Podcast 87 Transcript

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 87 page.

David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets, Episode 87. I am David Blatner. I am here along with my cohost, Anne-Marie Concepcion.

Anne-Marie Concepcion: Hey David, how are you?

David: I am very excited because today is the 23rd. [yodels] Actually, it’s not the 23rd right now specifically, but this is going to be released on the 23rd. This is what we call a prerecorded episode, and because we are not allowed to talk about InDesign CS4 until the 23rd.

Anne-Marie: That’s right.

David: So we figured we’ll do it a couples day early and then just release it for you on the 23rd. So you have the hottest, newest, fastest information…

Anne-Marie: That’s right. Something like that. You see how optimistic we are that we both believe that 23rd will occur, at this point.

David: [laughs] I do have faith, September 23rd will happen and normally that but I do believe that InDesign CS4 will be released any moment now.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: May be any week now. Pretty soon.

Anne-Marie: The 23rd is when Adobe is going to announce when it will be released.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: And all the pricing and when everybody involved can talk about all the new features. We can’t teach it yet until it’s actually shipping. But we can talk about it and show it through our screenshots. That’s what this episode is all about. It’s a special InDesign CS4 sneak preview.

David: It is preview, preview, preview…

Anne-Marie: All right.

David: Our podcast we should say podcast and blog at InDesignSecrets.com are the independent resource for all things InDesign.

Anne-Marie: [echoes] Ign, Ign, Ign.

David: [echoes] Ign, Ign.

Anne-Marie: And in today’s show well, mainly it’s going to be all about InDesign CS4 new features.

David: Yeah. What we like.

Anne-Marie: What we like and mainly what we like, it’s pretty good. David and I’ve been involved in this for a long time and then also the Obscure InDesign feature of the week.

David: …is user. That’s right you are the user… Oh no, different user feature. A feature called user.

Anne-Marie: A feature called user.

David: OK. This episode is sponsored by Markzware, makers of lots of cool file format converter software, including the Pub2ID, which does Microsoft Publisher files to InDesign, and the QX2ID, of course…

Anne-Marie: Q2ID.

David: Sorry, Q2ID, which converts QuarkXPress files to InDesign. I think they should have done QX2ID. That would have been cooler.

Anne-Marie: OK.

David: Anyway, that’s just my personal thought about it. But they’ve got all kinds of stuff. They also have a preflighting software, of course. Many of you are aware of Markzware because of their excellent preflight software; so definitely check that out. We just noticed…I think they just released a brand new version.??They keep updating it in all kinds of cool ways, giving new free upgrade. So that was a good thing. And Q2ID though, not QX2ID, but Q2ID, is like a 199 bucks usually, but for a limited time special exclusive deal for you, the InDesign Secret listeners, 25 percent off. That’s like 50 bucks off.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, that’s a good deal.

David: It’s a very good deal on this thing. So what you do is when you go and checkout, you go to the Markzware.com we’ll have a link on our show notes when you go to Markzware.com, you order the Q2ID, just use the code “secret” and you should get 50 bucks off. It will quote as 25 percent, but it’s a limited time offer. So definitely do it fast. Fast, fast, fast.

Anne-Marie: And it’s Markzware with the Z; Markzware.com, in case you don’t have time to jump to our show notes. Check the URL.

David: Good point. Good point. It’s excellent. You should definitely check that out.

Anne-Marie: OK. All right. So let’s get into it. A?

David: Yes, A.

Anne-Marie: A, all right. Tell me your what are your top five favorite new features?

David: OK, I have to tell you the tweekiest new feature. First of all, CS4 is a very cool upgrade. There’s all kinds of interesting features in there, a wide variety of stuff, and we’ll be talking about some of the interactive features and this and that, but I have to tell you that my favorite new feature, honestly, is grep Styles. That’s because I am a geek.??So the idea is this. We’ve known for a while throughout CS3, we could do a find and change with grep. Grep we have talked about in previous episodes a way to search for patterns inside text.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: And that’s very cool, but grep styles lets you do like a constant automatic find change for grep inside a paragraph style. So you could say like, in a paragraph style you could specify paragraph style. So anytime you see a number, let’s say apply a character style to that number and it just works just automatically. Or anytime you see anything that looks like a telephone number, change to a different character style.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. Anytime you find an emdash, add a thin space before and after.

