Podcast 82 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 82 page.
[intro music]
Ann-Marie Concepcion: Welcome to InDesignSecrets Episode 82. I’m Ann-Marie Concepcion, and I’m here along with my wonderful co-host David Blatner.
David Blatner: Hey, there, Ann-Marie.
Anne-Marie: Hey, there, David. What’s that? He’s creeping me out, man.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Our podcast and blog at InDesignSecrets.com are the independent resource for all things InDesign.
David: It’s true. And coming up in today’s show, The Do’s and Don’ts of Text in InDesign; looking back into the past, in order to learn for the future. Also, the strange case of the space-eating hair space… [laughs] What is that? You wrote that, the space-eating hair space.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: All right, good. We can do that. And then the obscure InDesign feature of the week, Join. Not miter join, we did that before, I think. Not joiner, I think we did that one before.
Anne-Marie: That’s correct.
David: Just plain Join.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: That’s what we’re going to talk about.
Anne-Marie: OK, and we want to welcome our new support of InDesignSecrets.com, Certitec, with a C – Certitec.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Certitec is a UK-based training company and authorized Adobe Training Facility owned by the one and only John Bessant, who I’ve met. And he’s a wonderful guy. And he decided, “Hey, I think that this will be a good way to reach InDesign users, by sponsoring the podcast.” So, thank you, John and Certitec. And they have a wonderful promo for our listeners too.
We’re going to give the URL, which is certitec.com/InDesignSecrets@html. And, you go to that, and within seven days of the publication date of this episode, Episode 82, fill out the form and you’ll be entered in a drawing for a free two-day course on Adobe InDesign in either London or Cardiff in the UK.
And they’re going to pull one winner for this episode and all the future episodes that they’re going to be sponsoring; they’re going to do it again. So, they’re actually giving away four chances, right, because they’re doing four episodes?
David: Mm-hmm, Mm-hmm.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty cool.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And they teach everything, not just InDesign. They teach Acrobat and all the Creative Suit apps. And you should check out their website. They have nice locations and classrooms.
David: Yeah, definitely. I mean, they do training all over the place. But, I think, they specialize in London, Manchester, Cardiff, Glasgow and Leeds. And I think, they’re great. If anybody from the UK called me and said, “Hey, you know, I need to get some training in the UK. Where should I go?” I would definitely suggest Certitec.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: That’s one of the top people. I mean, John…
Anne-Marie: Their trainers are presented at the C Bold and Adobe stuff and Publishing Expos. And I heard John was the presenter at the last InDesign user group meeting in London.
David: Yes, yeah. And he also, he was a speaker at the InDesign conference. Mogo hired him to speak at the InDesign conference a couple of years ago in London. And he was great. I mean, he really, really knows his stuff.
So, I’m sure that all the folks at Certitec know their stuff and can really communicate it well. So, thank you, again, for sponsoring InDesignSecrets. And, anybody in that part of the world, definitely you’ve got to go check out the Certitec website.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. And don’t forget to enter for your chance to win a free two-day class. I don’t remember how much it was, something like 400 pounds, 500 pounds – which is like about US$30,000.
David: Yes, yeah. Or, US$100,000, or something like that.
Anne-Marie: Mm-hmm.
David: No, it’s a… [laughs]. But, you should definitely enter; enter to win.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: You could be a winner.
Anne-Marie: Certitec.com/InDesignSecrets@html.
David: Let’s talk about dos and don’ts of text in InDesign. I did a blog post on this about a year ago, on this with the same title, Do’s and Don’ts of Text in InDesign. We’ll link to that in the show notes. And basically, I just got fed up. This happens about once a year.
You know, I get enough people – so here it has happened again – we get enough emails from people with various questions and core complaints, where I see enough files that have these just horrible mistakes in them, that I would consider errors – errors of judgment, if nothing else. And I just get so fed up that I put my foot my foot down and we say, “Dang it, we’ve got to tell people to stop doing this.”
So, that’s what happened on our blog posts and that’s yet again what’s happening now in it today. We want to put of foot down and say, “Stop this foolishness. And there’s a number of rules that we want to talk about. And we can’t cover all of them.
