Podcast 93 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 93 page.
[music]
David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets, Episode 93. I’m David Blatner. I’m here along with my very cold cohost Anne-Marie Concepcion.
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Brrrr! Brrr!
David: [laughter]
Anne-Marie: Brrrr Wilbur!
David: [laughter]
Anne-Marie: Hi David.
David: We are both very snowed in. You in Chicago, where it’s like minus ten degrees or something, right?
Anne-Marie: That’s right. It was negative 40 degrees with the wind chill on Sunday, two days ago. Negative 40 and I went out to Target and just the 50 foot dash from the car lot, from the parking lot to the store was just so painful. It was horribly painful. We came home and walking just from the garage into the house, it was like we’re exhausted.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: It’s exhausting being out in that kind of cold. And now, we’re getting another like seven inches of snow, on top of the frozen snow.
David: So this is the InDesign Secrets snow report coming to you from Chicago and Woodinville, near Seattle.
Anne-Marie: And out there in Seattle, you got snow. You guys never get snow and now you’re snowed in.
David: We have record amounts of snow here. I have actually been shoveling the driveway. I’ve never shoveled the driveway in my life. I’m from California. What is all this shoveling thing? So this is… We got a lot of snow. It’s fortunately not as cold as it is there, but we still have a lot of snow. So, snow there, snow here, snow everywhere…
Anne-Marie: It’s crazy over there. You know Nicki, my daughter, came in from the East Coast. She flew in from LaGuardia Saturday night and a bunch of her friends are flying home for the holidays too and she heard yesterday from a friend of hers who was supposed to leave Monday morning from New York City to go to Seattle and there’s so many flights canceled. It’s so backed up. He cannot get a confirmed flight until Christmas day.
David: Wow.
Anne-Marie: Four and a half days later and he’s stuck in New Jersey at JFK.
David: So now you know exactly when we are recording this. It’s just before Christmas and we do want to say a Merry Merry Christmas to all of you out there and it’s also Hanukah. We’re almost halfway through Hanukah.
Anne-Marie: Happy Hanukah.
David: So, Happy Hanukah and Hippy Solstice, because the solstice just happened.
Anne-Marie: Merry Kwanza.
David: Merry Kwanza and you know for those of you who are listening to this in June, because of course with these podcasts, people listen to it… who knows when people are going to be listeners.
Anne-Marie: That’s true.
David: Happy almost 4th of July and….
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Right. Hope you got all your school supplies. Labor Day is coming up.
David: [laughs] So whatever… Happy Valentine’s Day. Whenever you are listening to this, we welcome you to InDesign Secrets, which is the independent resource for all things in design.
Anne-Marie: And coming up on today’s show, we got a bunch of stuff to talk about. First of all, we want to welcome a new contributor to the InDesignSecrets.com blog. We want to talk a little bit about the state of CS4, the Creative Suite 4.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Who’s upgrading if so…
David: If not, why not?
Anne-Marie: We have some news about the InDesign CS4 ACE Exam, the Adobe Certified Expert Exam, which is coming up around the corner. We have some news about a couple great plug ins for InDesign that lets you do right to left text without having to purchase InDesign ME, or Middle Eastern edition. David wants to rant about PICT. P, I, C, T, PICT, the old school Mac graphics format that people persist to use, persist in using.
David: I may just rant about all kind of file formats. I don’t know… This should be… this could go on for days.
Anne-Marie: We have a guide to special characters in InDesign that I put together. We want to mention that and it’s a free download from our website. And finally the obscure InDesign Feature of the Week, “Hide Master Items,” Yes!
David: Yes! Hide master items will be lots of fun to talk about.
Anne-Marie: Hey! New contributor to InDesignSecrets.com blog: James Fritz, aka Fritz.
David: He’s typically just called Fritz.
Anne-Marie: And some of you may have seen his comments over the years. He is a very bright young fellow from some in the Middle East, no, Middle West. [laughing]
Anne-Marie: He’s from the frozen tundra that is Milwaukee, Wisconsin. [laughter]
David: I had the Middle East on my mind.
