over here and say “View proof set up” and I’ll put this one in document – let’s say document CMYK. You won’t notice anything here because this is black and white. But, we can see that this one is listed as document CMYK. So, you’ve had CMYK and RGB on the same screen at the same time! Lot of possibilities for new Window.
Anne-Marie: That’s a great tip.
David: Thank you very much.
Anne-Marie: Thank you. I want people to know about that.
David: You’re welcome. It’s an important one. People really need – like what we were saying there – you need to push through and use these things or else, you won’t get into the habit. So much of becoming efficient in InDesign is about getting new habits and the habits have to be slowly created and the way you do that is by using them over and over again, so use that feature.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: Now, Bob, you’re mentioning Bob earlier and some of the posts that he had been doing. One of the things that he said, which I couldn’t believe when I read this was about the 20-activation limit. I was sort of went along, find a little bit grumply when Adobe instituted activation in their programs, but, you know, it works pretty easily. You activate, if you want to move to a different computer, you deactivate, takes 20 seconds.
Anne-Marie: Yes, I think, it’s the biggest pain in the world.
David: Oh, really?
Anne-Marie: I hate deactivation but they’re all using it. What I thought was a big pain when they’re suppose to enter serial numbers. “I remember back when you didn’t need a serial number and everything was based on your faith in your fellowmen!”
David: [laughs] That’s true.
Anne-Marie: Then, they started having serial numbers then the serial numbers got ridiculous. Then, you had serial numbers and keycodes and then serial numbers and keycodes and activation, it’s insane! I hate it.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: So, I was really disgusted when I heard, “Oh, there’s a 20 activation limit on this stuff, that’s disgusting. I don’t think I’m going to be unactivating and reactivating 20 times, but still, you buy this software for bazillion dollars, you think that you can use it as long as you have a computer and you’re walking around.
David: Right. [laughs] That’s true. I don’t know, activation just does not bother me that much anymore. It works, it’s pretty, it’s nice that they let you activate work on two machines at the same time. But, in the set up, let’s say you’ve got three machines, you’ve got a home machine, a laptop, and a work machine. You want to have them on all three, you should be able to deactivate off of one, let’s say your laptop, and then have them running on your home and your business machine. Then, when you go on the road, you deactivate, let’s say, your home machine, take your laptop machine, activate that one and go off to your trip.
Anne-Marie: That’s true. That’s the newest point that I doubt many people know about is the fact that you’re allowed two activations legally of the same serial number software program as long as you’re not using them both at the same time. So, it’s completely legal in the Adobe End User License Agreement. If your boss installs InDesign’s CS3 on your work computer, you can grab that same CD and install it on your home laptop, completely legal as long as it’s OK with your boss.
David: That’s right.
Anne-Marie: OK. But then, if you want to install it on another computer, let’s say you have two homes, you’re living a double life…
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: You’ll need to deactivate one of those, in order to be legal and activate the next one.
David: That’s right. And again, the activation, as long as you’re connected to the Internet, is very fast; it’s very easy. But, what Bob mentioned, which I had never heard before, is that you could only do it 20 times. And at the end of 20 times it says, “Uh… what the heck are you doing?” And it’s not going to let you do it.
Now, in theory, you can call Adobe and say, “I need to do this a few more times,” and they’ll give you like five more times to do it. But, I don’t know. It’s really kind of dorky. It just kind of made me angry again about this whole activation thing like you were saying. Why don’t you just trust us?
Anne-Marie: Seriously. Because I have more than two different computers and I keep having to deactivate and reactivate because I want to work on it in Tiger, than work on it in my in my Leopard machine, then work on it in Windows. Well, that’s a different serial number, but…
I’m setting up my new Leopard laptop and I went to iTunes and I activated it for my music that I bought from the iTunes store. And it says, “You have used up four out of your five activations for the Apple Music Store.”
David: Right. Same kind of thing.
Anne-Marie: And I don’t recall when I did that. I bought the music. Why can’t I listen to it on my new computer? It’s ridiculous. I don’t like it.
David: [laughs] It’s a long story.
So, it’s something to be aware of, and thank you Bob for posting that, because I hadn’t heard of that before. Then, of course it started a whole rant about activation. Like your rant, on why we have activation…
Anne-Marie: Yeah, I have my [inaudible]. I have it all in me.
