To conclude the evening we covered the new Interactive features that Adobe’s added to InDesign CS5. Animation, Object States, Timing etc. Most popular amongst these features was the creation of custom motion paths in InDesign CS5.

We witnessed three little fish swim across the page… and playing happily together… I’ve recorded that part of the demo in a short YouTube video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L4uNzi5xuM

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Web-reference: deke Pod (2008, O’Reilly Media Inc.)

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Modified 23-April-2008 (improved sound quality)
Modified 22-April-2008 (added transcript).

Martinho da Gloria’s Layout Zone script adds two cool features to InDesign CS3. The script was announced via InDesign Secrets earlier this month, and Tim Cole on his Adobe blog, provided excellent instructions on installation and usage of the script.

With this podcast I’m hoping to provide some visual ideas of how useful the script could be in your workflow, using a newspaper layout with lots of ‘layout zones’ as an example. I apologize in advance for the poor sound quality.

A recent upgrade to OSX 10.5.2 (Leopard) seems to come with a limitation for use of my old logitech USB-headset (it records with severe feedback echo after about 20 secs, from notes on various Apple forums I understand I’m not alone in experiencing this…).

I’ll have to look into getting a new microphone or headset that works with Leopard. Tips welcome!

Erratum: I state in the video that the script was released early this month. in fact it was late last month.

Transcript (slightly amended in write-up)

Martinho da Gloria’s Layout Zone script once installed, adds the Layout Zone menu to the Edit menu in InDesign.

The script provides you with two commands “Object To InDesign Document” and “Linked InDesign Page to Objects”.
The script was launched at the end of February @ InDesign Secrets.com and Adobe’s own Tim Cole wrote several extensive posts on his InDesign BackChannel blog, providing installation instructions and in-depth notes on all of the settings the script dialogs provide.

About Layout Zone

The About Layout Zone command provides links to the listed web-sites. Without replicating what others have already listed in their podcasts or blog posts I’d like to show you an example of how you can use this script in a small newspaper workflow.

Small Newspaper workflow

I’m talking about a workflow that has no editorial workflow integrated with InDesign, such as for instance InCopy or other Integrated Editorial Systems that work with InDesign.

• An editor might be deciding beforehand what article is going to be positioned where on a page prior to the text being written and be “zoning the layout”.
• Ad space will be preserved, for ads that are being sold.
• A Designer works on the newspaper page layouts, another designer creates the ads etc.

What are some of the issues you encounter in such a small editorial workflow?

• Different parts of the layout will arrive at different times.
• In addition several people might want to work on a document at the same time:An editor wants to write his/her article, whilst the designer is still putting the pages together or setting an Ad.
• In InDesign only one person can work on the document at any one time so we’re all waiting on eachother whilst the other finishes work on a particular component in the page?

This is where LayoutZone will help out a bit. Let’s have a look.

Objects to InDesign Document

We’ve got some ad-space reserved for an Ad here. The ad is going to be set by someone else either Inhouse or external. With inDesign’s ability to place InDesign documents inside InDesign documents this ad could be provided in native .indd format.

Layout Zone allows you to extract the exact the reserved Ad space (the Text Frame), as an InDesign document of exact Ad size, whilst also replacing the original text frame containing text with a graphic frame that holds a link to the external InDesign file.

Select The Ad Text Frame, then choose Objects To InDesign Document from the Layout Zone menu under the Edit menu.

We’re just saving the Selection and will replace this with a link to external InDesign document. We don’t have to worry about ascenders or descenders sticking out of the bottom of the frame in this case. Click Ok, and I’ll save this into the relevant folder.

As soon as this is done the original text frame has turned into a graphic frame, with a link to the external file.

I’m going to do a quick pretend ‘ad-design’ here, I’ve set this ad before and am copying it across to the linked .indd file. As you can see I’m actually placing the Ad in the “Ads layer” I created in the original document.

After the Ad-artists has set and saved the Ad (finished), the designer working on the Newspaper page will see a modified Link marker in the Links panel.

Updating the link will result in the Ad being placed.

Similar to how we just set the Ad, we can convert the yet to be placed article into an external InDesign file. Select all of the related frames, then from the Layout Zone menu choose Objects To InDesign document as we did for the ad earlier.

Again naming and saving the article as an external InDesign file.

The editor can now work on his/her own indesign file.

Like before I’ve got a version finished so will cheat and copy this into the external InDesign file I created earler.

