Podcast 85 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 85 page.
[music]
David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets, Episode 85. I am David Blatner. I am here along with my cohost Anne-Marie Concepcion.
Anne-Marie: Hi there David. How are you doing?
David: I am tired honestly, pretty tired.
Anne-Marie: Long day?
David: It’s been a long day. How about you?
Anne-Marie: Long week, yes. I am doing great. I am feeling peppy.
David: Peppy?
Anne-Marie: Peppy and zippy.
David: Zippy! Wow! Peppy and zippy; OK, we’ll balance each other out.
Anne-Marie: OK good.
David: There we go. So if I have a big yawn in the middle everyone will understand.
Anne-Marie: Yes. OK, no problem.
David: All right, our podcasts and blog at InDesign Secrets are the independent resource for all things…
Anne-Marie: InDesign.
David: Oh yes, InDesign.
Anne-Marie: You always do that. I think, did he actually forget? This episode is sponsored by our friends at Certitec, Jon Bessant, et cetera; Adobe authorized training across the United Kingdom. They specialize in our friend Adobe InDesign and Acrobats. They have training courses that start from introduction to expert level and their offices are all over the UK.
As regular listeners know, they have been offering this cool deal where, if you go to their website to the URL certitec.com/indesignsecrets.html; which will be in our show notes; fill out a form within seven days from the time this podcast has been published, you will be entered in a drawing for a free two day class in Adobe InDesign, introductory or advanced.
Jon has told us he’s gotten a phenomenal response. This is the last of the four podcasts that he is sponsoring at this time. So each time people could sign up and try again. This is your last shot at it right now. Go to certitec.com/indesignsecrets.html to sign up to be entered in their drawing.
David: Yes if you are anywhere even near the UK, you should definitely check out Certitec. If you’re in South Africa or something, it may be less relevant to you.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: But if you’re in the UK definitely check out Certitec. They do really great stuff, definitely.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: OK, coming up on today’s show we’re going to talk about some news, a little bit of news. Then we’re going to talk to about colors.
Anne-Marie: Colors.
David: Colored. Then we’ll do the obscure InDesign feature of the week eek eek eek eek eek with our special guest obscurist Sandee Coen.
Anne-Marie: Obscurist? Is that a word?
David: Well, obscurists usually make things obscure. I guess. Sandy is doing the opposite. Sandy Coen is going to be our special guest deobscureist. Deobscureing the unfocus and unblur features.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: So that’s going to be very interesting.
Anne-Marie: Those are good ones, unfocus and unblur in InDesign. That’s obscure.
David: Who knew?
Anne-Marie: OK; so news. I think the big news for both of us this week is the astounding success and happiness that we had at our first online webinar.
David: That’s so true. It was awesome. It was awesome. We got people from all over the world, from Norway, Mexico, Slovenia, all across North America. People signing in to our connect session, our connect room. We did a 90 minute. Actually, it was a little bit more; probably, a hundred minute eSeminar on InDesign Tips Tricks and Techniques.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: It was fun.
Anne-Marie: By we, we mean you.
David: David.
Anne-Marie: David? You carried that show. I was there just listening and helping out people with questions. 90 minutes you talked nonstop, of the top of your head basically; just throwing up new documents, drawing squares, insisting ‘I’m not a designer. Remember I’m not a designer.
But I thought it was great. I learned a couple of new things too. I liked that.
David: Well, there is always more to learn. That’s what the great part about these things is: there’s always more to learn.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: We had beginners, intermediate and advance users in that class. We got a bunch of comments back from people saying, “yes, there were all kinds of little things stuck in there that I just did not realize”. That made me happy.
We had a good time. We will definitely be doing more of those.
Anne-Marie: Yes. If you missed the announcement for that webinar or eSeminar, however you would like to call it, just keep an eye out on the blog because we’ll post about it…
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: Then we will also announce it in the podcast. At some point we’ll have some sort of sign up list prepared. Definitely we are going to be doing one next month I’m sure. So keep that in mind.
David: Yes. Maybe in the next couple weeks even, if we get excited. Who knows? I had a good time. I want to do another one.
Anne-Marie: I know. I know. Well, I do connect a lot; but not the public seminars. In fact, this week I did eight straight hours on connect teaching a company, for two days straight; in Minnesota, the InDesign and Copy Workflow.
David: Oh, interesting.
Anne-Marie: Then an advanced InDesign session one afternoon. So that was fun.
Other news is that I mentioned earlier that I was speaking at a conference in Milwaukee this month.
David: Yes. How did that go?
