Podcast 83 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 83 page.
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David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets, episode 83. 83 is, I don’t think there’s anything special about 83.
Anne-Marie Conception: No.
David: It’s a prime number. It’s probably a prime number.
Anne-Marie: Is it?
David: I don’t know. I think so. I was trying to think of something special about it. Hey, I’m David Blatner. I am here with my co-host, Anne-Marie Conception.
Anne-Marie: Hi, David. How are you?
David: I am well. I’m still trying to figure out what’s special about 83. I don’t know. It’s going through my head today. So, our podcast and the blog at InDesignSecrets.com are the independent resource for all things InDesign-ign-ign-ign-ign-ign.
Anne-Marie: And once again, this episode is sponsored by Certitec, Adobe authorized training across the U.K. That is United Kingdom; and they specialize in Adobe InDesign and Acrobat. Their trainers have presented at Siebold, at InDesign conferences, publishing expos, and they are offering a premium goodie to InDesign Secrets readers and listeners – a free two-day Adobe authorized InDesign CS-3 training course.
And they offer introduction and also advanced; and it’s your choice which one you want to take. The courses are held in London or Cardiff. It’s in the U.K., so they’re not paying your plane fare. So if you want to be involved in that drawing, they’re giving away one free course with every podcast that they sponsor. Go to Certitec.com/InDesignSecrets.html, and of course, we’ll have that URL in our show notes, and fill out the form. You have to fill out the form within seven days after the date of this podcast.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: And then, I think a week after that, they announce who the winner is. So, they should be shortly coming up with the winner from the first time they did this, for episode 82.
David: That’s right. We haven’t heard that yet.
Anne-Marie: No, we haven’t heard that yet.
David: But they’re very good. If you’re anywhere in the U.K., you definitely need to check out Certitec for training. Just get some information from them because they’re very, very good. And they also have 83 offices, no.
[laughter]
David: Well, there’s got to be something about 83 in there. OK, so, thank you very much, Certitec and John Bassant for sponsoring InDesign Secrets.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: Coming up on today’s show, we’re going to do a quick show with some gotchas, some little hidden things that you often don’t think about in InDesign. And also the obscure InDesign feature of the week-eek-eek-eek-eek-eek.
Anne-Marie: Eek-eek-eek-eek-eek.
David: Which is deactivate.
Anne-Marie: Deactivate.
David: Deactivate. We must deactivate.
[laughter]
David: All right.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: So, you came up with this gotchas thing. And you wrote me this huge, long list of all these gotchas that have bit me.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Well, somebody emailed me and said that they’re trying to add a button. No, no, this was on the InDesign form on the [inaudible] website. They’re trying to program a button that, once it’s opened up in the PDF, will go back to the previous page. And they say it’s not working. And, David, I’m sorry to say that they had your book in front of them. They quoted from it.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: They said we have Real World CS-3 book, a wonderful book, but I’m following the instructions exactly; and it’s not working. And I said, I will bet, and I felt like Carnac the Magnificent or whatever Johnny Carson used to do, I will bet that you have forgotten to click the add button.
David: Uh-huh.
Anne-Marie: Because that’s what everybody does. Now, I haven’t heard back from the woman, but I was thinking, that is a gotcha. You think you’re doing everything right, but you forget to click one tiny button. You know, there’s a little tiny add button and then there’s a big, fat OK button that’s throbbing.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: So, you click the OK button; and it’s not working. That’s because you’re supposed to click add. So, that is just one example of some of those gotchas in InDesign. And then I just had this stream of consciousness thing where I started typing out all the gotchas that I know about. And I said I think this would be a good topic for the podcast.
David: Well, I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, it’s a crucial one – the idea of having to click add. And that shows up all over the place. Same thing in the edit keyboard shortcuts dialogue box.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: You make a keyboard shortcut and say OK, but you forgot to click assign, and it just bites you.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. There’s a little assign button right above a huge, throbbing OK.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Right. You have to click assign and make sure that keyboard shortcut appears in that little dialogue box, which is just the same thing with a button.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: When you select a graphic and you go to object interactive convert to button. And you choose an event and an action, like the lady has said, on click, this thing should move back a page; you can’t click OK. You have to click the add button. And then you’ll see that little Java script written out on the left hand side. And then you’re good to go.
David: But there’s a lot of things like that, a lot of gotchas which are, don’t forget to click. In fact, in general, I think most of these things are, don’t forget to click.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. Let’s take turns. Let’s do one and one.
David: Another one is when you make a style, let’s say a character style or a paragraph style; and you make one, and then maybe you’ve made it based on something that’s some text in your document. So you create some text in the document, you put your cursor in there, you make the style. InDesign automatically sucks up all the formatting from that into your dialogue box. You click OK, and then, boom. You figure that is has applied it to that text, but in fact, it does not by default.