Once again on the newspaper page itself, the modified link is being updated after the editor has completed work on the article .indd file and saved it again.

Objects to InDesign document, without placement in InDesign

In some occasions you might have InDesign artwork in a document, such as for instance the “Whale Watching tours ad” here, and receive a request from someone who’d like to receive this artwork for use in another document. In this case there is no need to create a link back to this page.

This time around we’ll not be replacing the Objects in the Document with the linked InDesign document, but retain the artwork as is, whilst creating the external InDesign file. Again from the Layout Zone menu choose Objects To InDesign document as we did earlier, but this time ensure you don’t enable the Replace Objects With Document option.

This is a bit like providing someone with a snippet with one major difference in that you’re actually providing a full indesign document, ready to use, whereas the snippet must be placed in an existing InDesign document.

Linked InDesign Page to Objects

The last thing I want to show you is a scenario where an editor has submitted an article as an InDesign document and it’s been placed on the page with a link to this document. The editor wants to make a few changes, and rather than dong that him/herself, wants to sit with the designer whilst the pages are made on the page itself.

In this case we’re looking at converting the linked InDesign file back to real InDesign artwork.

The Whale article as you can see links back to the “Whale in Swan River” .indd file. To convert this to InDesign objects, let’s select Linked InDesign Page To Objects from the Layout Zone menu.

We’ll create these objects as in the Original document, click OK and all the objects are there on the page and fully editable.

Hopefully this Layout Zone example has given you a bit more of an idea of how you can use the script in your workflow.

Video Tutorial

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

web-reference: theInDesigner.com

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

The following tip gives an another example of how the Free Typefi’s Autofit plug-in – downloadable from www.typefi.com can be used with InDesign.  In this tip you’ll learn how to create a one-to-many relationship that results in a background tint with two rounded corners expanding as the parent text frame grows.

Changing height of path issue

One of the problems we have in InDesign is, that when you change the depth of the path below by selecting on one of the bounding box handles, the corners on the path will distort.

Incidently, the path was created using the cornereffects script  (see digitip 067) . In order to work with a similar looking shape that expands, we’d need to chop the shape into three pieces and control the growth of the middle section and the movement of the bottom section with the set-up of AutoFit relationships.

Let’s get started.

Setting the resize behaviour

First of all the text frame must be able to automatically grow as more text runs into the frame.

Select the Text Frame, then in the Typefi AutoFit panel select Resize From Top. An automatic baseline gap is set, if you’ve left some space between the bottom of the last baseline (lower-case x) and the bottom of the frame.

Setting parent-child relationship number one

The first parent-child relationship will cause the bottom shape to reposition itself as the text frame is moved down or grows as a result of more text insert.

Select the AutoFit tool and click the bottom of the text frame, next click the top of the bottom shape. Moving the text frame down results in the bottom frame shrinking… which is not quite what we’re after. To prevent the bottom frame from shrinking we’ll lock in the minimum/maximum frame width/height settings.

To match the current frame width and height settings, click each of the buttons left of the minimum frame width, maximum frame width, minimum frame height and maximum frame height settings in the Typefi AutoFit panel.

Moving the text frame downward now results in the bottom shape moving with it. As a matter of fact, what the parent-child relationship does, is retain the distance between the bottom of the text frame and the top of the bottom frame as a constant value.

Setting parent-child relationship number two

Time to set the second parent-child relationship now. This by the way will create what is referred to as a one-to-many relationship. One parent, with two or more relationships to child objects.

We need to ensure that the middle shape grows as the text frame grows.   Select the AutoFit tool and click teh bottom of the text frame to set the parent control point, then click the bottom of the middle box, to set the child-control point.

Moving the frame down now results in the middle frame growing.

Distribute Spacing

Time to close the gap between the three beige background boxes. With the Selection tool click and drag a marquee around the edge of the three objects.

This will select the three objects, display the Align panel and enable the Use Spacing value and set the value to ‘0‘.  Ensure the Alignment Location option is set to Align to Selection. Note that this feature is not available in InDesign CS2 or earlier.

Click the Distribute vertical space button, to close the gaps between the three selected objects.

Applying text formatting

To automatically apply the text formatting, I’ve created an Object Style called “Liftout”. All this style does is apply the Paragraph Style with Next Style, no other settings are enabled.