Anne-Marie: That went great. It was the first time they put it on. It was the C2 graphics training up in Milwaukee. They put it on. It’s called Creative Transitions. Three days. They had people from Adobe there, people that flew in, and me. I just drove up from Chicago. They had, I know, over a hundred attendees from all over the place.
David, what I wanted to mention was that one of the first sessions that I did, one of the first ones, was “Taking InDesign to the Next Level.” That was it. They gave me a really nice introduction. It was very crowded; standing room only, in the back. I said something about, “Oh yes, this was an obscure InDesign feature of the week.” About 12 people in the audience went ‘eek eek eek eek’, [laughter] all together. It was so funny.
I was like, “oh, we have some podcast fans in the audience”.
David: That is brilliant. That’s great.
Anne-Marie: I thought that was great. All right, that was wonderful. Thank you very much, C2.
You guys should check them out up there is Milwaukee. Just go to creative transitions or search for that in Google. You will see what it was all about.
David: Excellent; excellent.
Anne-Marie: Also the last bit of news…or almost the last bit of news, don’t forget we still have out backtoschool special for our posters.
David: Oh yes, yes, yes50% off all those posters; either the CS2 or the CS3 posters. You can go to the site and click on store. There’s a little coupon code there.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: You can get 50% off. So that is a great deal on those full color posters.
Anne-Marie: It is a great deal, yes.
All right; then also lots of stuff in the latest issue of InDesign Magazine. Did you get it?
David: Oh yes. Thank you. Yes, the InDesign Magazine issue 25 just shipped. It has lots of great stuff. We don’t publish InDesign Magazine. I am the editorial director of it so it is sort of an informal relationship with them.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: It’s a good issue. Chuck Green did a very nice article on colors, which is what started making me think about all these colors; why we wanted to talk about colors in our podcast today. Keith Gilbert did a great article on how to get stuff from one document into another in InDesign. There’s five ways that you need to know about how to do that. There are all kinds of other articles, reviews, and stepbysteps.
Pariah Burk, one of our contributors, wrote two articles in that issue, one on making really, really cool side sideheads and another one all about placing. So definitely check that out.
If you are not a subscriber then you should at least download the free trial issue at indesignmag.com. Just go to indesignmag.com. We’ll have a link on our show notes. It’s a free trial issue and there are some really cool articles in there, including a nice article by Michael Murphy on how to design and work with tables. If you do anything with tables you must read that article.
Go to indesignmag.com. Get the free download. Hopefully, you’ll subscribe and get that newest issue. It’s good stuff, Maynard…
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: So good.
Anne-Marie: All right, so we need a few good color tips.
David: Yes, yes, yes, yes. Let’s do that; tips.
These are just a few color type of things that we think people need to know about. I found some old blog entries from a couple years ago that we mentioned. They are totally relevant for today too. What is the paper color? People, for years, have been using this paper color thing. They don’t really realize what it is.
Anne-Marie: Yes, I know. I still run into people who add a color, white; Right?
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Because it’s what they are used to from Quark. They’re coloring everything with white instead of paper. I will go there. I will delete the color white. They will go “ha ha ha ha” [panting ] . [laughter] I go, look, you can replace it with paper. You delete the white. You replace it with paper.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: One less color to deal with in your swatches panel.
David: Exactly. Paper means go all the way through to the paper, right? It basically knocks out the paper. It is white. In most cases, it is white. Yet, it isn’t always white, because you can change the paper color. A lot of people don’t realize that you can just go right into InDesign, into the swatches panel, and edit the paper color. When you do that it only changes on screen. It doesn’t change your final output at all. It changes your screen view of what paper color is.
So if you’re…
Anne-Marie: That’s correct. So like when Whole Foods hires you to design their new logo for their jute bags. It is like a tan color. You are trying to design something that would look good against that tan color. You don’t have to drag up a big color swatch and fill it on the master page with that color, just change the paper color.
David: Right, right.
Anne-Marie: Then if you knock something out, if you put black on top. Then you put some type on top of that and color it with that brownish color paper color it will knock out to the back.
David: Right, exactly.
Anne-Marie: Of course when you print, you have to load the printer with some of that jute color paper. Otherwise it’s not going to look like how it does on the screen!
[laughter]
David: In that case, if you want to proof on that then you need to get a profile that actually uses that color stock. Which isn’t so hard and then you can actually print using Indesigns proofing feature to print to that color. But that’s another bigger subject. The paper color itself is a nice, simple, quick and dirty proof on screen for color.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: I definitely think people should check that out. Speaking of editing colors, I wanted to throw one other quick tip here because a lot of people don’t realize that you can edit a color by right clicking on it in the swatches panel or control click on a MAC with a one button mouse.