Anne-Marie: No.
David: Especially that blog post got, I don’t know like 50 or…
Anne-Marie: 60.
David: Sixty different responses to it; a lot of excellent rules that other people suggested as well that we should talk about. Maybe we’ll…
Anne-Marie: A very basic rule, one that people still are flagrantly disobeying is one space after a period.
David: Yeah, oh, please.
Anne-Marie: One; one, people, one. Not two.
David: Right, right.
Anne-Marie: In the old days…
David: The problem is you had millions of people who are trained to type two spaces after a dot, right? And you have to stop it.
Anne-Marie: On a typewriter.
David: On a typewriter.
Anne-Marie: Because on a typewriter every letter took up the same amount of space. A lower case I took up the same amount of space as a capital M. And so, in order to distinguish between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next, you needed some extra space. But, that’s not true with the fonts that we’re using these day in PCs and Macs, right?
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: They are proportional fonts, so a lower case I takes up much less space than a capital M and the space after a period is much bigger, proportionally, than two space after a period looks ridiculous. But, you know, sometimes I’ll talk with a client and they’ll say – and I’ll see this, it pops out to me – and I’ll say, “You know, you’re not supposed to use two spaces after a period.” And they’ll say, “But, that’s what the boss likes.” Yeah.
David: [laughs] Oh, geez.
Anne-Marie: We have this conversation; we have it every year.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: That’s what they like. They don’t think it looks right with one. So, sometimes your hands are tied.
David: Oh, no, no. You can always get a different boss.
Anne-Marie: You can say, “There are two spaces here.”
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: It just…
David: It’s so frustrating. One space after the punctuation is the modern way. And if you want, back up on that and you can either have them go to our blog, right? That’s one option. But, if you want even more backup, if people like it in print, go check out Robin Williams “The Mac is Not a Typewriter” or “The PC is Not a Typewriter,” depending on what platform you’re on.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: And she wrote this book years and years ago. It’s a wonderful book; it’s like 20 years ago. And you got to check it out. It has lots of wonderful rules about dealing with text. It’s really sort of the book on do’s and don’ts of text in many applications.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. And it applies not just to InDesign, but to Quark and Word and Publisher and everything.
David: Yeah, yeah. So, that’s one thing. The other one that comes up that I mentioned in that blog post was, “Do not apply a character style to an entire paragraph.” I think, we’ve talked about that in the podcast before as well. That’s a crazy-making one. Anybody…
Anne-Marie: It is.
David: You know, you don’t make the character style and apply it to anymore than just a few words. If you’re ever applying a character style to an entire paragraph, you’re probably doing something wrong.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. You know, I see a lot of client files in my business, doing training, because we almost always will ask a client to send us some of their sample files before training so that me or the trainer can go over it and see the kind of documents they’re working on and what it is they need to do.
So, I’ll get their InDesign file and that’s one of the first I do is I go to the paragraph styles panel and the character styles panel. And I think that you can judge, you know, the expertise level of a designer by looking at those two things.
In the paragraphs styles panel, usually there’s something, right? There is a few styles. But, you look at the character styles panel. If there’s none, I think that’s an issue.
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: And if there is a ton that are duplicates of the paragraph styles panel, that’s also an issue.
David: Oh, yeah. That’s a big red, one flag.
Anne-Marie: When you see like five or six or seven that actually make sense like red lead-in or something like that, then you say, “OK, these people know what they are doing,” you know? But, I probably at least half the time, maybe a third of the time, 80% of the paragraph styles are duplicating the character styles.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: It makes no sense.
David: It’s really, really a big problem. Do not do that at all. There’s lots of other dos and don’ts. There’s…
Anne-Marie: Double spaces after a paragraph.
David: Double, double, yeah – double returns after… Basically, anytime you see two of the same character right after each other. If it’s a white-space character, you know there’s a problem. So, if people are hitting two returns or they are hitting two tabs, you know, like tab, tab, tab, tab to get over somewhere. That is ridiculous. Just…
[crosstalk]
Anne-Marie: A lot of that, I think, comes from Word users.
David: Sure.