David: And then somebody said, “You know what I really like? I really like the way Maya uses dongles.” And I almost fell out of my chair. Whatever you do Adobe, please don’t institute dongles again. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: I was talking about dongles to somebody, and they cracked up. They thought I was kidding, over the name alone.
[laughter]
David: It’s true. It is kind of a strange thing.
Anne-Marie: They thought I was teasing. No, a little hardware that looks like a little USB flash stick that you have to insert into the computer in order to run the software. That’s what a dongle is.
David: Right. Quark used that for many, many years, especially on the international version of Quark Passport. It was like the biggest pain in the world, dealing with this little hardware device that you’d put your monitor down on top of it and squish it. Then, you’d have to get a new dongle, and it was horrible. So, dongles are very bad.
But, activation? I don’t know. Not so bad, but Adobe does need to get at least a little more trusting.
Anne-Marie: Beware of the limit, yes. You can’t just go crazy with the reactivating and deactivating.
David: That’s right.
Anne-Marie: Indeed. That was a great post, Bob. And the other hot button post was that one that you wrote about indexing.
David: Yeah, right. What did I write about indexing? I’ve already forgotten.
Anne-Marie: Well a reader had written in saying, “How can we do page ranges in indexing?”
David: Oh yeah, the whole page range thing. Well, the page range thing was interesting, like if you index page two and you put another index marker on page three, and another index marker on page four, InDesign will create an index that says “2, 3, 4;” It won’t do “2-4,” And that’s just one of the limitations.
InDesign assumes that if you wanted it to be 2-4 that you would have put an index marker on page two that, using the range feature, spans two more pages. That’s just the way InDesign’s thinking about it. And, people were like, “What the heck is going on there?”
Anne-Marie: So, there are some interesting comments going on there that sometimes that’s what you want. You want it to say, “two and three and four,” because it’s not really a range. Indexing actually needs a lot more human thought than what a computer can do.
But, what was so cool about that, in addition to your wonderful reply to the writer, is that a new commenter, I don’t think I recognize his name from the comments before, named Marc, said that he’s got a script that will do this for you. He wrote about the script, and then for the rest of all the comments, there are about 30 or 40 of them, people were talking about that script, which is very cool.
David: Oh yeah, the script is amazing because it’s something that people have asked for for quite a while. I have a list of things that I want to create an index of. I’ve got a 200-page document and I’ve got a list of 100 words and I want to make an index of those 100 words in my document. And there are plug-ins that let you do that, but this is a free script.
Anne-Marie: It works in CS1, CS2, and CS3.
David: Yeah, and it just looks awesome. I need to download this and try this, but it looks really cool.
Anne-Marie: It is called “IndexBrutal” and a couple of the people from our blog have already tried it and reported that it worked beautifully on long documents with lots of word that need to be indexed. And it did the page ranges fine. So, it is not just for fixing a page range problem, it is actually for creating the index itself from a concordance. Isn’t it not what it is called, a concordance?
David: Yes, it is kind of a do a concordance, yes. It is a self concordance of words that you specified, I guess that is true.
Anne-Marie: So, you include a URL to Mark’s website where this is just one of the many interesting looking InDesign scripts. However, it is all in French.
David: Yes, yes.
Anne-Marie: So, be aware that… I use one of my favorite tricks to translate that page into English, so we will include both the original URL to his site in French and then translated by Google in English.
David: Great, that is a good idea.
Anne-Marie: You know how to do that trick?
David: They have French speakers sitting around?
Anne-Marie: [laughing] If you go to a website that is in a foreign language, you know how to get Google to translate it?
David: Yes, in Google, but go ahead, go for it.
Anne-Marie: How do you do it?
David: I just go to Google and I go to advanced stuff, advanced search.
Anne-Marie: If you are looking at the page, you look at a page in a foreign language. How do you get Google to translate it?
David: Oh, I am looking at the page yes.
Anne-Marie: There you go, copy the u-r-l, paste it into the Google search field.
David: Ohhh…
Anne-Marie: It will be the first hit and then after the URL, it will have a little link that says “translate this page”.
David: You are so good! Wow!
Anne-Marie: Aren’t I?
David: That is easy.
