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.

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 Addedvideo

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.

Adding Paragraph Rules

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 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

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

Left it a little late this time due to work commitments (Recertification deadline for InDesign CS4 is 30 June)

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!

The following IDUG meetings are currently scheduled:

2 June 2009: Perth – Making Text Flow: Efficient, cool, clever and downright fun ways to format text in InDesign, presented by Marianne Young and Cari Jansen.

2 June 2009: Sydney – Treasure Hunt: InDesign Tips & Tricks, presented by Mike McHugh

10 June 2009: Melbourne – Interactive PDF

11 June 2009: Brisbane – Let’s Style it!, presented by Cheryl Zwart

Membership and attendence of the InDesign User Group meetings/events is FREE.

Not a Member yet? then log-on to www.indesignusergroup.com and become a member and choose which Chapters around the world you’d like to be come a member of. You will automatically receive event notifications.

Michael covers everything, and I mean EVERY-thing to do with Styles in InDesign CS4. From the basics of Paragraph and Character style usage to Object Styles, Stroke Styles, Nested, Next, GREP, and many more styles…

It’s an easy to read and easy to understand book. Written very much in the style of his podcasts. So if you like those, then definitely grab a copy of his book

Web-reference: Adobe InDesign CS4 Styles: How to Create Better, Faster Text and Layouts (Michael Murphy, 2009)

The blog and podcast are a great addition to her recently published book.

“Bleed ? what’s bleeding? Uuuuhhhh why can’t you print my Powerpoint designed ad in your glossy magazine? Just grab the logo of our web-site it should be good to go… What???? Colour can be illegal????”

Web-reference: From Design Into Print – blog/podcast (Sandee Cohen, 2009)

Web-reference: From Design Into Print – the book (Sandee Cohen, 2009)

When building so called prototype or “base” tables that form the source for formatting tables in InDesign using these tools, there is generally a rule that states that the prototype table may not contain merged cells.  This is to do with the fact that no information regarding cell formatting of the ‘merged cell’ is recorded as part of the prototype and can result in new tables once formatted with these styles displaying unexpected results, if they are build with merged cells.

To build our table designs however, we generally do work with merged cells, for instance for header rows, so we can visualise end-results better.

A quick way to unmerge ALL cells in a table, regardless where they appear, is to select the entire table and then choose Table > Unmerge Cells command.

Doing this before defining your prototype, will also display any formatting issues that might require cleaning up, prior to defining the styles.

Web-reference: Acrobat.com Ideas.

This is the 6th tip in a series of tips on Interactive PDFs. We’ve learnt in previous tips to create buttons, add cool roll over effects, add actions to buttons, create hyperlinks to pages and more. In this tip we’ll look at how we can create a Table of Contents in InDesign and automatically use the inclusion of an interactive Table of Contents during export to PDF as well as create navigational bookmarks in the PDF. The preparation as we’ll see is all on how we define and set-up our Table of Contents.

Building a Table of Contents

Rule number 1: In order to automatically generate a Table of Contents list in an InDesign document, you must use paragraph style consistently throughout your document.

So what do paragraph styles have to do with building a Table of Contents? Through-out your InDesign document (or document that is part of an InDesign Book), you use paragraph styles to format the text in the document. Styles such as “Heading1″, “Heading2″, “BodyText”, “Normal” and so on. Generally when we create a Table of Contents we want to create a copy of text, such as headings that is used through-out the document, or figure-names or table-names etc.  InDesign’s Table of Contents feature can automatially filter out this text from an InDesign document IF you have formatted those headings with a unique paragraph style. Let’s say Heading1. Here’s how it all works together…

Step 1: Format headings etc. consistently with paragraph styles

Step 2: Design your Table of Content

First of all, if you are looking at building a Table of Contents from different heading levels, consider how many levels deep you’d like the Table of Contents to be. For example will you only include “Heading 1″ text? Or do you want to see different levels, such as “Heading 1″ and “Heading 2″?

Once you’ve determine this think ahead a little. When the text is formatted in the Table of Contents:

• Would you like to see a Page Number?
• If Yes, will that be preceding the heading text that is filtered out of the document? or will it follow the text?
• If there is a page number, would you like to separate it from the text in some way. Say by entering a tab-character, or maybe even an En-Space then a Tab-character? etc.
• Build a small temporary Table of Contents in which you mimic this formatting in your document.
• Also include the Table of Contents Title… that is if you want to have the ability to also generate this text during the TOC creation.