Anne-Marie: Nope.
David: Not unless you turn on the check box that says apply to style. And I believe that’s new in CS-3.
Anne-Marie: That’s correct, in CS-3.
David: So, in CS-2 and earlier, it wouldn’t do it. You always had to apply it manually, apply it to the text. That’s a gotcha. That one made me crazy.
Anne-Marie: Right. Yes and another gotcha that Adobe fixed in CS-3 has to do with find font.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: You get a document; and let’s say you want to convert, I run into this all the time when you’re converting a document into open type. So, we want to get rid of the old school type one versions of Helvetica or whatever; and change to open type. So, oh, the fastest way’s just to go to find font, choose type find font, say OK, it used to be this font, change it to that font, go throughout the entire document, and then you’re done. Everything is perfect. You’ve got all your new fonts. You click done, but the first time that you start writing something new in a new text frame, it’s using the old font.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: And that’s because it’s still in the style, right?
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: So find font does not automatically update the fonts called in the styles. You used to have to do that manually, but now in CS-3, they’ve got this little check box at the bottom of find font that says redefine style when changing all.
David: I know, but I’m forever forgetting to click that check box, to turn that on.
Anne-Marie: Oh, I love that thing. I love it. And you have to remember it only works with change all. That’s a hint. It doesn’t work with change, find change. You have to hit change all for it to go into effect.
David: Right, right. That’s a good point. And it’s all kinds of things, like work spaces. If you work with a bunch of work spaces and you move your panels around your screen. And then you switch to a different work space; you lose all the work that you’ve done in moving your panels to where you want. So, don’t forget; if you have moved your panels around and you want to save that work, save that work space. Save it as a new work space. That’s another little gotcha for sure.
Anne-Marie: OK. How about tables?
David: Oh, there are so many things with tables. Oh, my goodness.
Anne-Marie: You’ve got a table. You’re adjusting table size. The table’s perfectly sized. All the columns are perfectly sized, and you realize, oh, this third column needs to be a little bit bigger. So, if you drag the column divider with the mouse, the entire table, or that column and everything to the right, resizes proportionately.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: Yes. You don’t want that. So if you love the overall dimensions of the table, you don’t want to change it; you just want to the column widths within it, you need to hold down the shift key as you drag that column divider. That’s a little gotcha.
David: -hmm. That’s a gotcha. That’ll definitely – that’s more of a tip than a gotcha. I don’t know. That’s a cute tip.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: But I don’t know; splitting hairs here.
Anne-Marie: It’s a tacha.
David: Let’s just do one more here.
Anne-Marie: It’s a tacha.
[laughing]
David: Let’s just do one more here. [laughs] A tacha; I like that. One more. Let’s talk the layers. You’ve got a bunch of objects on different layers; and you copy them. Then, search for a different part of your document or search for a different document, and you paste them. This really bugs me. Again, it gets me all the time.
It typically by default will show up on one layer; whatever the later you’re currently on. All of those objects that were on different layers show up on the same layer, on just one layer. It doesn’t put it on proper layers, and that makes me crazy because the gotcha is don’t forget to turn on paste remembers layers. That shows up on the layers panel, file menu.
Anne-Marie: That’s true.
David: Little things, that you just have to remember to turn it on or click that check box or whatever. It’s so important. We should move on, but I really have to say though because while you were doing one of those tachas or gotchas or something I did have to look up in real world InDesign CS3.
Page 801, bottom of the page, it does say when talking about buttons and adding behaviors to buttons, it says Step No. five and I quote, “Very, very important: very, very important. Click the add button at the bottom of the behaviors tab. If you don’t click add, the behavior does not stick, and you get really frustrated”.
Anne-Marie: I don’t know what it was in my instructions that changed it; but she said–her reply, I just looked it up, was, “Yes, that is a huge help. Thank you!!”
David: So your help could have been look at Step No. 5.
Anne-Marie: I could have said that; but I said the other gotcha was don’t forget to turn on include inter-activity and include hyperlinks or whatever when you export to PDF.
David: Oh my goodness, that’s a huge gotcha. That one gets people all the time. If you are doing anything with the inter-activity buttons or movies or whatever; you have to have to have that inter-activity thing turned on. Well, not hyperlinks, that’s a different check box. That gets people all the time. Why aren’t the buttons working in the PDF? So, always turn on that check box. Good. All right.
Can we move on to…?
Anne-Marie: Yes, and what I think is interesting is that the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week [echo] is also somewhat of a gotcha.