After applying the Liftout object style the first paragraph is automatically formatted with the “Heading” paragraph style and the next paragraph is automatically formatted using the “Body Text” style

More relationships

The example above – as mentioned earlier – is a one-to-two relationship. The text frame as the parent has a relationship with two other objects that move/resize as the text frame resizes.

To build on to this you can add more relationships, such as one between the text frame and a line… The video I recorded will show you how to do that

Video Tutorial

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

The following tip will take you through Script installation, running scripts, assigning a keyboard shortcut to a script and reviews the sample script “CornerEffects.jsx”. With the installation of Adobe Creative Suite 3 or InDesign CS3, a series of sample scripts, ready for use are installed.  In the previous version of InDesign you would have had to locate these sample scripts either on your Resources Disk or on your Installers disk somewhere and copy them to the Scripts directory.

Scripts panel

Access the Scripts panel from Window > Automation. And twirl open the arrow in front of Application, Samples and JavaScript and you’ll see a list of the scripts displayed.

If you’re on a Mac you’ll also see the same set of scripts in an AppleScript directory. On a PC a VBScript directory. AppleScripts and VBScripts are native to their respective operating system, JavaScripts are shared and used across platforms.

Scripts are installed at Application level or User level.  Application level scripts are accessible to all users logging into a workstation, User level scripts are only accessible to the user who’s installed them.

Installing Scripts

To navigate to the install locations of either Application or User level scripts, right-click the folder name in the Scripts panel and select Reveal in Finder/Explorer. Double click the Script Panel folder to open it. Copy new scripts to this folder. Either copy them to their own folder so that the Scripts Panel displays them in a more organised manner or drop them straight into the Scripts Panel folder.

To Run A Script, either double click the script name in the Script panel or select the script, then select Run Script from the panel menu.

The CornerEffects script

CornerEffects, renamed  Corner Options in InDesign CS3, are the round, bevel, inverse rounded etc. corner settings you can apply to objects, normally by using the Object > Corner Options… command.  This command applies the selected option to all corners of the selected object.

This is where the CornerEffects script comes in handy

It is build around the assumption that you are applying it to a rectangular 4-cornered object and allows you to select which corners you’d like to apply a corner effect to.

To run the script you must first select the rectangular object. Next Run the Script.

The CornerEffects dialog appears, allowing you to set the Corner Type and Offset option and Pattern.  With the Pattern option you can select which of the corner(s) is going to have the Corner Option (effect) applied to it.  I’m opting to apply selected settings to all even corners.

You could achieve a similar result using the PathFinder commands by adding different shapes together, but this script is definitely the quikest way to get from ‘A’ to ‘B’

If it is a script you intend using a lot, consider assigning a keyboard shortcut to it.

Assigning keyboard shortcuts to scripts

To assign a keyboard shortcut to a script, access Keyboard Shortcuts from Edit menu. If you’ve not yet created a custom Keyboard Shortcut set, start by creating a New Set.

Note: When using InDesign CS3 you will be prompted to create a new set when you try to change a shortcut when no custom set is active. This is because you can not override the [Default]. Earlier versions of InDesign would just update the [Default] set if you didn’t create a new set first. As this file doesn’t reset itself when you delete application preferences, it’s best practice to create a new set first, based on the [Default].

Click New Set and name your set, I’m basing my set on the [Default] so it adopts all of InDesign’s standard shortcut settings.

Click OK to create the new shortcuts set.

Next set Product Area to Scripts and scroll down to the CornerEffects.jsx script. Place your cursor in the New Shortcut box and press the keyboard shortcut you’d like to assign to this script. If the shortcut is already assigned to another command you’ll see that command listed as “Currently Assigned to:”. Although you can use the same shortcut in different Context (Text or Tables), be aware that in same context you’d be overriding the previous shortcut. So best to look for one that is [unassigned].

Click Assign, then click Save to save the shortcut set changes, next click OK to close the dialog.

Note: if you don’t “Save” the shortcut set changes and InDesign Quits/Exits unexpectately due to a crash, you’d loose the amendments you’ve just made, as the new settings aren’t saved until you Quit/Exit InDesign normally.

Applying CornerEffects Script on a polygon

Did I say earlier that the CornerEffects.jsx script is assuming your object has 4 corners?  Well that is true, but try applying “Even” or “Odd” points only to a starburst that has an even number of points. You can now access the CornerEffects.jsx script using your newly assigned shortcut

Gives a nice visual effect.  If you’re interested in playing with starbursts, be sure to also look at my earlier tip: Bursting stars with Scaling and Corner Effects.

