Podcast 81 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 81 page.
[music]
David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets Episode 81, nine times nine. I am David Blatner. I am here along with my co-host, Anne-Marie Concepcion.
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Hi, David. How are you?
David: I am well. How are you today, Anne-Marie?
Anne-Marie: I am doing great.
David: Our podcast and blog at indesignsecrets.com are the independent resource for all things…
Anne-Marie: InDesign. [echo]
[laughter]
David: I just thought it was all things.
Anne-Marie: For all things.
David: Everything. Yeah, I mean, THE independent resource. So, today we are going to be talking about all things.
Anne-Marie: Yes, we have some news about our site. If you haven’t been to our website you should check it out because it looks slightly different. It’s something we have been working on for many months in between 10,000 other things. Along with our good friend and contributor, Pariah Burke, designed and produced a new look for our website with a whole bunch of features we have always been wanting to add, like recent comments, quick links to more recent posts and the most commented posts, often known as the most popular ones.
There’s more pictures of our contributors on the home page with links to their stories, and it is very cool. You’ve got to check it out. It does look quite different, and there is a long thread going on about people suggesting things to fix.
Of course, developing a website is an ongoing process, and at some point you just have to throw it out there. You can’t wait until it is perfect.
David: That’s right. And we will be making changes as time goes along.
Anne-Marie: Oh, yeah.
David: Trying to fine tune it and make it easier to read and so on. Our goal is to get you the best information about InDesign in the easiest way possible. We are trying to make it easier to get to the content that you want because there is a huge amount of stuff out there. There’s like 600 posts about InDesign over the past couple of years. Most of them are still totally relevant, even the older stuff. It’s how to get that old stuff into your hands easily; it is not always the easiest thing to do. Anyway, that’s what is going on there. You should definitely check that out.
Anne-Marie: We should put up screen shots of our original site. Do you remember that one? The one that we had for like seven months before the blog went live.
David: I remember back when it was chiseled out of rock.
Anne-Marie: It had blue links with lines on them.
David: I remember those days. What else are we going to talk about today?
Anne-Marie: Other things–cool scripts that we’ve been posting about. A whole bunch–it seems like it’s script season, especially you, David. You have come across a whole bunch of really useful ones, so we’re going to run through those and tell you about why they are so cool and how to get them from our site and other sites.
We are going to talk about problems with PDF presets, certain PDF presets in particular and how to work around them or just watch out for them.
And finally, our Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week. [echo] Orthogonal line–Dave said, let’s do orthogonal line for the obscure feature, and I went to InDesign Help because I’m like there’s no orthogonal line, and it said you have zero results.
David: [laughs] It’s so obscure it’s not even in the documentation.
Anne-Marie: It’s not even in the documentation, but it is in the interface.
David: It is.
Anne-Marie: So, we’ll be talking about it.
David: That’s right. Don’t forget today our episode is sponsored by Recosoft, the makers of PDF2ID, the converter that converts PDF files into editable InDesign files which is very, very cool. We have talked about it in previous episodes, and we just recommend that everybody needs a copy just around.
It is one of those things that you want to have around because soon or later, within the next year, you are definitely going to find yourself with a PDF file that you’re like, “If I could only get the content out of this easily and put it into my InDesign file, whether that’s a PDF from a free hand file or Excel or another InDesign file or whatever.
Anne-Marie: Did I tell you about how I used it to import just the comments into an InDesign file?
David: How did you do that?
Anne-Marie: I sent the PDF off to a client, and they had 10,000 comments on their publication, and they sent me back the comments in PDF. Well, you know what a pain that is to bounce back and forth between Acrobat and InDesign and search for every comment and make sure that you have made it and find the corresponding line in the InDesign document.
I submitted a feature request to Adobe’s website–we should be able to import comments from Acrobat from PDF files. And then I remembered. Oh wait, wait, I have that PDF2ID. Maybe, I could just convert the entire thing to an InDesign document. So, I just switched window to window to make it a little easier, but then looking at the preferences or the setup when you are saying how exactly you want to convert the PDF to an InDesign document, you can say comments only.