• With the formatting in place, create some paragraph styles specifically designed to format your Table of Contents.
• In the sample here, we’re keeping things pretty simple. Just a single level table of contents preceded by a title.
• Clear the content from the dummy Table of Contents text frame, and leave the frame on the page.

Step 3: Defining a New Table of Contents Style

Time to define your Table of Contents Style. From the Layout Menu choose Table of Contents Styles…

The Table of Contents Styles dialog appears. Click New… to define a new style.

Click the More Options button to see the full TOC dialog.

Let’s review this dialog top to bottom…

First of all we’ll name the Table of Content Style. Let’s say “Newsletter TOC”

The Title refers to the first bit of text that preceeds the contents listing itself. We’ll make this “In this week’s edition:”.  The paragraph style next to it is the style used to format this text. We’ve created the “TOC_Title” style for this earlier.

Now we get to the good bits. Which text formatted with which paragraph style do you want to copy from the InDesign document into the Table of Contents? Answer in this example ChapterTitle_Black and ChapterTitle_White.

From the list of Other Styles you can select any of the paragraph styles that need to be included in the Table of Contents. To select multiple non-continuous styles hold down the Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (PC) key as you are clicking style names. Press shift to select a continuous style range.

Next click the Add button to move the styles to the Include Paragraph Styles list.

InDesign automatically increments the Level numbers for each additional style included (up to 10 levels).

For each style listed set the correct level. As the ChapterTitle can appear in either Black or White I’ll set both to “Level 1″ in this example.

Now let’s go back to the list of questions we asked ourselves when designing the look of the Table of Contents.

• We created a Paragraph style called TOC_Level1 to format the Table of Contents Entries
• We decided to have the page number After the Entry and to enter a Right-Indent Tab between the Entry and the PageNumber.

Select each of the Included Paragraph Styles and set its settings for Entry Style, Page Number and Between Entry and Number

We’re almost done now…

When it comes to creating our Interactive PDF with interactive Table of Contents and PDF Bookmarks, we must enable the Create PDF Bookmarks option.  Yep… you’re right… all this hard work and all we need to do is click this one button to get some extra interactivity in our PDF? Well kinda… we’ll still have create our Table of Contents in the document

Click OK twice to add the Table of Contents Style to the InDesign document.

Step 4: Create a Table of Contents

Yay. Finally… we’re going to see our Table of Contents appear in the document.

Choose Layout > Table of Contents, and in the dialog select TOC Style created earlier in this example “Newsletter TOC” created and click OK.

The loaded text cursor appears containing all of the Table of Contents text. Click in the Table of Contents frame placed on the document page earlier or simply place the text wherever it needs placing.

And… ta da… There it is…

We’re now ready to test this rollover effect in the interactive PDF.

Creating the PDF

Choose a File > Adobe PDF Presets and select a PDF setting from the list of settings. Alternatively choose File > Export and set Format to PDF.

In the General section of the Export Adobe PDF dialog ensure the Bookmarks option is enabled for inclusion. Next click Export and generate the PDF.

This is the 5th tip in a series of tips on Interactive PDFs. We’ve learnt in previous tips to create buttons, add cool roll over effects, add actions to buttons and more. In this tip we’ll look at using InDesign’s Hyperlink feature to create a link from the thumb tabs that appear on all pages of the PDF to particular pages in the PDF.

Master page and artwork

At the very start of this interactive PDF project, I opted to create a Master Page, that contained all of the side tabs on it that appear on all pages of the document.

First I renamed the A-Master default master page that appears in all new InDesign document. By choosing from the Pages Panel menu Master Options for “A-Master”…, and changing the master Prefix to “b” and the Name to “Base”.

Why Base? well, this master page is going to be the base for all other master used in this project.

On this master page, I’ve added the 6 thumb tabs that are going to be a navigational link to selective pages in the finished PDF file.

To ensure the Tabs always on top of any other content, I’ve place the the 6 text frames in a separate layer called “ThumbTabs”.

Basing master pages on other master pages

As the background tints and textures applied to document pages in the 6 different sections vary, I opted to create additional master pages that would be applied to each section’s document pages.

In order to include the thumb tabs on these additional master pages, each New Master page I created is based on the “b-Base” master and thereby inherits all of the objects (the thumb tabs in this case) that exist on this master.

Choose New Master from the Pages panel menu and enter the Prefix and Name for this this master.

Next set Based on Master to ‘b-Base’ and click OK to add the master to the pages panel.

Each of the background textures was placed into its own layer.