Video Tutorial

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

The following tip gives an another example of how the Free Typefi’s Autofit plug-in – downloadable from www.typefi.com can be used with InDesign.  In this tip you’ll learn how text is run into a Header-Text Frame and a Body Content Text-Frame that are threaded to eachother. As the text is formatted with Paragraph Styles, the Header and Body Content Text Frames automatically grow to fit the header text and to balance the body content across three columns.

Preparing the Paragraph Styles.

Everything starts with good preparation. This tip uses InDesign’s Next Style feature. There are three paragraph styles that will format the text. The first paragraph style “Heading” will format the header text. The second paragraph style “Body Text 1st Para” formats the first paragraph of the body text, and “Body Text” is applied to all remaining paragraphs.

Right-click the “Heading” style in the Paragraph Styles Panel and select Edit Heading… Set the Next Style for “Heading” to “Body Text 1st Para”.

Right-click the “Body Text 1st Para” style in the Paragraph Styles Panel and select Edit Body Text 1st Para… Set the Next Style for “Body Text 1st Para” to “Body Text”.

To ensure the first paragraph of the body text starts in a the Body Content Text Frame we’ve created, set Start Paragraph to “In Next Frame”.

Preparing the Text Frames

Start by drawing the Body Content Text Frame, with the Type Tool.

Access Object > Text Frame Options, and set number of columns, in my example, “3″, and if preferred also set the Vertical Justification.  I like inserting a Paragraph Spacing Limit, that ensures that additional space is inserted between paragraphs prior to it being inserted between the lines of paragraphs (which tends to look like the leading’s been increased).

Click OK to apply the settings. And insert some dummy text (not required).

I’ve inserted more text than fits in the frame I’ve created. From the Typefi AutoFit panel, select the size option Resize From Top, this ensures that as more content is added the frame will retain it’s top “Y”-coordinate (vertical top position), whilst growing downwards. I’m also setting a maximum Height “60p0″. as I want to ensure that the article text stays well within the Page Margins.

Next, draw a second Text Frame for the Header Content.

I’m inserting some dummy text again, as it makes it easier to see what’s going on.

Again, I’m setting this frame to Resize From Top (AutoFit Panel), I’m also applying a small Baseline Gap of 2p0, this ensure that the bottom of the frame extends at least 2p0 from the baseline of the last line of text in the frame.

Position the Header Text Frame at the top of the article. Overlapping the Body Content Text Frame.

Set the Text Wrap to Jump Object. A

Next thread the Header Text Frame with the Body Content Text Frame, by clicking the Out-Port of the Header Text Frame, then clicking the Body Content Text Frame.

Edit > Select All of the dummy text that was helping out until now, and delete this. You can group the two frames together (this makes it easier to move the article around on your page after content has been added).

To group the two frames, click-drag a marquee around them with the Selection Tool, then select Object > Group. We’re now ready try out the AutoFit functionality we’ve added to the two frames.

AutoFit at work

Place your text cursor in the Header Content Frame and start type-setting, or Place some text.

All of the text will sit inside the first frame, and this frame will grow to make the text fit.

Let’s format our text and see what happens next…  Edit > Select All. Right-click the Heading Paragraph style and select “Apply Heading then Next Style”.

Wow, this is cool!  The entire article runs in fully formatted. So what happens if you edit the heading?

Both Text Frames resize!!

Video Tutorial

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

This tip succeeds the previous tip, and show cases how the dotted patterns created earlier can be faded, whilst retaining their vector and spot colours.

Spotted dots

The dotted patterns created in tip 53, can also be spot colours, by ensuring that the colour of the circular component that forms part of the pattern is filled with a spot colour.

Add Black and White Gradient

Draw a rectangular shape over the top of the dotted pattern object and fill this with a Black and White Gradient.

Turning Gradient into Mask

Using the selection tool, select both objects by roughly click dragging with the selection tool over one of the corners. This will ensure the top and the underlaying objects are both selected.

Ensure the Transparency palette is visible and select “Make Opacity Mask” from the palette fly-out menu.

The gradient effect is now complete. Spot colours are retained. When saving this file as an Illustrator file and placing it in InDesign, spot colours are also honoured.

For more information on Opacity Masks, please also refer to tip 007. Although this tip was written for an earlier version of Illustrator, the technique is valid today.

Video Tutorial

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

This is part 3 in a 3 part tutorial on Vector Smart Objects.