Anne-Marie: I can’t see a designer actually doing that. Well, they’re not typing out articles, I don’t think, in InDesign. But, they are importing Word files and they are just leaving it there.
David: Yeah, I guess that’s true, but you can clean that stuff up pretty quickly with that text clean-up script.
Anne-Marie: Right, right. It’s called Find/Change My List is the name of it.
David: Yeah, yeah. And that will remove all of those tabs in a row and replace it with a single tab. And you know, if you want more space between paragraphs, use space before or space after. Don’t…
Anne-Marie: As part of the paragraph style would be good.
David: Absolutely, yeah. Don’t try and sneak it in in various ways. What else? Oh, all caps. That was another one that always drives us crazy. Don’t type in all caps.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: That’s sort of an old one. And then, other people started throwing in a bunch of other ones. One of the first ones that came up I thought was interesting was don’t use lots and lots of text frames. If you can do it in a single text frame, then you should. Don’t try and create stuff with 50 text frames. That’s not really a do or don’t with text, but I thought it was an interesting related one.
And it is a problem. I’ve seen from some people where they would make a text frame for everything.
Anne-Marie: Right. They make a text frame for a sub-head and then they put the body copy in another text frame below it and then try to keep the spacing even. I’ve seen that quite a bit. Or text frames when they’re trying to do tables, or not tables, tabbed columns?
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Instead of making tab settings for one large wide text frame they will create each column in a separate text frame. I’ve seen that.
[laughter]
David: Oh, geez. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that. Oh, that’s bad. You know, people do the craziest things. I remember somebody doing a bulleted… I remember getting this document from somebody that had a bulleted list and I…
Anne-Marie: Oh, I know what you’re going to say.
David: Yeah, and every bullet, at the end of the line it was like hard-return, tab and then hard-return, tab, because they wanted to indent. They wanted to make a hanging indent, right?
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: And they didn’t realize that you could make a hanging indent just by doing a positive left indent and then a negative first line indent.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: And, oh, that was just…
Anne-Marie: Oh, that’s not what I thought you were going to say.
David: Oh, what did you think?
Anne-Marie: I thought you were going to say, because I’ve seen this, all of the bullets are in their separate text frame.
David: Oh, the bullets, yes! [laughs]
Anne-Marie: I’ve seen it in one tall skinny text frame with the bullets there; people using letting and empty returns to make them line up as the right side of it.
David: Yeah, right.
Anne-Marie: Or, just like a little bullet by itself; multiple 10,000 little bullets in tiny little frames they would just sort of like nudge over.
David: Wow, OK.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
David: I’m getting a stomach ache talking about this stuff.
Anne-Marie: One that bugs me is hyphens, hard hyphens.
David: Yeah, right.
Anne-Marie: It’s just amazing to me that so many people don’t even realize that there’s this thing called a discretionary hyphen. It’s not an InDesign-only feature. It is in lots of other programs.
If you have a word and you want to break it with a hyphen and it’s normally not hyphenated, and InDesign is not hyphenating it for you, you can click inside the word and type a hyphen and InDesign will often break it right there at the hyphen. You think, “OK, good, my job is done; go on to the next project.”
But then, if you edit the text, that hyphen is hard. And that hyphen might end up in the middle of the paragraph.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Very hard to catch in the final throws of getting the document out the door. Instead, you should choose type/insert special character – what is that? Where is it hiding? Anyway, it’s a discretionary hyphen under… Right. Insert special character hyphens and dashes.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: This hyphen. And there’s a keyboard shortcut for it too, which I forget. It’s something like, option hyphen…
David: You know, it’s funny, I always forget what that is now, because I used to remember it all the time. There is a discretionary line break and then there is a discretionary hyphen, which is under special character, hyphens and dashes. Discretionary hyphen is command, shift, hyphen.
Anne-Marie: Thank you.
David: So, that is definitely an important one.
Anne-Marie: So, the point of that is that it will still… If the word can break there, it will still put a hyphen there, as though you had manually entered it. But, if you then edit the text so that the word doesn’t need to break, it gets rid of the hyphen.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: You edit the text again and it has to break there, it adds the hyphen. So, see, it is discretionary.