David: Yeah, yeah.
Anne-Marie: And it will maintain the same page positions, so it worked really well. Now, the only thing is it didn’t insert every kind of comment, just the kind in the yellow boxes.
David: Yeah. That’s the one thing. You just get the regular sticky note kind of comments.
Anne-Marie: The sticky note kind, but if somebody did a cross-out with an insertion you don’t get those.
David: You don’t get those. So, you would open the PDF file in InDesign, just the annotations, and you get all the annotations on each individual page. And then, they all come in on their own layer so you could then option or alt click on the layer, select all the annotations, then copy and then go to your other document and paste in place. So, they would actually be put right into your original InDesign document, then you would have your annotations right in your InDesign… Oh, that would be very useful.
Also, if you are going to be doing that, you want to make sure that in the layers panel when you paste, actually before you copy and paste. You want to make sure in the layers panel you have ‘paste remembers layers’ turned on; otherwise, when you paste it will paste onto the current layer. It won’t paste onto its own annotations layer. So, copy out of one. Make sure ‘paste remembers layers’ is turned on. Paste and place in the new document, and then you get all your annotations back in your original InDesign document. Oh, I like that. Well done. Excellent.
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: Let’s talk about the redesign. We talked about the redesign a little bit, but we should talk about the scripts. There are just all these scripts. As you said, I have been finding some new scripts, but to be honest, a lot of these scripts [inaudible].
Anne-Marie: You’re a script magnet.
David: [laughs] We have become a script magnet at InDesign Secrets, and scripts, as we’ve talked about in previous episodes, are so great for adding to the functionality of InDesign.
There are just so many things that you wish InDesign could do, like why can’t it do such and such? Well, if you have the right script it can. Russell Viers was talking about how one of his clients had a situation where they imported an ASE file with names like color1, color2, color3 and so on, and then they later wanted to change the ASE file like from Illustrator…
Anne-Marie: ASE?
David: The Adobe Swatch Exchange, so that’s the way Creative Suite Apps can move color swatches from one app to the other.
Anne-Marie: Exchange swatches and thus the name, Adobe Swatch Exchange.
David: Exactly. So, the problem with InDesign though is if you import a new ASE file that has the same names it doesn’t ask you, “Do you want to replace the originals?” You just get like color1 copy, color2 copy and so on.
We found this script guy, Steve Wareham, who wrote a great script to simply replace the original color1 with color1 copy, color2 copy, etc. So, it switched the swatches. I can’t even say that right.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: Anyway, that was a great script, and Russell Viers posted that on the site. You should definitely check that out. That’s what is happening now. We are finding a lot of people who have needs in InDesign, and then we are finding script writers to write them. There is a whole bunch of stuff like that out there.
When I was at the New Zealand InDesign Conference a couple of weeks ago a guy who worked at a book publisher there said, “You know, what I really want is a way to add captions underneath my text frames, and there are various ways to do that But, underneath image frames. I want to create a text frame under the image frame and put the caption in from whatever is on the clipboard” because people would send him a word file that has all the captions in it. He just wants to copy it out of the word file, go back to InDesign and say, “Make me a caption frame and put whatever is on the clipboard put it in there”.
Steve Wareham, once again to the rescue, wrote this great script. I just posted it on the blog which adds a caption frame, a label frame underneath whatever image you have selected. And you can put whatever is on the clipboard into it. Very cool little script that addresses a need that a lot of people need.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. I want to just interrupt a minute and talk about Steve Wareham himself. We got an email from him in May and he said, he just threw it out there. He said, “Do you guys ever encounter a situation when using InDesign when you say, “I’ll bet a script could solve this, but you can’t find a currently available script to do what you want? Do you have someone that you usually go to when you want a script? I am an Adobe developer that is looking for ideas on scripts that could be useful for InDesign users. I’m not looking to make any money, but if you are in need of a script maybe I could write it. Let me know if you are interested.”