Previous tutorial: Part 2

Replacing the content

So, if we edit an individual smart object, that has been copied, all related objects are also updated after the edited object has been saved…

So what happens when instead of editing we select the Replace Contents.. command from the Layer > Smart Objects menu?

Well, it’s kind of obvious by now I guess , so let’s just go ahead and do it. We’re locating our replacement Illustrator file — in my case coffee bug number 2.. –

Placing this and returning back to Photoshop…

Wow, I love this stuff. A different bug for all copied instances

So the tip for today really is to start looking at how you work with Photoshop? We’ve been using layers for many years, but have never been able to work with them in a non-destructive manner, and smart objects can do even more than what I’ve just shown you in these three short tutorials.

Video Tutorial

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

This is part 2 in a 3 part tutorial on Vector Smart Objects. .

Previous tutorial: Part 1

Replacing the content

So, if we edit an individual smart object, that has been copied, all related objects are also updated after the edited object has been saved…

So what happens when instead of editing we select the Replace Contents.. command from the Layer > Smart Objects menu?

Well, it’s kind of obvious by now I guess , so let’s just go ahead and do it. We’re locating our replacement Illustrator file — in my case coffee bug number 2.. –

Placing this and returning back to Photoshop…

Wow, I love this stuff. A different bug for all copied instances

So the tip for today really is to start looking at how you work with Photoshop? We’ve been using layers for many years, but have never been able to work with them in a non-destructive manner, and smart objects can do even more than what I’ve just shown you in these three short tutorials.
Continued: Part 3 of Tutorial

Video Tutorial

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

This is part 1 in a 3 part tutorial on Vector Smart Objects.

An Illustrator file as a smart object

Illustrator files that you have created can be added to Photoshop as Vector Smart Objects. The Illustrator art is nested inside its own layer in Photoshop when the smart object is created.

Creating the object

To create a Vector Smart Object, either copy and paste art from Illustrator, or use – as I’m doing here – use the File > Place command.

Navigate to your Illustrator file, then click Place and in the Place PDF dialog box, se the Options “Crop To” setting to Art Box, then click OK.

Your Illustrator art is now placed in Photoshop.

A transform bounding box appears around your artwork, that behaves a bit like Edit > Free Transform. Shift-dragging one of the corner handles will scale and moving the cursor outside the corner handles enables rotation.

And moving the cursor outside the corner handles enables rotation. Press the Enter or Return or return key on the keyboard to apply these settings.

With the Move Tool selected I can further position this newly created layer, which indeed is a Smart Object layer.

I’m enabling Auto Select Layer as my move tool options, so I can automatically select my bug layer.

In addition I will enable the Show Transform controls option which allows me to easily apply transformations to selected layers without having to access the Free Transform command.

Clicking the bug, now displays the transform controls and automatically selects the appropriate layer in the layers palette.

Clicking the text “Xpresso” automatically selects the Xpresso layer. B.t.w this word is by no means associated to “that other page layout applications”

With both these settings enabled I can now use my Alt or Option key to drag a number of coffee bug copies on my graphic and at the same time scale, rotate them as I am creating the copies.

And yes, the graphic is no literally littered with coffe bugs

Continued: Part 2 of Tutorial

Video Tutorial

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Tables are a great way to format text in InDesign. Rows and columns can be colourised, merged, redistributed and cells can contain both graphic and textual content. Most of us will probably format tables in InDesign that originate from either Microsoft Word or Excel. In some cases, you might be asked to insert additional rows or columns as part of a design or content change.

About the tip

The tip takes you through several row or column insertion methods in InDesign CS2.

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Nested styles really ARE better than sliced bread… and I know because I love my breads They really provide an incredibly powerful tool for text formatting. Where in the past you might have been using Character Styles to format part of your text, you can – with the help of Nested Styles – apply selected character styles within a paragraph style.

About the tip

The tip takes you through a step-by-step “how to create a nested style” example. Starting out by generating a paragraph style, applying this style and then creating character styles. The tip finishes off show-casing how the character styles are nested within paragraph styles enabling very powerful formatting controls in InDesign.

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

The last line right indent feature was included in InDesign’s Creative Suite 2 release. It has many different uses, and in show-casing it in this very short tip, I hope to provide CS2 users with another useful tip.

About the tip

A very quick tip using a combination of right indent and last line right indent paragraph formatting controls.

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker