Podcast 99 Transcript

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 99 page.

[music]

David: Welcome to InDesign Secrets, Episode 99.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: Yes?

David: I’m David Blatner, and I’m here with my cohost the singing Anne-Marie Concepcion.

Anne-Marie: Hello.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: You’re in a happy mood today.

David: I’m in a happy, happy mood. It’s a beautiful day and our podcast and blog at InDesignsecrets.com are the independent resource for all things in InDesign. Wooyoo.

All right. Fine.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: That’s more complicated.

David: Anne-Marie, get happy.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: Coming up on today’s show, news, such as a little old free InDesign update that came out a little bit ago.

David: Update.

Anne-Marie: And we’re coming to a city near you, InDesign seminar tour. Maybe, I suppose, if you’re in that city then it would be near you.

David: That’s right.

Anne-Marie: We’re going to talk about that and a few other bits of news. We’re going to present to you the world’s simplest GREP style. For those of you whose hair rises on the back of their neck when they hear the term GREP and they just sort of glass over it, we’re going to get you started with GREP with the world’s simplest thing that you’re going to find so useful.

David: Totally.

Anne-Marie: And, continuing to talk about styles, you know, now that we have GREP styles, and in CS4 we have line styles and all that kind of stuff, now we can have more than one character style applied to the same bit of text.

And when that happens, who wins?

David: huh.

Anne-Marie: So we’re going to talk about the hierarchy of styles, of character styles.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: And we’re going to be talking about our plans for episode 100.

David: 100, 100, 100, 100.

Anne-Marie: And one more. We have lots of fun stuff and we need you to participate. So, that’s coming up.

And the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week. Eek, eek, eek, eek, eek. Paragraph spacing limit.

David: Yes, the limit of paragraph spacing.

Anne-Marie: I got that one. Been around forever. Everybody has seen this.

David: Not everybody understands it.

Anne-Marie: That’s right.

David: So, we’ll talk about that. But, first, let’s talk a little bit about our sponsors. Our helpful sponsors. We have three in this episode including MOGO. MOGO seminars, MOGO events, MOGO Media, and we have a very special announcement there. Some of you may already read this on the blog. Anne-Marie and I are doing InDesign seminars and those are going to be coming to a city near you if you happen to be somewhere in America. If you’re not in American, then you can always fly to America and then it would be near you.

We’re doing some… Coming up in June, we’re going to be doing seminars in San Francisco, Seattle, Las Angeles, and then… later in the month.

Anne-Marie: In Boston.

David: And then later in the month, Boston…

Anne-Marie: And Minneapolis.

David: And Minneapolis. Yup.

And then in the fall, we’ll be doing a few more New York, Philadelphia and some others coming up as well, so that’s going to be very exciting. That’s right.

Anne-Marie: Now that’s not both of us?

David: At each one.

[crosstalk]

David: That’s true.

Anne-Marie: Somebody has to hold down the home fort and make sure that nobody spams the blog.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: So, it’s either going to be David or I, and we basically split the U.S. along the Mississippi, I think. David’s taking half and I’m taking half. And there may be some other speakers. We don’t know yet. And we might…

David: We may sneak into the other person’s seminar…

Anne-Marie: Yes.

David: Maybe virtually, if we can figure out how to do that, cleverly.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: It’s going to be fun.

So, InDesign seminar tour, which is cosponsored by InDesign magazine, and of course is presented by MOGO seminars.

MOGO is also doing a couple of other seminars coming up like this week as your listening. If you’re in Chicago, definitely head down to the Dreamweaver’s CSS seminar that Brian Wood is doing in Chicago.

Anne-Marie: I wanted to go to that.

David: You got to go to that. It is going to be awesome.

Anne-Marie: I forgot all about it.

David: He has been doing a bunch… I am sure he is going to be doing more of those. That’s cool, too.

And for any of those seminars we have got a discount code for you and it looks like it is perfectly aimed for… It looks like it was written for Anne-Marie, because the discount code is AMCTIME09.

Anne-Marie: I asked MOGO Media, a couple of weeks ago, for a discount code to announce in a seminar and they gave me that one.

David: Oh.

Anne-Marie: So they just let us use it for InDesign Secrets too.

David: Cool, cool.

Anne-Marie: No problem. I earn all of the money from the referrals, so…

David: Ah! Even better.

Anne-Marie: No, I don’t earn anything. That just gives you a nice little discount.

David: That’s a good discount.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. So, go to… Is it MOGOSeminars.com? That the URL?

David: They have got a bunch of seminars… They have got a bunch of URLs. The one I always use is MOGOSeminars.com, because that takes you right there. I like it.

Anne-Marie: Oh… That’s cool. Get your MOGO on, come see us in a seminar.

David: Most excellent. It is going to be really, really, fun. OK. Next sponsor is WoodWing. We welcome WoodWing for the first time sponsoring InDesign Secrets.

Anne-Marie: Yay…

David: And WoodWing, many of you know, they are the maker of many, many, many awesome plugins for InDesign including SmartStyles, which is a great plugin which lets you… How do you describe it?

Anne-Marie: It combines every single style known to man in InDesign, so all text styles, all table styles and object styles along with a library and, whatchamacallit, the eye dropper tool.

David: Yeah, it is kind of like the eye dropper, but you can drag and drop whole definitions of styles.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: So, if you have a table and you really want all of your tables to look the certain way, the certain way, just like this one table, you can make a SmartStyle of that one table.

And it is much smarter than the built in table styles. I mean, it is nice that InDesign has table styles, but the SmartStyles is much more intelligent about how it sort of figures out what your tables should look like and how it applies that formatting.

Anne-Marie: Right, you just drag and drop a SmartStyle from a library, like a smart library. That is what you get when you get the plugin.

I mean, I installed it and I was looking all over for the SmartStyles menu and there is none. It just adds stuff to existing things. With the library, you get a SmartStyle library and when you drag and drop one of those library items on to an existing frame. Boom, it takes on the formatting.

You have really fine tuned control over which formatting. Sort of like the eye dropper when you double click it you have all those check boxes. You can do the same thing for every item in that SmartStyle library.

And they are linked. So, if you then update that library item by replacing it with one with the same name, then all of the items in your InDesign document update to match.

David: It is very sweet.

Anne-Marie: So, it is pretty powerful. That is one half. The other half is that they add two very useful items to the table menu, which is “sort,” really strong sort, you can sort by one column, two column, three column, ascending, descending, all that kind of stuff.

And “formulas.” I know we have complained about this mightily. Any program that has tables, should also let you do formulas, or at least simple sum. It has that formula and a few other ones. Pretty simple to get your head around.

We also have a… Don’t we also have a deal with WoodWing too?

David: I think so, a discount code, but I can’t find it here. Where did it go? Where did it go? We do have a discount code and we are going to be putting that in our show notes so that you can link to WoodWing and get that plugin.

SmartStyles is very, very, sweet plugin. There is no doubt about it. You should definitely check that out. It helps just layout pages. Whenever you have boring, repetitive, tasks and you need to format a bunch of stuff quickly, SmartStyles is the way to go.

Anne-Marie: It’s a discount. You get a discount off of SmartStyles if you use the coupon code INDESIGNSECRETS.

David: Oh, you found it.

Anne-Marie: We’ll put a link there in our show notes.

David: “InDesignsecrets.”

Anne-Marie: Right. But, it’s only valid until the end of April 2009, so get there quickly.

David: Yes, for sure.

Anne-Marie: Before they run out.

David: [laughs] They only have a certain number of bits that they’re going to sell.

Anne-Marie: That’s correct.

David: Finally, the third sponsor is Adobe.

Anne-Marie: It’s a tiny little company. Who are they? Abode.

David: [laughs] Abode.

Anne-Marie: Abode.

David: No, Adobe. Adohbee.

Anne-Marie: Makers of the finest stucco and bricks in the whole Southwest.

David: [laughs] Exactly. Exactly.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, OK. Adobe, yes. Adobe is a very welcome sponsor. Thank you, Adobe.

David: Yes. That was very, very kind.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. What exactly are they sponsoring?

David: Well, you know what they want? They really, really, really want you, the InDesign Secrets listener, to upgrade from CS3 to CS4, or from CS2 or CS or whatever, whatever version you have, to upgrade to CS4. And CS4, I have to admit, is a great upgrade.

And I’ve heard some people go, “Oh, well, it doesn’t have that much stuff.” I’m like, “This is a great upgrade.” And I’m not just saying that. I love CS4. And whenever I have to go back to CS3, I’m like, “Where’s this feature? Where’s that feature?” It’s just crazymaking going back.