It was like getting a letter from Santa Claus. Would you like anything? Can I get you any presents?
[laughter]
David: Exactly. Exactly.
Anne-Marie: We occasionally get those kind of emails that people are offering their services. Then we actually ask them to do something, and we never hear from them again. He has really come through.
David: Yeah, he has. He has a bunch of other scripts on his site as well. Actually, we’ll put something in the show notes and link you to his site. He’s got a bunch of scripts there that are terrific. So you should definitely check it out.
Anne-Marie: Muchas gracias, Steve. We appreciate it.
David: A lot of other developers out there have been doing that. Marc Autret, we have mentioned him before with his Index Brutal script.
Anne-Marie: I think it won first place at Cannes.
David: [laughs] It should have, if nothing else. But, actually we’ve got a number of people asking about: why can’t I make an index based on character styles?
Anne-Marie: All right. Yes.
David: And Marc said, “Oh, I could do that”. So, he has been working really hard, and I have a beta of that that I am going to post. Hopefully, maybe, by the time you listen to this I’ll have that posted on the site. If not, it will be within the next week. Check it out.
If you need to make indexes from character styles, then check this out and see if it works for you. I’ve tried it, and it works beautifully. It’s really quite amazing, but, you know, there might be a bug here or there, so check it out and see if it works for you. Then, he will tweak it hopefully and do a final version pretty soon. Go ahead.
Anne-Marie: Could we convince him to do one that would allow us to include character styles and tables of contents?
David: Well, in some ways this kind of does that. It kind of makes a table of contents of whatever you have in character styles. I mean, you sort of could get that kind of thing but…
Anne-Marie: I’ll have to beta test it.
David: [laughs] Go and try it out. See it if it works for you. But, Marc also was the one; I posted about this recently. He is also the one who did a free script–all of these are free–that swaps two items on a page. Let’s say, you’ve got two images, one on the paste board and one on the page, and you’re like, “Which one should I use?” You can swap them back and forth, and I put a blog post about that as well.
There are all these really cool scripts out there. Can I mention just a couple more?
Anne-Marie: Yes, just two more.
David: Two more. The navigate with keyboard shortcuts, Kris Coppetiers did this amazing set of scripts that lets you navigate around your page or spread or even document from one object to the next. I have on my system; I have got it set up so that when I hit control right arrow it invokes the script because, remember, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to scripts. When I do a command, control right arrow, it invokes the script for go to the next object to the right of the current object. It is just so slick, and it really helps me keep my hands on the keyboard more which helps me be more efficient. Check out that post as well.
Anne-Marie: Isn’t Kris the guy who owns Rorohiko?
David: It is. Yes, exactly. Same Kris Coppetiers. So, he does all those great Rorohiko plug-ins which is all Lightning Brite, so yeah. That is exactly right.
And then the last one I should mention is the selection to PDF by Martinho da Gloria who is the mastermind behind the Layout Zone script which we have talked about a number of times. Basically, a lot of people said, “Well, Layout Zone is great because it lets you take objects on your page and export it out as an InDesign file”. But some people just wanted to select a few objects on their page and export just those as a PDF file.
So, Martinho said, “That’s OK. I can do that”. So he re-jiggered the script that he had already. So, instead of exporting it as an InDesign file it exports it as a PDF file. So, now there is a selection to PDF script, and that is, again, free from Automatication. We’ll put a link to all of these in the show notes.
It’s just an important thing to keep in mind. Scripts are really easy to use. If you haven’t been using them you really want to start looking into them and taking advantage of them because there is some amazing functionality.
Anne-Marie: I would say that although these are… I think all the ones you listed–are they all free?”
David: Yes, they are all free.
Anne-Marie: Although they are free, I am positive that all of their developers’ websites have got, like, contribute. Help support my scripting please! Send them five bucks, 10 bucks, 25 bucks via PayPal or whatever to help keep them going and support the InDesign community. I always do that. Don’t just grab everything that’s free and think that’s going to be there forever.