Anne-Marie: Your mind is all in the Middle East.
David: Exactly.
Anne-Marie: James “Hava Nagila” Fritz. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: James is.
David: Anyway, so Fritz has joined us as a contributor on he’s already put together some very good blog posts. He also made a suggestion that I thought was kind of clever. He said “Hey, why isn’t InDesign Secrets on Twitter?” And I said “I don’t know why we’re not on Twitter.” So, now we are. We now have a Twitter feed in case you enjoy reading Tweets on Twitter, on whatever your favorite Twitter client is, you can find us at InDesign Secrets right there at twitter.com.
Anne-Marie: Have you tweeted?
David: Yes, we’ve had a number of tweets from… You have to have a whole new terminology for dealing with Twitter.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, I know. I was talking to my brother. My brother just got a new iMac. He’s a new Mac fan for the last year. Anyway, he just got on Facebook. And so he’s discovering all the social media kind of stuff and I mentioned… He’s got an iPhone, all right?
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: And I said “So, are you on Twitter?” And he goes “What?” and I said “On Twitter.” And I sort of told him the concept of what Twitter was, and he cracked up. He thought I was teasing him. He thought I was joking. And I said “No, people just…’ They send these things. They have to be up to a certain number of characters, and they just say like “What do they tweet about?” And he said “Uh.” He couldn’t believe the word ‘tweet.’
David: Yes.
Anne-Marie: That was it.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: He’s like, he thought I was kidding about the word tweet. They’re called tweets. Well, you say, like “I’m standing in line at Starbuck’s,” or, you know, “I’m waiting for my car to be repaired,” or “I’m at this, you know, client.” And he’s like, he thought it was the most insane thing ever. It’s huge.
David: Well I just like the idea of being on Twitter. Like “Hey man, are you on Twitter?” [laughter]
David: You know, it’s like “Yeah, I’m totally tweeting.” You know, it’s just a whole new drug slang, I think, around this thing. [laughter]
David: In this case, we’re not tweeting “Hey, I’m at Starbucks.” We’re tweeting twips. [laughter]
David: We’re tweeting tips. We’re putting tips up. Basically, keyboard shortcuts, you know, little tips that you can do in under 140 characters. That’s at InDesign, that’s at twitter.com/InDesignSecrets, so…
Anne-Marie: You can subscribe to it without actually having to tweet yourself.
David: You have to sign up for Twitter…
Anne-Marie: Can you receive those?
David: Which is free, and then you can just subscribe to our, yeah, you just go to, you don’t subscribe to it, you follow it. So, you can follow our tweets, InDesign Secrets tweets.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: It’s just kind of fun. We do little tips every now an then. Very short tips. Or ‘twips.’
Anne-Marie: Ah.
David: I really like that. InDesign Twitter tweeps, twips. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: Right. That was a brilliant idea from Fritz. And you know Fritz, a lot of the podcast listeners may recognize the name because he won a ‘Quizzler’ contest about how many ways can you add a CMYK swatch color in InDesign, and he came up with, it was, about, over 200 ways, or something insane.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Which we sort of narrowed down to a solid 28. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: And he had every single permutation of all the different ways. So, he is a true InDesign geek. And he’s an InDesign trainer and a Creative Suite trainer up at a training company in Wisconsin.
David: So, we welcome Fritz as a contributor along with Mike Rankin and Ted LoCascio and…
Anne-Marie: Bob Levine.
David: Bob Levine and all the other wonderful posters at…
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: At InDesignSecrets.com. So, that said, we should move on to talk about InDesign CS4 and Are you upgrading? Have you upgraded, Emory?
Anne-Marie: Yes, I upgraded. But, I got a discount on the upgrade. If I wasn’t an InDesign trainer and an InDesign speaker and I was just doing this for production, I am not quite sure, actually, if I would have upgraded to CS4.
David: It’s a good deal.