David: You know, a lot of these rules come down to the basic tenant of publishing, which is “Always expect the unexpected”. In other words, always expect that your document is going to change.
That the art director at the last minute or your boss is going to come in and say, “Oh, we need to make this one little change, here.” And you need to expect… you need to create your documents so that at any moment they will change and you don’t have to go through a huge amount of work.
So, this discretionary hyphen thing is a big one, a really important one, because stuff changes all the time. You know, you have a little bit of reflow; you don’t want those hyphens sticking in the middle of a word looking completely dorky. So, yeah, that is definitely an important one.
Anne-Marie: Yep.
David: What else? What other kinds of things? Some people have wrote just all kinds of things in here. You know, some people say you should never track or do kerning to copy for the story?
Anne-Marie: Oh, yeah.
David: And, I don’t know, that seems a little extreme to me.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: I think there is…. It is a time-honored tradition of doing a little bit of tracking, a little bit of horizontal scaling to make something fit. In fact, there’s the…
Anne-Marie: Horizontal scaling?
David: What’s that?
Anne-Marie: Horizontal scaling?
David: Horizontal scaling? Oh, yeah, I would do like a half a percent or a percent of horizontal scaling just to sneak something in sometimes. In fact, the Teacup software…
Anne-Marie: Justification lets you do that.
David: Yeah, right. InDesign’s justification will let you do that. Teacup software has a whole plug-in, which is sort of based on that idea called Type Fitter. And Type Fitter lets you create your own sets of things. If anyone who does magazines or newspapers; times where you have to build a copy fit really fast, Type Fitter is a great tool for doing that because you just, “I just need to pull this one word up,” and it is a hassle to do it manually. And the plug-in does it really quickly. So, we will put a link in the Show Notes about that.
Any others that come to the tip of your tongue, there? Things that you would change?
Anne-Marie: No.
David: You know, a couple of people mentioned different books that you people should pay attention to.
Anne-Marie: That is correct.
David: Like the Chicago Manual Style, which, of course Ann-Marie lives by because she lives in Chicago.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] They make us all use it, yes.
David: Exactly. Even people who…
Anne-Marie: With the Yellow pages on the front stoop, you get the Chicago Manual Style.
David: [laughs] I like the very friendly and fun book, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves.” If you haven’t seen this book, it’s definitely worth taking a look at. It’s a very fun book about, mostly about grammar really, grammar and not really typesetting. But, I think, it’s a must read for people, by Lynne Truss.
Anne-Marie: Well, what about “The Elements of Style”?
David: Sure, “Elements of Style,” of course that one.
Anne-Marie: That’s more of a grammar kind of thing.
David: It’s still more grammar kind of stuff like you’re saying, but another person pointed out, “The Elements of Typographic Style” by Robert Bringhurst, which a lot of people have said, that is a really important one. So, that’s a great book you should take.
Anne-Marie: How about “Typography in InDesign” by Nigel French?
David: Oh yeah, very good book! Very good book and video, he also did that as a video title for lynda.com. So, you can either read it or watch it.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: Whichever you like. So, there’s lot’s of do’s and don’ts out there. Take a look at that post. Come up with your own. Write your own do’s and don’ts in the show notes for this episode. And we’d love to see what you think.
Anne-Marie: You know what? Do you mind if I use this as a segue?
David: Please do. What’s your segue?
Anne-Marie: I need to use it as a segue.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: To segue into something I forgot to mention at the beginning the podcast in your news.
David: Oh yeah, what?
Anne-Marie: All right, which is that I’ll be teaching some of these more high-end do’s and don’ts of text in InDesign as part of the seminar I’m doing at a conference that’s happening in Milkwaukee.
David: Oh yeah!
Anne-Marie: And I want to mention the conference because I have a discount code for InDesignSecrets users.
David: Great.
Anne-Marie: The conference is called The Creative Transitions Conference. It’s put on by a training firm up there in Milwaukee, C2. And they’re a great training company. I think, James Wamser does a lot with them. It’s the guy from Sells Printing. And it’s a three day conference sponsored by Adobe. They’ve got a bunch of speakers. They’re talking about all of the Creative Suite apps for both printing and web. Lunch and dinner is included. It’s like a big whoop-dee-doo thing up there.