David: Yeah. It’s very interesting. Well, you couldn’t add a thin space. You could only apply a character style to it, but you could kind of fake that.

Anne-Marie: Yes, you are absolutely right. Sorry yes. You could find a thin space before an emdash and then apply… You can find a space and apply a style to the space.

David: Yes, that’s right. Or you could apply a style… Search for a character followed by an emdash anyway, we could get into it later. We’ll do a whole episode on grep styles some other day.

Anne-Marie: It doesn’t mutually exclude the regular good old nested styles.

David: Yes.

Anne-Marie: So you could have a grep styles and nested styles.

David: What’s your favorite new feature on CS4?

Anne-Marie: Well, there are some big ones that we haven’t got to yet, but I think that one of my favorite ones is a little quite one.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: That just basically changes the way I work, making life much easier; and that is place, go to fileplace, select an image, drag it out on the page and you’re done.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: Because it automatically fits to the frame as you drag it out. No more fit proportionally, then fit frame to content. You don’t need to do anymore. As you drag it out, it automatically fits and it tells you the scale as you’re dragging out the frame.

David: Yeah. That’s sweet, that is so sweet.

Anne-Marie: And it saves so much time. Oh, my gosh!

David: The other place when they added which almost nobody is ever going to find unless you are an InDesigns Secrets listener is while you are dragging….let’s say you place like five different images or 50 different images or whatever, at the same time.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, we have already done that.

David: You got the place cursor you can hold down the command and shift. I think it’s commandshift I better make sure.

Anne-Marie: I think so.

David: And while you are dragging (or controlshift on Windows) and it will actually add each one of those on a grid. It looks like a contact sheet of all of those. I love that. These are just little things but they are so cool that Adobe snuck them in there.

Anne-Marie: All right, so the big ones…big guns.

David: Yeah, we are going to talk about big ones.

Anne-Marie: Crossreferences.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: You can finally do automatic crossreferences and it is a deep feature. It has a whole bunch of different crossreferences formats; like, do you want to include the page number or not; do you want to include the number of from a numbered list or not. Then you can edit the crossreference formats. You can say, I just want to include the first characters up until a colon, for example.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: It’s sort of like a little grepy thing going on in there. You can make crossreferences within the same document or across documents. You get a little crossreference panel that lets you update all the crossreferences fantastic.

David: It is so sweet. A lot of InDesign users are already using the crossreferences plugin from DTP Tools Software. If you are familiar with that, you are going to find yourselves right at home, because it looks really similar, to be honest. It is pretty similar to our DTP Tools. It doesn’t do everything that the DTP Tools CrossReferences software does, and so I think many of you are still going to want to use that tool but if you just need basic crossreferences, this is awesome.

Anne-Marie: Yes.

David: It really is awesome. They have done a lot of other… The other huge text one, of course, is conditional text.

Anne-Marie: Oh yeah.

David: The ability to apply conditions to text so that you can turn that on or off. I think that it’s really, really cool.

Anne-Marie: So that means, for example, that you can create a document that is for an Englishbased audience and then the same document you can make for a Frenchbased audience. Just my showing and hiding the conditions.??A lot of people are doing that now with layers. But with conditions, you can have individual characters turning on and off within the same text flow. So whenever you need to update something that’s common to all the different editions, the different languages, the different regions of the country, the different teacherstudent editions it’s the same text. You just have to update it once.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: It’s very cool.

David: It is a really nice thing.??Another huge thing, of course, is the interactive features, the new SWF stuff. You can now, in CS4, export directly to SWF, the Flash format. That turns out to be very, very useful. Especially when you have a little booklet or a pamphlet or something and you want to sent it to somebody, you can do a SWF of it and put it up on a website as a SWF file. It will even write the HTML to put on the website for you.