With all this master work completed, and master pages applied to document pages we’re now ready to get the thumb tab links working.

Thumb tab links

Before we build the hyperlinks, there’s a little homework to: dot down which document page is the first page of each of the different sections to which the thumb tabs will lead

In all honestly there are few different methods you can use when creating hyperlinks and link destinations in InDesign. The most commonly used method is to set the destination options as you are creating the New Hyperlink. However, I prefer to set my hyperlink destinations first and then point to these destinations later on when creating the hyperlink. Maybe a preference I picked up from earlier Acrobat work… not sure…

In this example I’m focussing on the orange Melbourne thumb tab. It is going to link to page 6 of the document.

Display the Hyperlinks panel (Window > Interactive > Hyperlinks)

From the panel menu, choose New Hyperlink Destination.

In the dialog that appears set Type to Page.

Name the Destination and set the Page number to ‘6′ (or other number in your case).

The Zoom Setting enables you to set display behaviour for the destination page in the PDF. I’m choosing “Fit in Window”, as I’d like for the person clicking the thumb tab to see the entire first page of the Melbourne section.

Next, display the b-Base master page.

On the master page select the thumb tab for which you want to create the hyperlink. In the example I choose the Melbourne thumb tab text frame.

Choose New Hyperlink from the Hyperlinks panel.

In the dialog that appears choose set Link To to “Shared Destination”.  The destination we created earlier, can be used as many times for various different links if needed.

To complete the Destination setting, select the active Document, as this is the file in which we earlier created the destination and choose the Name of the destination. “Melbourne” in the sample here. [note: I've noticed that the Page reference below this isn't always correct, not quite sure why, but believe me, the link will work in the end and jump to the correct page number]

Had I selected the text “Melbourne” instead of the text frame on the master page, I could have also assigned a different character style to be applied to the Hyperlink. Be aware though that applying a character style to a hyperlink text will remove any other local character style settings that might already be applied to the link text.

Appearance settings is another way in which you can make a hyperlink stand out. As the design of the interactive newsletter with its thumb tabs is pretty straight forward I opt not to apply a visual queue for the hyperlink.

For Appearance set Type to “Invisible Rectangle” and Highlight to “None” to create a fully functional hyperlink that only become apparent to the user when they move the cursor over the tab.

Click OK to complete the hyperlink.

We’re now ready to test this rollover effect in the interactive PDF.

Creating the PDF

Choose a File > Adobe PDF Presets and select a PDF setting from the list of settings. Alternatively choose File > Export and set Format to PDF.

In the General section of the Export Adobe PDF dialog ensure the Hyperlinks option is enabled for inclusion. Next click Export and generate the PDF.

We’ve learnt in previous tips to create buttons, add roll over effects. In this tip we’ll look at how we can create a roll over effect button that reveals hidden information and hides that which is shown originally.

We start at the very beginning. By creating buttons for each of the items that we want to show and hide.

To make things a little easier I have placed the content that is to be shown and hidden into separate layers.

Our PDF page will show and hide three different parts of content. Which originates from the “Batavia”, “Skeleton” and “Portico”-layers.

Step 1: displaying what is shown by default

Our first step is to determine which content must be revealed when the PDF viewer first navigates to the “Shipwreck Galleries” page. I’ve decided to choose the Batavia topic for this.

Start by showing the content of this layer, by toggling the visibility icon ‘on’ (it displays the ‘eye’-symbol) and by selecting all of its content.

To select all items on this layer, Alt or Option click the Layer Name in the Layers panel.

Before we can make this content into a button we must group it. Choose Object > Group.

Next display the Button panel, and with the group still selected, click the Normal State Appearance to turn the Object into a Button.

With the button created, we now need to determine whether this button’s content is visible by default when we navigate to the Shipwreck Galleries page. From the Buttons panel menu choose “Visible in PDF”, this option will ensure that we can see the Batavia information when we first look at this PDF page.

Before jumping to the next layer & content, Name the button. I’ve named my button “Batavia”.

Naturally displaying the Batavia content, means we should leave the other two topics hidden in the PDF. We’ll make these appear later

Step 2: Hiding what’s hidden by default

We’re now ready to work on those two pieces of content that are hidden by default. The content of the “Skeleton” and the “Portico” layer. I’ll describe the steps for the “Skeleton” layer, you’ll need to repeat these for all other layers in your project that should be hidden by default.

As in Step 1 – Start by showing the content of this layer, by toggling the visibility icon ‘on’ (it displays the ‘eye’-symbol) and by selecting all of its content.

