Podcast 92 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 92 page.
[music]
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Welcome to InDesign Secrets, Episode 92. I’m Anne-Marie Concepcion and I’m here along with my co-host David Blatner.
David Blatner: Hey, Anne-Marie, how are you doing today?
Anne-Marie: Doing great, how are you?
David: I am well. It’s a beautiful day in Seattle, which is…
Anne-Marie: I think, the weather here in Chicago is just like Seattle. It’s gray, it’s cold. It’s miserable and depressing.
David: [laughs] that’s perfect, perfect! Love it.
Anne-Marie: Our podcast and blog at InDesign Secrets.com are the independent resource for all things InDesign.
David: It’s true! And coming up on today’s show we’ve got some good news. We’ve got some not so good news. Good news is…
Anne-Marie: We’re still here.
David: We’re here. Bad news is that not everybody is here with us. We’re going to talk a little bit about Black Wednesday about the big layoffs at Adobe and throughout the publishing world. We’re going to talk about the hot post of the week. I wrote a little post all about stripping.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: It’s not really about stripping.
Anne-Marie: Is there a video?
David: [laughs] You don’t want to do the video. All right. This is a post about stripping stuff out of InDesign documents, which got a lot of comments from all around the globe. So, that will be fun to chat about a little bit.
Then, we’ll talk about moving formatted text around from one creative suite app to another. And the obscure InDesign feature of the week.
Anne-Marie: Custom text. Custom Text. Isn’t all text custom? Unless it is in alphabet I guess…
David: Or placeholder text is not really…. Well, you could do custom placeholder text. This is going to be a special feature called custom text.
Anne-Marie: Right, custom text. There is a feature, something you can choose that is labeled custom text and that’s the obscurity. But, the very first thing that we want to talk about is what they are calling in the publishing world at least “Black Wednesday,” which was last Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008.
It was kind of weird because Thursday morning, the day after, I was doing some long distance connect training with a very large textbook publisher, about eight people on the other end of the line. They were pretty bummed, pretty depressed because they were one of those companies that had been part of that black Wednesday.
If you do a Google search for Black Wednesday publishing, you will come up with all the hits that we’re talking about. Basically, especially, in the world of book publishing, there were a whole lot of layoffs, a whole lot of brands being cut and companies announcing just bad news.
That’s always great right before Christmas for that to happen. But, it was Random House, I think, was the major one. I don’t know, David, did you look at any of that news?
David: Yeah, there was a number of companies that had pretty significant layoffs. Random House, Simon and Shuster, Thomas Nelson – big Bible publishers here in North America – Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; of course, big layoffs.
And then, of course, at Adobe as well, a lot of people last week lost their jobs at Adobe. They have laid off about 600 people worldwide, including people, someone who a lot of us know, Tim Cole, who was the primary InDesign evangelist who traveled all over the world.
Anne-Marie: Ran a blog, InDesign Channel.
David: Yeah, yeah. The Back Channel. We’ve talked about him. We’ve had interviews. I interviewed him for InDesign magazine a while back.
Anne-Marie: He was in Chicago and he went on client site visits with me to visit InDesign InCopy using customers. It was so cool for them to be able to speak with somebody from Adobe about what’s good and what’s bad and what they would love to see in the next version. I mean, his business card was InDesign InCopy Evangelist.
For them to lay off somebody like that after 10 years.
David: Yeah, yeah. Well, the only thing that gives me hope is that for Tim, well a couple of things. One is that he’s brilliant and he’s not going to have no trouble getting another job. But, secondly he used to work for Aldis. He was on the PageMaker team. And then they canned him when Adobe bought Aldis.
Then they said we can’t survive without Tim. So they hired him back in I think ‘98, ‘99, when InDesign started kicking off. I think, there’s no doubt that he will land well, but our thoughts go with Tim and then of course he will be back probably as CEO of Adobe any day now. Or the president of World Bank or something like that.
Anne-Marie: And there are also 599 other people that unfortunately were laid off and they don’t announce a list of the people. It’s up to the person who is laid off to somehow email to their friends mentioning it. All day Thursday and Friday was calling around to some of my Adobe friends: You there? You still there?
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: They knew exactly what I was talking about: Yes, I’m still here.
David: The industry has been hit hard, not just software but, as we said, the publishing industry has been hit very hard from the economy.
Anne-Marie: I mean, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced that they are not going to be acquiring any new titles in their adult book publishing division. That’s a huge deal. Because the publishing market is to a large extent, the InDesign market, which is why we thought it would be important to bring up and to acknowledge in this podcast.