Anne-Marie: That’s very nice.

David: Then it just references the SWF. The SWF can have the page curls in there if you like the page curls in there. A bunch of interactivity you can have buttons.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, because now you can you transitions within InDesign and you can preview the transitions in a little preview box as well. So you can add transitions to that SWF file or to your PDFs directly from within InDesign.

David: So what Anne-Marie is talking about is this page transitions panel. Because if it’s in InDesign it’s got to be another panel.

Anne-Marie: [laughs] That’s right.

David: Heaven forbid they make it a menu item. It’s yet another panel called the page transitions panel. I actually find it an incredible waste of space.

Anne-Marie: Awww.

David: I’m sorry. I just think it’s like do we really need a whole panel just to apply a page transition?

Anne-Marie: Yes!

David: There you go.

Anne-Marie: All right, you get a glass of wine, you lower the lights you watch the transitions for a while. [laughter] The blinds that dissolves. So you just sort of zen out.

David: I guess so. Anyway that’s there.

Anne-Marie: The interactive crowd gets a lot of cool stuff.

David: A lot of cool stuff.

Anne-Marie: We’re not done with that. But also what I liked is that it seemed to me that the Adobe engineers are listening basically to what people are asking for, for both print and for interactive. Like for print: live preflight.

David: Oh yeah!

Anne-Marie: I’m a big fan of live preflight. The live preflight means you get a little status bar at the bottom. It already comes with the basic profile that checks for things like overset stuff that InDesign already checks now, except you don’t find out until you print. You find out you have something that is overset. It will tell you where something is overset. You could click it and jump right to that part where it’s overset and it gives you instructions on how to fix the overset.??But it’s far deeper than that. You can ask it to check for things like, resolution that are too low or too high; RGB colors. What else? Spot colors, if you don’t want spot colors, if you do want spot colors. You can attach and embed it inside the file so that profile always travels with the file.

David: I think the whole idea of creating your own custom preflight profile is that it is just really powerful. Another one that I really like, another thing that you can set up in there, is check for bleed. So you can say, does this document have the proper bleed guides, and do the objects on this page go out to the bleed guides. So if you have something that just ends at the end of the page and it will give you a warning, that no, it needs to go all the way out to the bleed guides. So very powerful feature in the preflight stuff. They’ve done a nice job with that.

Anne-Marie: Yes.

David: Another really cool one, just to throw out there, is the links panel has been totally…

Anne-Marie: Oh yeah.

David: Totally redone, very cool and you can now get so much information. You can really dial in and customize exactly the information you want in the links panel. I am very pleased with that. Because, for someone who has to deal with a lot of linked images, the links panel has always been good. It’s one of those features I never really realized that I wanted more until I saw the CS4 links panel. And then as soon as I started using it, I’m like, wow! This is great. And then when I go back to CS3 I’m like, what a quaint little links panel they have.

Anne-Marie: You can’t click on these pages numbers and jump there. Right, so you can customize it is the big thing. You can customize it with as much information as you like to appear in the links panel. First of all come the thumbnails; you can have little thumbnails of all your links, which is very useful. You can change the size of the thumbnails. You can have it set to show you the scale of every single linked image.

David: Yes, yes.

Anne-Marie: Even the links that are embedded inside InDesign files that you place…

David: Love that.

Anne-Marie: … appear and so much more information ICC profiles, and how many notes are in a story. You can have it show the number of notes.

David: Here’s one that I really like. You can actually have it show you folder zero which is we’re going to do a whole InDesign Secrets Feature of the Week, folder zero.

Anne-Marie: It’s a good one, yes.

David: But basically the quick version is it tells you what folder the file is in. The cool part about that is, let’s say you have maybe, two or three different folders. Once you tell InDesign to show you that information, like what’s the name of the folder that these images are in, you can also sort by that. Anything you’re showing you can sort by. So you can say, sort this by the folder they’re in. So lots of little things like that, I really think, add a lot of power to dealing with a lot of images.??Another one that we should probably bring up is the smart guides.