So, I’m going to encourage everyone here to upgrade to CS4. Just take the plunge and jump in. They’re doing this offer where, if you’re using CS2 or CS, you can upgrade for the same amount that you would if you were using CS3.

Anne-Marie: Right. It was supposed to expire like a couple weeks ago, but they extended it.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: And the thing is that, as somebody who pays for upgrades from CS1 to CS2 to CS3, when I pay for the upgrade to CS4, it’s a little aggravating that somebody who didn’t upgrade to CS3 gets it for the same price.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: So, they’re trying to take care of the people who’ve been upgrading regularly by, at some point, olderversion users have to pay more than oneback version users. But, just for a little while, they are extending the offer where everybody pays the same price to upgrade. So, that’s a good deal.

David: It is. Do us a favor, even. If you go to the InDesign Secrets site and you go to our show notes, use the link that’s there to jump to Adobe. That tells Adobe that you’re listening, and it helps them help us. So, that’s a good thing.

Anne-Marie: That you came from our site. And that offer, by the way, for the same pricing, ends on April 30th as well.

David: That’s right.

Anne-Marie: So, keep that in mind. It’s not forever.

David: It is not. So, thank you for Adobe. Check into upgrading. It’s really, really worth it. And thank you to all our sponsors.

OK. We’d better move on to some of this news. There’s lots of new stuff.

Anne-Marie: The first bit of news is that InDesign and InCopy both received 6.0.1 updates. That’s for CS4. Because InDesign is version 6. CS4 is version 6.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: And a lot of the other CS4 apps also got updates. So, if you haven’t run your Adobe updater, please run it. Just go to any CS4 program, go to the help menu and choose “Check for updates.” Or I think now it just says “Updates.”

And 6.0.1 for InDesign fixed some serious bugs. One of the most aggravating was that, oh, this cool, new “Export to SWF” feature, that I can make this cool, interactive SWF, and then it has the revamped hyperlinks panel. I’ll put some hyperlinks to my website and my email addresses, and the thing is that it failed on the email address part. It wouldn’t work in the SWF. So, they fixed that. So, now email addresses work, which is very nice.

David: Yeah. Yeah. Also, the one that they fixed that was making me crazy was, if you imported an InDesign file into another InDesign file, then stuff from that InDesign file’s master page sometimes didn’t show up when you exported to PDF files, which was absolutely aggravating beyond words. So, they fixed that as well, so that’s good. There are lots of little fixes in there. Definitely upgrade to 6.0.1.

Anne-Marie: And then we have some sad news.

David: Yeah, yeah. That’s true.

Anne-Marie: The foreclosure crisis has hit Adobe.

David: [laughs] Ouch.

Anne-Marie: Has hit the Creative suite. They had to close Bridge Home.

David: Bridge Home has been closed. Yep, it’s true. Tell us about Bridge Home.

Anne-Marie: I guess they got in over their head. [laughs]

David: Yeah. Bridge Home was where you had tips, and it was like an RSS feed of all these tips, tricks, and links and stuff, right?

Anne-Marie: Yeah. It was a link in Bridge to Bridge Home. I think it was there by default, or you could turn it on or off from preferences. It has links to all the videos. Do you remember the CS3 videos that we did?

David: Yeah. Yeah.

Anne-Marie: It had links to all those videos. And by the way, that’s still available on Adobe’s website, those CS3 videos, which are still immensely helpful to me. But also, right, it took an RSS feed from Adobe with the latest tips and hints and stuff. And I guess, like I said, they got in over their head, and they were under water, as they say. They owed more on their house than what it was worth, and so they foreclosed on Bridge Home and tore it down, and they’re going to put up a parking lot.

David: It’s kind of like Adobe Stock Photos. That was in Bridge as well.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: They’re slowly just killing off pieces of Bridge.

Anne-Marie: I look at it this way. They’re trying a whole lot of cool stuff, and some things don’t work. That’s all.

David: Yeah, I guess that’s true. You’re right.

Anne-Marie: They’re trying ConnectNow, and they’re trying Share My Screen, and they’re trying the Cooler panel, and they’re trying this and that…

David: And that does work.

Anne-Marie: Not everything’s going to work, but at least they’re trying. I like that.

David: Yeah, I guess that’s true. That’s a nice, optimistic way of thinking about it. [laughs]

Anne-Marie: Also, another bit of news. If you have never been to one of the Adobe community forums, you’re missing out on a ton. I subscribe to a lot of the Adobe forums by email, and I go there a lot. These are the usertouser forums, where if you have a question about InDesign or Photoshop or whatever, you just go there and post it, and then all these other users will respond to you.

They are finally redesigning or actually, they’re upgrading the forum software, because it’s been the same for about the past, I don’t know, seven or eight years, and the search engine is horrendous, and it’s hard to follow threads and things like that. And so now it’s all spiffy.

And you can test it for itself. It might be live by the time you hear this. They haven’t announced when it’s supposed to go live. But, if you go to the regular Adobe forums from the link on their website, under the community forums, you’ll be in the old forums. But, if you go to this URL, if you start with adobeforums.adobe.com, then you’ll be in the preview of the new Adobe forum software.

There you can upload a picture of yourself, or any fun, little avatar, and so your little picture appears with your post. And you can see how many times somebody has posted, and if they are employee or one of the community experts, like David and I are.

And I like that you can see it in threaded versions. So, if somebody replies to my post in one of these threads, then it’s sort of indented a little bit. And if somebody replies to the original poster, it’s outdented a little bit. So, you can sort of follow the multiple conversations that often carry on. And it has few little bugs. But, the search engine is fantastic. Much better.

David: Yeah, I think it’s really coming together. It’s great. So, kudos to John Cornicello and everyone at Adobe who is involved with that, because it’s definitely coming along, which is great.

Hey, one other thing. It’s not really news, but I wanted to just remind people again to sign up for our Twitter feed, which is just InDesignSecrets is the Twitter feed. Or you can just go to, there’s a little “subscribe” button in the upperright corner of our web page. If you go there and you click “subscribe,” you can sign up for the Twitter feed. You can also sign up for our mailing list and RSS feeds and all kinds of stuff there. So, don’t forget that little “subscribe” button. We want to get you signed up.

Anne-Marie: So, InDesign Secrets. We’re getting lots of new users every day in our Twitter feed.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: And we try to send out a tip or two every few days. It’s not overwhelming. We’re not talking about what we’re having for breakfast or anything like that. I got into a big argument this weekend with some of my family about Twitter. They’re like, “Why are you using Twitter? That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of! Who cares if you brushed your teeth with Crest or Pepsodent?”

David: Yeah, I agree. There’s a lot of stuff I just don’t care to read from other people on Twitter. But, InDesign Secrets, we are putting out just basically tips; tips and links, important stuff to InDesign Secrets listeners, not random stuff. That’s a good point.

We should jump into the world’s simplest GREP style. This is actually a CS4 thing when we’re talking about GREP styles, but it is just so easy to do cool things with GREP styles. We’re not going to go into details about what GREP is other than to say that it’s a pattern. It’s a text pattern. It’s a way to define a pattern.

Anne-Marie: Right. Finding and changing, or detecting things based on a pattern rather than a string of letters. That said, our tip is the opposite of what we just said, which is to treat a string of letters as GREP.

David: Exactly. For example, somebody emailed us and said, ’so, what I want to do is every time my company name shows up, I want to make it italic. How can I do that?’

The answer is, that’s a perfect example of GREP style, and it’s a really, really easy GREP style. So, in InDesign CS4, you just go into your paragraph style definition, go to the GREP Styles pane, and click on New GREP Style. Click on what looks like a code, it’ll be like ‘/D+.’ Click on that and erase it, and just type the name, like in this case, the name of the company.

Then, in the character style area, click on that and choose a character style, which could be italic in this case, or it could be any character style you want. You can even define a character style from that popup menu, if you want, in CS4. As soon as you’ve done that, any time that word or company name shows up in that particular paragraph style, it will become italic automatically. It’s so easy; you don’t have to put codes or anything.

Anne-Marie: As you type it, it happens magically. It’s just amazing. You don’t have to worry about doing ‘Find’ changes every time, or one last time before you send it off to the printer. It’s part of the style.