And I also appreciate all those people helping us out (pretends to start crying). It really touches my heart!
David: It does! It does because it really helps the community. I totally agree with you. It’s a great idea to contribute even if it’s five bucks, you know. If 100 of you sent five bucks, then that suddenly makes it more worthwhile for that developer to start doing more scripts. So there you go!
Anne-Marie: That’s exactly right! I hear back whenever I contribute. I get a big thank you email very often saying: “Thank you so much. Do you know only three people have clicked that button all year?”
Alright, next topic, problems with PDF presets. This is something I’ve wrote about on the blog because it actually came from a client of mine who I actually taught InDesign about three years ago and hadn’t heard from him.
He emailed me with the subject line that said – HELP with like nine exclamation points. And the issue was–he does a two color newsletter for his company, everything was copasetic until the previous issue when his printer told him, “You have a problem. All of the black has separated into four different plates”. It’s just a two color newsletter. It’s PMS Red and black text and everything else.
I don’t know if the printer charged them money to fix it or if they just had a horrible output or what happened. He said, now he is working on the next issue and he is paranoid that it’s going to happen again. He was even afraid of his PMS colors separating.
He said the only thing he can think of that he did differently in the last issue. He said was maybe somehow I accidentally went into preferences, down to appearance of black and changed one of these settings. I think we have talked about this setting before, the appearance of black. Do you want to display all the blacks as rich black or do you want to display them accurately?
You have a couple of options. One is on screen and one is printing exporting. If you choose output all blacks as rich black next to printing exporting you might think OK, there is the cause of the problem. But, people miss the title of that little area which is options for black on RGB and gray scale devices.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: So, it really makes no difference. It has no impact whatever you choose here. When you make a PDF that is supposed to be for CNYK or spot black or when you print to your local color laser writer only when you print to RGB devices. And the point is because you want blacks to be really rich black on RGB because otherwise they come out really washy looking.
He sent me his file; he sent me the InDesign file and the PDF. The PDF from last issue did indeed have four color blacks, and then I looked at the current InDesign file and separation preview showed no problem, just black in the PMS color Exported to PDF, no problem.
I figured it’s got to be something with his PDF preset. So, I gave him a call, and it turns out that he was using smallest file size preset. He had gotten used to that because I guess he was working with larger files, and they were taking forever to send the PDFs to his printer’s websites to FTP. So, he thought, “Oh, I’ll just use smallest file size”. And he was savvy enough to know smallest file size resamples images down to 100 dpi, so he increased that. He made a custom preset based on smallest file size.
What he didn’t realize was that smallest file size also converts all the colors to SRGB. You have to look under output. So if you go under output, you will see it says convert to destination. Destination is SRGB, so that would mean that the PDF had RGB blacks.
David: So, all the CNYK images and all the CNYK colors including that 100 percent black converted to RGB.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. And then Acrobat, when you open up its output preview when you open up advanced print preview, just InDesign it doesn’t say here’s the percentage of R and G and B. It immediately converts them to CNYK.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: So, RGB black converted to CNYK black is a big mess. If you have ever made a black in Photoshop, you know, it’s not 100 percent K. That was the issue, and so I said, “Just don’t choose that, don’t use that option?” Or, when I wrote about that you also mentioned he could change under color, color conversion instead of leaving it at the default convert destination. He could choose convert to destination preserve numbers.
David: Well, but you would also need to change the destination from SRGB…
Anne-Marie: From SRGB to CNYK.
David: So, he was getting hit by all sides. I think to me there’s a bigger lesson here which is just because something appears in the Adobe PDF preset menu–when you go to export a PDF at the top most pop-up menu it has a bunch of presets in it, like PDFX1A, high quality print, press quality in smallest file size. Just because something shows up in that menu doesn’t mean that it is safe for you to use.