Anne-Marie: Oh right, yeah. That is so useful. Any time you start dragging something also you get a smart cursor. The smart cursor tells you the xy position or the width and height of the frame that you’re dragging depending on what you’re doing. Then the smart guides, which are easy to turn on and off, automatically let you line up whatever you’re dragging. Line up its edges or its centre to the edges or centre of anything else that’s visible in the window. Or even the page elements. So as you’re dragging you could precisely line up something to the centre of a column, for example.

David: Yeah, I love that.

Anne-Marie: So when you release it and then it just snaps to it.

David: When I first starting using it, it was driving me crazy because you have all these lines flashing on and off. Some of the lines have arrows on them indicating that it’s the same width as another object on the page that’s visible and so on. It drove me crazy until I figured that you could turn it off with a keyboard shortcut, which I think is CommandU, if I recall. Command or CtrlU. You turn it off and so I ended up leaving it off about 60 percent of the time, and then whenever I’m moving stuff around on the page and I want to align things I just click it on, align things, click it off. It’s actually faster than dealing with the align buttons or the align panel.

Anne-Marie: Definitely, especially if you’re trying to space stuff out. Smart spacing lets you drag something and it shows little tiny lines in between the item you are dragging and the item next to it, if they match, the space between that item and another item.

David: It’s basically constantly looking at all the objects on your page that are visible to you right now and it says, OK, is this aligned, is this spaced? Is it distributed and it just gives you that feedback very, very sweet feature.

Anne-Marie: Which is a nice segue into our first tip for CS4. We want to be the first ones on the block with a tip for CS4.??If the lines are bugging you because they are flashing all over, what David has said is correct. It only lines up to what’s visible in the window. So if you don’t care if something is lining up with something on the opposite spread just zoom in more so that you sort of filter it down. If you’re just trying to line up something in a corner of the page then zoom into that corner of the page and then those lines will stop appearing the ones that align with things on the other side of the spread.

David: It’s one of those things you have to try it as soon as you get CS4. Hopefully, you’ll all have it soon. As soon as you try it you’ll get it immediately. It’s really, really nice.

Anne-Marie: Hey, what about the whole new interface, especially for Mac users.

David: I don’t know, yeah, [makes noises]

Anne-Marie: First of all, everybody gets a new bar going across the top.

David: Wooohooo!

Anne-Marie: A new application bar.

David: Yup. Which you can turn of, if you want to.

Anne-Marie: You can turn it off and it’s cool. It has something like, you know, drop down widgets, they’re calling them.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: That collect frequently accessed things from the menus like, like view options. All right? Or view scale, or workspaces, you know, just little, just little handy widgets. But, my only gripe with it is it’s not customizable.

David: Yeah, exactly.

Anne-Marie: I would love to see it like sort of the finder windows, how you can customize what’s at that the top of a finder window…

David: Yup.

Anne-Marie: …to be able to drag and drop the widgets that I want to see up there.

David: Yup.

Anne-Marie: CS5, we’re already complaining.??[laughter]

Anne-Marie: But still, it’s the end Mac users can turn on the application frame if they want to. It’s not on by default. So that you get this dark gray background that obscures stuff on the desktop which, actually, can help you concentrate on what’s happening on the screen.

David: I think there’s going to be a lot of back and forth in the forums about this application frame thing and whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. And, I think it’s really one of those you love it or you hate it kind of experiences and like…

Anne-Marie: I’ve been working with it off and on, off an on, and I actually like it on and I’m a huge Machead. I actually like it on. It’s a Maconly thing and, as far as I know, it’s always on in Windows.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: It’s like, make this work like Windows.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: Is the application frame.

David: Right, right.

Anne-Marie: And so you, basically, the whole application, except for the menus, lives inside of a floating window. I kind of like Acrobat, you know, Acrobat, they did…they had a couple of versions ago.