David: Oh, it is. You’re right, that is. It is, as we mentioned earlier, deactivate which sounds pretty frightening; and it is pretty radical. Deactivate, which shows up in the Help Menu in InDesign, basically tells Adobe that you don’t want this version of InDesign to be active any more. It doesn’t uninstall it on this computer, this particular computer. It doesn’t uninstall it. It just takes your serial number off of it, as it were.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. It’s off. It means then the reason you would want to deactivate is because you want to install it on a different computer because under the end user license agreement you can have two activations. You can install it on two different computers and use them both. But you can’t use them at the same time. Right?
David: Right. Technically, you can use them both at the same time, but you’re not supposed to use them at the same time.
Anne-Marie: That’s correct. Well, who would technically use them at the same time unless you’re really busy and you’re have multiple brains. And you’re working on one project on one computer and the other project on the other computer?
David: You’re saying you don’t do that?
Anne-Marie: I actually do. I actually am surrounded by three computers.
David: Me, too.
[laughter]
David: But, if you want to have–say you’ve got two machines and then suddenly you’ve got a different machine that you need to install InDesign on temporarily, you are going to have to deactivate it off one of those computers that it’s already running on. To do that, you go to the Help Menu and choose deactivate. It says, are you sure you want to deactivate? Yes, I’m sure. You deactivate it. It won’t uninstall it. It just makes it no longer activated. It automatically quits. And then, you can have InDesign running on a different computer. You install it and activate it on that computer as long as you don’t have more than two at a time on.
Anne-Marie: It’s copy protection that’s on top of the serial numbers is the fact that you have to activate it.
David: Yes, that’s right.
Anne-Marie: And to activate it you need the Internet connection or you need to call Adobe if you don’t have an Internet connection.
David: That’s right.
Anne-Marie: Then, they ask you a series of 50, 000 questions to make sure you are who you say you are, and they will give you an activation code.
David: Now, what surprised me was Bob Levine a few weeks ago; maybe last month, mentioned in a blog post in InDesign Secrets that it turns out you can only do this deactivation, reactivation 20 times. And then it stops working. Then, Adobe says, “Whoa, whoa. What the heck are you doing? You must be doing some kind of nefarious work here”. And they stop you.
You can call them, and apparently they’ll give you a few more. But I just think that’s wrong. I think that’s just sick and wrong that Adobe does that. If I want to deactivate and reactivate as many times as I want, I should be able to do that. That’s my basic feeling about that. Anyway, that is one little thing. That’s what deactivate is all about, and it can be very, very useful.
Here’s the gotcha. This has happened to me a couple of times now. I won’t be thinking and for some reason I need to uninstall InDesign. Maybe, I’m upgrading. We do a lot of stuff with Beta software so I’ll uninstall the version of InDesign that I have. And then I’ll go and try and reinstall the new version. And I will have forgotten to deactivate the last version, and that’s the gotcha.
InDesign does not make it easy to deactivate once you have uninstalled. If you’ve uninstalled, then it’s gone. There’s no way to get it back so always deactivate before you uninstall, for sure.
Anne-Marie: Right, right. For example, you are selling your computer and you want to get rid of all the software. Don’t just delete everything, right? Make sure you deactivate your Creative Suite programs, then delete it, then wipe the hard drive.
David: Exactly, exactly. Somebody was pointing this out; and I haven’t had this experience so I don’t know if it’s true. They put a new hard drive into their computer or a new mother board or a new something into their computer and then ran it. And then InDesign Creative Suites said, “No, this is no longer active”.
And I think something about the activation ties it to the particular hardware, I believe. If the hardware changes too dramatically, then it may mess up your activation. You know, somebody out there…
Anne-Marie: Sounds like that could be trouble. I know it’s OK to upgrade your RAM. It’s not going to change it. I think Windows is the same thing. They may be more Draconian than Adobe.
David: Well, definitely if there’s anyone out there who has had that experience, go to the show notes and tell us, leave us a comment on this podcast if you’ve had that experience or you have not had that experience, either way. If you think that’s true or not, that would be very interesting to learn more about. That is deactivate.
Anne-Marie: The no longer obscure feature, deactivate.
David: Exactly.
Anne-Marie: That’s it for Episode 83. Thank you again to John Lesant and Certitec for their support of the show. Don’t forget about that special URL, certitec.com/indesignsecrets.html to sign up for that free drawing for that free 2-day InDesign class over there.
Be sure to check out the show notes on our blog at indesignsecrets.com where we’ll have links to all the places we mentioned. We’d love to hear what you thought of today’s quickie show. Leave a comment in the show notes or email us at info@indesignsecrets.com.
Until we meet again, this is Anne-Marie Concepcion and.
David: David Blatner for InDesign Secrets.
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