Anne-Marie: I thought that we made a rule that we could not say control click anymore in this podcast!
[laughter]
David: Because you want everyone to have a two button mouse?
Anne-Marie: Yes!
David: Yes, yes. Some people they like that one button mouse. But we are not going to go there right now.
Anne-Marie: All right; fine.
David: I am going to keep saying it, right click or control click with one button mouse.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: It is almost one syllable now.
Anne-Marie: At least you don’t say… what really gets me is when they say or control click if you are on a MAC. NO!
David: Yes, right.
Anne-Marie: So just say one button mouse.
David: One button mouse.
Anne-Marie: I don’t think a one button mouse will even work on a PC.
David: I don’t know. It is a good question. We are going to have to try that! Anyway, if you want to edit a color…
Anne-Marie: Yes?
David: … right click on it or [mumbles] then choose swatch options. I find it really annoying they call it swatch options. I really wish they would call it edit color or edit color swatch or whatever or even just edit swatch. They call it swatch options.
Anne-Marie: They do that for paragraph styles, too.
David: I know it just all options.
Anne-Marie: Yes, I know.
David: It’s not options. It’s editing it. You are editing the thing.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: Choose swatch options and that is how you edit it. The reason I like doing it that way instead of double clicking on the color is because when you double click on a color, we have talked about this before, it is a gotcha. Double click on a color it will apply it to any object you have selected on your page.
Anne-Marie: That is right.
David: Or it will make it the default color.
Anne-Marie: That is right.
David: I don’t like doing that, right clicking on a color swatch is much better. Then you just choose swatch options even though they have a totally stupid name for that in the context menu.
[laughter]
David: Anyways, that is that!
Anne-Marie: That is a good one! What about finding colors?
David: Oh yes, you wrote that great post, two years ago or something…
Anne-Marie: Oh that is right!
David: … about how to find colors in your document.
Anne-Marie: Yes, how do you find colors?
David: Tell us about that?
Anne-Marie: What the fine dialog box is missing, is a pop up that list all the swatches. Find where this color is used in everything, in text, in objects, in strokes, as spot colors and imported PDF’s and so on. You can’t do that.
David: You can search for one at a time. You can search for all the text that has fill of such and such.
Anne-Marie: Yes, right. You can search for text colored with a certain color by going to find change in the text field, in the text panel don’t enter anything to find what and change to just go right to find format. You might need to click more options to see that and in find format you can choose character color and chose whichever color you want to search for in the document. Thank heavens, in CS3, you can use the objects section of find change.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: If you go to the objects section of find change and find object format, you can click that little magnifying glass there. You can do things, like find objects that are filled with a certain color or stroked with a certain color or have a drop shadow with a certain color. If you are that kind of person who likes to color their drop shadows.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: You can also limit your search; by default it searches every single frame. You can say only text frames or graphic frames or unassigned frames. I don’t know if it does find this. Actually while we are talking I will do a quick test. Maybe you already know. What if you have just a line, an arrow?
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Will ‘find object’ find that?
David: It’ll find it if you do it as a stroke because it’s a stroke. If you wanted to find let’s say Pan Tone 286 you have to do four searches. You have to search for all the text which is filled, all the text which is stroked, all the objects which are filled and all the objects which are stroked. So you do four find changes as far as I can tell, I don’t know how to do it in less. It’s just really, really annoying. If you are just trying to find something on your page; you know you used it somewhere. You just want to scroll through and find it. It is just really annoying.
Anne-Marie: Well, for Pan Tones it’s pretty easy. For Pan Tones you would just go to window, output separations.
David: Great, yes.
Anne-Marie: Yes? Window, output, separations and then in separations previews is the technical name. Change the view from off to separations. You will see all the Pan Tone colors or spot colors. They don’t have to be Pan Tone, any spot colors and the CMYK colors used in your document. It won’t find RGB colors. RGB colors are automatically converted to CMYK when you turn on separations preview because you are actually looking at overprint preview. It turns it onto overprint preview which shows you more of this is how it will look when it is printed.
So there is a different solution for that. But for Pan Tone then you just turn off the button next to the composite CMYK entry there in separations preview. Turn off any other Pan Tone colors other then the eyeball, other than one that you want, the eyeball next to that. Then anything colored with that Pan Tone color will be black on the page.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: You can just scroll through there. There is even a way it’s kind of convoluted. I think we might have written it up in a post or I did it in a design geek issue; about you can print just that place separation to a PDF.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Tell it to ignore empty pages.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: As long as you remember to include the page numbers, somehow, on those pages. Then you’ll save some trees and some eyeballs. What if you have a three hundred page Indesign document and you know that Pan Tone is used. It shouldn’t be used on about nine of those pages, but might be a period in a tiny little foot note; that you forgot to change.