David: Yeah, I guess that’s true.

Anne-Marie: You start up Acrobat, you have a PDF and everything else is taken up by this gray. But, what I like about InDesign is that you can resize that.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: You know, you can put your cursor on there at lower right hand corner, which nobody knows about, and then you can drag it to resize. And, if you have panels that are open, those will automatically resize too. So, you can get to the desktop even with the application frame.

David: It’s true. And that too is a tip. So, that’s another tip…

Anne-Marie: Two tips…

David: …right here. You heard it here first. Smart Text Reflow, that’s another one…

Anne-Marie: That’s an interesting one.

David: It is and we’ll get into the details of a lot of these features later, you know, what, exactly how you use it and how you might not want to use it. [laughter] But, Smart Text Reflow certainly has its purpose and we’ll just say quickly, what it does.??It lets you automatically add or it lets you tell InDesign to automatically add additional pages and text frames as you type or edit text. So, you’re typing along and Smart Text Reflow is on and you can get it to automatically add another page so you don’t have to add a page, make a text frame, like a…

Anne-Marie: So as you type and, suddenly, your cursor jumps to the next page and there’s another frame that’s threaded to the previous one and you can keep on going.

David: It’s nice.

Anne-Marie: It works when you paste as well. If you paste, instead of an overset, it will add another page.

David: It’s pretty much the way QuarkXPress used to work, although it’s a little bit more cool features that they added into it. So…but, it’s similar to that.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, that’s true.

David: All right. Oh, geez, there’s other stuff that I know we’re for…oh, yeah, I did want to mention earlier about the grep styles.

Anne-Marie: yeah.

David: Can I talk more about grep styles?

Anne-Marie: Yes, you did. That was for…

David: This is similar, but they added one more style which is a line style. So for all of you people who wanted to do like a drop cap and then the first line should be in all small caps, let’s say. You can now do that because you can…you don’t do that with nested styles, you don’t do it with grep styles, you do it with a new thing called line styles. And you can simply specify I want the first line to be in such and such character style. So, really nice little thing that they added in there.

Anne-Marie: And it keeps up as you edit the line, it keeps up.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: They said it couldn’t be done, but I guess they figured out a way.

David: I’m not entirely sure why they didn’t just put it in as part of nested styles. I still don’t get that, but, I don’t know. One of these days, we’ll figure it out. Maybe at the InDesign conference, we’ll ask Eric Menninga about that. And say, “What were you thinking? Why isn’t this just a nested style?”

Anne-Marie: Well, then, we have new file formats. It’s still INED…

David: Yup, yup.

Anne-Marie: It’s still INED, but one of them is XFL…

David: Yeah, yeah.

Anne-Marie: …which is you can take your InDesign document, export it as XFL, and somebody with Flash CS4 Professional can open up that XFL file and bam, they have your InDesign document right there. All the text is editable, assuming they have the fonts, right?

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: It maintains the same styles and they can add interactivity there.

David: It’s very interesting, you know. I think you really have to…once you get that, well you end up getting in Flash each page of the InDesign document because it becomes a separate frame in Flash. And then, you really need to know Action Script and, if you have like a multipage InDesign document, you’re really going to need to know Action Script and use some cool stuff in Flash. But, if you do know Action Script or you can hand it off to somebody else to do the cool stuff…

Anne-Marie: I would think that’s probably more likely that you’re going to hand it off to a Flash team.

David: Probably so. And they can then pull the whole thing apart and in a matter of minutes or hours or days or weeks, they can turn that into something amazing. So, it’s nice.

Anne-Marie: Smart stuff in the background too. I mean, I believe if you have repeated placed images that it turns them into symbols.