People really need to go through. When you choose one of those you really need to go through and pick out, look at each of those panes and say, “Now, this is what this preset does. It’s going to have this amount of compression, this kind of marks and bleeds, this kind of output and so on”.
That is certainly the case with smallest file size, but even with high quality print or press quality print those don’t necessarily give you what you expect. So, for example, high quality print is a preset that will not change your RGB images to CNYK. You will get RGB in your final PDF, and a lot of printers will freak out about that Some printers are fine with it, but a lot of printers are like, “Whaa, it has to be CNYK”, especially here in North America.
Another thing is both with high quality print and press quality presets that ship with InDesign, both of those have a compatibility of Acrobat 5, not 4. So, if you expected those to be flattening your transparency into PDF 4, you know, having actually flattened transparency. Well, it’s not going to do that.
Anne-Marie: I think in an earlier versions of InDesign though, The ones for press did flatten.
David: Oh, maybe so.
Anne-Marie: I am pretty sure that CS3 press quality the compatibility is now Acrobat 5, so transparency flattener is rated out in the advance panel.
David: So, you need to take responsibility for not just choosing one of those presets out there but really looking at what it is going to do. If you chose prepress quality and you do want it to be flattened transparency because your printer says, “No, we don’t handle that”. Then, you are going to have to go ahead and change the standard to, let’s say, PDFX1A or…
Anne-Marie: Or just change the compatibility to Acrobat 4.
David: Sure.
Anne-Marie: Just leave it at press quality but just change the compatibility to Acrobat four which wakes up the transparency flattener settings in the advance panel, and then you need to make sure and change it from medium res to high res or to any custom res that you have set up.
David: Right, exactly. So, again I just keep wanting to emphasize that the presets that Adobe ships are just starting points. They are not ending points for most of us.
You have to go in there and really pay attention to all the different settings in the export Adobe PDF that it was. And once you have set it the way you want it, then save your own preset. Choose preset. This is the way I like it and then go for it.
But that smallest file size thing, that’s a scary one. That’s really setup for PDF that you are going to throw up on a website, certainly not for print.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Or for a proof, maybe.
Anne-Marie: Well, it was a huge relief to learn that it was just a menu setting that he had to change.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And then suddenly everything was fine.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: So he was happy.
David: Great. Hey, we should talk about the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week.
[eek eek sounds]
Anne-Marie: Alright. Orthogonal Line.
[laughs]
Anne-Marie: So…
David: It has something to do with dentistry? Right? [laughs] This is one of those when you go in for your orthogonals?
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: To the orthogontist?
David: Yeah. [laughs] Exactly.
Anne-Marie: Not in the help file. It’s not in preferences which is a very rich source of Obscure InDesign features and so where is this thing hiding, David?
David: The orthogonal line is hiding under the object menu down in one of my favorite submenus that convert shape submenu.
It converts shape submenu is where you can convert one shape frame to any other shape frame or path into a different type of path or frame to path and so on.
It converts shape, at the very bottom of the convert shape a popup menu for a submenu is orthogonal line. It is right underneath line. Right. You’ve got line and you’ve got orthogonal line. So what’s the difference?
An orthogonal line is only horizontal or vertical. It is perpendicular to the page and that’s the definition of orthogonal and that’s what you’re going to end up with.
Technically, if you convert, let’s say, an object which is taller than it is wide, you will get a vertical line right down the center. If it’s wider than it is tall, you will get a horizontal line.
So basically you take any object, it could be a frame, it could be a wacky path, doesn’t matter what. You convert it to an orthogonal line and you get a vertical line or a horizontal line.
I am not entirely sure who would find that useful, but it’s there. And I think my guess is that they put in there because Quark Xpress actually has an orthogonal line tool that only draws horizontal or vertical lines. It’s not entirely accurate, but it’s close enough.
Anne-Marie: You know…
David: And so I think they wanted to have something similar in InDesign.
Anne-Marie: OK. Well, I found an instance of where choosing orthogonal line does not give you an orthogonal line.
David: Wooh.