Next select all items on this layer, by Alt or Option clicking the Layer  in the Layers panel and group the content. Choose Object > Group.

Next display the Button panel, and with the group still selected, click the Normal State Appearance to turn the Object into a Button.

With the button created, we now need to determine whether this button’s content is visible by default when we navigate to the Shipwreck Galleries page. From the Buttons panel menu choose “Hidden in PDF”, this option will ensure that we can see the Batavia information when we first look at this PDF page.

Name the button. I’ve named my button “Skeleton”.

Repeat these steps for any other button that must be created and for which the content will be hidden when first viewing the PDF page.

Step 3: show all layer content

Our next step involves displaying all layer content. Click the visibility icons for the three (or more layers) that are part of the show/hide magic we’re working on.

Things might look a little messy in InDesign, but remember, we’re working towards creating an interactive PDF

Step 4: Creating the roll over buttons

We’re now ready to create three more buttons and that will provide us with the roll over.  Each of these roll over buttons will (a) show the content to which it relates and (b) hide the rest of the content. Let’s start with the Batavia button.

Select the text frame, that is to become the roll over button, and in the Buttons panel click the Normal State Appearance.

This turns the object into a button, we can now work on the show/hide business   Change the Event setting to “Roll Over“, then select the Actions drop-down menu and choose Show/Hide Buttons.

After you’ve set the Show/Hide Button Action, a Visibility section appears in the Buttons panel, locate the Button names you created earlier (Portico, Skeleton, Batavia) for each of the content that is going to reveal/hide. Select the button that needs to be hidden, then click the “Hide” button.

This will change the visibility icon to an eye-symbol with a red line over it. Repeat this step for all button content you want to hide on the page when someone rolls over the selected button with the mouse/cursor.

Next, select the button-content that must be revealed during roll over and click the Show icon. This will add a small eye-symbol in the Visibility column.

In the example here, I’ve closed two eyes and opened one

Repeat the previous steps for each of your remaining roll over buttons.

You’re now ready to test the hard work and create the interactive PDF.

hoose a File > Adobe PDF Presets and select a PDF setting from the list of settings. Alternatively choose File > Export and set Format to PDF.

In the General section of the Export Adobe PDF dialog ensure the Interactive Element option is enabled for inclusion. Next click Export and generate the PDF.

In the previous tips we’ve learnt how to add a simple rollover effect and insert a movie in InDesign.

In this tip, will add our own controller buttons to the movie with which we can stop, play, pause and resume the movie.

Adding the buttons

The four buttons I have added below the placed movie, are simple text frames that have an Embossing effect applied to them.

The Embossing settings I have used are as follows:

I’ve used a small inner bevel, that makes the text frames look like buttons.

With the Effect applied, we are now ready to convert the text frames into a button and add some rollover effects (see also Creating Interactive PDFs from InDesign (1)).

In the Button panel click the Normal State Appearance. Doing so converts the text frame to a button.

Next click the Rollover State Appearance in the Button panel and change the Fill colour for the text frame. I’ve used green.

Next click the Click State Appearance in the Button panel and change the Fill colour for the text frame. I’ve used orange.

Setting Event and Action

We’re now ready to set Events and Actions. An Event is something that triggers an Action. In other words. If I switch on my kettle in the morning (Event), the water in it will boil (Action) … What we want to do is ensure that when the button is clicked the movie starts playing.

The question is though… what event would you choose? There are several events available: On Release, Click, Roll Over, Roll Off, and On Focus and Blur.

At which time when clicking a button would you want the Action (Play movie) to occur? I’m choosing on Release, as that will give the viewer the chance to change their mind when they click the mouse button, they can still move the cursor away from the button and it won’t start playing when they release the button again. Instead the Action will not be triggered until the Mouse button is released right on top of the button.

With the Event set, we can now determine what Action needs to follow the Event.

There are quite a few actions to choose from. There isn’t a “Play Movie” action. However there is a Movie action, and we’ll choose that. When you select the Movie Action there are two more settings to set.

First of all InDesign must know which movie you might want to use in the Action. You could have multiple movies placed throughout the InDesign document. Choose the correct moview from the “Movie” pop-up.

Next we need to set the Option.

There are four (4) options available: Play, Stop, Pause, Resume.

Play will start playing the movie in the PDF

Stop will stop playing the movie and will return to the original Normal state (the start of the movie and the movie poster we selected).