Anne-Marie: I impress myself, yes. I wrote it up InDesign giggle awhile ago and I used it for a couple of times. That is how we got that URL for a translated page. And what it needs is that after Google brings you to a translated page, if you click “links” there it translates those new pages on the flier.
David: Wow!
Anne-Marie: But, it is very funny, it is one of those funny kind translations things because it is obviously not a French speaking person who knows English who is translating it. It is a machine.
David: It is a machine, so you have to take the translation with a grain of salt.
Anne-Marie: Yes, that is right.
David: What is interesting about that script though is… again, I have not tried this one I am quite curious see if it works. What the page says is, “if you are using it on an English version of InDesign, the UI for the script will change automatically to show you an English UI.”
Anne-Marie: The user interface?
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: I am quite curious if that really…
David: I don’t know how they do that, but it is very cool. So, anyway, very cool indexing script…
Anne-Marie: Called IndexBrutal.
David: Well, remember it is French so it is “Index Brutal”
Anne-Marie: [laughing] That is right and the website is… what is it called? Blogged out?
David: Blogged not or blogged new.
Anne-Marie: Blogged out FR or something like that.
David: Anyway, we will have the URL. So, check that out. It is very cool, very interesting.
So, thank you very much Mark for posting that because… You know, what is interesting is that just last week at the “National Conference,” somebody was saying, “You know there are not just many… there don’t seem to be as many plug-in developers as there use to be for Quark” and there are so many Quark extension developers out there and there are some really excellent plug-ins available for InDesign.
And what it occurred to me though is that a lot of the people who would be doing plug-ins are just writing scripts now, because so much is scriptable that you don’t even need the whole plug-in you just need to script to do the same kind of functionality. So, while there are lots of really great plug-in developers for InDesign, there are dozens and dozens or hundreds of people writing excellent scripts that add this kind of amazing functionality with that you would have gotten.
Anne-Marie: If you come across and you try to compile them in a list if you go to our website, you go to “resources plug-ins and scripts.” You have links to the major scripts that we think a lot of people should know about what the little with little bit of explanation about what the scripts are for. So, better check that out.
David: Absolutely.
Anne-Marie: OK, I have to add IndexBrutal to that list.
David: OK.
Anne-Marie: What’s this “Stop the Transparencide?”
David: Well, “Stop the Transparencide” was a post that I wrote quickly to point out the new public service announcement that Tim Cole and Rufus Deuchler did for the Adobe PDF Print Engine. You all have heard this talk on and on about the PDF Print Engine and how important it is. How cool it is and how you should all go ask your printers to get the PDF Print Engine and so you can print PDFs with the transparency instead of having the [inaudible] stuff.
Anne-Marie: Right. It’ll be bypass postscripts.
David: Yes. Bypass postscript, don’t worry about flattening, just print the ding thing and it just works. So they did wonderful little…
Anne-Marie: Tongue-in-cheek.
David: …yes, it’s a kind of a tongue-in-cheek ad as it were for the PDF things. So, talking about the terrible transparencide that has been going on in the world and how you can avoid it if you use Adobe PDF. So, we’re going to put a link in the show notes. Everybody, you have to see this video, it’s just terribly funny.
Anne-Marie: Very funny. It’s up on YouTube so we’re linking it to the YouTube.
David: Yes. Originally, it was on Adobe TV but then they said, “You know, we want to have it go even further than just people watching Adobe TV. Let’s put it on YouTube as well.”
Anne-Marie: Tim and Rufus are the ones who do Café Fibonacci, which is the cool [inaudible] InDesign show on the Adobe TV.
David: That everybody has to see it. OK. Let’s throw in one more tip if we have time here. One more tip from Nashville. Let’s do that one that you were talking about Dynamic Spelling. How cool that is.
Anne-Marie: All right. OK.
I hate to step here, we go to edit spelling, check spelling and then you start the first word. You go Skip, Add, Skip, Add… I can’t stand it. It’s just so tedious to me, I always like skip the whole spellchecking. I’m like, “Oh, I wouldn’t notice it if I spell something right.” This is something I see, there are hardly any InDesign user ever does is that you go down to Spelling and turn on Dynamic Spelling.