David: Right, Right.
Anne-Marie: You could do that.
David: No, I think that is a great idea. The other thing is you said really simple to do with spot colors.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: But the separations preview panel doesn’t work for process colors. If you have particular swatch that you are trying to figure out, here is the cayenne; just trying to find anything in cayenne.
Anne-Marie: Let’s say you mixed a custom color. You made a pretty color in CMYK. You called it logo green or something like that.
David: Right, so how would you find that in your pages?
Anne-Marie: Right, it’s broken down in CMYK components in separations preview. The answer is to right click on that custom CMYK color…
David: Or control click with the [mumbles] .
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: … in your swatches panel and chose swatch options. What you are going to do is temporary change the color type from process to spot.
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: It doesn’t change the mix of the color at all. Click OK. Then you will see the fun little spot button/ icon in swatches. Now it has been added to separations preview.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: So you can turn off every other color except for your fakeo spot color. It will find every instance of that custom CYMK color. That is also the answer for RGB colors.
David: I love that tip. That is so incredibly useful. You turn the CYMK or RGB color into a spot color. It doesn’t affect anything except that all of a sudden you can search for it with separations preview or your cool PDF trick as well. It would work that way too.
Anne-Marie: Yes, that is right.
David: Because it is technically a spot color. You could leave it that way and tell all spots to convert to process. It would be OK.
Anne-Marie: I suppose you could. I think that would be courting disaster.
David: You are right.
Anne-Marie: I would never, ever do that. [laughing]
David: It would be better to go back and change it from spot back to process.
Anne-Marie: I would always reconvert it back. It is one of the preflight checks I do is: just take a quick scan through swatches and make sure I don’t see any little spot icons there.
David: If you don’t expect them.
Anne-Marie: That’s right, exactly.
David: Anyways, I think that is a great, great trick for sure.
Anne-Marie: Good.
David: Thank you. Quick little thing about the swatches panels and colors that I wanted to point out is that, you can reorder those colors in the swatches panel. It is not a very exciting tip, but can be very useful because a lot of people don’t realize that you can just reorder them. You reorder them in a very intuitive way. You just drag them to where you want them to be. Sometimes I’ll demo that and people will be like you can just drag them?
Anne-Marie: Well, I don’t think you could always do that? Could you do that in CS1?
David: I have no idea. I can’t even remember that far back. I don’t even remember last week!
Anne-Marie: Well the one that you want to definitely move: is registration down. Move it way down to the bottom. What is the deal? Why is registration even in there? Who uses registration that often that it has to be there as part of the default set?
David: I think that’s just one of those legacy things that they started with so you have to keep registration there. But, you’re right. That’s really annoying. It’s definitely annoying having it right next to black. That’s insane. People are forever just clicking on it instead of black.
Anne-Marie: Yes, exactly. Remember, you can do this with no documents open, reorder them. Then that becomes your application preference. Every new document that you open from then on you’ll have your custom order in swatches.
David: Exactly; really, really important. That’s awesome. Anyway, that’s just a few, little color tips; hopefully, there’s some good stuff that will make your day a little easier when you’re dealing with color there.
We should switch to the obscure InDesign feature of the week, eek eek eek eek eek eek eek]. All my pals in Milwaukee are going, eek eek eek eek eek.
[laughter] As we mentioned, we have a guest star today; Sandee Cohen; the author of the InDesign Visual Quick Start Guide, and some other great books. We taped her earlier in the day. This is not live. We taped her earlier and let’s hear what she has to say about OnFocus and OnBlur.
Sandee, tell us about this incredibly, obscure InDesign feature.
Anne-Marie: Of the week, ekekekekek.
Sandee Cohen: Oh gosh. It is obscure and it’s called OnFocus/OnBlur, which I always follow up with, OnDasher/OnDancer/OnPrancer/OnVixen [laughter] .
David: OnFocus/OnBlur.
Sandee: You start to think, is this one of the reindeer’s and where’s Rudolph and what does it mean?
David: First of all, where is that? It’s got to be hiding in InDesign somewhere, right?
Sandee: Well, it’s on the sleigh.
David: [laughter] There you go.
Sandee: OnFocus/OnBlur; if you create a button in InDesign, one of the interactive, features a button. You then open the button options, which is under object interactive button options.
David: Or you could just double click on it with the selection tool. That will take you right there.
Sandee: If you’re in a hurry.
David: If you’re in a hurry, right.
Sandee: If you then, under button options, you’ll be in the general dialogue box. Click on the behaviors tab and you will see there, events. Now, these are not proms and weddings, things like that, but when you choose events, there is a list of events that the button will respond to. You have events like on mouse up, mouse down, which are easy to understand. You release the mouse as up, you press it down as down. On mouse enter is when somebody moves the cursor over the button without actually pressing anything.
David: Like a rollover.
Sandee: Like a rollover and mouse exit. But then, below those mouse things… which is really nice for the Night Before Christmas idea, you’ve got all these mice OnFocus and OnBlur. What does that mean?
David: What does that mean?
Sandee: It’s very obscure.
David: They are quite obscure.
Sandee: What you have to understand is; in the world of pdf, which is what the button is going to be exported as. In the world of pdf, you can tab into a button and tab out of a button. zthat prompt, when you tab into the button, is when the button becomes in focus, which can also be called OnFocus. Well, then the people who designed this, which I actually, always thought were Adobe people, decided what is the opposite of focus? It must be blur.
David: Right.
Sandee: So they decided that when you tab out of a button you are on the blur, which is a very silly name. It does make focus and blur seem very romantic. [laughter] Now, I always thought these romantic people were the Adobe engineers who created the buttons for PDF. AnneMarie explained to me that I am wrong.
Anne-Marie: Yes, I’m sorry to say. One of the one out of a million times ever. No. OnFocus/OnBlur, I don’t know who invented them. They’ve been around since forever because they are actually, I believe from JavaScript. It refers to fields when you’re doing like even in HTML.
When you’re doing a form in HTML and you can say, OnFocus/OnBlur as someone is tabbing through the fields. You can say, OnFocus somebody gets to the state field and a popup menu appears listing all the states, for example. That would be an OnFocus. OnBlur means, you leave that field, so close the popup menu. That’s all I know. It’s been around, I think, since the beginning of JavaScript. Or at least, I know it was there in the early versions of NetScape, way back when.
Sandee: [in old woman's voice] Out in my day, I couldn’t see a thing because of the blur. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: Sandee, I’ve been following while you’ve been talking about the button options. I opened up the events. I have to rant slightly about the inaccuracy of these events, though, they’re accepted terms mouse up, mouse down because I can move my mouse up and my mouse down and nothing happens to a button. I actually have to press the mouse button down and release the mouse button for things to happen.
Sandee: OK. You’re saying, you’re lifting your mouse above the desk. Then placing it back down on the desk?
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: I’m doing exactly what the event says: mouse up, mouse down.
[laughter]
Sandee: This is an exercise routine that you follow with little dumbbells. But not…no, it’s the mouse button. By the way…
Anne-Marie: I had a pet mouse. I couldn’t find its button. I just kept pushing and pushing. I don’t have that mouse anymore.
Do you know, if you keep the command or control key held down, and then you click on the event popup menu; you’ll see another entry in there. It says, of my demise.
Sandee: What?
Anne-Marie: In the event of my demise. Yes, you can select that and type your will in that little field down there and then click Add.
[laughter]
Sandee: Wait, I have one more little…
David: [laughter] Don’t try that at home. That’s only on AnneMarie’s machine.
Anne-Marie: I must have a plugin installed.
Sandee: I have one question, though, because I always ask my students this. “Why is it that when you are doing an event, you always want to choose mouse up and not mouse down?”
Anne-Marie: Because it’s a click. Mouse up is a click.
Sandee: If you choose mouse down; when you press down you have prompted the event. However, you have not given anybody a chance to go, “Oh, no, wait. I don’t really want to do that.” So, always choose mouse up because it means that we can’t back out.
Anne-Marie: Yes, done that many times. That’s a good tip. Thank you, Sandy. Excellent obscureness.
David: Truly, truly obscure, wonderfully obscure. I love it. Thank you so much, Sandy, for that insight into this weird, little corner of InDesign.
Sandee: Thank you so much for asking me to be here.
David: That’s great, it’s always nice having Sandee along for the ride here.
Anne-Marie: Yes, definitely. I hope she has fun in Australia.
David: Indeed, indeed. She’s off on another adventure.
Anne-Marie: That is it for Episode 85. Thank you again to Certitec for their support of this show.
People, don’t forget about their special URL to sign up to be entered into the drawing for the free class. You have seven days from the time this podcast has been published. That is at Certitec.com/InDesignSecrets.html.
Be sure to check out our show notes and our blog in InDesignSecrets.com, where we’ll have links to Bayer and all the other places that we mentioned.
We’d love to hear what you thought of the show, we’d love to hear that. Leave a comment in the show notes or email us at info@indesignsecrets.com. Until we meet again, this is AnneMarie Concepcion, and David Blatner for InDesignSecrets.
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