Group work (InDesign Secrets)

This makes a huge difference from how we might have processed documents in the past…

Imagine this: You’re working on a longer document, let’s say an annual report. You’ve received the text in Word document format, and import this into InDesign to commence the layout process. It’s something we’ve probably all done… and following the import… we might have heard some loud comments going around the office.. “oooh my… I’ve got some cleaning up to do… “. Removing double spaces, removing double carriage returns, changing double tabs to single tabs, running through a document and ensuring certain words are spelled correctly…

InDesign’s Find/Change command would have been of some help. Others might have used the Find’Change By List Script to run through a series of Find/Changes in a ’single’ hit. This script itself does require some knowledge on formatting the accompanying text file correctly that is used to process the multiple commands…

The Multi-Find change script is well worth the price and has been released today.

Watch the following YouTube video to have a bit more of an idea of how this plug-in works and then jump across to the Automatication web-site to get your copy of the plug-in.

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.

I used Fontographer in the very early days, and if I dig into my ancient software archive I will probably still find an original installer disk floating around somewhere, if I remember correctly it was bundled with on of the MacroMedia Studio software bundles?

If you’re an old Fontographer fan, hop onto the new Product Page to find out more…

It’s a super quick 4-step process, that makes it super easy to access the Upcoming InDesign User Group Meetings list from your iPhone.

1. Launch the web-browser on your iPhone.
2. Enter the following URL:
   www.indesignusergroup/iphone/meetings/
3. Then in the screen that pops up, Tap the plus sign at the bottom
4. in the Next screen Tap “Add to Home Screen” … and you’re done

Once you’ve added the iPhone Web App, it becomes just another App icon on your iPhone. Click it and you’ll never have to miss another meeting again… where ever in the world you might be.

Sorry about the out of synch audio… I recorded with and uploaded via QuickTime X.

You MUST register for this event, as seats are limited.

Information & Registration:

http://indesignusergroup.com/chapters/perth/events/1471/

Augmented Reality (AR) combines the physical and interactive 3D world. It’s not a new technology, but it will definitely make you jump up and down. I know I did when I first saw this back in March at an Adobe event I attended. Simply wave a piece of paper at the camera and some video is projected on your piece of paper in virtual reality.

Want to know more?

Read “Augmented Reality using a webcam and Flash” on Adobe’s Developer Connection or watch some of the Max 2009 videos on Adobe TV:

• Designing for Augmented Reality. What is it, how is it being used? how can you use it yourself inside of Flash?
• Augmented Reality within Flash Player. (FLAR), superimposing graphics over video…

Once installed his script provides a simple on/off mechanism to display any local style overrides that are applied to text. No need to look for that tiny little + symbol in the Character/Paragraph Styles panel… instead a very clear red line marks all the overrides. It even picks up things like hyphenation enabling/disabling, lack of style formatting etc, by placing a red vertical rule at the start of each line in the effected paragraph.

It really is very cool indeed! Merci Beaucoup Marc!

Although Marc doesn’t mention this in his blog-post. I’ve tested the script in InDesign CS5 as well, and it seems to work just as nicely as it does in CS4. That’s super!

As soon as I read it I thought: Calendars… so I tested his tip and ooooh yeahhhhh baby….. you can now construct your InDesign document with vertical spreads… A much requested feature… What an amazing tip Mike!!!

Not just that… if you Export the InDesign Document as Spreads to PDF… you get a similar result:

A seriously cool find! Thank you Mike!!

This is a great way obviously of providing proofs to your customer, however, I won’t guarantee that your printer will be happy with this

You can actually achieve a similar PDF result from InDesign CS4 as well… (and CS5) … using Rotate Spread View (Pages panel menu) … However, that results initially in a rotated spread PDF (landscape) output. You’d need to use the Rotate Pages command in Acrobat to get the same finished (portrait)  result.

Check out InDesign CS5 known issues on http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/840/cpsid_84016.html

Vertical Type in Illustrator

Illustrator provides us with three different tools for setting vertical text. The Vertical Type Tool, Area Type Tool and Type on a Path Tool. For this exercise I’m using the first of the three available tools: The Vertical Type Tool.

With this tool, just click anywhere in your artboard area and start typing… and tadaa…. vertical type appears… How easy is that? (Let’s put this tool on our wishlist for future version of InDesign…)

To decrease or increase the spacing between the characters, change the Tracking value. You can do this at Character level (using the Character panel and tracking settings), or you can amend this setting as part of a Paragraph style you might be using.

Save the text (image) as a native Illustrator file.

Into InDesign

Time now to bring the vertical type into Illustrator. Although you can copy and paste from Illustrator into InDesign. I wouldn’t recommend doing this with vertical type, especially if you intend to edit the text at some point.

Copying and pasting Illustrator artwork into InDesign can be useful, for instance when you are interested in bringing logo-type shapes as editable paths into InDesign. One thing to consider is that the artwork would from that moment forward be edited in InDesign itself. In some circumstance that might be desired. However, when copy and pasting vertical text from Illustrator into InDesign, you’ll find that although the colour of the text and the size (of the placed artwork) is still be editable, the text itself can no longer be altered.

Instead Place the .ai file as a graphic using the File > Place command. To have control over the size of the image that is brought in, enable the Show Import Options.

To reduce the image area that is imported, set the Crop to Art. Assuming that the vertical type is the only artwork on the artboard in Illustrator, this crop sets the crop-size to the bounding box size that you’d see in Illustrator when you select the artwork. To place the text at the exact size that you’ve created it in Illustrator, simply click with the Loaded Graphics Icon on the page, then use InDesign’s Selection tools to position the text on the page.

Editing the text

To change the text itself in the future, the Illustrator file would need to be edited. With the text-graphic placed in InDesign, Option/Alt double-click the graphic. This will edit the original in Illustrator (the default application for placed .ai files). Make the changes in Illustrator, save the Illustrator file and return to InDesign and witness an immediate update.

Vertical Type in InDesign using GREP

For those of you that only have a copy of Adobe InDesign, the following tip provides you with a pretty quick and easy way to set vertical type.

First we’ll start by creating a Text Frame that has our soon to be vertical text set in it. For the best result, set the text alignment to Align Centre.

Now that we have the text frame with our text on the page. We’re ready to convert this to Vertical Text.

Getting to GREP

The work-around I choose to use for this is the insertion of a ‘Forced Line Break” … that’s hard work!!! Imagine having to manually press Shift+Return/Enter after each character… surely there must be a quick way to do this?
Oooh yeah… there is… We’ll be using a super-duper quick GREP Find/Change for this.

From the Edit menu choose Find/Change and click the GREP tab

I’m using the GREP option here, because it allows us to search for every individual character in the selected text frame (Story) and say .. “now go and put a forced line break behind it”…

Click the metacharacter menu on the right of the Find what part of the dialog. Metacharacters incidentally are characters that have a special meaning in InDesign.

We’re looking really for any type of character, so let’s choose Wildcards > Any Character.

This adds a single full-stop in the Find what field in the dialog box. Super.

Now on to changing things… What we need to do is put the originally found text back AND add a forced line break behind it. So here we go.

From the metacharacter menu on the right of Change to, choose Found > Found Text. This adds a $0 in the Change to field.

Next from the same menu choose Forced Line Break. This adds \n to the Change to field.

Before we do anything else, ensure the Text Frame is selected, and set the Search option to Story. Then click the Change All button.

Changing the space between characters

In one quick hit, the text will appear Vertically (in reality the text is now broken over a number of lines).

To control the spacing between the characters, either alter the Leading for the text, or set the Vertical Justification to Align Justified (Object > Text Frame Options).

The latter provides you with a nice click and drag method to expand the height of the text frame and automatically insert more space between the characters.

For some alternate approaches you can also refer to David Blatner’s post on the InDesign Secrets blog. A very nice article outlining another couple of InDesign vertical type methods.

Let’s have a look at some of the new Gap Tool’s capabilities…

Remember you can pre-order your copy of Creative Suite 5 right now from the Adobe Store or an Authorized Reseller near you.

This new release is truly amazing…  it reduces design boundaries, helps you work faster and will most certainly be a critical facter in streamlining your workflows (ok, I know it… ‘workflow” … it’s a bit off-putting as a word… but wait till I show you some of what the updated apps can do!!! and you’ll know what I’m talking about).

To start of the new release celebration, let me take you through my most favourite application (InDesign) and most favourite new feature in InDesign: Spanning Columns.

Spanning and Splitting Columns

Well I have to admit this is my favourite new InDesign CS5 feature. I know there’s tons of other cool stuff. But until now you would have had to either break your text threads or use keep options and build lots of different text frames in order to change the layout of your text from say a single column to a double column view or vise versa. All those headlines you’ve cut out of stories and turned into separate frames? Nested frames with more columns with content etc? Your pain has come to an end with this new span and split column feature. Additionally this feature will benefit those of use building EPUBs in InDesign… because of the uninterrupted content flow it allows us to create. More about this later…

In the following video tutorial I demo how simple it is to build full articles on a page in a magazine/newspaper scenario, even better I include some of the CS4 features as well to show-case the absolute power of this new feature. 1+1 truly makes 10!!!

Video Tutorial

So you might find yourself going back to Page 1, fixing the first overset text frame you find, only to find the Warning dialog pops up once again when you try to PDF the document.

If you’re using InDesign CS4, there is a much easier way to navigate to the each and everyone of the overset text frames: InDesign’s Preflight comes to the rescue! And… its out-of-the-box set-up in InDesign CS4 already locates Text Overset.

Let’s look at how we can work with this feature to find all occurrences of overset text and fix them before sending out a PDF.

Preflight

InDesign enables live preflighting for all documents out of the box, using the [Basic] profile. You might have noticed the green or red circle icon in the status bar in the lower left corner of your document window.

You can access all the preflight tools from the Status bar (or else from Window > Output > Preflight) . The “Enable Preflight For All Documents” option in the status bar indicates that live preflighting is indeed enabled for each InDesign document. You can disable that if needed, and opt to preflight a document on a needs-only basis, by enabling the “Preflight Document” option.

To see which errors are picked up by the working Preflight profile, choose Preflight Panel from the status bar. The default active profile is [Basic]. If this profile is not your active profile select it from the drop-down menu. The document I’m checking contains 2 Text errors.

Clicking the arrow in front of “Text” to expands the error-log, and displays a sub-menu of errors, grouped by error-type. Expand each error-type  to see each occurrence of that error in the document.

Each individual error contains a link marked by the page-number. Click this link to jump to the problem item in the document. After each issue has been fixed InDesign’s Preflight should give you the green light

You’re now ready to create that PDF with the assurance there is no overset text anywhere in your document.

Moving?

If you’ve ever moved house, you might have experienced that moving involves a little more than just repositioning your belongings from one location to another… In fact you might even go through the contents of your pantry or cupboards and decide there are things you would rather not move. Over the period of time that you’ve worked with your Adobe applications on your soon to be ‘old’ computer you have likely collected “additionals”,  some of which you might want to keep.

The Additionals…

There’s no better time then right now to do some house-cleaning. As a self-confessed digital hoarder I can relate to finding more than just the files that my Adobe software installs in my Adobe application/program folders

Third-party plug-ins

Third party plug-ins generally come with original installers and most importantly their own licensing keys. Where to start?

• Determine which plug-ins you would like to ‘move across’
• Check on the plug-in developer’s web-site if you have the latest version of this plug-in currently. If not download the latest installer version available for your version of the Adobe software
• Locate your original licensing key. Sometimes this might be retained in an email that was send out to you when you purchased the plug-in online. In other cases there might be a licensing key on a printed card that shipped with the software when you bought it. The key might even be on the CD/DVD case itself.
• One additional thing to check is whether the Plug-in requires activation. It would be likely that you’ll need to de-activate the plug-in license before you can activate the license on another computer. In fact, we’ll cover Activation / Deactivation a little later on when we get to the actual Adobe software.

Scripts

Adobe applications can be expanded through the use of scripts and you might have obtained some scripts for the various Adobe applications that help you improve productivity or even add additional functionality to your application.

• As with plug-ins I would suggest you first of all determine which scripts you want to keep
• Then check with the script-developer if you’ve got the latest version, and obtain the original scripts, some even come with installers, although many will come with drag-and-drop instructions only.
• Scripts could be licensed as well. In that case locate the original licenses keys as you’d do for Plug-Ins.

Colour Settings

Your printer or photo lab might have given you .icc profiles or colour settings to install at some stage. Grab a copy of the settings you want to move across.

PDF settings

As with colour settings, our printer, service bureau or photo lab might have provided you with .joboptions (PDF Settings) files to use when you are creating PDF iles. Grab  a copy of the settings you want to move across for these as well.

Other

The story continues here. Depending on which Adobe application you’re looking at you might have added new Swatches sets, Brush strokes, Filters, Patterns and other gadgets that add to your creativity.

With all the previous preparations complete you’re just about ready for the move.

On to moving your Adobe Software

Most likely there are additional housekeeping tasks to perform, such as reviewing the settings and additions you made to your Adobe software.  Identify them… locate them… where possible take a copy of them to load on the new computer.

I’m thinking of things such as:

• libraries added to Illustrator’s Brushes, Symbol or Graphic Styles panel for instance, it might be sufficient to just grab a copy of the .ai files that you’ve added to the Adobe Illustrator CS4 / Presets / en_GB (or US) / etc… folders
• Actions added to Photoshop, you’d need to choose “Save Actions” from the Actions panel menu and generate a .atn file… so that you can choose “Load Actions” on your new computer and have access again.
• Printer and Document presets you might have added to InDesign.
• Preferences settings you’ve altered. Note that it’s not recommended you copy preferences files across, instead recreate the settings after the new install.
• etc.

Activation / Deactivation

Before you install your Adobe software on the new computer, you must deactivate the software on the old computer.  Choose Help > Deactivate.

The deactivation dialog for your Adobe Creative Suite bundle appears. I’d recommend enabling the Erase my serial number from this computer after deactivation completes option, to ensure that your license can no longer be used on this workstation.

Click the Deactivate button to commence the deactivation of your software. The dialog box informs you once the process has been completed.

You are now ready to move over to your new computer and start installing the Adobe software. After you’ve installed the software, first of all ensure that you’re also installing all the updates Adobe’s made available. Then test your software before adding the plug-ins, scripts etc. again.

Good Luck!

Have I missed something vital in my write-up? Add a comment below and I’ll ensure I add it in, so this post is as complete as possible. Thanks heaps.

- Cari

The creative, print and publishing industries are bubbling with excitement. A whirlwind is blowing across the publishing industry as we speak, and publishers are deciding which electronic reading devices to support, what formats to build and how to convert their current print-publications to electronic format.

The iPad has just gone on sale in the US and will be coming to Australia in late April. First-hand experience reviews are starting to pop-up everywhere.

We are only days away from witnessing Adobe Systems launch of an entire new suite of products with the Creative Suite 5 launch. Bigger and better than ever before… continuing the publishing revolution.

It seems the world has gone a little mad with excitement… and I’m riding along with it.  As of April 6, 2010, I will be working as a freelance trainer, public speaker and publishing consultant. I hope to bring knowledge, experience and excitement about creative and publishing technologies to your organisation… Be it in the role of Adobe Certified Instructor, bringing your staff up to speed with the latest tools and tricks in Adobe apps, a speaker at one of your events, or as an independent publishing consultant helping you manage & map the path of your publishing future.

I look forward to being part of the great changes technology will make in our daily personal and work lives.

Web-Link: http://cs5launch.adobe.com/ap/

The Newspaper Publishing Association is organising a short eSeminar tomorrow: Next-Generation Publishing: Developing Content for the iPad and other E-Readers. The event is sponsored by Adobe Systems. Speaker: Michael Stoddart.  Not too late to reschedule your appointments and attend this event online: more info & registration

Hope to see you all online!  Things are buzzing right now!

Cari

The preference setting hasn’t disappeared in Photoshop CS4… Press Ctrl+Alt or Cmd+Option on startup of the application and you should see:

I’m guessing that the reason why this preference setting is now hidden is the fact that most of us editing images in Photoshop are working on workstations with 4+Gb RAM, which would mean that Photoshop would hardly be using the swap file for memory usage.

Web-link: www.twitter.com/carijansen

http://www.indesignusergroup.com/chapters/perth/events/1350/

The InDesign User Group is a networking and learning platform for anyone using Adobe InDesign, be it as a teacher, student, graphic designer, marketing & pr professional, publisher, editor,  hobbyist etc.

This IDUG  is brought to you by volunteers, those working on the web-site, behind the scenes organisation to support the groups, Chapter Representatives who organise and manage the meetings, speakers, sponsors locally, speakers who present, volunteers that help with registration, room clean-up etc.

Membership and meeting attendance is absolutely FREE.

How to become a member of an InDesign User Group?

• Visit www.indesignusergroup.com
• Click Join a Group
• Check the User Group chapter you want to become a member of
• Scroll down enter your preferred username and password, and the rest of the fields (those marked with a red-star MUST be filled in.
• Click Sign Me Up button at the bottom of this form.

You’ll receive an email (send to the email address you used in the form) with a link to click to validate the new membership account.

How to register for an InDesign User Group meeting?

• You must be a member of the InDesign User Group community and Chapter to which you want to register.
• Visit www.indesignusergroup.com
• Click Log-In Link at top of the page
• Enter the username and password provided when you became a member
• Click Log-in Button

You should now see a list of Upcoming meetings.

• Click the Register for this Meeting link listed below the Registration heading.
• And you’re done!

We’ll see you at the meeting and you’ll be on the registration list.

This is the second part of a two part write-up about sorting paragraph and table text in InDesign and covers the sorting of table data, thanks to a great script developed and provided freely by Peter Kahrel.

Sorting Table Columns

Sorting Table data is not something the SortParagraphs.jsx script that comes installed as a Sample script in InDesig does. Unless you first convert the Table to Text, then sort based on the ‘first column’ and recreate the table. However, if the table has already been created and been nicely designed that might not be an option. In addition, you could only sort on the first column in that case… and not choose to sort on another column.

Peter Kahrel, UK-based InDesign Scripter extraordinaire has been kind enough to release a free script that allows you to sort table data, amongst a myriad of other scripts.

Sort Tables script from Peter Kahrel.

This might be the first time you’ve gone through the steps of downloading a script for use in InDesign. I’ll take you through the process of downloading and installing the script in InDesign. Believe me it’s a pretty painless process.

To download the script from Peter Kahrel’s site, Right-click the Show Script button. Depending on which browser you’re in the contextual menu that appears might be a little different. I’m using Mozilla Firefox here, and this has a Save Link As… option.

The Save Dialog Appears. At this stage, I’ll just save the script SortTable.jsx  to the Desktop. Your browser might download into a Downloads folder.

How to install scripts in InDesign

We’re now ready to install the script so we can run it from within InDesign, but must first install it. InDesign Scripts can be installed in two different locations:

• At Application level, which makes the Script accessible to all users on the workstation. E.g. regardless of which user account is used upon startup
• At User level, which makes the Script accessible only to the current active user.

If you’re into sharing Scripts with your mates who use the computer on which you’re installing the script, than install at Application level!

Ensure the Script Panel is visible (Window > Automation > Scripts).

Click the Application folder in the scripts panel, then from the panel menu choose Reveal in Finder (on Windows this will say Reveal in Explorer), alternatively right-click the Application folder

The Scripts Panel folder inside the InDesign application folder on your computer is selected. Double click this folder to open it.

You’ll notice that this is the folder that contains the Apple and Java samples Scripts

The folder hierarchy you see here is identical to what you see in the Scripts panel. If you want to organise your scripts a little you can create additional folders inside the Scripts Panel directory. I’m adding a folder called myOtherScripts.

Next copy the previously downloaded script into the Scripts panel folder (or sub-directory there-of).

Time to check if the Script is now visible in InDesign (there is no need to relaunch InDesign when you add a script).

That’s it we’re now ready to start sorting some table data. The script allows you to either sort a particular range of data, or all of the table data.

• To sort based on data range, highlight some cell data in the column that is the trigger for the sort order you want to generate
• To sort the entire table, simply insert your cursor anywhere in the column that is the trigger for the sort order.

In my example I want to sort the entire table, based on the data in the very first column. So I use my Type Tool and click in one of the cells in the first column.

Next it is time to run the script. This time I’m double clicking the script in the Scripts panel (to learn more about running scripts refer to the first part of this 2-part “Sort it please…” series.

I’m placing my cursor in one first body cell of the first column (“Road with Pollard…”), and going for the Double Click to run the script option.

Running the tablesort.jsx script triggers a dialog prompt that asks for some input.

I’ll be sorting in Ascending order (A-Z) and my data is alphanumberical (combination of numerical and alphabetical characters). The script is smart enough to pick up that the Table I’m sorting contains a Header Row.

For a detailed write-up of the script functionality, please refer to Peter Kahrels accompanying post to the Script.
http://www.kahrel.plus.com/indesign/tablesort.html

Once the Table Sort Options are set, click OK… and wait a little while (long tables might take some seconds to fully complete their sorting).

and ta-daaaahhh… one beautifully sorted table…

A special thank you goes out to Peter Kahrel, who’s made this script available to us InDesign lovers! Thank you Peter!

Video Tutorial

Not yet available, hope to have this up on Tuesday.

Updated 23-Feb-2010 Added video

You’ve spend a few days working on some great layouts for a customer. Lots of bulleted lists and tables, and when you receive the first proof back, many of the lists and tables have a note on them: “can you please sort this in alphabetical order”? I won’t ask you what your first thought is when you read this scenario. But my response to my customer would be: “Not a problem, I’ll have an amended proof for you this afternoon, that will have things sorted as requested”.So two separate tasks to perform… and I’ll break them into two separate posts. This being the first.

Sorting Paragraphs

Let’s start with the sorting of paragraphs in alphabetical order.

I’m revealing secret number one… we won’t be going through cut-paste steps here… I just don’t have the time to show you how to reorder a long list alphabetically like that.  Instead I’d like to introduce you to one of the sample scripts that is supplied with Adobe InDesign. It is designed to sort paragraphs in alphabetical order.  What’s a script you might ask? Well it’s like a little bit of code that has been written to perform a particular task automatic, that you might otherwise need to perform manually.

Sample scripts come installed with InDesign CS3 and higher. For earlier versions of InDesign the set of sample scripts can be downloaded from the Adobe web-ste:

So where do we find these magical scripts? They come pre-installed with an InDesign installation. You access them from the Automation > Scripts panel.

The default install in InDesign will provide a series of Sample Scripts. On the Mac in AppleScript and JavaScript format, on Windows OS the AppleScript is replaced by VB Script. AppleScript as the name says, is specific to the Mac OS. VB Script support in InDesign specific to Windows OS.

To stick with common ground between the OSes, let’s expand the JavaScript folder in the Scripts panel and see what that brings us in available Scripts.

Plenty of Scripts there as you can see. I posted a summary of what each of these does quite some time ago.

Time to start sorting those paragraphs. Start by highlighting the paragraphs that need to be sorted (Type tool).

How to use a script in InDesign

There are a number of methods you can use to execute the script: Double clicking the script name in the list, or selecting the script then choosing Run Script from the Script panel menu. You can even assign a keyboard shortcut to a script if you want.

I’m using the Run Script command from the Script panel menu.

As soon as the script is executed you’ll be prompted with an additional dialog, asking for some input on your end.

The Sort Options dialog appears.

First input requested from us as a user of the script is whether or not the Sort Method choose needs to Retain the formatting of the highlighted text.  If you hadn’t yet formatted your text, I would always stick to the default Ignore Formatting option, it’s nice and fast. However if you have formatted your text, then use Retain Formatting. Yep, I know it says “slower”. but believe me … slower is still fast! Depending on how much text you have highlighted… it might still all be sorted in a blink of an eye!

Yes, you can get away with retaining formatting when using the default ignore formatting settings, however, I won’t guarantee that will always work! For instance when you have a paragraph style applied to your text and also have some style overrides applied to the start of a paragraph, you’ll see some interesting (if that’s what you call them) results.

Ignore Spaces, when selected basically ignores any leading spaces found at the start of a paragraph, and sorts on the first non-space character found in that paragraph. So if you want your spaces to sort at the top of the sort order, deselect this option.

Reverse Sort, will sort in descending (Z-A) order instead of ascending (A-Z) order.

With your settings all sorted, click OK (and don’t blink an eye!! or you’ll miss it!).

All done! Now aren’t you glad you told your customer you’d have it done quickly. They’ll love you for it for sure!

This write-up is continued in a second blog-post.

Video Tutorial

16 February 2010.  5:45pm – 8:30pm

The Perth InDesign User Group invites you to become a Member (Free) and attend its Long Live InDesign! meeting on Tuesday, 16 February 2010.

In a belated celebration of InDesign’s 10th birthday, our theme for the evening will be to focus on making Long and Beautiful documents with InDesign.

We will be taking a look at some very cool tips and tricks for working with Longer InDesign documents.  Learn how to use InDesign’s Book feature, automatically add new pages to documents, work with more than one Table of Contents in document, pick up some tips and tricks on how to bring in content from Microsoft Word and Excel, and be introduced to InDesign Table Styles.

To finish the evening we’ll be showcasing some great designs “Made with InDesign”.

Event Registration

Although InDesign User Group (www.indesignusergroup.com) membership is absolutely free, you must REGISTER for this event, as seating is limited (max 90), so be sure to pre-register soon!
For registration and more information: http://www.indesignusergroup.com/chapters/perth/events/1350/

Updated: 5-Jan-2010: Added Video Tutorial at end of transcript

During our InDesign Trivia night at the Perth InDesign User Group in December, we had some fun with colours in InDesign.

Here’s one of the scenario’s we used: So you’re working on a layout in InDesign, and although you know you can use the Eyedropper tool to pick up colour from a placed image for use in InDesign, you’ve got the sudden urge to build a series of colour swatches based on the colours found in one of the images used in the layout.

The ingredients

Ok, so let’s have a look at how this works. The ingredients and tools we need are:

• a placed image in Adobe InDesign
• Adobe Illustrator

Getting the colour out of your image

I’m assuming you’ve already placed the image in InDesign. So let’s start by selecting the image that is to be the source of your swatches with the Selection tool.

Next either right-click the image (and choose the contextual menus) or choose Edit > Edit With > Adobe Illustrator CS4.

Illustrator???? Hang-on this is a photo, shouldn’t we be opening this in Photoshop? Nope   Illustrator has a very cool feature called Live Trace, and that’s what we’ll be using in this case to extract our swatches from the image.

The cool thing is that you can now choose in which application you’d like to Edit a placed file. This is something you couldn’t do before CS4.

In Illustrator select the image with the Selection tool. As soon as you do that you should spot the Live Trace button in the Control panel at the top.

We could just click this button, however, doing so means that we have no idea of the settings that are being used, so we’re taking a different approach.

From the drop down menu next to the Live Trace button, choose Tracing Options… This will allow us to determine exactly how many colours we want to extract to swatches.

The Tracing Options dialog appears. Yay! We’re not going to do too much in this dialog. Just a few minor changes in the Adjustments section of the dialog.

Set the Mode to Color. Leave the Palette on Automatic. and choose how many colours you’d like to create by setting the Max Colors option. The most important thing comes next: Enable the Output to Swatches option.

We’re now ready to start extracting those colours.

Click Trace.

Back in Illustrator display the Swatches panel. Notice all those cool colours in it? These have all been created from the original Photoshop file that was opened in Illustrator through the Edit > Edit With option in InDesign.

Now all we need to do is get these colours to InDesign…

Click the first colour in the Swatches panel, then whilst holding down the Shift-key, click the last of the Swatches and from the panel menu choose Save Swatch Library as ASE… (Adobe Swatch Exchange).  This Swatch Exchange is a way in which you can share swatches between various Adobe applications.

You’ll be prompted for a save location. Save the .ase file in a spot where you can find it later on. An additional Swatch Exchange Alert, will explain that only solid swatches may be exchanged..

Once you’ve got the .ase file saved, there’s no need for the open Illustrator document anymore. Close it (don’t save) and let’s get back to InDesign.

Back in InDesign

Time to return to InDesign. In InDesign choose Load Swatches from the Swatches panel and navigate to the previously saved .ase, select this file and click Open.

All the Swatches from the .ase file are now added to the Swatches panel in InDesign. Their names however are a little meaningless. You could opt to edit each name manually, however as we’ll be using the swatches as a colour palette it’s probably enough to know the breakdown in C-M-Y-K.

Select the first of the swatches, then whilst holding down the Shift key (same as previously in Illustrator), click the last swatch to select all Tracing swatches, and from the Swatches panel menu choose Swatch Options…

The Swatch Options dialog appears. To give the swatches a slightly more meaningful name, enable the Name with Colour Value option.

Click OK, to accept this change and return to the InDesign document.

You’re now ready to go wild with colours in InDesign. Enjoy!

Video tutorial

Sorry for the crackling noise… my headphone makes noises when I move my head!!! and the fan of my computer is running non-stop, as it’s too hot in my office… (summer here and 32C inside)…

I know it’s been a little quiet on my site the past months. One of my new year resolutions is to make more time for those things in life I enjoy doing the most and a successful outcome of that will without a doubt be more posts and tutorials on my blog! There a stack sitting on the back-burner… so keep an eye out for them the coming weeks

Wishing you all a great, creative, happy & healthy 2010 together with friends & family.

Cari

http://www.indesignusergroup.com/chapters/perth/events/989/

I’ve used paragraph rules from my early days when working with that other page-layout application back in the late 1980s (yes, I’m THAT old!).  I used them to create the horizontal lines in tabular tables before table styles were invented (I was the “annual report girl” in my production days), and I have used paragraph rules for a long time as a way to create ‘reversed out’ text.

Text with shaded backgrounds

So yes, paragraph rules have been around for some time in various layout applications indeed…

The following tip shows you how you can use paragraph rules in InDesign to create a shaded tint behind a title and heading paragraphs. It shows you how you can work with a single paragraph style to apply shading behind single and double line paragraphs.

About Paragraph Rules

Paragraph Rules are lines that attach themselves to a paragraph. This means that if this paragraph were to move due to text reflow in your document, the ‘lines’ would move with the text.

I’ve already created a paragraph style called ‘ad Title”, so let’s start by editing this style.

Right-click the style name in the Paragraph Styles panel, and from the contextual menu that appears choose Edit “ad Title” (or other style name in your case)

Editing the paragraph style.

The Paragraph Style Options dialog appears. Click Paragraph Rules on the left.

Enabling Paragraph Rule Below

A paragraph can contain two paragraph rules, one above and one below the text.  For now let’s focus on just enabling the Rule Below, by checking the Rule On option.

Note: If you’re not using a paragraph style, or intend to define a style later on, then choose “Paragraph Rules” from the Control Panel menu, or the Paragraph panel menu.

The default rule is 1pt in (Text Colour). If you intend to change the colour of your text to “white” (paper) as way of generating a reverse text effect, then remember that leaving the Colour setting on (Text Colour) will result in the rule turning “white” as well .

Let’s have a look at the settings I’m using for the shaded effect.

Rule Below settings

I’ve increased the Weight, which is the thickness of the line, changed the Colour to [Black] 50%, and moved the vertical position of the Rule by amending the Offset value. Ensure you have Preview enabled so you can see the movement of the rule as you’re changing the value.

My Rule Width is set to Column this means that the rule will fill out to the full width of the text column. As my Text Frame has a 5mm Text Inset (Object > Text Frame Options) set on it, it means that a 0mm Left Indent will not draw the rule to the edge of the Frame. I’m therefore giving it a negative indent of 5mm.

Note: you can actually expand the paragraph rule past the text frame itself, to create the effect of the rule sticking out of the frame, just increase the negative indent value even more to create this effect.

Cool so we’re done with this Paragraph Style now? No not quite. Let’s assume that every now and again the heading (ad Title in my case) wraps over a second line. Oops, that doesn’t look right (see below).

Ooh, double lines don't work yet.

So how do we fix this so that we can use the paragraph style for single and double line paragraphs? Well the trick is in the Rules! Remember at the beginning I mentioned there’s a Rule Above and Below option?

Well let’s Edit the paragraph style once more and this time enable the Rule Above.

Enabling the second rule (Rule Above)

Generally I’d make the Rule Weight identical to that of the Rule Below. Indent, Colour and Width setting identical as well. Where you’ll have to play a little is with the offset.

Basically get it as close to right as you can. Then remove the second line and check that the Rule Above and Below nicely overlap each other when the paragraph is only a single line para. I tend to temporarily change the Rule colour to make it easier to see this. Make the final Offset adjustments and you’re done.

Updating a paragraph style

Ok, so after fiddling with the rules on the paragraph style, I decided I wanted to change the text colour. Being a little lazy, I opt to just highlight some sample text and change the Text colour to [Paper] in the Swatches panel.

Last minute colour change for text

As a result, the paragraph style now displays a + symbol next to it. It’s telling us the selected text has a paragraph style applied to it PLUS something extra. This extra bit is called a style override. If you leave your cursor hovering over the style long enough you’ll see a yellow tool tip that tells you exactly what the overrides are.

So what if you want to incorporate these overrides in the paragraph style? I remember back from my days with that other layout application, that we’d create a New style and then delete the Old style replacing it with the New style… Man, that was a lot of work.

Luckily things are a much, MUCH easier in Adobe InDesign.

Right click the style with the overrides, then choose Redefine Style. This updates your style with the override changes.

Redefine style to incorporate changes

We’re all done now. Let’s have a look at the single and double line paragraphs now:

The result. Style now works with single and double line paragraphs.

Beautiful! Just like I wanted things to be.

Video Tutorial

Fall of Autumn’s Alan Lastufka is the producer of the following video on Letterpress.

Letter Press

From job case, leading, quads, coppers & brasses, guide pins, chase & furniture to inking and printing.

Deconvolution sharpening in Photoshop

Mike McHugh did this really cool & funny video on Deconvolution Sharpening. I have to admit I’d never heard of this before… you might not have either. Watching his video, I’m thinking “aaaaahhhh… so that is how they do that on NCIS, CSI etc.” the blurry and invisible become visible.

If you’re looking for some background information on deconvolution:

• Wikepedia provides additional (technical) info.

ePubs from InDesign

David and Anne-Marie recorded back in September a cool InDesign Secrets video on creating ePubs from InDesign. A nice accompanyment to Gabriel Powell’s Essential guide to making and editing eBooks published in the last edition of InDesign Magazine.

Whether you’re looking at:

• growing your business
• developing new services
• acquiring new clients or increasing customer loyalty

Connect09 provides you with an opportunity to learn from the experts and give you an insight into generating positive and long-lasting outcomes for your organisation.

Event Information & Registration: www.connectaustralia.com.au

The Adobe “Daffy Dills”-team is trying to raise at least A$20,000 for the Cancer Council Australia this year and organising:

• an Adobe Master Class (minimum $100 donation required) on 30 September in Sydney: Learn from the best in the industry! @ Adobe Offices in Sydney.
  More info: www.daffydills.com/BookingRetrieve.aspx?ID=47437

You’re already an expert but would want to contribute?

• Signup for the Sydney Relay for Life,. Adobe’s organised 8-teams.
  More info: www.daffydills.com/Relay

And if you happen to be somewhere else in the country, then your donations could be either towards a Raffle (and you can win some Adobe software!) or Just a Donation.

• More info: www.daffydills.com/Raffle
• More info: www.daffydills.com/donate

On behalf of the Adobe team and the Cancer Council: Thank You for your support.

Info & Registration:
http://www.indesignusergroup.com/chapters/perth/events/938/

More and more organisations now-a-days, require that publications are made accessible in accordance with Government guidelines. Accessibility enables those people in the community with visual impairments or other disabilities to have access to the content contained in our publications and to navigate through this content and interact with it.

This meeting will introduce you to the different aspects of accessibility: going from traditional print to Accessible PDF, HTML, Braille in DAISY and ePub.

Flying over from Melbourne for this session is guest-speaker Chandi Perera, CEO of Typefi Systems. Chandi has worked in publishing and media technology industry over 15 years and earlier in the year spoke at the “Tools of Change for Publishing” conference in New York. With his depth of knowledge about publishing technology, content repurposing (XML, XSLT) and InDesign publishing automation, Chandi brings to the publishing industry a wealth of knowledge.

Agenda

• 5:45 – 6:15pm: Registration and meet-and-greet (cold drinks and some food provided)
• 6:15 – 6:20pm: Meeting Welcome
• 6:20 – 7:05pm: Publishing for Accessibility (principles)
• 7:05 – 7:15pm: short break
• 7:15 – 8:00pm: Publishing for Accessibility (in practice)
• 8:00 – 8:30pm: Questions, Prize give-away
• 8:30pm End of meeting

Registration

Attendance to our IDUG meeting is FREE as always. However, seating is limited (90 max), so be sure to register soon!

Register today:
http://www.indesignusergroup.com/chapters/perth/events/938/

See the following tips for some AutoFit tutorials:

• one-to-many relationship
• automatic frame resizing
• round corners and text inset

Web-reference: AutoFit plug-in (2009, Typefi Systems)

Modified: 13 September 2009 – Added “Note”.

Super quick tip. A  practical example. I’ve been writing Technical Documentation the past weeks, and am processing an awful lot of screenshots. Sometimes they are kind of big and I really only want to focus on one part, but would love to see a fading edge and I crop the images so they don’t take up too much room. Photoshop CS4’s Mask panel helps be produce the desired effect.

Photoshop CS4 makes this a 3 second task… I’m not kidding ! Don’t blink, you might miss them.

Quick Steps 1-2-3

Create a Selection, with the Rectangle Marquee tool, roughly the size you want the final image to be.

Note: If you want to feather the bottom half of an entire screenshot, don’t select the entire canvas. Instead, just select an area that falls a few pixels within the canvas area at the feathering point.

Click Add Pixel Mask in Masks Panel.

Click Mask Edge… The Refine Edge dialog appears.

Play with Feather and Contract/Expand settings (and others if preferred) until you get the edge just right

Click OK

and you’re done.

Video Tutorial

[apologies, 2nd video upload... I goofed up on the first one...]

The following tip is the 4th tip in a series of tips on GREP that I’m working on. It’s one of my personal favourites. Probably because I’ve worked with so many people in my carreer who set those Ads you find in your letter box twice a week. The local supermarket product advertising material is what I’m talking about.

Because of the amount of GREP styles involved in creating this Paragraph Style, I won’t add screenshots for each step, but instead provide you with step-by-steps on how to get to the end result.

Let’s start working.

Paragraph Style

We will be formatting our Paragraph Style with 6 different character styles, in order to do this I’ve started out by creating a very simple Paragraph Style called “PriceTag”. It merely sets the Alignment of the style and nothing else.

Character Styles

Next with the Paragraph Style applied to two samples, format the samples as you would like them to look. Basically what you’re doing is prepping for the Character Styles. One tip is that I would advice you to change the Kerning setting to Optical so that the  spacing for figure pairs is just that bit better looking.

Once you’ve got the format right. select the formatted text bit-by-bit and define Character Styles for all of the components.

Dollar Symbol is used to set the ‘$’ in $99.99
Dollars is used to set the first ‘99′ (or other number) in $99.99
Decimal Point is used to make the full-stop . disappear in $99.99
Cents is used to set the second ‘99′ in $99.99 in a smaller font and with baseline shift (or superscript if you prefer).
Cents Big is used only when defining a 99c type price and sets the ‘99′.
Cents Symbol sets the ‘c’

Make the decimal disappear

To make the decimal disappear, I set it to 1pt font size and 1% horizontal scaling and change the fill colour to [none]. You might need to play around with this a little till you get things right.