David: Yup, I think so. Actually, the other thing, the other place that they’re doing that symbol, the whole symbol thing, is in PDFs. I believe in PDFs now, oh I better go check this, but at least in some PDFs, if you have stuff on the master page, it turns into a PDF, it’s not called a symbol but it’s sort of repeated object, and that happens especially if you have, if you’re doing data merge. Because in data merge, you can now write directly to PDF.??You don’t have to make an InDesign document and then make a PDF. You can just make a PDF directly from the data merge panel, which is great. And, I think anything on the master page gets shrunk down into one of their, I think it’s an X symbol or something like that, and it’s very nice. So, it keeps your file size down…

Anne-Marie: Is that new? Hasn’t that been around for a while?

David: I don’t think they put that in InDesign. The feature has been there in Acrobat and PDF.

Anne-Marie: Right. OK.

David: But I don’t think InDesign had any support for it.

Anne-Marie: Oh, that’s pretty cool.

David: Hey, the other new file format is, just to skip back to what you’re talking about, is IDML. Right. Did you already talk about IDML?

Anne-Marie: No, IDML is the bee’s knees, bee’s knees, export to IDML. And we still have export to INX.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: If you need to share your files with CS3 users, you export to INX. And, by the way, CS2 users cannot open that INX. Only one version back. C’est la vie.

David: Yup, yup.

Anne-Marie: But IDML…go ahead, do you want to talk about IDML?

David: IDML is basically, as far as I can tell, it’s going to become the replacement for INX. But IDML is another XMLtype of format to describe an InDesign file. But, behind the scenes, it’s actually really quite clever. It’s really a zip file.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: And here’s tip number, secret tip number 431, you can change the IDML file extension to .zip and then use a zip extractor to look inside of it and you’ll find every story has its own XML file, every, you know, the whole structure is all the images get stuck in there.

Anne-Marie: There’s an XML file that describes the document itself, one that describes each master page…

David: Yeah, yeah. And it’s a little bit complex but here’s the power of IDML, the power is that thirdparty developers will be able write IDML files even without InDesign. So you could actually create a database that can spit out an IDML file, send it to you and you open it in InDesign and you’ve got an InDesign file all laid out. It’s really quite amazing. So, the end user IDML is not going to be that important necessarily right now but, down the line especially with thirdparty developers, it’s going to be huge.

Anne-Marie: Yes.

David: Huge workflow considerations. So that’s very good. We’re going to have to move on pretty soon here because we’re running out of time.

Anne-Marie: One thing that I want to talk about is, one last thing I want to talk about is how we know that most software companies are moving their services online. Right? Microsoft has services. Apple has services online, obviously, and Adobe has Acrobat.com and there’s Photoshop elements running some place. Well, they’re bringing some of those online services into the apps and one of my favorite things in InDesign is Share My Screen.

David: Yeah, that’s cool.

Anne-Marie: You can go into the file menu and choose Share My Screen, which brings you, which automatically opens up the free Acrobat.com ConnectNow service, though you don’t see anything with Acrobat Connect Now. You’re not brought to their website or anything like that.??Suddenly a screen opens up saying, “Alright, well here’s your URL. Do you want me to email a link to somebody?” and boom, you can share your layout with up to two other people.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: So you want to show somebody, show your client what it looks like, you can just give them a call and say, “Hey, go to this URL and take a look.” And it’s built right in to InDesign. I just love that feature.??Of course, you’re not limited to InDesign, alright? You can start it from InDesign if you want, but then, of course, you can jump over and show them your, I don’t know, you QuarkXPress layout, I guess, if you wanted to [laughs].

David: That’s a really nice, almost like having a free addon, this ability to suddenly start sharing and demoing and stuff. I’m really impressed by the fact that Adobe’s starting to let people do that.

Anne-Marie: And then the other one is Cooler. They’ve built in Cooler into InDesign.

David: Well, Cooler, we’re going to have to have a whole separate discussion about.

Anne-Marie: [laughs]

David: Yes, there is a Cooler panel in InDesign. It’s RGB only. If you create stuff, it’s only for RGB colors. And that’s the main limitation right now. I’m hoping they’re going to change that and start adding CMYK there. But for people who are doing interactive documents, then it’s awesome. It’s very, very cool.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, it’s got a little link there so you can add them to swatches. You can upload your swatches to Cooler directly.