Pause, will interrupt play of the movie and leave the “play-head” at the last point in the movie you’ve seen.

Resume, will continue playing the movie from the position of the “play-head’.

As we’re working on the Play button, we’ll choose Play.

Repeat all of the previous steps for the other three buttons you’ve created and choose the relevant Stop, Resume and Pause options at the end of the movie settings.

Last but not least don’t forget to Name your Button. I’ve named my button “Play”.

Once the remainder of the buttons are ready, we can export our InDesign file to PDF and test that all buttons work as intended.

Tip: To preview/play a movie from InDesign, Double click the movie with the selection tool. Quicktime movie player will launch and you can preview the movie in Quicktime.

Creating the PDF

Choose a File > Adobe PDF Presets and select a PDF setting from the list of settings. Alternatively choose File > Export and set Format to PDF.

In the General section of the Export Adobe PDF dialog ensure the Interactive Element option is enabled for inclusion, this ensures the buttons are all working. You must also include the movie itself. I’m choosing Embed All. As I selected “Embed Movie” in the Movie Options earlier, I could also have choosen the “Use Object Settings” here. Either option will embed the movie in the PDF as long as I’ve ensured that the Compatibility setting (top of the dialog box) is set to Acrobat 6 or higher.

Next click Export to generate the interactive PDF.

In this tip we’ll look at how we can add a movie to InDesign and set movie options.

InDesign CS4 provides support for placement of movies in various formats: QuickTime (.mov),  AVI, MPEG, and SWF. With support for playing these formats in Adobe Reader & Acrobat depending on the PDF version that is eventually exported from InDesign.

Placing the movie

Placing a movie in InDesign is no different to placing an Image. You use the exact same command: File > Place.

The loaded placement cursor provides a pretty unsubtle hint as to the file type you are placing in InDesign: it displays a small film-strip. In contrast to the image previews you normally see when placing images, no preview is displayed for the movie that is being placed. In addition movies don’t display import options when placed with the “Show Import Options” enabled in the Place dialog.

The placed movie, unless specified differently will be played at the size at which it is inserted in InDesign.

Movie Options

The Movie Options are accessed by choosing Object > Interactive > Movie Options or by double clicking the placed moview.

To make your PDF more accessible, enter some Descriptive information in the Description area of the dialog. For PDFs that are saved to PDF version 1.5 (Acrobat 6) or higher format, movies can be embedded in the PDF file.  As we’ve already placed our moview we don’t need to be concerned with the URL specification. However there might be cases where you want to create a link to a movie that’s stored on the web somewhere instead of opting to embed a movie.

We’re now left with a choice of Options.

The Poster settings control what the viewer of the PDF will see when they first access the page containing the placed movie. I’m opting to use a photo as a poster. Select  “Choose Image as Poster” to insert an image as the poster and click Choose…

Other options available allow you to choose a movie frame as a poster, or use a standard icon. If you want to insert iconic images throughout your document instead of choosing a poster there is an option to create your own standard movie poster icon. Create an image file in your favourite illustration application and save it as a file named StandardMoviePoster.jpg and place it into the the InDesign application folder, inside the Images folder that is placed inside the Presets folder.

When Play on Page Turn is selected the movie will automatically start playing when the viewer of the PDF displays the page containing the movie.

We’ll be creating our own controller buttons in the next tip. But if you’d like to give the PDF-viewer access to standard play, stop buttons, enable the “Show Controller During Play“.

The Floating Window options will result in the Movie – when played – appearing as a separate entity that hovers over the PDF at the size & in the position specified.

Creating the PDF

Choose a File > Adobe PDF Presets and select a PDF setting from the list of settings. Alternatively choose File > Export and set Format to PDF.

In the General section of the Export Adobe PDF dialog ensure the Interactive Element option is enabled for inclusion. Next click Export and generate the PDF.

The following tip demonstrations how to create a very simple roll-over effect in InDesign that carries through to export to Adobe PDF format.

So what is it we’re trying to achieve in this example? Well let’s assume we’re starting out with a standard InDesign page, a collage of images. Each image at the start has its blending mode set to “Luminosity“, which results generates the appearance of the images being ’sepia’-tone images.

Creating a button

Step one in creating simple rollover effect involves converting the graphic into a Button. Display the Buttons panel (Window > Interactive > Buttons) and select the graphic with the Selection Tool.

To turn the selected graphic frame into a Button choose Object > Interactive > Convert to Button, alternatively click the Normal state in the State Appearance section of the Buttons panel, or click the Convert to Button ‘button’ at the bottom of the panel.

The [Normal] state is now active and has adopted the original look of the image, which contains the “Luminosity” blending mode. Had you started out with a normally placed image, you could at this stage, change the appearance of the [Normal] state.

To add a [Rollover] state, click the [Rollover] state in the Buttons panel.

The [Rollover] state is now active, and the button should still be selected. To change the appearance of the state, make the required changes in the Effects panel. Change the blending mode to Normal.

We’re now ready to test this rollover effect in the interactive PDF.

Creating the PDF

Choose a File > Adobe PDF Presets and select a PDF setting from the list of settings. Alternatively choose File > Export and set Format to PDF.

In the General section of the Export Adobe PDF dialog ensure the Interactive Element option is enabled for inclusion. Next click Export and generate the PDF.

• CtrlBridge
• CrtlCrossTalk
• CrtlChanges
• CtrlPrint
• CtrlLayers

web-reference: http://www.ctrl-ps.com/products

Learn to unlock the power of Adobe InDesign Scripting

Learn from one of the world’s best. Take advantage of a unique opportunity to attend either a half day introductory or full day master class on scripting with Adobe InDesign, presented by Dave Saunders, one of the world’s leading scripting experts.  Dave will be in Australia in March to share his knowledge and expertise during sessions to be held in Melbourne (3 & 4 March) and Sydney (5 & 6 March).

These seminars will allow attendees to gain a solid foundation for creating scripts and scripting their workflow, along with an understanding of how scripting can immediately enhance productivity, creativity and quality assurance in the work environment by automating repetiive tasks, with lightning speed and predictable consistency.
Who should attend?

Print providers, publishers, creative professionals and any InDesign user who can benefit from automating tedious manual work. No matter what your background is, it’s easy to get started in scripting.

For more information & registration: www.automateindesign.com

Description

What better way to start the year than to try something new and exciting. As such, we shall be doing away with our usual format and giving you the opportunity to submit questions in advance and hopefully, we’ll be able to provide some answers and some relief.

A panel of experts have been assembled to help answer your thorny questions:

• Mike McHugh – Adobe
• Billy Atta – Konica-Minolta
• Jason Cutler – Oxford University Press

Download and complete the submission form (PDF), then send it back. http://www.indesignusergroup.com/chapters/melbourne/files/submission_form_interactive.pdf

 Alternatively, email your question to melbourne@indesignusergroup.com before 16 February 2009 (Monday).

Be sure to include:

• Name
• Email address
• InDesign version (ie. CS4, CS3, C2 etc)
• Operating System (ie. Mac, PC or both)
• Clear and concise question

Please note that only selected submissions will be addressed at the meeting. The clearer and more concise your question is, the more likely we are to choose it.

After all, it would be difficult to answer a question we don’t understand. 

Schedule

6.30 – 6.50pm: Registration, meet-and-greet
6.50 – 7.00pm: Welcome to the meeting
7.00 – 8.30pm: FAQ
8.30 – 9.00pm: Prize giveaway, mingle

Description

The start of the New Year seems a long time ago already… and it’s only weeks away till we all meet again for our first InDesign User Group meeting of 2009.

Wednesday, 11 February 2009 we will delve into the world of Creating Interactive PDFs with InDesign.

We’ll take a close-up look at how a newsletter laid out in InDesign is turned into an interactive PDF, that contains active bookmarks and links, navigation buttons, cool roll-over effects, movies, page transitions and more.

Our main interactive PDF session, delivered by our Chapter Representative Cari Jansen, will be followed by a short session on using Data Merge in InDesign, delivered by François Gintzburger, one of our User Group members.

François will take us through a Step-by-step: How to work with Data Merge in InDesign as well as provide some cool real-world examples.

User Group Membership and Attendance is FREE. However, seating is limited, so be sure to register soon!

http://indesignusergroup.com/chapters/perth/events/784/

Wishing all of you a great festive season!  I’m going to have some serious R&R time the next 2 weeks (although taking my laptop whereever I go – grin… is a little freakish I know!)

My goal for 2009 is to finally get back into posting more regularly, learn Flash and XSLT and not only update my Adobe Certification, but also get a Microsoft one

Talk to you all next year!

Another image magic trick we showed at the recent Perth InDesign User Group meeting is how to create a sticky tape / photo collage effect using Object Styles.

Where do we start? Let’s design our look first.