Before we start with the GREP styles… Let’s reset our original text again and clear the character formatting changes we applied for the purpose of character style development.

Right-click the Paragraph Style, and choose Apply “PriceTag” Clear Overrides.

GREP Styles

Time to start creating our 6 different GREP styles that will make up this PriceTag style.

Right-click the Paragraph Style and choose Edit “PriceTag”… Then in the Paragraph Style Options, click the New GREP style button for each of the styles listed below and follow the rest of the prompts listed.

Setting Dollar Symbol

Change Apply Style to: Dollar Symbol

Clear the Expression in To Text. Cool so the literal text we’re look at here is the dollar sign itself. Unfortunately we can’t just enter a $, as that character is one of the reserved characters for GREP. We’ll “escape” it by placing a backslash in front of it ‘\‘.

To Text: \$

Setting Dollars

Now to those dollars. Change Apply Style to: Dollar Symbol

The Expression in To Text has already got the /d+ in it (Wildcards > Any Digit, Repeat > One or More Times), to allow for the dollars digits to be formatted.

Place the cursor after the /d+

It’s now time to insert a Positive Lookahead. The dollar ‘digits’ are placed ahead of the full-stop (decimal point) and that’s what we’re looking for when defining the GREP expression that sets these. We need to tell the expression that ‘if’ the digits are ahead of the full-stop, then the character style must be applied.

From Special Characters for Search choose: Match > Positive Lookahead. This adds (?=) to the expression. All we need to do know is, insert the full-stop inside this part of the expression.  Again, the ‘.‘ actually has a reserved meaning in GREP, so we must escape it with the ‘\‘.  Insert these characters before the closing parenthesis.

To Text: \d+(?=\.)

Setting Decimal Point

Change Apply Style to: Decimal Point.

Clear the Expression in To Text.We’re once again inserting literal text here ‘.’ and as in the previous GREP style we must escape the character and are thus inserting ‘\.‘

To Text: \.

Setting Cents

Wow, we’ve made it to the Cents. That means we’re half way there   Change Apply Style to: Cents.

As previously mentioned the expression in To Text has already got the /d+ in it (Wildcards > Any Digit, Repeat > One or More Times), to allow for the cents digits to be formatted.

Place the cursor in front the /d+

It’s now time to insert a Positive Lookbehind. The cents ‘digits’ are placed behind of the full-stop (decimal point) and that’s what we’re looking for when defining the GREP expression that sets these. We need to tell the expression that ‘if’ the digits are behind the full-stop, then the character style must be applied.

From Special Characters for Search choose: Match > Positive Lookbehind. This adds (?<=) to the expression. All we need to do know is, insert the full-stop inside this part of the expression, similar to how we did this for the Positive Lookahead (?<=\.)

To Text: (?<=\.)

Setting Cents Big

Ha, time for another Positive Lookahead  the bigger cent digits ahead of the ‘c’

Character Style setting first… Change Apply Style to: Cents Big

The Expression in To Text has already got the /d+ in it. Place the cursor after the /d+

It’s now time to insert the second Positive Lookahead. The bigger cent ‘digits’ are placed ahead of the ‘c‘. We need to tell the expression that ‘if’ the digits are ahead of the ‘c‘, then the character style must be applied.

From Special Characters for Search choose: Match > Positive Lookahead. This adds (?=) to the expression. Then insert ‘c‘  characters before the closing parenthesis.

To Text: \d+(?=c)

Setting Cents Symbol

We’ve made it to the last GREP style, another Positive Lookbehind… remember the ‘c’ behind the bigger cent digits

Character Style setting first… Change Apply Style to: Cents Symbol.

The Expression in To Text has  got the /d+ in it. This time we’ll clear that.

Instead we will insert the ‘c’ first and place our cursor in front of the ‘c’.

We’ll insert a Positive Lookbehind. The ‘c’ is placed behind the bigger cent ‘digits’. We need to tell the expression that ‘if’ the c is behind the digits then the character style must be applied.

From Special Characters for Search choose: Match > Positive Lookbehind. This adds (?<=) to the expression.

My instinct was to insert \d+ inside this expression, but that doesn’t work. Instead we’ll have to insert a Character Set that tells the expression the c can sit behind a 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 or 9.

Place the cursor in front of the closing parenthesis. Then choose from Special Characters for Search choose: Match > Character Set. This adds [] to the previous insertion.

We’ll now insert the characters, and if we enter 0-9 we’re basically defining all of digits.

To Text: (?<=[0-9])c

Wow… we’ve made it to the end Click OK to update the Paragraph Style.

Ready to apply our new Paragraph Style with Grep Styles to our Price Tag text frames.

If you want to make things even more exciting, then enable the Paragraph Style option as part of a fancy Object Style… and all your formatting will be applied through the Object Style.

Video Tutorial

This is the third in a series of tutorials I’ll be writing up about GREP styles. The previous GREP Tutorial is about applying a different style to figures.

In this tutorial we look at how we can convert text typed in Capital Letters to Small Caps.

Let’s get started.

We’re jumping straight into the Paragraph Style and GREP style this time around (see the previous tips (1) and (2) for different approaches)

Right click the paragraph style in the Paragraph Styles panel to edit it and in the Paragraph Style Options click GREP Style.

Then Click New GREP Style, this adds a third GREP Style to our “Body Text” paragraph style.

At the bottom of the Apply Style pop-up I can still choose New Character Style. Yay! That’s very cool. Thank you Adobe!

I’m naming my style Small Caps (OT). Hmmm wonder why?

Changing Cases

So someone typed in A.M and P.M. through this James Cook Voyages diary manuscript whilst holding down the Shift-key on the keyboard. Normally that would require a painful Find/Change that changes them to lowercase first, before we can change them back to small caps, as presently no “Upper Case” style has been recorded.

However since I’m using an Open Type font for my Body Text, I can prevent myself from having to jump through all sorts of hoops – Type > Change Case, being another one of them – to get this looking right.

One of OpenType’s extended features is that of having the ability to set true small caps characters to text, regardless of the current formatting.

John D. Berry talks about extended features including the OpenType small caps feature back in October 2006, in an article he wrote for Creative Pro.Com. It’s worth a read.

Let’s click Basic Character Formats and look at the Case menu.

There it is the Open Type All Small Caps.  Let’s choose this and click OK to define our newly created Character Style for our GREP style.

So that’s it our Character Style has been defined. Let’s get to the GREP Expression.

GREP Expression

Basically there are only two occurrences of text that I want to change in Cook’s journal. The words “A.M.” and “P.M.”.  So what I’m looking at setting is that either A.M. OR P.M. when encountered must be formatted using our Character Style.

OR, means that either A.M or P.M. can appear in the paragraph. There is no need for both of them to be inserted as text in the paragraph.

To set the expression, let’s start by entering A.M. as literal text for the To Text (I’m making a mistake here on purpose, we’ll fix that in a little while).

Match

So what is it we are trying to match with our GREP style… Oooh yes, A.M. or P.M.

Now as to the OR…

From Special Characters for Search choose Match > Or

Next let’s set P.M.  And ensure you click the Preview box in the Paragraph Style Options dialog to see the effects of the current settings.

It looks kind-off OK… but no it’s not.

Remember back in the first GREP tutorial, I mentioned that certain characters are reserved by GREP for other things. We actually used one of them in our very first GREP the “.” (fullstop), and it meant “Any Character”. Now that we are looking closer, you might notice that not only the word “A.M.” is set to small caps, but the word ARM as well.

The solution is that we need to change this “.” “Any Character” into a literal character… and that’s done by escaping it with the “\” (Backslash) character.  We’ll need to make this change manually.

Once we’ve made this change our third GREP style is completed.