Look, nothing would happen, but if I actually spell something incorrectly, if I say curs instead of course, I get a little thingy that tells me it’s misspelled. This is actually a feature in Word that I love. So, now what are you suppose to do? Now, it’s like open up a dictionary, find how to spell it? No, just right click on the word, and then you get a list of the suggestions, so you can correct it on the fly. Or, if you know somebody’s name that it’s not recognizing, but it’s the name of the owner of the company that you work for and you want to add the guy’s name to the dictionary. Choose Add to Dictionary right here, or you can also ignore them every time you go. So, that’s all, just a better way to check spelling is to turn on Dynamic Spelling.
It does not have a keyboard shortcut but if you can assign one from Edit Keyboard Shortcuts, which probably an essential tip in itself, and the way you can have it turned off if the red squigglies are bugging you. And then, when you write a word, you’re like “I wonder if that’s spelled correctly?” Press the Keyboard Shortcut and see if the squiggly appears; if it doesn’t, then you know you’re fine. So, you can turn it on, turn it off as you go.
David: I like that. Yes, I love that.
Anne-Marie: Use the keyboard shortcut to turn it on and off, and it works just like how you want to work, how I like it to work.
David: Yes, indeed. Let’s move on quickly because we’re running out of time here. I wanted to mention that thing about master pages that you and I were talking about before. That’s one a lot of InDesign users are still stuck on their old QuarkExpress ways of using automatic textbox.
Anne-Marie: Yes, that’s right. I got this email from a client that I taught this company InDesign last year, I think; yes, last year. Twelve users, they do long documents, all sorts of documents. One of the lead designers emailed me and said, “Is there a way to overwrite all master page items throughout the entire document instead of having to do it spread by spread?” I emailed her back and said, “You know, if you’re asking me that question, you don’t understand the concept of master.
David: Right. Why are you using them to be there?
Anne-Marie: Right. Or, you’re asking on behalf of a new hire who’s trying to convert from Quark to InDesign because that’s how I felt. When I moved from QuarkExpress to InDesign, I’m like, “I don’t like this whole locking thing.” I remember writing a feature request saying, “You should make it…when people put something on the master page, there should be a little check box there to say this is unlock or overridden automatically on all the document pages,” you know, because I wanted it to work like QuarkExpress. And then, after awhile, I realized, “Oh, this makes much more sense,” because actually, you should be…
As I told this client the things on the master page are things that hardly ever change. They never change or just occasionally need to change. When they occasionally need to change, then, you can use the keyboard shortcut to override a master page item on the document page with command or control shift clicking or you can use override all items on the spread if for some reason you want to do that. But, throughout the whole document, it doesn’t make any sense to me why you would ever want to do that.
David: Well, I could see one reason to do that is with templates. If you are creating a template that everything basing on the master page is something you are going to be filling with a graphic or text. But then, what you have to understand is, you don’t have to override those objects if you are simply going to be using the place command, you can choose place from filed place, load the place cursor, and then you can click on one of those master page items to fill it if it is an empty frame. You don’t have to overwrite it first. It will overwrite it automatically.
So, that is the one instance where I could see where you might be tempted to do that, but you don’t actually need to.
Anne-Marie: If you have created a master page with placeholder text frames that you are not going to place text into, you are going to actually type in to I suppose.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: How many text frames could there be?
David: That is a good point. I think, in general though, people… I think, you are absolutely right, people are using master pages in that case. If you really want to overwrite everything, you probably are misusing the master page more or less.
Anne-Marie: But, I hear a lot about master page text frames from people, especially moving from QuarkExpress is that they can not understand how you could do any kind of autoflow without a master page text frame.
David: Right. So, typically like in a new document dialogue box in QuarkExpress, it said, “Automatic text box” and InDesign, there is a thing called “master text frame.” And you can turn that on, and it will automatically put a text frame on the master page that goes to the edges of the margins and fills the whole page with that.
Anne-Marie: Right or the column guides if you have more than one [inaudible].
David: That is right, and those… I just want to say those are almost entirely superfluous. I have completely stopped using those now, because autoflow works is just much smarter InDesign. You don’t need that kind of silliness when you are dealing with InDesign, especially if it is working…
Anne-Marie: If that frames is going to butt up against the margin and column guides then you don’t need it on the master pages, because when you autoflow on a document page the frames automatically butt up against the column and margin guides.
David: Exactly, exactly.