David: Yeah, yeah. There’s no special codes, you just type in the name of whatever you’re looking for. I use this a lot, for example, with the word InDesign. If I don’t want InDesign to ever break, I don’t want it to hyphenate, just type InDesign into that GREP style, and then I apply a character style that has ‘Note Break’ turned on. It won’t break. It’s a nice, easy way to do it.

Anne-Marie: I just go to ‘Edit Hyphenation’ and put the little squiggly in.

David: I know, I know. It has to do with the dictionary. But, there are a lot of things I find that I just don’t want to bother with messing around with my user dictionary. I just want it to work. Especially in this particular document, or this particular style, so I use the Note Break a lot, or colorizing, or changing something to italic a lot. Again, you don’t need to know codes; just type in the word and it just looks for that word. It is so cool. The world’s simplest GREP style, just type it in.

If you don’t mind, I will throw in a quick little plug here, one of the reasons why GREP is on my mind so much is because I just finished a title for Lynda.com on GREP and how to use GREP in InDesign. It’s something like, 10 Things You Have to Know About GREP and InDesign, something like that. It will be showing up at Lynda.com probably Aprilish, I hope. I hope they are going to finish editing it by then, probably in April. It’s going to be fun, it’s a fun title.

Anne-Marie: Fantastic. All right, so then we want to talk about the priority of styles.

David: Yes, because as soon as you start talking about GREP styles, you have to talk about the hierarchy.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. Let’s say for example that the name of the company that you are trying to make italic throughout occurs at the beginning of a paragraph, and you had set up a nested style for that paragraph style that would make everything bold italic or something like that up until the end of the first sentence.

So, you have both a GREP style that is supposed to affect the formatting of that word, and a nested style. Which one wins? Especially like if they conflict. What if your GREP style, instead of trying to make it italic made it green and your nested style made it red. If you had that word in the beginning of a paragraph where the nested style gets applied, is it going to be red or green?

David: Right. And then, there’s other ones too, like drop cap styles.

Anne-Marie: Line styles.

David: Line styles.

Anne-Marie: What if your line style made it purple and it was the first word?

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, so actually, if they’re not conflicting and something makes it bold, something else makes it red, and something else makes it all caps, then you get additive character styles. For the first time, you can have more than one character style get applied to the same word automatically.

The only problem is that there is no way to tell, there is no feedback in the user interface in the character styles panel that tells you all the character styles that are affecting that word.

David: Yeah. It’s frustrating, very frustrating.

Anne-Marie: It does say one. I think it just lists the one from the nested styles, or maybe the most recent.

David: Yeah, whichever one is on top, I think.

Anne-Marie: Let’s say that they are conflicting. Which one wins? First of all, I think you should know that any character style that you apply manually, not automatic through any of these fancyschmancy techniques, but that you just swipe over the text and click on the character style, that always trumps everything else.

So, if you really need something to be red, no matter what color it is now, you can select it and choose red in your character style panel and it will be red. But then, after that, the big boss of all those automatically applied style is the GREP style. So, that trumps any formatting applied by line styles, nested styles, drop cap style. So, if you have a GREP style that wins.

You know, you can have more than one GREP style. So, then the GREP style priority is the one on top of the list is the most important. The number one GREP style is king of the pack.

David: I thought it was the one at the bottom. Are you sure? I’m going to have to fight you on this one.

Anne-Marie: GREP styles are applied in order from first to last.

David: Yep. The one that is on the bottom is going to be applied last.

Anne-Marie: Ah.

David: So, that would end up being on top of everything else.

Anne-Marie: See I was, I had my screen turned 180 degrees.

David: Ah, that would do it.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, it looked the opposite of what you said.

David: If you turn your monitor upside down…

Anne-Marie: I had rotate page on the styles dialog box up.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: All right. So, that’s number one is GREP style. Number two, after that, is drop cap style. Let’s say you have a line style, and then you also have a drop cap style. The drop cap style will format that drop cap differently than the line style.

And then after drop cap style is nested style, and then finally line style. Poor line style, line style is the runt. Line style tries, but any type of something else automatic or manual that conflicts with it, the other one is going to win.

David: You know, I think it makes sense, though. Typically, you want to have a line style, let’s say your line style is all small caps for the first line. Then on top of that, you may want to have, for the first three words in the nested style, make the first three words something different. And on top of the first three words that are different, you may want to have a drop cap. You want the drop cap to be overwriting that, right?