I’ve placed an image and set the Frame Fitting Options for the frame to Fill Frame Proportionately from the Centre (see also Frame Fitting Options in previous post). That is so that we can apply our future Object Style to empty frames, resulting in images automatically being sized when we drop them in…

The border I’ve set to a 3 point solid Paper stroke.

In order to add some depth to the image on the page, let’s add a fuzzy darkish outline around the image. Select the image with the Selection Tool and check that the Effects panel is visible. At the bottom of the Effects panel, choose the Object Effects drop down and select Outer Glow…

The Effects dialog appears. I’m changing the Blending Mode to Multiply, as this behaves like an overprint where images overlap and set the colour to Black and Opacity to 40% so that part of the underlaying images will display (in fact 60%!). For the Options I’ve gone for a very subtle Size of 0.5pt and a little Noise (scattering of the effect on the outer edges of the ‘fuzziness’ and spread of 8% (this means that the fuzzying of the glow doesn’t start immediately, but displays solid 40% opacity for the first 8% before fading into full transparency (0% opacity).

With the basic design done, we can now create an Object Style. Select the artwork, then from the Object Styles panel menu choose New Object Style…

The New Object Style dialog appears. Name the style (Picture wBorder). The dialog picks up all settings that were applied to the image, more than those few we just added. Let’s uncheck all of the ones we never touched, so that these aren’t overwriting any settings that might already have been applied to the object. Just leaving the Stroke, Frame Fitting Options and Outer Glow settings enabled.

Click OK to create the new Object Style. You’re can now select all of the images in your collage and click the Object Style name in the panel to apply the Stroke, Outer Glow settings etc. without the need to manually set all of these for each image on the page.

Sticky Tape effect

We’re ready to start working on the Sticky Tape effect now, I’ve placed a small rectangle over the top of the image so I can see the effect as I’m building it. Fill the shape with 100% Yellow, then using the Effects panel, set the Opacity on the selected object to 40% and set the blending mode to Multiply. That will ensure the sticky tape really gives that true transparent look.

After this I replicate the tiny Outer Glow I applied to the Image border earlier on. Using the exact same settings and also apply a tiny drop shadow.

Once again, with the basic design done, an Object Style can be created. Select the artwork, then from the Object Styles panel menu choose New Object Style… 

The New Object Style dialog appears. Name the style (Sticky Tape). The dialog picks up all settings that were applied to the image, more than those few we just added. Let’s uncheck all of the ones we never touched, so that these aren’t overwriting any settings that might already have been applied to the object. Just leaving the Fill, Drop Shadow and Outer Glow settings enabled.

Apply this object style to the many pieces of sticky tape you’ve drawn over your images.

Editing the object style

So let’s assume we want to make some global changes to our design, you decided you’d like to use another type of sticky tape or use black instead of white borders. We’re in luck, as we’ve used an Object Style as way of formatting the image borders, shades and sticky tape etc.

To make the change globally, start by selecting one of the pieces of sticky tape (in my example), and change the colour, opacity etc.  If you look at the Object Style name in the Object Styles panel there will now be a small “+” symbol next to the style name. When hovering over this and pausing the cursor on the style name you’ll see a tip that tells you exactly what changes you’ve made that are different to the Object Style.

To incorporate the changes you’ve made in the Object Style, select Redefine Style from the Object Styles panel menu. And in one quick click all of the artwork that has a link to that style has been updated.

Happy Scrapbooking

Greyscale and line art (Black & White) images placed in InDesign can be colourised. So how can we create cool colourisation that pretends to generate duotone effects?

Ok, so let’s start by bringing in a greyscale or black and white image and applying some colour to it. First of all when colouring the image, ensure you select just that… the image. Double click with the Selection Tool to access the image or else use the Direct Selection tool to select the image. To apply colour to the image click a colour in the Swatches panel or else assign colour through the Colour Panel.

To use an image as a background tint, reduce the Tint percentage in the Swatches panel.

The Fake Duotone

To create a fake duotone effect utilising a mixture of a spot (Pantone) colour and Black, first add the spot (Pantone) colour to the Swatches panel. Select New Colour Swatch from the Swatches Panel menu, then set the Colour Mode to the spot colour chart of your preference.

Click Add to add the selected colour to the Swatches panel.

Once you’ve got at least one spot colour added, you can use this colour to create the new mixed ink colour that will consist of spot and black colour inks. From the panel menu select New Mixed Ink Swatch.