Video Tutorial

This is the second in a series of short GREP Style tutorials. I introduce GREP styles in the first post in this series. In this short tutorial we look at how we can use a GREP style to change the appearance of any figures within a paragraph style.

Task for this GREP Style is that it changes the formatting on any numerical characters (figures) throughout the Body Text paragraph style.

We’re starting the same way once again. By creating a Character Style that sets the formatting for the figures.

OpenType Fonts and Figures

As I’m using a Open Type font in this example (Minion Pro). I can use OpenType features for figure formatting. Kind of cool.

To create a Character Style that has my figure settings included, I start by highlighting a figure and from the Control Panel menu choose OpenType.

Any OpenType font features listed between square brackets [] are not available to the font. The last group of features are figure specific features: Tabular Lining, Proportional Oldstyle, Proportional Lining, Tabular Oldstyle and the default setting Default Figure Style.

There’s much more to OpenType then just being a cross-platform font. As these fonts are double byte fonts they can contain an expanded character set and provide cool typographical features.  Adobe Systems Inc. has a good OpenType Q&A page available as part of their Open Type ‘branch’ on their web-site

In brief (and I’m not font expert to be honest): Oldstyle figures, are generally designed smaller and match with lowercase characters. Lining figures are designed to match uppercase characters. Tabular figures are designed for figure placement in tabular (tabbed/tables) format, e.g. as in financial reports etc. Proportional figures are designed to be proportionaly spaced.

I’m a fan of Proportional Oldstyle, I like the smaller font size.

From the Character Style panel menu choose New Character Style and set the Style Name for the style. I’m setting mine to “Proportional Oldstyle”.

Click OK to add the style to the Character Styles panel.

Paragraph Style

Time to start GREPPING again… and this one will be a quickie

From the Paragraph Styles panel, right-click “Body Text” (or the style that you want to edit) and choose Edit “Body Text”.

The Paragraph Style Options dialog appears.

Click GREP Style, and click New Grep Style… to add another GREP style to the paragraph style.

Choose the “Proportional Oldstyle” Character Style from the Apply Style list. And believe it or not you’re done.

That’s because the default expression that InDesign inserts is “Any Digit, One or More times”. But let’s imagine your setting the expression anyway

Clear the field data in To Text. Then from the Special Characters for Search pop-up choose: Wildcards > Any Character

Follow this with: Repeat > One or More times.

Click OK and you’re done

Video Tutorial

InDesign CS3 introduced the ability to perform GREP Find/Changes, making it easier for us to apply character styles to text pattern strings such as ‘all text’ between parentheses.  InDesign CS4 introduces the ability to lock this pattern based application of character styles into your Paragraph Styles.

In the upcoming series of tips I hope to introduce some uses of GREP Styles as demoed during the June 2009 – InDesign User Group meeting in Perth.

This first GREP style tutorial tutorial looks at how we can automatically apply a character style to all text between parentheses.

All of the paragraphs for which the text between parenthesis must be set in Italic have already had a Paragraph Style “Body Text” applied to it.

Define a Character Style

In preparation for the GREP style, I prefer to create the Character Styles required prior to defining the GREP style components (Character Style and Expression).

To define a Character Style:

highlight some text in the Body Text paragraphs and change its formatting. I’ve changed the Font Style to Medium Italic.

Next choose New Character Style from the Character Styles panel menu and Name the Style. I’m naming mine “Medium Italic”.

Click OK to add the style to the Control Panel. I’m purposely not clicking “Apply Style to Selection’, as the text I formatted with Medium Italic is only used as the basis for the Character Style definition.

Because we set some of the text in Medium Italic (Font Style), our Paragraph Style now indicates with the ‘+’ icon that this format is not native to the Paragraph Style. Let’s remove this format override, by clicing the Clear Overrides icon at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles panel.

It is now time to add the GREP Style to our Paragraph Style.

GREP Style

Right-click the Paragraph Style and select Edit “Body Text” to edit the style. The Paragraph Style Options dialog appears. Click GREP Styles.

First of all lets set the Character Style that we’re going to apply to the GREP Expression we’re inserting in just a moment. From the Apply Style drop down choose the Character Style created earlier.

The Character Style we want to apply is “Medium Italic”.

Oops did you forget to create the Character Style? Don’t worry, from InDesign CS4, you have the ability to create your Character Style right here in the Paragraph Style Options dialog. Have a look at the bottom of the Apply Style pop-up and notice the “New Character Style”.

GREP Expression

It’s time to get GREPPING… so what was that pattern again we were looking for? An Open Parenthesis character, followed by any type of text (alpha-numerical, spaces etc. all allowed), finished off with a Closing Parenthesis character.

Symbols

If you are already a GREP wiz you might be able to enter the required GREP expression in the To Text field. However I personally prefer constructing the expression bit-by-bit. The Special Characters For Search pop-up is a great help in constructing the expression. InDesign will automatically insert the correct expression data.

Our Open Parenthesis Character is part of the Symbols group.

As choose this component, you might notice that the text entered in the To Text field is now set to \(.  Certain symbols are reserved by GREP for particular expression components. The Parenthesis form part of this group of characters. For our GREP Expression to recognise the  “(” as a literal character it must be preceded by a “\” character. This “\” is referred to as an Escape Character.

Each of the following characters is reserved by GREP: * ^ } ] ) $ . { [ ( | + ? ~

If you want to use these characters as a literal character in a GREP expression, you must escape them with the “\”.

Wildcards

Next we’re after our next part of the expression: The any text or words etc. that are inserted prior to the closing parenthesis.

When you are looking for ANYTHING… Think of the fact that you know that this ANYTHING might be an “a” or a “b” or really any character of the alphabet, and even numbers or spaces.

Wildcards are a way of defining an “ANYTHING”.  And as we’re looking for any type of character, not just Digits (numbers), Letters (alphabetical) or White Space (spaces), we’re choosing Wildcards > Any Character.

A “.” is added to the GREP expression.

Repeat

You might think at this stage that you’re there… Not quite… GREP Expressions need to know home many times on ef these Any Characters can occur… So we need to know tell the Expression how many times this Any Character can repeat itself.

Let’s assume we don’t encounter “()” (without text between the parentheses). So we’re looking at One or More occurrences.

Shortest Match

So what would happen if there is more than one set of “()” within a paragraph? Well, this is where the Shortest Match option comes in handy. Shortest Match looks for the first occurrence of the “(” and the first occurrence of the “)”, the shortest possible string it can find in the paragraph, and that is exactly what we’re after

So let’s choose Repeat > One or More Times (Shortest Match).  This adds “+?” to the expression.

We’re almost there at this stage. All we need to add to our expression now is the Closing Parenthesis character. We jump back to Symbols for that one.

Choose Symbols > Close Parenthesis Character

Our finished expression is \(.+?\)

Any text between brackets is now set using our GREP style. Click OK to apply the GREP style to the Paragraph Style and see the finished result.

Video Tutorial

26-June-2009 – Comment Cari: “Bob Bringhurst (who’s responsible for Help Documentation for InDesign and InCopy), is acknowledging that the changed behaviour we’re seeing in CS4 is a bug. See his post ‘Page Numbering on a Single Spread Page‘.”

The following tip is the CS4 write-up of a Digitip 027. Based on the comments below that particular tip, I’ve decided to add an CS4 step-by-step instructions, as it seems that possibly the change in terminology, Auto Page Number is now called Current Page Number… causes some confusion. In addition, the tip doesn’t work like it used to  in earlier versions of InDesign

Like the previous tip, this tip looks at creating double page numbering on the right hand page, indicating the left-page number and right-page number in the same text frame on the right hand page.

Master page setup

Start by creating a new document, and select the Facing Pages option. Or alternatively work with island spread master pages. In your Pages panel double click the A-Master A or other Master page that is going to be the basis for the pages that will have the double page numbering on their right hand page.

Your document will then display a page spread.

Two text boxes

On the left hand page draw a text frame (click drag with the type tool), then using the Selection tool, with the text frame still selected, click the Out port (see image below). Doing so changes the cursor into a loaded Type Cursor icon. With the loaded cursor, click-and-drag on the right hand page to create a second text frame.