And on top of all of that, if there were a GREP style that just happened to target that first word, you’d want that to be on top. So, in my mind, it’s really kind of logical. Although, it’s rare that you would have a GREP style that would trump everything. But, in general, the drop cap on top of nested on top of line style, I think it’s the way that people would want it to work. I applaud Adobe’s logic, but I do wish that they would have given us some kind of UI because it is really frustrating.

By the way, we are going to put a couple of links in our show notes to other blog posts on this. Tim Cole wrote a great one. Mike Franklin wrote a great one on this topic. It gives you a visual of what goes on top of what, so definitely check those out. If we have been completely confusing to you on what the hierarchy is, check those out.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. And by the way, we’ll include a link to my Lynda.com InDesign CS4 New Features because I have a whole video on what trumps what.

David: Woohoo. Oh really, wow.

Anne-Marie: Yes, I do.

David: There you go. All right. More commercial plug ins excellent we like that. OK, now. The next episode you may have noticed, the next episode is going to be episode 100! Anne-Marie and I have been doing this for…

Anne-Marie: 100 years!

David: 100 Years. One hundred years! So, 100 episodes and that’s going to be our next episode. So, we decided to do something kind of special in that episode. We’re going to be giving out some awards. What is tentatively called the best of the week eekeekeek awards. I don’t know maybe we’ll change it to something.

Anne-Marie: Because it’s the best of the year.

David: Well, here’s the thing. I just wanted to put eekeek in there. I don’t care what the word is.

Anne-Marie: How about the eekeekeek awards? The best estest awards.

David: No, eekeekeek. The eekeekeek awards. That could work.

Anne-Marie: That could work.

David: OK, so I’ll tell you what. We are going to ask you the listeners, readers, InDesign users of the universe, to give us your ideas, to vote on what you think is the best free script out there. What you think is the best commercial plug in out there.

Anne-Marie: And we’re not asking you to come up with an email and send it to us. We’re actually going to have something prepared!

David: It’s true!

Anne-Marie: We’re going to have a ballot.

David: A real poll which is going to be at SurveyMonkey. Really nice. They’ve done a really nice job with it and we’re going to… We’ll give you the URL in the show notes to jump to that. That would be…

Anne-Marie: We will post it, and we will email it, and we will put it in our twitter feed, but we’re only going to give you until the end of March. Because, sometime in the beginning of April, and this is not an April fools joke by the way, we will be doing episode 100 where we’ll announce the best commercial plug in, the best free script, the best InDesign book, that kind of stuff.

We’re also going to have like a logo. So, if you’re the winner, you can put a little triumphant badge on your website or print it on your cards as the winner of the first annual eekeekeek awards.

David: That’s right. It’s going to be fun, lots of fun. So, please sign up! Hey, why don’t we just tell people the URL they can jump to and if you’re not even near the show notes or anything… InDesignsecrets.com/bestof100. So, all one word best of and then the number 100.

Anne-Marie: That’s good.

David: We will just make that… we’ll figure out how to make that work later.

Anne-Marie: We’ll put a link to the survey on that page. Yeah.

David: Yeah, let’s do that. Perfect. So, check it out. All right, we’ve better jump in next to the obscure InDesign feature of the week eekeekeekeekeekeek.

Anne-Marie: Sorry, that was kind of lame. Let’s try that again.

David: Yeah, really, come on. OK. The obscure InDesign feature of the week eekeekeekeek.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: We sound like monkeys, speaking of SurveyMonkey. Where is paragraph spacing limit?

David: Paragraph… SurveyMonkey…no. Paragraph spacing limit….

Anne-Marie: Is in text frame options which is command or controlb, which makes perfect sense.

David: Well, you know, more or less.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, text frame options and it has to do with vertical justification. You know like every text frame that you drag out is by default a line at the top of the text frame. If you start typing everything grows from the top down.

David: Yeah.

Anne-Marie: But, you can change that in vertical justification. It can be aligned on the bottom. So, as you type it starts at the bottom of the text frame, which is a great April fools joke by the way. Change that in somebody’s default text frame option style. Or centered, which I use all the time to… Actually, not as necessary anymore in cs4 since we have those fancyschmancy smart guides.

David: That’s true.

Anne-Marie: I used to use vertical justification by dragging out a text frame from the top to the bottom margin and then specify it as centered align to get text that’s exactly vertically centered on the page.

David: Oh, I like it! But, now you can just kind of drag it right into the center of the page.

Anne-Marie: That’s right because you get a little center guide there that appears. Or the one that is of interest to us is justified. That’s really the only time that paragraph spacing limit applies.

David: Right.

Anne-Marie: When you treat it as justified. And you’ll see it for all the other choices it’s sort of dimmed.

David: Yup.

Anne-Marie: So, you want to talk about that in detail?

David: Well, sure.

Anne-Marie: Got time to talk?

[laughter]

David: Her steam just ended right there.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: That’s right.

David: And Anne-Marie’s time zone is lunch time right now.

[laughter]

David: An hour ago. We’ve just been waiting.

OK. The question is, and this actually was a question that came up recently….

Anne-Marie: huh.

David: In email was: how do I if I’m using vertical justification, get it to stop messing up all my letting? Usually when you choose it to vertical justification, it adds the same amount of space between every line in the text frame.

Anne-Marie: What some people know is feathering, I think.

David: Feathering. It feathers the whole, the whole, all the text in the text frame. And that’s really annoying because most people want the letting to be a certain amount.

And the answer is, you add the paragraph spacing limit. You set the paragraph spacing limit from zero to something big like two or three picas or ten millimeters or whatever, and that allows InDesign to add space in between each paragraph so that it doesn’t it doesn’t need to add it in between each line.

So, that’s what it’s all about. It allows…you’re giving it permission to add space between each of those paragraphs.

Anne-Marie: That’s right.

David: And it’s great. Typically you want to do that.

Now, it’s not perfect because in many cases, you might want to have more space between, before a heading than between a paragraph. Two normal body paragraphs, for example. And what it does is it adds an equal amount of space between each paragraph, instead.

So, it turns out there is a plugin, that, a commercial plugin, but it’s an awesome plugin, from InTools.com, in dash tools dot com, called ProVJ, and it basically figures out how much space should go between each paragraph. It looks at things like the space before and the space after.

And it looks and says, “Well, you know, I should put more space before this heading and less space between here.”

Anne-Marie: Right. It adds proportionately.

David: It adds proportionately. And it’s really, really sweet. You know, if you’re doing text books or any kind of book publishing, you really want to have this, this plug in from InTools.

So, check that out.

But for those of the rest of us, if you don’t need, if you only need this once in a while, or you’re trying to do vertical justification, and you just want to make it a little bit better, then don’t forget to add some paragraph spacing limit.

Anne-Marie: You know what they need here? They need a little check box that says, ‘Don’t change letting.’ That’s all. I would be good.

David: Oh, that would be even better.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. You don’t have to guess about the paragraph spacing limit.

David: Even better.

Anne-Marie: Just don’t change the letting. You know what I do, the work around, is to put in a paragraph spacing amount that is way more than could possibly be supported.

David: That’s right.

Anne-Marie: So there’s actually no way that… Do you know what the limit is that you can enter into paragraph spacing limit?

David: Four thousand miles.

Anne-Marie: Close. Very close. Seven hundred twenty picas.

[laughter]

Anne-Marie: Which is ten inches.

David: There you go.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. Just put in ten inches and you’ll never have to worry about justified, ah, vertically justified text having its letting affected.

David: Perfect.

And that is this episodes “Obscure InDesign Feature” of the week.

Anne-Marie: Of the week.

David: OK.

Anne-Marie: That’s it for episode ninety nine. Be sure to check out the show notes on our blog on at InDesignsecrets.com where we will have links to all the places we mentioned.

Don’t forget to get to that survey….

David: Yes.

Anne-Marie: And that is it. InDesignsecrets.com/bestof100.

David: Ah hum.

Anne-Marie: We’d love to hear what you thought of the show. Leave a comment in the notes or email us at: info@InDesignsecrets.com.

David: Oh, and also don’t forget our sponsors, WoodWing, makers of Smart Styles…

Anne-Marie: Oh, yeah.

David: And adobe, makers of a little thing called CS4…

[laughter]

David: And the MOGO seminars. We hope to see you at a city near someone in June.

Anne-Marie: And until that time, this is Anne-Marie Concepcion and…

David: David Blatner for InDesign Secrets.

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