We hope that it’s just a temporary reaction to the current state of the economy and that by next spring everybody is going to be…. What did we do with all those editors and designer again? We need them back.
David: Yeah. Exactly. I hope so. I hope so. And well, definitely our feelings go out to all those people who did lose their jobs, but we will… this could be time to bone up on all of your InDesign skills and when the economy does turn, you will be ready for anything.
So, if you want to do something, just hang out at InDesign Secrets and read all the blog posts. There you go. That should do it. On to some happier news.
Anne-Marie: Yes, let’s talk about something happier. Let’s talk about you stripping.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Or is that sad? I don’t know… I think that could be happy, a happy time. Is there a pole involved?
David: [laughs] Well, I thought about taking a poll about it, but no, no poles involved. Listen, I wrote this post. Somebody emailed us about wanting to strip out all of the styles and master pages from a document. And it became clear in reading this thing that what he really wanted to do was he needed to send the document on to his client and he just didn’t want the client to be able to do anything with it.
They wanted to archive it and he just didn’t want them to give it to some other designer or another print shop or whatever.
Anne-Marie: To do the next issue or the next version.
David: Yeah. And so, he wanted to protect himself. You could tell from the email, it was a little bit wry, a little malicious, but mostly he was just being protective, I think, self protective. So, I wrote about it, talking about how you can strip the styles out and the master pages out. And there’s a step by step that I gave him in the blogpost, involving break link with style and overwrite all master pages items, and so on.
We’ll put a link to it in the show notes.
Anne-Marie: You give that to somebody. They open it up in InDesign, it’s all perfectly editable, but it would be a nightmare to update because there is nothing in the styles panel except for basic paragraph. And the master pages are empty.
David: Right. So, what was interesting though is the little storm of responses from people about how they felt about this practice of stripping out all the good stuff. And I thought that was very interesting. First of all I did say in the blogpost and I want to be very clear about this that I personally would not strip this stuff out.
But, what I really would do, and what I encourage everyone to do, is make it clear with your client up front whether or not you are going to be giving them the original documents. I hate giving original documents to clients. I don’t want to give them my InDesign files at all. I’ll give them a PDF file. But, the way that I created that document is mine.
Anne-Marie: I don’t know. It’s kind of like a photographer giving away their negatives or somebody else brought up a comment. It’s like you buy a home from a builder and you get the home, you don’t get the blue prints.
David: Right. That’s right.
Anne-Marie: But, I have to tell you. I ran into this really a long time ago, when I used to do a whole lot of… Aldis Persuasion slides for a company that was going to do an IPO and this is for their little song and dance that they had to do with all the investment bankers.
Towards the end, we had round after round after round of these involved charts and graphs and things. They wanted all of the Persuasion files. And I looked in my Graphic Artist Guild Handbook and consulted with all these various blogs – not blogs, back then, but forums.
And everybody said those are not the client’s. You give the client the final PowerPoint, the final print output, but the stuff that happens in between those are yours. You actually even own the copyright. Unless the work is work for hire, unless in the contract it says this is “work for hire,” then the client owns all of those files as well. Otherwise, you only own the end product.
So, and obviously the client wanted this so they could hire somebody to do your job to somebody cheaper, maybe somebody’s nephew who says: I know PowerPoint or I know Persuasion I can do that.
So, you should offer it to them at a price if you’d like. I said, OK, I’ll offer it to you at… I gave them a 50% of the average cost for each job. And thought I had done it fairly and ethically. That’s the last I ever heard from that client.
That peeved them so much that that was it. And I really was upset too that I lost them as a client. I look back on it and I’m like I can see where they would come up with that, because how much would it cost to recreate these? Probably not 50% of the cost. It wouldn’t cost that much to recreate a template.
But, I had withheld. Even though I was ethically and legally right, as far as I know, it wasn’t really good client relations. So, what you said is the most important is to get this upfront with your client. What happens when a job is done? Are they going to want the InDesign files or the Photoshop files?
If they want them and you still agree and it is OK with you, then I would increase your fees for the job if they are going to be taking that file in the end.
David: Yeah, you can say, “Look, here’s the fee for the job and here’s the fee if you want all my files.” And give them a choice up front. It’s not a good idea to try and argue that downstream as you discovered. Because then, there is a lot of misunderstandings and everyone is unhappy. Everyone is unhappy in the end.
Anne-Marie: David, ever since then I always assume that the client is going to want my finished files and I just bill out my jobs accordingly. Assuming that I’m not going to get this as a repeat job that they are going to ask for these files and then it doesn’t bother me.
Very often they want them and even if they want them, though, they don’t do anything with them. [laughs]
David: I think, you are absolutely right. In a lot of cases, they don’t know what to do with them, but they just archive them. Yeah. And that’s fine, but in that case, then why not strip out all the stuff.
So, one of the most interesting comments that came up in that blogpost was people saying, “Well, if I were a client, if I hired someone and they gave me a file that has no style, no master pages and so on, I would look at that and say, well these people are idiots. How could they have done this without using styles and master pages? I’ll never hire them again.”
So, there’s also a question of your perception.
Anne-Marie: I suppose, I don’t know. If they were that pristine I would imagine that they did something underhanded with this. Because somebody else said you could just export the file to PDF and then place the PDF into an InDesign document. There’s your InDesign document.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Happy. Are you happy now?
David: Sandy Cohen posted – you could post a PDF and then open that PDF using RecordSoft’s PDF to ID and you basically have a stripped down document as well. Which is even in worse shape…
Anne-Marie: Yes it is.
David: … But it is technically just like the original. It’s certainly dicey. I think people really need to be aware of it. Again, I think in the old days, 15, 10 years ago, my experience is that most people assumed that the client would not get those files. It all changed. I really think that all changed.
Anne-Marie: It all changed. I know.
David: In the past 15 years. But, not everyone is thinking that way. So, there are still gray areas.
Anne-Marie: You still have the same kind of issue with Photoshop files or Illustrator files. If I had done a multi-layered Photoshop file of all sort of interesting layer effects and they wanted this magazine illustration, they wanted that Photoshop file, which I think hardly ever happens with photo illustrators.
I don’t think clients ever ask for those. But, if they did, I would probably want to flatten the image before I gave it to the client.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Right. Or maybe you would flatten all the layers in a big illustration I did in Illustrator. There you go, take that.
David: Yep, absolutely. So, there are options out there for stripping out a document, not just stripping, but stripping out a document down to nothing, down to its bare bones, but we don’t always necessarily agree that that’s what you should do.
But, we wanted to at least bring it up, because that was the hot post of the week.
Anne-Marie: And feel free to add more comments, to make it an even hotter post.
David: [laughs] OK. Hey, let’s talk about moving text around from one document to another. You mentioned that you had done a seminar recently and this came up in this Create Suite Seminar having to do with moving formatted text from InDesign into another program like Illustrator.
Anne-Marie: Right. Right. And that was the actual question. I was showing how you have to set the preferences for InDesign and Illustrator in order to be able to copy and paste vector objects from one program to the other and still be able to edit them in the receiving program.
And what happens if you forget to turn on the right thing and you get that phantom illustration in InDesign. You paste something in there and it doesn’t appear in the links panel, but there’s obviously artwork, where did that come from?
I think, we have talked about this in previously podcasts. But then, someone said, well, how do we get formatted text from InDesign to Illustrator? And you can copy with this type tool, select text in InDesign and paste it into Illustrator. It comes in as regular text, not formatted.
So, the answer was to select the text frame or frames with the selection tool in InDesign and then you paste that into Photoshop. Not a lot of people know that smart objects – you can make smart objects out of InDesign elements in Photoshop as well as Illustrator elements.
Whenever they showcase the smart object feature in Photoshop, they are always showing, you’re bringing in an Illustrator logo. But, they never mention that you can bring in something you designed in InDesign too.
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: So, when you copy and paste, it automatically comes in as a smart object in Photoshop, which is essentially like a placeholder link to the original file.
David: Sort of. I think, what is technically happening when you paste, when you copy out of InDesign and paste into Photoshop is InDesign is actually behind the scenes making a PDF file, putting it on the clipboard. Then Photoshop says, oh, here comes an incoming PDF file.
Anne-Marie: Right. I’ll bring it in as a smart object. Unfortunately Photoshop is too dumb to know that you want to edit this in InDesign. But, that works to advantage in this case, because when you double click a smart object in Photoshop, it opens up in the original application. Well, actually it opens up in Photoshop if it’s a raster object or Illustrator if it’s vector or vector text, regular text.
So, you double click that object in Photoshop and it opens immediately up in Illustrator. And there is your editable InDesign text with the formatting intact. Now, what you are supposed to do is modify it, close it and save your changes and that updates the Photoshop file, but from that point on you can just do a “save as” and name it something else, or you can select the elements in that temporary Illustrator file, copy and paste them into you actual Illustrator document, or save a copy, whatever you’d like.
Now, it does come in… It doesn’t come in as paragraph text. Every line is an individual line of text, point text. But there are many ways to fix that, too. We have the script that we are talking about on our website…
David: Yeah, the folks at Ajar Productions came up with a script, originally for Flash and then it was updated for Illustrator. Now it’s for InDesign, as well. And this little script you can download this script, install it into Illustrator or I think it may only be CS4. No, I think it’s earlier as well, right?
So, any version of Illustrator… you can sew into Illustrator or InDesign and then you can select a bunch of text frames. I know what I was thinking about, the CS4 thing. There’s a way to install it that only works with CS4, but there’s a different way to install it that does work with CS3 and CS2.
Select a bunch of text frames or point text or area text in Illustrator or whatever and then run the script and it merges it all together into a single bunch of text, a single text frame in InDesign or a single edit text.
Anne-Marie: Right. Single text frame, single paragraph. I have to test that more. And I know the manual way of doing that with Illustrator, which is to shift click all those lines of point type and then cut to the clipboard and then switch to the type tool, click an insertion point and paste. It comes in as one long paragraph. So, you can do that way as well.
At least that’s how you can get formatted text from InDesign to Illustrator. You just have to make a quick side trip into Photoshop. And while I was testing this I noticed that what if you don’t have Photoshop running. You know, that’s kind of a big pain.
Well, OK assume that it is running but you don’t have a document open in which to paste the smart object, you can just quickly press command option N or control alt N. On a PC, the same keyboard shortcut to throw up a default in InDesign document in InDesign. It doesn’t work the function.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: No, it just ignores it and puts up a new document dialog box. But, you don’t care what the size is at all. Just click enter or return to accept it, even if it’s a tiny little thing and your smart object is much bigger than the artwork, the artboard whatever they call it in Photoshop. Oh, the canvas.
It makes no difference you can just double click the smart object and it will open up the object intact.
David: Yeah, it still lets modern Illustrator. Now, I do want to point out that even if Photoshop isn’t anywhere around you can still do this. Remember, all that InDesign and Photoshop is doing here is InDesign is converting it into a PDF file, putting on the clipboard. You’re pasting it into Photoshop. You’re double clicking on it.
In Photoshop, it will opens up in Illustrator. But, if you don’t have Photoshop around that’s fine. You can still do the same route. You just have to export that file out of InDesign as a PDF or that clump of text or whatever as a PDF. Then open that PDF in Illustrator. So, you get the same result. Illustrator can open all the PDF files directly.
If you are only trying to work with one text frame or just a couple text frames or something in InDesign, there is a script – Martino DeGlorio wrote that wonderful script. He did Lay Out Zone, but he also did another script which lets you make a PDF out of any selected objects on your spread.
Anne-Marie: Oh, yeah, that would be great.
David: Yeah, so that would be another way: select the text frame, use the script, it exports just that as a PDF. Open that into Illustrator and it will be formatted again as a whole bunch of non-threaded point text. It is one way to do it.
Now, the other thing that I wanted to say about this is you have to understand this is a creative suite, right, and these programs are supposed to work together.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: And they just don’t hear. And the big problem is not InDesign in my humble opinion. The big problem is Illustrator. Because Illustrator is lacking one basic feature which, if it had it, it could handle most of the copy and paste needs. And that is Illustrator cannot deal with RTF, rich text format, formatted text. There is just no filter. Illustrator has no filter for RTF.
If it did, you could copy and paste formatted text all day long. So, I encourage everybody to go to San Jose, find the Illustrator team and shake them until they add RTF formatting, formatted text, to support to Illustrator. It’s just that simple.
I was just talking to somebody at the InDesign conference, somebody on the InDesign team and I was talking about this exact same issue. They said, oh, no, it works. And I showed them that it didn’t work. He was just like, Oh. And the more we looked at it we were like, “Well, but Illustrator lets you import and export RTF, right?”
And I said, no. there’s no RTF support.
Anne-Marie: It does let you import text, plain text.
David: Yeah, plain text, but not rich formatted text.
Anne-Marie: I just tried while you were talking to see if I could discover an incredible secret while you were talking but it didn’t work. I tried exporting a frame to Snippet from InDesign and then opening up that snippet in Illustrator.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Wouldn’t that be exciting if it worked? But no. You have to turn on all readable file, like all files. It said all readable which is a default. And then you can select it and it comes in as text import options. And it exports it as a big, hairy XMLE snippet thing. It was kind of fun.
David: Right. If anyone ever wondered what Anne-Marie and I do in our spare time, we just try random… I wonder if I can open this in Illustrator?
Anne-Marie: You never know what you might discover.
David: It’s true. You never know. You never know. All right, we need to move on to the obscure InDesign feature of the week. And that is custom text.
Anne-Marie: So, think about it, where do you think audience you might find custom text?
David: Help menu. Window menu.
[Anne-Marie humming Jeopardy theme]
[laughter]
David: Well, it’s something having to do with text. So it’s probably under the type menu.
Anne-Marie: That’s correct.
David: Look under the type menu and we start looking for custom, custom, what’s another almost synonym for…
Anne-Marie: You’ll never find it, forget it. [laughs]
David: Text variables. Custom text is a text variable. You can find it by looking under the text variables…
Anne-Marie: No, no, no, if you go to text variables and choose insert variable, it doesn’t appear there.
David: That’s true. That’s true.
Anne-Marie: But, this is really obscure.
David: Well, it doesn’t show as a variable that you can insert because you haven’t created a custom text variable yet. So, the first thing you need to do is create your own custom text variable by choosing define from the text variables popup menu.
Even there, it’s not there. [laughs] Then, you have to click on new. You click the new button.
Anne-Marie: Keep the faith, baby, that it will show up if you just keep on clicking.
David: Click on the new button, then under the type popup menu you can finally choose custom text. And there is one option the text field, you just type in some text, whatever text you want.
Anne-Marie: It does have a flyout menu if you want to insert a thin space or thick space or quote marks.
David: But, let’s say you put some custom text your company, whatever company you would want to put in there or the name of your company, Happy Company. And that will be your text variable. You can insert that text variable throughout your whole document just by inserting it like you would insert any text variable right into a text flow, into a text story.
Now, what’s interesting about custom text variables is that you can change them. So, if we had another… If your company gets bought out by some other company and you have to change your…
Anne-Marie: That never happens, though.
David: … change the name of your company throughout the entire document. You can do so very quickly simply by changing the definition of your custom text variable.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: That said…
Anne-Marie: Or like on your resume you would put the company that employs you as a variable.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: That way when you get laid off then you can just edit the variable and say “Freelancer.”
David: Now, I have to tell you what’s weird to me about custom text variables is why don’t you just use find/change. I mean, if you really wanted to change the text throughout the entire document, you could do it just as easily in the find/change dialog box as changing the definition of your text variable. So, do you have any thoughts on when you actually would use custom text as a…
Anne-Marie: This is what the software companies, especially Adobe, call a use case. What’s your use case? Jargon. I’m been trying to use it in general talking like with my mom. Why don’t you wear different shoes? What’s your use case for shopping at Carsons?
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: No I have no use cases. I can’t think of any time when I actually used it, other than to see if it works. But, this is one of those things like when I was talking about using snippets in a post on the blog. Who uses snippets? I would like to know your use cases for snippets. What are you using snippets for?
And we got a bunch of great posts, a bunch of great comments from people like put all their display ads as libraries on the server and the folders for snippets. And archives of old documents as snippets, all sorts of fun stuff for snippets.
David: Well, Snippets I can think of a lot of use cases for, just off the top of my head. But custom text variables, I’m scratching my head. I’m just trying to figure out what… so yes, I agree, everyone should go… anyone who is using this, please go to the show notes and tell us how are you using custom text variables.
And even if you’re not using it, tell us how you might use it in a way that would not be better served using find/change or some other feature.
Anne-Marie: Yes. And if you ever run into somebody from the Adobe InDesign team you could ask them, “I’m curious. What is the use case for custom text variables?” And that will stop them in their tracks.
David: That’s right, that’s right.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] that would be perfect.
David: You know, what I think their answer is going to be? We put it in there because we could. It was probably really easy for them to implement it. And they thought, it’ll take five minutes to put it in and someone is going to want it.
Anne-Marie: I’m sure, David, that we are missing some very obvious thing that we’re going to get hammered on by people. I have this feeling.
David: I look forward to that. I look forward because along with stripping, getting hammered is way up there.
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: OK, that’s it. That’s it for episode 92. Be sure to check out the show notes on our blog, InDesignSecrets.com, where you can find out how other people are stripping and using use cases and all that kind of stuff. And we’ll also have links to the places and the cool scripts that we mentioned today.
We would love to hear what you thought of the show. Leave a comment in the show notes or email us at info@InDesignSecrets.com. And until we meet again, this is Anne-Marie and…
David: David Blatner for InDesign Secrets.
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