I’m doing two sessions. One is called “Taking InDesign to the Next Level,” which means really improving your skills in all different ways. And “Moving from QuarkXPress to InDesign.” Yes, there’s still QuarkXPress users around…
David: Oh yeah.
Anne-Marie: … Who need to move to InDesign. And then, there’s a bunch of other presenters doing other sessions. So the discount code, which will give you $100 off if you enter this in the coupon area of the form on the website is: AMC (guess who that stands for).
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: AMC0808.
David: There you go.
Anne-Marie: For $100 off, and the website… we’ll put it in the show notes, but in case you’re listening in your car and you need to veer off really quick and go to an Internet cafe and dial in, is c2-events.com.
David: Great. That promises to be a great show I’m sure.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. OK, so that was my segue about teaching do’s and don’ts as part of my InDesign.
[crosstalk]
David: [laughing] Very subtle.
Anne-Marie: I forgot to put it in our TOC.
David: OK, that’s great. I’m glad you stuck that in there. Another typographic thing, which we should talk about is the strange case of a space eating hairspace.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: Which is an issue that Jamie McKey brought up. And Jamie, some of you know, he’s taught at some conferences in the past, is very active in the InDesign community. He’s a great typesetter in Michigan, I think. And he brought up a very interesting point, which is if you have let’s say a single quote immediately followed by a double quote…
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: And what I’m saying quotes, I’m talking about curly quotes, typographer quotes here.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: So let’s say you’ve got somebody speaking, and they’re quoting somebody else. And so you end up having…
Anne-Marie: She said, “I love ‘InDesign.’”
David: Ooh good. He said, “I love ‘InDesign’.” And so at the end of that, you would have an end single quote and then an end double quote. Or, I think if you’re in England it would just be the opposite. You’d have an end double quote, and then an end single quote.
But, in either case, when you typset that in many many fonts, it looks just totally wrong in InDesign.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. It just looks like three curly quotes in a row. It doesn’t look like a single followed by a double, or a double followed by a single. The spacing is almost exactly the same. And so, the point is that Jamie McKey was trying to add a little bit of space in between the single and the double quote.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Right? So, he went to type, insert special character, spaces, hair space, insert white space hair space. And the strange case of the hair space thing is that it made it tighter.
David: Yeah. It actually got closer together so that the double quote actually overlapped the single quote. So, it did this huge negative kerning all of a sudden. And I was like, what the heck is going on there? So, he was checking into it. And it turns out, it’s not really a bug, but it’s a really weird thing in InDesign.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: That has to do with the fonts.
David: Yeah, well.
Anne-Marie: With the font metrics.
David: With the font metrics. And what’s really going on here is that InDesign says that any time you’re setting text, InDesign is constantly going back to the font metrics. Font metrics means the way that the designer designed the font, especially kerning pairs. So, this “t” next to this “o” should have a little bit more or a little bit less space.
And so, all that stuff is built into the font, and all that information is called the metrics. So, there are lots and lots of kerning pairs in many fonts, especially Adobe fonts. And there is a kerning pair for space followed by a quote. Right? Or a quote followed by a space.
And typically you want those to be a little big closer together. The problem is that when InDesign, when you add that little hair space, InDesign says, well it’s a space, so let’s kern it, let’s do a negative kerning, let’s make it closer together. But, the hair space is already tiny, and so you end up with the characters overlapping.
So, it’s trying to be helpful, but it ends up just making a mess. And that’s not just hair spaces, it’s also, I’m trying to remember some of the other spaces that are in there. Like a sixth space, or a thin space, quarter space, basically any of these other spaces often will get screwed up.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. It’s interesting that the fonts don’t include a kern pair for hair space.
David: That’s what they need.
Anne-Marie: Well I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s an Adobe font they should be including the kern pairs for all the characters possible to be included in their software.
David: I guess. I don’t know if I think it’s really reasonable for them to do like a hair space. What I think is unreasonable though, is I think it’s unreasonable that InDesign treats all spaces as the same width. I mean, InDesign is smart enough to know that a hair space is smaller than a regular space. So, InDesign should simply say look, don’t do a kerning pair for a space quote when it’s not really a space. I mean, it’s basically treating all of the space characters as the same width, and that’s simply not true.