The two frames are now threaded. Double click with your Selection tool in the first frame to access the Type Tool again. You should see a flashing cursor in the first text frame.

The page numbers

Now that the text cursor is flashing away, let’s force it to jump to the text frame on the right hand page, by choosing Type > Insert Break Character > Frame Break.

Now we are ready to include our (automatic) previous page number marker.

Choose Type > Insert Special Character > Markers > Previous Page Number to insert the marker for the Page number on the left-hand page (which is indeed your previous page).

Next insert the characters that sit between the previous and current page numbers. I’m inserting a pipe character in this example.

Time to insert the current page number now. This will set the actual page number of the right-hand page. Choose Type > Insert Special Character > Markers > Current Page Number to insert the marker for the Current Page Number

So now we have two “A”’s in our master page indicating some automatic numbering occurring in A-Master (hence the letter A).

At this stage you might have the urge to test things and navigate to your document pages… but I can guarantee you things won’t work as they did in earlier versions of InDesign…

So here’s what you do next as a work-around to make things sort of work again in CS4. It’s a dirty trick not as clean and nice as it all used to be.

Alright. Pull up your Layers Panel (Window menu) and create a new layer called “PageNumber Frames”

The dirty trick here is that we’ll have to ensure that ALL the frames involved in creating the page numbering are going to be overridden on the document pages of your document. Now that is a little bit of a painful task and you certain wouldn’t want to override all master page items… It defeats the purpose of using master page items doesn’t it?

So the trick here is that you must ensure that the frames involved with this page numbering tip are placed on their own unique layer.

Select the frames, then click and drag the little icon in the Layers panel that points to you having something selected into your newly created layer.

Leave this as it is further and start the work on the rest of your document. Complete your pagination and your page designs and when you’re finished with that lock all BUT the PageNumber Frames layer.

Yay, now it is time to return to your document pages.

In the Pages panel select (double click) the first page of your document, scroll down to the last page of your document. Press the Shift-key on the keyboard and click the last page of the document in the panel. All pages should now be selected.

Next choose Override All Master Items from the Pages panel menu.  Because we had all other layers locked, any other master page items NOT placed on the only unlocked layer will remain as they are and won’t be overridden.

Perth – Making Text Flow: Efficient, cool, clever and downright fun ways to format text in InDesign, presented by dyanmic duo Marianne Young and Cari Jansen.

Sydney – Treasure Hunt: InDesign Tips & Tricks, presented by Mike McHugh , Application Engineer Adobe Systems and host of creativesweettv.com

Vertical Justification…  according to Webopedia is the “automatic adjustment of vertical space between lines, so that columns and pages have an even top and bottom margin” …   In InDesign Vertical Justification really refers to the vertical alignment text has within its text frame.

Vertical alignment can be changed by choosing Object > Text Frame Options… In the General section of this dialog box we find the Vertical Justification Setting.

It contains four (4) different alignment options. Top, Centre, Bottom and Justify.

InDesign’s default Vertical Justification setting is Align Top. We can easily change that using either the Text Frame Options dialog or by clicking the preferred Vertical Justification  button in the Control Panel.

You don’t see these buttons in your Control Panel? In that case either your monitor settings don’t allow for adding of more control panel buttons or this particular option is not enabled as a button that can be displayed in the Control Panel. The first reason could require you to increase your screen resolution (or purchase a new monitor that allows for increased screen resolution settings). However, you do have some control over what you see in the Control Panel   It’s called the Control panel for a reason I guess…

From the Panel menu on the far right of the Control Panel, choose Customize… Click any of the triangles before Object, Paragraph etc. to twirl down and display what settings can be displayed in the Control Panel. Was Vertical Justification selected? No? Then enable it, and with a bit of luck – after clicking OK – you’ll be able to see the buttons 

Ok, now let’s look at the last of the Vertical Justification settings: Align Justify.

I have the bottom frame selected on my page, and as you can see the frame is defined as having multiple columns. However, although the text lines up nicely at the top of the columns, it is rather ragged at the bottom. Not a pretty sight.

A similar affect you might see when looking at two neighbouring pages in a long document that uses “Facing pages”. Not pretty at all.

To ensure that both Top and Bottom of the text in the frame is nicely lined up, change the Vertical Justification setting to Align Justify.

Nice right? What you don’t like it? Aaaah, I see. It appears as if the text in neighboring columns has a different leading now. Still not a pretty sight.

Why did that happen? InDesign basically needs to insert some space in order to make the text line up at top and bottom of the frame. And for shorter columns it will need to insert a lot more space. It inserts this space anywhere… that’s right… anywhere… between the lines within a paragraph and between the paragraphs themselves.

Where a lot of space is inserted between lines of a paragraph it will appear as if the leading has increased.

To avoid this from happening and instruct InDesign to first of all try and justify the text vertically by adding some space between paragraphs, increase the Paragraph Spacing Limit setting.

A setting higher than “0″ instructs InDesign to insert up to the defined amount of space between paragraphs first, prior to starting to place space between the lines within a paragraph.

Ok, that seems to improve things. But what happened to the last column of the story? Vertical Justification doesn’t know when to stop!

The End of Story, be it in a mutli column frame or the last page of a chapter in a book doesn’t require the Justify setting to be enabled.

For a mutli column frame we can’t just disable the Align Justify setting on the text frame, as it will affect all columns. However, making the column interact with a small object that has Text Wrap enabled on it will ’switch off’ the setting for just that column (or Frame in case of long documents, e.g. end of book chapter).

To easily insert this so called “end of story marker”,  I place the object in an InDesign library, so I can grab a copy of the ’shelf” each time I need create an “end of story marker” that fixes this “always justify alignment everywhere issue”.

To create a new Library, choose File > New > Library. The library itself behaves much like an InDesign panel. It is totally empty when first created.

To add an item to the library for reuse, select the item on the page then choose Add Item from the Library Panel menu.

TIP: press Alt/Option as you are doing this and you’ll be prompted to name the item. Alternatively double click the Untitled item you’ve just added to name it.

I can place it as a floating “object” but if for some reason more text is inserted, the object will stay behind and continue to cause a particular column NOT to be justified. So instead I insert them as an Inline item (Anchored Object) that flows with the text when more text is inserted.

At the end of your story insert your type cursor and press return/enter.  This places your cursor on the next line. From the Library Panel menu choose Place Item(s)… and you’re done.
Note: You can even add a Keyboard Shortcut for the Place Item(s) command to make things even easier and faster.

Now no matter where the story ends, the last column of the story will never be justified.

Video Tutorial

In all honesty it wasn’t a Warning dialog I had ever encountered before.

Basically it means that in the Units & Increments section of the InDesign Preferences dialog, the points/pica size reference was changed from the default “PostScript (72 pts/inch)” to “Traditional (72.27 pts/inch)“.

This particular preference setting was introduced in InDesign CS2, possibly for the reason of giving the “Traditionalist” the choice to stick to their old measurement systems. Changing the setting back to the default “PostScript” will likely result in seeing some very irregular point-sizes

As someone who’s gone through conversion from conventional typesetting systems to Desktop Publishing based on PostScript ‘points’ (yes, I am THAT old!), I remember that our first conversions of publications from typesetting systems to our then desktop application (QuarkXPress) caused some pain in getting the point sizes/leading right.

Especially where conversion was for the purpose of reprint. The text sizing, leading etc. needed to resemble the original as closely as possible. The original jobs were set using Didot points and originated from our Berthold typesetting system. The Didot points (12 points in a Cicero), was a point system based on the “pie de roi” and French inches. Hermann Berthold adopted this system and adapted it to the metric system later on.

Basically I remember us continuously setting small print samples at various sizes, making tiny size adjustments and then comparing the printouts with type set in the previous system.   Newer jobs  (and I’m talking about the late 1980s), would adopt the new point system and over a period of some years this difficult conversion process was gradually phased out and we were traditionalists no more…

This really makes me wonder why in 2009 I would be opening an InDesign file that has the points/pica size settings changed to “Traditional”… I dare not ask!