This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 6
It’s summertime, and everything feels like it’s slowing down… But there are still lots of great articles on InDesign floating around. Here are a few of my favorites that have popped up recently:
- Gerald Singelmann has released an awesome startup script that adds three features to InDesign: Swap Images, Swap Places, and Load Image in Placecursor. Check it out and give him feedback! Not sure if it works in CS3, but it’s an amazing addition to CS4! I particularly like the ability to load one or more images back into the place cursor. (It kind of “sucks” the image out of the frame and into the place cursor, so you can place it elsewhere.)
- Rufus Deuchler has a new episode of CSInsider (a great videocast for adobe tv) in which he talks about conditional text, smart text reflow, and converting text to notes in CS4. (Okay, it’s a video, not an article, but you should still check it out. Of course, I can’t help pointing out that I also have a free video on using conditional text at adobe.tv. But Rufus has a nicer accent than me.) ;)
- Are you a beginning user who wants to help Adobe make the page numbering feature easier to use? You could get paid $100 if you qualify. Check out this post from ID Doc King Bob Bringhurst.
- Brian Lawler, already an expert, keeps banging away at color management issues, fine-tuning the sometimes obscure and difficult to understand issues involved.
- Lorraine Donegan (also of SLO fame, like Brian!) wrote an interesting piece on preparing documents for print for PaperSpecs.com. I don’t agree with everything she says (especially a recommendation to convert text to outlines, which I think is dangerous), but it’s a nice overview anyway and the site is very interesting if you’re into paper!
- Looks like Chris Paveglio came out with a new version of his excellent font catalog script (Mac only).
- Need to make a “word puzzle”? I love this little piece about how to combine InDesign and Excel from the folks at CreativeTechs.
- Hey, here’s another video: Neil Oliver created a nice movie showing how to tell InDesign to maintain (or remove) text formatting when you copy and paste from Word.
- If you’re a Mac user, you may have run into the “font cache bug.” There are various tools to remove font caches from your computer. But here’s a very interesting look from Tidbits into what may be causing some of the problems. (All Mac users should subscribe to Tidbits, by the way.)
- I haven’t used CtrlLayers yet, but it’s new and shiny and it looks like it could be really helpful to anyone who wants to manage layers across multiple documents better.
PLUS: Great Mac software bundles! I’ve gotten notices of two amazing software bundles for the Mac you should check out. These aren’t really InDesign-related, but they caught my eye anyway:
- TheMacSale.com has a deal going until August 16 with 10 apps for $50. The apps include Flux (which looks like a really cool web design tool for people who are tired of trying to figure out Dreamweaver works), TaskPaper (my favorite new to do list software… can’t wait for him to finish the iphone version), RealBasic, and more!
- MacWeed has a deal going for one more week with 12 apps for $50. This, too, looks like a great deal, including apps such as DevonThink, SkypeCap, Interarchy, and ProfCast. The only one here that I’ve used is DevonThink (I use the Pro version, though).
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These should be posted under “Public Service Announcements.” :)
Big thanks to Gerald Singelmann for the swap script, just one point… can you assign a keyboard shortcut to these functions?
>can you assign a keyboard shortcut to these functions?
CS4 shows all startup scripts in the product area “Scripts” of the “define shortcut” dialog. So: yes.
I am not sure if this works in CS3. The script itself should work in CS3, though.
Excellent list of resources. I shall be reading Brian Lawler a lot more often from now on.
I like the tip from Paper Specs to save an outlined version and put OL at the end of it. I’ve been doing it for years, but a lot of people overwrite perfectly editable text files with Outlined versions, to which it’s a long road back to make the text editable. I certainly wouldn’t send the printer a text editable file and an outlined file at the same time. The only time I’d ever outline fonts if there was major weirdness going on with fonts or the printer specifically requested it. I wouldn’t do it in a hurry though.
Thanks again Gerald, for some reason they wasn’t showing in the (excellent) keyboard shortcuts plugin, I forgot the adobe shortcuts panel was still there!
Should have mentioned: Thank you to Eugene for the paperspecs article, which he kindly pointed out! (If anyone sees fun InDesign articles you think the world needs to know about, do feel free to send them along to info at indesignsecrets.com.
You’re welcome David.
I have nothing to do with Paper Specs or Lorraine Donegan, I only recently subscribed to Paper Specs newsletters. So, just to be clear, I received the information through an email.