Anne-Marie: That’s true, that’s true, I guess.
David: So, I think, it’s closer to being a bug in InDesign than anything.
Anne-Marie: But, there is a fix. The fix in InDesign is to switch from metrics to optical kerning.
David: Yes, that’s right.
Anne-Marie: When you switch to optical kerning, then suddenly the spacing goes out, and it looks like how you wanted it to look.
David: That is correct. That is correct. Or, it just uses a larger space. Because you select space and that would do it to. But, yes, in general, optical kerning is a pretty good solution, if you want to have optical kerning through out your entire document, which I’m not sure a lot of people want to do.
Anne-Marie: Some people don’t like it. I personally love it.
David: Well, there you go. Then, you can use that.
Anne-Marie: Right. So me, I never saw the problem. I went “Oh, he must be using metrics,” I see.
David: Using metrics instead of optical. Interesting. I typically use metrics for all my body text. I think, Jamie and I both have the feeling that optical is great for headlines, but for any kind of body text then why not just use metrics. I don’t know, I’m going to have to look at that. Maybe, I’ll have to rethink that, but…
Anne-Marie: We talked about this before and I mentioned that optical, when applied to smaller typefaces, usually adds a little bit more space, and when applied to display faces, or large type sizes, tightens it up.
David: Usually, yeah.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: There you go. Anyway, that was the case, the strange case of the space eating hair space. And, something you should be aware of, if you’re doing that kind of setting of type.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: Definitely. Watch out.
Anne-Marie: OK, now, it is time for the obscure InDesign feature of the week.
David: Which is?
Anne-Marie: Today’s letter is Join.
David: [laughs] Join? Come and join us. Join the club.
Anne-Marie: That’s right, Join. And, this is another one of your suggestions where I’m like, where is Join?
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Right. What was the one you did the last time? That I’m like, it’s not there is it? Orthogonal line, that’s right. By the way, you know, you guys should read our show notes about the orthogonal line episode.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Because people came up with a bunch of really great uses for it.
David: It’s true.
Anne-Marie: So, yeah.
David: Good ideas. Definitely.
Anne-Marie: All right, so this one, Join, is to…
David: Join.
Anne-Marie: You think Join, oh InDesign can join two separate paths? I mean, that’s what I immediately think of, right, from Illustrator, Join.
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: And actually it’s true, but where? Where do you do that?
David: Yeah, you could look through all the menus, all the panels, you could look throughout all of the entire document.
Anne-Marie: You could look till the cows come home buddy, and it’s not going to be there.
David: Yep, yep. I mean, it should be under the Paths sub-menu, right. You go to the Object Menu, go to Paths and there’s like, Open Path, Close Path, Reverse Path. You expect to find Join Path there, and it’s not there. But, that is, as you said, it’s all about joining two open paths and making them into a single path. It’s not in the menus, but it is a keyboard shortcut and you know how much we like keyboard shortcuts.
Anne-Marie: Yes, we are keyboard shortcut freaks.
David: Definitely check out the InDesign Secrets Keyboard Shortcut poster.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Which, actually I don’t think it’s on there, because it’s not a default.
Anne-Marie: No, because it’s not part of the default.
David: That’s true. It’s not a default keyboard shortcut. You have to add your own keyboard shortcut to that. Which means you have to go to the Edit Menu and choose Keyboard Shortcuts. Then, make your own new set, if you haven’t already. Then, go to Product Area Object Menu, because, remember we thought it should be in the Object Menu and in fact, there in the Object Menu product area, there is an option called, Join. Well, it says Paths Join, Paths Join, and you assign your own keyboard shortcut to it. Then, it just kind of magically starts working.
Anne-Marie: So then, you need to create two paths that have open ends.
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: And then, select the two open ends? Do you need to select the two open ends?
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: Or can you just select both paths?
David: You do need to select the open ends, the points at the end.
Anne-Marie: So, you do that with the Direct Selection tool, the white arrow. Just drag a little selection rectangle around… I’m doing it as we speak and then, I assigned Ctrl+P, and there it is! It joined them.