Anne-Marie: So, the trick is to make sure that your margin and column guide is to find the live page area, right. So, if you don’t want your text to start until 20 picas down from the top of the page, make that the top margin even if you are going to put stuff up there and upper 20 picas, make that a top margin so that you can use the autoflow as when necessary.
David: Right and you should mention what the autflow is, how do you…
Anne-Marie: The autoflow is when you have a loaded text frame… a loaded text cursor either from placing or from loading over set text in the existing frame. When you want to place that so that it automatically creates a series of threaded text frames and adding additional pages if necessary, you hold on the “shift” key and you click with the loaded text cursor.
David: Yes, “shift, click” with the place cursor will keep adding frames and pages as necessary.
Anne-Marie: That is right.
David: We have mentioned that one before but it is a really important one and when it does that, it will automatically add those text frames all the way out to the margins and therefore, you don’t need those master page text frames, those ones that go away with the margins of the text frames on the master page.
Anne-Marie: If you need a secondary automatic text flow, like let’s say you have the main body and then you have side bars always on the outside margins and you have a long file that you need to margin notes or something. You have a long file that you need to autoflow through all of the outside columns. Then, you can put text frames on the master page and just put them there manually.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: As long as you thread the empty one on the left facing page to the right facing page that’s it. You are done. So, you go to page one, shift, click on that first master page frame with the loaded text cursor, which will automatically override it, like David said earlier. Then, it automatically flows from page one to two to three to four because it is threaded throughout the entire document. You can do that multiple times. You could have lot of different threads of text on the master page.
David: I love that. Sometimes, people will have like an English and Spanish version on each page. You have on the left side English and on the right Spanish, let’s say, and you can thread through both of those. You can have multiple text flows going on from one page to the next by setting it up that way.
In general, the only time that you need to create that text frame on the master page is when the text frame does not go to the margin boundaries. That’s when you want to put the text frames on the master page. A little detail there, but it is useful. I think, again, when we are changing habits that’s one of those habits you really want to change from QuarkExpress to InDesign. You don’t need those master page text frames. Cool. All right.
Anne-Marie: It is time for the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week. [Geek, geek, geek, geek]
David: Place items.
Anne-Marie: Place items.
David: Place items. As I mentioned earlier, it is not the place feature from the file menu, which we keep going on about. This is a different place. This is a place inside the library panel. If you have a library panel floating around…
Anne-Marie: And you won’t find it under the window menu, by the way – library.
David: That’s true. That’s a good point.
Anne-Marie: You have to actually create it. You go to file, new. Instead of choosing document or book, choose library. Then, you will get the library panel.
David: Or open one that you’ve bet someone else has already created. Yeah. If you have a library file you can open it or you can create a new one, as you mentioned. Then, there is a fly out menu in that panel or pallet or whatever you want to call it. Inside that panel menu, there is place item. That is the obscure one. Why is that there?
Anne-Marie: It is there because it is an automatic paste and place.
David: Exactly. That’s the key because if you drag stuff out of a library and just drop it on the page it will go wherever your mouse cursor is, but if you use place items from that menu, it puts it back exactly where it was when it originally was on the page before you put it into the library. It pastes it right in the library.
Anne-Marie: That’s how you get items into the library. You drag them from an existing page and drop them into the panel. Then, you can reuse them in other documents. Instead of dragging it, select and choose place item.
David: But, if you had a logo or a boilerplate text or something that you always wanted in the exact same place on the page, use place item. I like that. I find that very useful. A lot of people don’t realize it is there. They are forever dragging out of the library and then positioning it, dragging it out and then positioning it. That’s just silly. It’s a good one.
Anne-Marie: OK. All right. That is it for Episode 78.
David: It is.
Anne-Marie: Thanks again to Reco/Riko soft. No, Reco.
David: Recosoft.
Anne-Marie: I say Recosoft, you crazy tool item. Thanks again to Recosoft, developers of PDF2ID, the cool plug-in for InDesign and for supporting our show. Don’t forget that you can go directly to that URL to get your $20 off if you want to purchase it. That is recosoft.com/pdf2id.htm [all lower case]. Of course, we will have all that in our show notes.
We’ll have all sorts of other links there to everything else we mentioned, and we would love to hear what you thought of the show. Leave a comment in the show notes or email us at info@indesignsecrets.com.
Until we meet again, this is Ann-Marie and…
David: David Blatner for InDesignSecrets.
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