Sleuthing With Snippets
“Don’t touch those files if you don’t know where they’ve been.”
Ah, sage advice, but unfortunately, we all inherit other people’s files from time to time. Recently I had to work with a set of files of “unknown provenance.” Sketchy stuff, to be sure. Document pages that don’t match master pages. Document pages based on blank masters. Styles that don’t seem to have any purpose. Manually-typed page numbers. The kind of stuff that makes David sigh and Anne Marie say “Gah!” The kind of stuff that shows the people who worked on them have never, ever been to an InDesignSecrets seminar.
Aside from the garden-variety cruft, the thing that bugged me the most was a strange little tag surrounding some text in the Story Editor.
It looked like Japanese to me. But my knowledge of that language doesn’t extend much further than what I’ve learned from karate classes, ordering sushi, and watching Kurosawa movies. I couldn’t find anything like it in any InDesign documentation I had. So I grabbed the mysterious text frame, and exported it as snippet. A snippet is just a chunk of XML, and in CS4 it’s IDML (InDesign Mark-up Language). IDML snippets describe in human-readable text everything about the object(s) they were made from. Reading a snippet is like looking at an x-ray of your InDesign content. All its deepest, darkest secrets are there for the viewing. So whatever this little gremlin was, IDML would shine some light on its identity. Yes, it’s true that gremlins don’t like bright light, but that’s another story…
I opened the snippet in Oxygen XML Editor, and started poking around for anything unusual. I didn’t know what I was looking for but I knew I’d found it when I didn’t know what I was looking at, if you get my drift. Sure enough, in the ParagraphStyle element the very last attribute was something I’d never heard of, “Tatechuyoko.”
A Google search lead me to TransPacificDigital, the company formerly known as TechArt and founded by friend of InDesignSecrets, Diane Burns. Turns out that tate-chu-yoko is used to create a span of horizontal text within vertical Asian text (for things like numbers, dates, and short words). TransPacificDigital offers downloads that allow you to apply Asian composition rules to text in non-Asian versions of InDesign, including a character style that applies tate-chu-yoko.
I don’t really have a use for this, but I still think it’s tremendously cool, in paragraph composer geek kind of way.
I enjoy the way text with tate-chu-yoko applied can just go on and on with no regard for life, limb, or the boundaries of the text frame.
The other thing I discovered in my Googling was that Illustrator has the ability to apply tate-chu-yoko to vertical text, if you enable Show Asian Options in the Type preferences. Now I’m doubly jealous, first of Illustrator’s vertical text, and now of the option to intermix horizontal text with one click.
So after all that I am still left wondering how and why tate-chu-yoko got into those sketchy documents. I’ll probably never know. But at least I have IDML as my ultimate mystery-solver. And the next time one of my documents secretly goes off to Japan, I hope it brings me back a Maneki Neko.
I like the IDML trick – that could come in really useful for those bugs that just won’t show up however hard you look at InDesign attributes…
Personally I find the “Warichu” text option in Illustrator incredibly useful for creating the “movie poster credit” effect where you have people’s job in smaller print in two individual lines and then their name goin over both of those lines. This type of thing is a major pain to create in InDesign.
I wish Adobe finally exposed those middle east text options in InDesign through the interface of the regular version so we wouldn’t have to rely on hacks as the one described in this post. But hey, there is still hope for CS6.
Very cool, Mike. I’ve seen those hieroglyphic-like tags in the Story Editor before and also wondered what they they meant.
Now, here’s another thing. Look at those autoleading and Min/Max wordspacing measures in your snippet. There are more digits to the right of the decimal point than in a credit card number. I’m wondering if that’s an artifact from an ID format conversion, such as opening a QXP file in ID.
What does the secret Component Information readout say about the ID file’s provenance?
Good thinking, Anne-Marie.
The log reveals that this file just celebrated its third birthday. It was born on March 28, 2007 to a Mr. and Mrs. CS of 3.0.0.424 FS InDesign Roman avenue in the town of Macintosh.
April of ‘07 was a rough month: six Recovered Mini-Saves for the poor youngster. Later on, a slew of Open Missing Plug-in events (K4) probably left the file confused and incomplete. To this day, it still silently longs for some of those plug-ins.
Over the years, the file had its ups and downs. It endured a few more Mini-Saves (hey, who hasn’t?). It spent a brief time in the land of the Snow Leopard before coming to me, where for project-specific reasons I have to work on it in Leopard and CS3.
But there is no evidence that this little fellow ever spent any time in Japan, or Denver.
I have also seen similar strange gremlins in the story editor. A client of mine wrote their own plug-in that will link prices to their database (a la autoprice). When you look at their text in the story editor it shows up with a strange looking tag as well.