Anne-Marie: So I was trying it, while you were talking. I was trying to see what is the difference between line and orthogonal line.
David: OK.
Anne-Marie: Alright. So you select like I just dragged out an empty rectangle?
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: The image frames and I chose line, and it created a line that went from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner of the shape. Right?
David: Yup. That’s the line.
Anne-Marie: And then if I chose orthogonal line then just like you said it would create, it creates a line that’s exactly horizontal because I have a frame that was more horizontal that it was vertical.
David: Uh-huh.
Anne-Marie: Suddenly, I had the duplicate of that rectangle that I rotated about 30 degrees and I chose convert shape to line and it again created a line that went from the left upper left to the lower right hand corner only now it was slightly angled differently.
David: Uh-huh.
Anne-Marie: And then when I chose orthogonal line it created a line that went–I don’t know how it figured out the line. It’s like an average…
David: Oh, oh well.
Anne-Marie: No. OK. It is exactly horizontal but it’s rotated 30 degrees.
David: Right, because if you look in the control panel it’s just a regular object. It is just a rotated horizontal or vertical line.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: So yeah. I guess that can be useful.
Anne-Marie: I suppose. Yeah. I guess.
[laughs]
David: So that is…
Anne-Marie: It won’t work on text frames by the way. I tried. I want to see if it would make all the text all squished in the 15th dimension or something but it didn’t.
[laughter]
David: It just throws it away. That’s kind of sad.
Anne-Marie: When would you ever use this?
David: Well, if you really, really liked horizontal or vertical lines, maybe.
Anne-Marie: Maybe. You know how some people create thick lines by dragging out very thin rectangles. You know?
David: OK. Yeah, yeah.
Anne-Marie: And then if I converted that one, let me see something really quick. If I fill that with black and then so now I have like a 4-point deep rectangle and I say object convert shape to orthogonal line. Nope. It just creates a line with no…
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: I could see that a line cannot have a fill.
David: Right. So yeah, it throws away the fill color.
Anne-Marie: So no use for it at all.
David: I would like to hear…
[laughter]
David: I would like to hear from our audience. So go to the show notes and give us a comment when would you use the orthogonal line tool. Have you ever used an orthogonal line tool? Did you even know that InDesign had an orthogonal line tool? Is it that obscure?
Anne-Marie: If the object has a stroke it maintains a stroke when you convert it to a line.
David: Yup. I just learned.
Anne-Marie: That’s about it.
David: There you go. It’s obscure.
Anne-Marie: It is an obscure feature. Yeah. I think everybody by now, if you’ve listened to all 81 episodes you have PhD in InDesign.
David: Indeed. Exactly.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: From all these obscure features you could probably come to the Master class in Seattle in November and quiz all the engineers and they would probably won’t know all these either.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: You know?
David: Definitely. I like that.
Anne-Marie: That was a good one. Well, that’s it for episode 81. Thanks again to Recosoft, developers of PDF2ID for their support of the show. Don’t forget about your discount, everybody, of $20 off of PDF2ID for one week after the show is published.
We’ll have the link to their special. You are all eligible for InDesign Secrets users on our website in the show notes. Be sure to check out those show notes on our blog at InDesignSecrets.com where we will have links to all the other places and all those cool scripts that we mentioned.
David: Our newly designed blog. Our cool design blog.
Anne-Marie: Our beautifully designed blog. And you know what is really neat is that when you go to the home page the latest podcast is right there with a flash little player to play the latest podcast.
You don’t have to go digging around in the site looking for it.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Thank you very much, Pariah. OK. So we’d love to hear what you thought of the show. Leave a comment in the show notes or email us at info…oh by the way and the comments. You now have time to edit the comments.
David: That’s one of the best.
Anne-Marie: As you write it. Right, so. Lots of cool features in the new design. [laughs] OK. Now we’re almost done, email us at info@indesignsecrets.com and until we meet again this is Anne-Marie Concepcion and…
David: David Blatner for InDesign Secrets.
[music]