David: Yep.

Anne-Marie: So it’s another panel, a Cooler panel.

David: [laughing] That’s all we need is another panel.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. But it also has that neat old thing like from Illustrator where you can sort of mix and match colors and drag them around the wheel and all that kind of stuff.

David: Yes.

Anne-Marie: That’s a lot of stuff to play with.

David: It’s “cooler.” [laughs]

Anne-Marie: Shut up. Alright. Did we hit all the high points? No, not yet. Go ahead.

David: One more feature I just remembered, it’s one of my favorites, I can’t believe I didn’t think about it earlier, and that’s power zoom. The power zoom.

Anne-Marie: That’s one of your favorites?

David: Oh, it really is. I love it. I love it.

Anne-Marie: [laughs]

David: Because, first of all, you have to know that the navigator panel, which I always hated, has gone away.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: No more navigator panel. It’s been replaced by this power zoom thing where, basically, if you have the hand tool, which you all get that with option, space bar, alt, space bar, right?

Anne-Marie: Mr. Spanky to most of us.

David: [laughs] Exactly. Then you hold down the mouse cursor for just like half a second or a second. You just have to pause, click and hold just for a moment and, all of a sudden, the screen zooms back so you can see the whole spread. And then you move the cursor to where you want to go and you let go of the mouse cursor and it zooms in to the same percentage that you were at.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. And then you see the red rectangle when you that. The red rectangle from the navigator lives on.

David: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s true. Exactly.

Anne-Marie: Right. So you can resize the rectangle. Say I just want to zoom in on this little folio down here or you can make it really large. And you do all this while your mouse button is held down so you do need a third hand.

David: [laughs]

Anne-Marie: Resize the rectangle while you’re holding down the mouse button with your scroll wheel and your 12button mouse. But, yeah, then it works great.??[laughter]

David: I love it. I love power zoom.

Anne-Marie: You used to hate it.

David: I got used to it. Well, now they’ve made it smoother. It used to be kind of crazier they way it worked.

Anne-Marie: That’s true.

David: Now in recent betas are we allowed to use that word, “beta” in recent times they’ve suddenly made it a little bit easier and cooler. I like it now. I like moving around in my document. It’s a very fast, efficient way to move around a spread, or even from one page to another.

Anne-Marie: Alright.

David: Anyway, we’ve got to move on. There’s a lot of stuff in CS4. We haven’t even covered everything.

Anne-Marie: Well, you have a very long article coming out about it, don’t you?

David: I sure do because in the next InDesign Magazine I’ve got a very big article going into much more detail and showing screen shots and all kinds of stuff like that about CS4. So I definitely encourage you…if you’re not a subscriber already, check that out.??We are also, at InDesign Magazine, sending out a couple indepth articles. Sandy Cohen did this great article on some of the…like how to make a swif file out of InDesign. And Russell Veers has done an article on how to do preflight, the whole preflight panel stuff.

Anne-Marie: Cool.

David: He’s gone into some detail there. So InDesign Magazine subscribers will get those first of all. So definitely go subscribe, check that out, and you’ll get those articles. And then when the issue ships, very soon after you’ll get the big, honkin’, everything you want to know about CS4 in there. Good stuff in there.

Anne-Marie: And we’ve been working on our Lynda.com videos.

David: Oh, yes we have. Oh, yes we have.

Anne-Marie: I did a title: “InDesign CS4 New Features.”

David: That’s right.

Anne-Marie: So, there you go. 40 plus videos. 40, count ‘em, 40, four zero, of videos all on the new features only…

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: …for people who are really into new features.

David: You’ve got to see that. If you’re already familiar with CS3, you definitely have to check out AnneMarie’s movies because you really want to just learn the new stuff with CS4. I’m doing the essential training and the Beyond the Basics, but with that, it’s all the new stuff kind of comingling with the old stuff. So, both are important, but for those of you who are already relatively advanced users, you’re probably going to definitely want to go through all of AnneMarie’s movies there. Great.

Anne-Marie: Well, thank you. OK, so time for our favorite thing.

David: Obscure it’s pretty obscure obscure InDesign feature of the week.

Anne-Marie: And that is User.

David: User. User.

Anne-Marie: huh. And that’s under the file menu.

David: Yes it is.

Anne-Marie: And I don’t know how many people ever noticed they have something there called User.

David: [laughs] It’s true. It’s true. It’s just right there in front of peoples’ faces, but people don’t even see it. When would you want to use User, Anne-Marie?

Anne-Marie: You would want to use Us

er if you are using Notes in InDesign. You know how you can embed a note inside of a text frame so your colleagues can read the note and…you know, it could be a love note…

David: [laughs]

Anne-Marie: …it could be a stalker note, but most often it’s like, “Are you sure this is how you spell this guy’s name?” or “I don’t like this picture, choose a different picture” or something like that. Some sort of whining is what you usually put in the note.

David: [laughs]

Anne-Marie: And your note is in your User color and is tagged with your User name so that when somebody’s reading the note and they have the Notes panel open…I don’t know if people know there is a Notes panel…then it says who wrote the note and when they wrote it and why they wrote it. No, it doesn’t say why.

David: [laughs]

Anne-Marie: It says how many words are in the note in case you’re really bored and you want to count the words in the note. But that’s what it’s used for.

David: Because if you don’t use User, then everything becomes a no user name.

Anne-Marie: That’s right.

David: Which is not very useful.

Anne-Marie: It’s also used for the InDesign InCopy workflow so that if somebody has checked out a story and they’re working on it and you hover over that text frame, it will say who’s actually working on the story.

David: Ah, that’s a good trick.

Anne-Marie: And then in CS4, in the links panel, it will say who was the last one to edit the story.

David: Whoa!

Anne-Marie: It takes your user name. Yep. And the links panel is used for, like I said earlier, it lets you know how many notes are in a story. And also, if you’re using the InCopy InDesign workflow, it will say if “track changes” is turned on or not in the links panel.

David: Wow!

Anne-Marie: And your user name is used for track changes, but not…well, sort of in InDesign, but more in InCopy.

David: OK. So cover that in InCopySecrets for sure.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. [laughs]

David: But in the meantime…

Anne-Marie: That’s what User is for.

David: That’s what User is for. Everyone out there, do yourself a favor and everyone around you a favor, go to File, User, and type in your name so you’re no longer an unknown user.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. And give yourself a pretty color. You know, it doesn’t have to be gold. That’s the default color.

David: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pick a different color.

Anne-Marie: You can give yourself…I like sulfur myself.

David: [laughs]

Anne-Marie: It’s a nice color.

David: Lovely. It’s lovely.

Anne-Marie: There’s also colonel mustard. [laughs]

David: Oh, my. [laughs] Yeah, I’m going to go for eggplant, I think. Obergine.

Anne-Marie: [laughs] I think you should be lipstick. That’s a good color.

David: [laughs] You know the difference between me and InDesign…

Anne-Marie: No, no, no. Don’t even go there.

David: OK, we’d better end this off.

Anne-Marie: Alright.

David: We’ve got to go. Thank you again to Markzware for your kind support of InDesign Secrets. Definitely, everyone out there, check out Markzware.com. Again, that’s Markzware with a Z and use the code “secrets” to get your 25 percent off.

Anne-Marie: No, just “secret”

David: Sorry, “secret” for 25 percent off at Q2ID. And be sure to go check out our show notes at InDesignSecrets.com. We’ll have links to all the places we mentioned. And we’d love to hear what you thought of the show, you know, leave a comment there or email us at Info@InDesignSecrets.com.??Until we meet again, this is David Blatner.

Anne-Marie: And AnneMarie Concepcion for InDesign Secrets.

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