Anne-Marie: I mean, I don’t use Photoshop a whole lot. I know Photoshop is useful. There’s a whole ton of new features in InDesign CS3. I love the features in InDesign CS4, but I don’t do a whole lot of long document production. I think it’s a must have upgrade if your doing a lot of long document stuff.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: But still, the issue is that Adobe… Remember in our last podcast we talked about Black Wednesday and how Adobe had laid off 600 employees and if you read that press release I think we linked to it in the show notes it said that one of the reasons in addition to just the state of the economy was that sales for CS4 were unexpectedly less than what they had hoped for.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: So why would that be?
David: Well, I think there’re two major reasons why that could be. One is Adobe continues to charge a great deal of money for the creative suite especially overseas.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: We continue to hear complaints. People saying, look if they just charged less money we would be upgrading left and right, but it’s just really really expensive. So, that’s one big problem. The second big problem is, do people really want to have an upgrade every 18 months? You know, it’s only been 18 months.
Anne-Marie: Oh, I know.
David: A lot of people are saying, hey, we’re just getting CS3 loaded here.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: So, why would we go to CS4?
Anne-Marie: I think people get exhausted. You know, it’s not just InDesign. It’s like, here, you have to learn 13 new programs. You get a whole slew of 13 programs. You probably haven’t even cracked open a couple of them from CS2 and here you are paying for two more versions of that same program. I mean, it’s a brilliant marketing thing that they did is the Creative Suite in general. But, this is the other side of that coin, is that…
David: I think, it’s really unintended consequences of having to do this enormous suite; and the more it becomes a suite, then a lot of people are getting the master collection. So, it’s hundreds and hundreds of programs all in one package…
Anne-Marie: Right, exactly.
David: … that you have to start learning. It is definitely problematic. I feel for people. As Anne-Marie said, we get discounts or in many cases free software from Adobe and that’s wonderful because we can get up to speed and help people along who are upgrading. But, it is a tough choice when you start looking at that thing.
What I know it always come down to is, will these new tools pay for themselves and now long will it take.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: I totally agree with you. For long document publishers, I think CS4 is a must have. For people who are doing interactive publishing, anything from InDesign to Swift, and to some degree interactive PDFs, I think the interactive features in CS4 will actively pay for themselves in a week or two.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, right.
David: I mean, it just saves that much time. But, there certainly are a number of people who are like, well, you know, yes I it would save time, but when we run the numbers it would take X number of months for it to pay for itself. Then you really need to start thinking about it. I know for many people, a single new feature in InDesign CS4 will pay for the entire upgrade in one job.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: GREP styles alone or some of the other things, cross references alone, or like I said, Swift expert, a single feature like that could pay for itself in just one job.
Anne-Marie: Right. That’s true. That’s true. And the upgrade price for the entire suite is a steal. It is. If…
David: If you’re using Photoshop and Illustrator, and so on. Like you said, Photoshop has some great new features. Illustrator, I love the fact that you can now do multiple art boards in illustrator. There’re all kinds of very cool things in illustrator.
David: Even Acrobat nine is very cool.
Anne-Marie: Acrobat nine is very good. I keep hearing people going “Well, why do we have to get a new version of Acrobat?” But, it’s great! It’s fast. It has all kinds of great features. It’s sort of like wow I thought Acrobat eight had finally arrived but Acrobat nine finally feels like it’s really getting to be a very usable program.
David: I don’t know. But, you know some people…we talked about this on the blog and got a lot of comments and I think Clarks was the one who said… because people were saying, “Well, it’s 18 to 24 month release cycle is too soon.” It should be longer than that. He said “What’s wrong? You don’t have to upgrade if you don’t want to. Those of us who want to keep up to date then we’re able.” He likes having the 18 to 24 month or maybe even sooner than that. I don’t know. You know what I miss though? I miss having the incremental updates. Like InDesign CS3.5 with the couple big new features. We’ve lost that with the whole CS. It’s gone.
Anne-Marie: I think you’re… I think a lot of people who are using InDesign are coming from Quark. Maybe not so much these days, but there’s a whole lot of people who are using InDesign that used to use Quark Express. We were used to seven year turnarounds. So, you got the new version of the software, it took you six months to learn it, and then boom you just did your work. [crosstalk]
David: But, you did have those incrementals. So, yes it was it was like seven years between three and four but, there was 3.1 which was significant, 3.2 which was significant, 3.3, 3.3, 3.32r5. There were these upgrades and 4.1 was significant. There were these upgrade that were… you got used to these new features incrementally. Quark could pull that off pretty easily because they’re privately held company. Adobe has all of these financial restrictions, which makes it really difficult. Because they’re publicly held, it makes it really difficult for them to deal with those kinds of incremental upgrades. But, I do wish that they would be able to do that kind of a thing.
If they could add a feature or a couple features here and there, I think people would be much happier when it came to upgrading.
So, anyway, we’d love to hear your comments on that as well. Are you upgrading to cs4? How quickly are you upgrading? When are you planning on upgrading? Do you think it’s a steal or do you think it’s a rip off? So, let us know.
Anne-Marie: In the show notes. Post a comment in the show notes. Yeah, we just want to open up the conversation.
David: We also want to open up the conversation about the ACE Exams, because the ACE Exams are right around the corner. I don’t think they’ve been posted yet for InDesign CS4, but they should be any moment now. We have a particular interest in the ACE Exam, and it’s not just that we’ve been complaining about the ACE Exams for the past several years quite vociferously. We have an interest in the ACE Exams because we actually managed the InDesign ACE Exams this time around. A lot of people don’t know that. [crosstalk]
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: We were… basically we complained so loudly that adobe said, ‘All right, you do it.’
Anne-Marie: You do it! Yeah and we wrote a lot of the questions too. We made sure they were very tricky about very obscure things.
David: We edited every question in the test we actually had…
Anne-Marie: A team of question writers as well other InDesign experts and it was just a ton of work. David, who sort of took the lead on that you did an incredible job, and we think in the end, we were both reviewing all the questions one final go through. We thought there are no weird questions like there were in previous versions. But, they are difficult.
David: It’s a tough one. It’s a tough exam, but a very fair exam. I’m quite confident that it measures whether or not you know the program. You know, in the old days, one of my big complaints about the ACE Exam was you could just like read the manual and get by, sometimes even pass, if you know the arcane details, the obscure stuff. Now, you really need to know how to use the program and how best to use the program.
I think, it is quite fair. If you know the program well, if you have been using the program, if you know the new features and so on, you will probably pass. I think it is unlikely that people are going to get 95 percent. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Correct. I don’t know if I could pass after reading over all those questions. I started getting a trembling in my gut, you know. If they say that… We don’t know… We have no control over what percentage they are going to say is passing. Historically, they have said anywhere between 60 percent and 75 percent is passing. I believe that if you pass at that rate, then you are definitely an expert.
David: Yeah, if you get…
Anne-Marie: They are going to post some sample questions and they are going to post these are the areas that the questions are going to be centered on. They are going to be about text and they will be about this. They won’t be covering how do you script InDesign. As long as you concentrate on those study areas just like we have in the past, then you will be good. I remember studying for the Acrobat exam a few versions ago and I was petrified that it would start asking me about all the JavaScript actions, like how do you program a JavaScript action. But, it was listed in the study guide, so that meant it wasn’t going to be on the test. And it wasn’t.
David: We, actually, on that point we have not an announcement yet, but we will be making a very interesting announcement in January about some other stuff that we will be hopefully be helping you learn what you need to learn about the InDesign ACE Exam. More to come on that topic.
Anne-Marie: All right. Two new plugins for InDesign that allow you to create right to left text. Normally, you have to purchase another version of InDesign that is sold by a third party. What is that company’s name, David?
David: WinSoft.
Anne-Marie: WinSoft. Right. It is called InDesign Middle East. It is like a cousin to InDesign. It has got all the same features, but it allows you to write Hebrew text and Middle Eastern text. Right to left. What if you just want to put just a paragraph or just a phrase of right to left text? You really can’t do it, except as artwork in InDesign, unless you grab on to these plugins. So, Bob Levine, one of our contributors, wrote a very funny post called “A Modern Day Hanukkah Miracle: Right to Left Language Features Come to Life in InDesign CS4.” That is because CS4 has a new feature called… Is it “World Language”?
David: Yes. World Language… World Composition…
Anne-Marie: “World Ready Composer.” It is called “World Ready Composer…”
David: OK.
Anne-Marie: That supports right to left language, but it is not in the menu item. It is sort of buried in the program and it can only be called on with a script or a plugin. Have you used either one of these? Have you tried them out?
David: Only a little bit. I have tried… There is two available. One is from the guy that does all the InTools plugins. The guy out of Jerusalem…
Anne-Marie: Harbs.
David: Harbs. It is a really robust plugin. It is Mac and Windows. It is great. The other one I didn’t hear about until last week, just before Bob posted that. It is currently Windows only. I have an email in to the guy saying “What the heck?” Come on, what about Mac users? If we can convince him to do a Mac version, that would be great.
Anne-Marie: That is called IDRTL. InDesign Right to Left. It is only $20. That is a good deal.
David: That one is like $20 and the other one from Harbs is like $100, but I think it does a lot more currently. Clearly, there is a lot of ability out there if you need to do right to left text, whether it is Hebrew or Arabic or whatever. Previous to that, I wanted to mention that we did have a script on InDesign Secrets.
Anne-Marie: Right!
David: …that let you reverse the text. Like if you just had one word, you could type it, you could basically type it, select it, and rung the script, and it would just kind of flip it around. If you really want to do a sentence or a paragraph or a whole document, with right to left, then you are going to need one of these plugins. Just wanted to let you know about those, very cool. They are CS4 only, because it relies on that CS4 feature we were talking about.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. All right. So, what is your rant about PICT, dear?
David: Well…
Anne-Marie: What is your problem with PICT?
David: Somebody emailed us about PICT, that they were using PICT in InDesign and it wasn’t working properly. Blah, blah, blah. I just kind of went off on another one of my rants on the blog about how people should not use PICT. PICT is a Mac only file format. It was great in 1987…
Anne-Marie: Wasn’t it the native Mac draw format?
David: It was. It was the original Mac Draw. From about 1984 to 1987, it was perfectly adequate and then it just should have gone away. Unfortunately, it still shows up every now and again, but you do not want to use PICT for virtually anything, in my humble opinion. There is a big difference between bitmapped PICTs and vector PICTs. Vector PICTs, you absolutely do not want to use. Bitmapped PICTs can have their purpose, but I just wouldn’t. There is just too many other good file formats out there.
It is like using BMP on Windows. Why would you use BMP? What are you thinking? Or WMF, the old Windows metafile thing. There are better file formats for professional publishing.
Especially if you are going to print. If you are ever going to print this puppy, don’t use PICT or WMF or BMP or even GIF, or something crazy like that. Use file formats that are tried and true for the print publishing industry like PDF, TIFF, EPS in a pinch if you have to. I don’t like EPS, but, you know, it does have its purposes every now and again.
Those are file formats that you need to be using, or, for InDesign certainly, PSD files, native Photoshop files, or native Illustrator, AI, files. Those are good file formats for using in InDesign, but not PICT! Get away from it. If you see a PICT, shoot it.
Anne-Marie: Well, if you see a PICT, you should try to convert it.
David: You should. That’s better. A little kinder than shooting it.
Anne-Marie: … libraries of PICT files available and so you can… I remember writing an article called, “I didn’t know Acrobat four could do that,” for Acrobat 4. One of the tips was you have a PageMaker file and there is a PICT graphic in there, that is embedded, and you want to be able to edit it. How do you get to it? You export it to PostScript. You write it to PS. Make a PostScript file and run it through Distiller, I remember. You open that in Illustrator and then you it as a graphic and suddenly it is a vector object that you can color. I thought that was the neatest thing. Definitely, even back then, that was probably like 1992, PICT graphics were on their way out. They are just not good. You need to spend some time. Give it to the intern. Give it to the new hire. Take this library of PICT files and convert it to AI or even EPS, if necessary.
David: I assume that Illustrator must open PICT. I haven’t even tried it in 15 years. I assume you can just open it in Illustrator. Illustrator is a great tool for converting from one file format to another. That is what I would try first. Unless it is bitmapped only, then I would open it is Photoshop. Let Photoshop be your file converter, but of course then it’s definitely only going to be bitmapped, then you are going to get…
Anne-Marie: I don’t know. I still think a good way to get a quality PICT is to write it to a PDF file. Because I think, in fact, I think somebody that commented on that post of yours mentioned that. Something about that there is quick draw object calls in PDF on Mac OS 10 and it sort of like fortifies the PICT. It adds necessary stuff to it, so that I think Illustrator can actually recognize it better.
David: Yep. There is all kinds of ways. The key is that you want to convert. You want to get it out of PICT as soon as possible.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: OK.
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: A couple of other really quick things here. I did want to point out your guide to special characters that you so kindly put together. It’s really cool.
Anne-Marie: I was working on a project, and they had all these bizarre little blue squigglies, and I could not figure out what it was. I know that there are various guides to what do the blue squigglies mean and InDesign when you have hidden characters showing, but I thought, OK I’m going to make a quick one for myself and make them really big because a lot of them are too small and also next to text. And then I just went crazy and spent the next day and a half in making the be all, end all guide to every single special character and marker, too. So, like what a footnote looks like in the Story Editor. It looks quite different than it does in Layout, and an index marker and an anchored object and so I put it up as a PDF. You can download that from our website. We’ll put a link to it in the Show Notes, but also you can just look for special characters in our cool little search engine.
David: Yes, I really think that’s great. I think everybody should have that PDF, study it. Those questions will not be on the ACE Exam, but they are still really worth knowing. What is this weird character? You don’t have to memorize all of them, but just to know that when you see a weird character, you’ve got a place to look it up is a great relief. Thank you very much for putting all of that work into that. It’s a very wonderful PDF and free, free, free. We like free. Here we go.
Anne-Marie: What is the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week?
David: Hide master items. Hide master items. What’s that?
Anne-Marie: I think that would be an easy one.
David: You think so?
Anne-Marie: But, I think it’s an obscure feature. I’ve probably used it, maybe, twice in the past seven years. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: I used to use that command all the time in Page Makers. I’m on a Page Maker bent today, but in Page Maker master items are always completely locked.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: Remember that?
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And so, if you want to sort of edit what the master page items, click on a particular document page. You had to hide all the master page items and go over to the master page, copy the ones that you want and then paste in place, on the page. That’s what you had to do. I remember using that command a lot in Page Maker, but, you know, I hardly ever use it in InDesign, and the command is hiding without a keyboard shortcut and I guess you don’t need it that often in the pages panel menu in CS3 and CS4 and I would assume since Version 1.0.
David: I don’t know. I don’t have the old versions anymore, but yes, it’s been around for quite awhile. The ability to hide all of your master page items and show them again, of course, because hide master items turns into show master items from the pages panel menu. I think it’s actually very useful. The reason I think it’s really useful is sometimes I’m not entirely sure what is a master item and what isn’t, so it’s a nice quick way of going, OK, just hide all that stuff. It was like turning off a layer; just hide it. The other reason I find it really useful is often on master pages you have things like backgrounds, you know, very busy backgrounds, the colors or whatever, and they come from the master items.
It’s a tossup. Do you go to the layers panel and turn off the visibility for that layer, or do you just hide all the master items? You could kind of go either way.
Anne-Marie: That’s a very good tip. That’s a good tip because a lot of people don’t even bother with creating more than one layer.
David: That’s true.
Anne-Marie: So, you have everything sitting on one layer. Unless you thought ahead and made a special layer just for your master page items, that’s a quick way to hide all the master page items.
David: Just get rid of all that extraneous stuff that you don’t need to be looking at. I just want to be looking at the text, just what’s on the document page, just hide all that other stuff that goes behind it or whatever. I find it useful.
Anne-Marie: One other thing that you should mention is that it does not hide overwritten master page items, only the ones that are currently locked.
David: Very good point.
Anne-Marie: So, something to keep in mind. All right.
David: And that’s actually interesting because it’s another way to tell what is overwritten and what isn’t overwritten. You can kind of tell that already, just like you can kind of tell what’s a master page, because there are the dotted lines, like anything in CS3 and CS4.
Anne-Marie: It’s very tiny though.
David: It’s subtle, but master items in CS3 and CS4 have dotted edges instead of solid edges. I find that very useful to be able to tell what’s a master item and what’s not, and when you override it, it becomes solid. But, just another way to do that, to turn it on and off, hide it and show it again.
Anne-Marie: Interesting. So, I chose hide master items and saw my overwritten master items sitting there, so then I selected it and chose remove selected local override and boom, it disappeared. I got a little freaked out for just a second, and I went, “Oh, yeah, that’s right because it’s supposed to be hiding”.
David: They are hidden, exactly. I like that.
Anne-Marie: There should be a little icon: feature request for CS5. There should be a little icon in the pages panel next to the page where master page items are hidden. What if you get a file, you’re like, “Gee, why isn’t this master page item showing up on this page?”
David: Is it? You know, I forgot to even check. Is hide master items on a spread level or a document level? I thought it was document level.
Anne-Marie: No, they only disappear for the active page.
David: No way.
Anne-Marie: For the active spread. Yes, dear.
David: Well, there you go. What the heck do I know about this program?
Anne-Marie: See, I was right.
David: You were right.
Anne-Marie: I was right. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: We need an icon that says that master page items are hidden. I was right.
David: Is that right? Whoa, that’s dangerous. That is really dangerous. It is only on the current spread, apparently.
Anne-Marie: That’s what I would think. Why would you think it was document wide?
David: Because you can’t tell. Otherwise, it’s exactly what you just said. You can’t tell if it’s on or off. You hit a spread, and suddenly there’re no master items. That could be a real problem.
Anne-Marie: I assumed it was just a single spread only because it’s in that little grouping of override all master page items. Remove all local overrides. Those are spread specific.
David: That’s a good point. And, you know, maybe, that’s useful to be able to do that on a single spread because that brings up a separate tip of, maybe, there’s a page for example, you are on page one of a document and you don’t want the footers on page one, whatever.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: You want the master page to be on page one. You could simply hide them. Usually, I override them and delete them, but in this case you, could simply hide them on that spread. I never thought of it.
Anne-Marie: If that’s the only item on the master page.
David: Well, basically, whatever is on the master page would be missing, and in theory it would not print. We’d better try that next. Hopefully, it would print though.
Anne-Marie: No, no, they don’t print.
David: Oh, they don’t print. OK, good.
Anne-Marie: But, you’re going to have to put a little note in the paste board that says, ‘I hid the master page items here’ with an arrow because you’re going to forget next time you work on that thing.
David: You see, everybody, there’s always more to learn about InDesign.
Anne-Marie: If something is acting weird, look in the pages panel menu and see if it says show master items. If it does, then that’s the problem. Choose it and then things will appear that weren’t there before.
David: Anyway, that is it for Episode 93. Be sure to check out our show notes on our blog at InDesignSecrets.com. We’re going to have links to all of the places that we’ve been mentioning in this podcast. Also, we’d love to hear what you thought of the show. So, go to the blog and type in your comments or email us if you have a question or thought or whatever. You can email us at info@InDesignSecrets.com, and until we meet again this is David Blatner and…
Anne-Marie: … and AnneMarie Concepcion for InDesign Secrets. [music]