David: Isn’t that cool?
Anne-Marie: That is very cool.
David: Now, the one thing…
Anne-Marie: Now they have to be… Go ahead.
David: They have to be really close to each other. They have to be within six points of each other on the page. So, whichever two points you want to have connected, make sure they’re within six points of each other and then you can connect them. It actually merges them together into a single point.
Anne-Marie: If they’re too far apart you will get an alert that says, “Cannot join path” and then it will remind you… It says, “The two end points may not be close enough.” [sarcasm] I like that. Who wrote that alert message?
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: It’s very chill. They may not be close enough.
David: That’s right.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Less than six points in parentheses.
David: Make them more intimate.
Anne-Marie: OK [laughs]
David: Hey, I just wanted to go back and change something I just said. I said that it merges into a single point. I think, that’s actually not true. I think, it actually creates a line segment between the two points.
Anne-Marie: Wait a minute. I don’t think so. Hang on.
David: Oh, really? OK.
Anne-Marie: Because I’m pretty sure it made just one path. And it actually merged two points.
David: You think so?
Anne-Marie: OK, I have two points… Yeah and then I select them and I press my Ctrl+P. Oops, I got the Chill Alert again.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: All right, so I’m zoomed in to like 9000 percent and these things are separated by the space of a flea speck and select them both. [sarcasm] Like I do this all the time, right? I’m so happy with this.
David: [laughs] Hey, we said this was an obscure feature, right? I mean, this is a trip.
Anne-Marie: No, it actually does join them into one point. It doesn’t drag out, it doesn’t create a new line connecting the points.
David: On my system, it connects them. It draws a line between the two.
Anne-Marie: No way.
David: Yeah, way.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: I made two paths and I select the end points on those two paths. They’re really close to each other and it draws a little line segment between them.
Anne-Marie: Wow. Are you on Windows or Mac?
David: I’m on the Mac.
Anne-Marie: Me too.
David: And I’m…
Anne-Marie: No, I click this one point and it’s got two handles poking out of it.
David: Are you sure you applied it to Paths Join? Fascinating!
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: Are they right on top of each other or are they just close?
Anne-Marie: No, they’re just close.
David: Dang!
Anne-Marie: They’re two completely different shaped line segments.
[clock ticking]
David: Wow, this is really frustrating. I think there’s either a bug here or some strange irrationality why sometimes it does a connect, and sometimes it actually averages it. It joins them into a single point.
Anne-Marie: Right. I know, I cannot get it to connect. No matter what kind of line I draw, it always averages and then joins.
David: All right. Well, at least we know what Join is supposed to do and we will get back to you in the next episode.
Anne-Marie: Either way, it does join, either way it does join the lines.
David: That’s true. It does join, that’s true. So, we’re going to get back to you, hopefully next time, with a more in-depth answer. We’re going to do, like, 20 minutes just on…
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: [sarcasm] Look forward to that one.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: [sarcasm] I bet John is really looking forward to that one at Certitec. Yeah, OK.
David: Exactly. [laughs] In the meantime, that is it for Episode 82. Thanks again to Certitec, the UK-based authorized Adobe training center that does InDesign and Acrobat stuff, for their support of InDesign secrets. Definitely check out Certitec.com/InDesignSecrets.html to enter your chance to win the first of four two-day InDesign classes that they’re giving away. You have to do that within a week of each of these episodes that they’re sponsoring.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. To be eligible for the drawing. Don’t forget about the Creative Transitions Conference coming up in August. August 13th – 15th, in Milwaukee, WI. A three-day extravaganza of all sorts of wonderful print and web stuff. And if you’d like to get $100 off the attendance fee, enter AMC0808 at c2-events.com. I’ll be doing two sessions there. Hopefully, I’ll see you there.
David: Great. All right, be sure to check out the show notes at our blog at inDesignSecrets.com. We’ll have linked to all of the places that we’ve mentioned here. We’d love to hear what you though about the show. Leave a comment in those show notes or email us at info@InDesignSecrets.com. Until we meet again, this is David Blatner.
Anne-Marie: And Anne-Marie Concepcion. For InDesign Secrets.
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