The New Mixed Ink Swatched dialog pops up. We’re ready to set the ink-mix. The thing to remember is that a mixed ink swatch must always consist of at least one spot colour. (see also previous post for some fun stuff to do with Mixed Ink Swatches and Mixed Ink Groups)

I’m keepng things pretty basic here, by selecting a 50-100 mix of black and spot colour. Click Add to add the colour to the Swatches panel and Done when finished adding new swatches. (You can continue to create new mixes and press Add to add multiple swatches without the need to close the dialog box).

With the Fake Duo swatch added, we can colourise our graphic again. A look at the Separations Preview panel will display that indeed we’ve managed to mix a spot and black colour.

Last Modification: 1-April-2009

The following tip looks at a few ways of working with image grids in InDesign.

Creating a Grid 101. To create a grid in which we can place images, start by drawing a rectangle frame about the size of the overall grid you’d like to create.

Next set your Frame Fitting Options (see previous post), with crop settings set to “0″

Creating the Grid

From Window > Automation, select Scripts. Olav Kvern has written some scripts that install with InDesign. In the Scripts panel, double click Application > Samples > JavaScript. The script we’re looking for is called “MakeGrid”.

We’re ready to run this script.

Oooh stop… You might find this such a cool script that you’d like to apply a shortcut to it, so you can use this as a command in the future without the need to navigate to the script in the scripts panel? (as is the case in my Scripts panel…). Easily done. Navigate to Edit > Keyboard shortcuts…, create a new Keyboards shortcut set if you’ve not done so yet previously, different to Default yet. (Click New Set.., then enter Name and choose based on option… normally that would be ‘Default’). Choose Product Area: Scripts and locate the script for which you’d like to add the shortcut. Enter the new shortcut, by pressing the preferred shortcut keys on the keyboard. Check the the shortcut you’ve chosen is unassigned (or else it will override other shortcuts in InDesign), then click Assign and OK…

Use the newly assigned shortcut or double click the script in the Script panel or select the script then choose Run Script from the panel menu to execute the script. A dialog appears asking you to enter the grid settings.

See as we’ve set Frame Fitting options for our graphic frame, we’ll opt to retain the Formatting and Contents, and as we won’t need the overall frame any more we’ll opt to remove that Original Object. Frame Type is Graphic. If you’re used to entering measurements in units other than points, you can enter those as well. E.g. enter .1 inch as “0.1in”, or enter 2 millimetres as “2mm”. Click OK to generate the Grid.

Note: this script has one nasty side effect: It changes the unit & measurement preferences in InDesign… These are easily reversed back to what you had before, right-click in the rulers and select your preferred preferences.

The Grid has now been created and we’re ready to select multiple images for insertion in the various frames.

Multiple images in individual frames

After placement we’ll look at a nice collection of images, beautifully aligned and distributed and set to our page with minimum effort.

One image in many frames

So what if you want one image in multiple frames? Well let’s go back to the point where we’d generated the Graphic Frames Grid…  With the Selection Tool, select all of the Graphic Frames created earlier.

Next select Object > Paths > Make Compound Path

Notice the large ‘X” on the frame? The Compound path command is making the series of frames behave like “one”. This means we’re now ready to drop in that pic to get to a different looking finished result.

Gridding it during placement (CS4)

There is another cool trick to add. We know that we can select multiple images right? and then place them on the page in InDesign? Using our cursor keys to toggle through the images?

But what about creating that grid right there and then?

Start by selecting multiple images for placement in the File > Place dialog (or use the Bridge as previously shown).

Press Command+Shift (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift (PC) and start click-dragging with the Loaded Placement Cursor.

Release the Cmd+Shift / Ctrl+Shift keys once you start dragging, but do not release the mouse-button.

Press the Left/Right Arrows in increase/decrease number of columns and press Top/Down Arrows to increase/decrease number of rows for the dynamic grid you’re drawing.

To Increase/Decrease the spacing between the columns and rows. Press the Shift Key whilst you’ve still got the mouse button held down and use the Left/Right Arrows to increase/decrease the space between columns and Top/Down Arrows to increase/decrease the space between the rows for the dynamic grid you are drawing.

Once you release the mouse button the selected images will be placed Left to Right, Top to Bottom with a Frame Fitting option set to “Fit Content Proportionally” and placement in Centre of frames.

During the Image Magic session at the last Perth InDesign User Group meeting we looked at how we could create a feathered collage in a circular/elliptical shape using only InDesign.

Start by drawing some basic wobbly shapes using the pencil tool or the pen tool (if you’re game…) . I’m using the pencil tool here, as I’m working with a digital drawing tablet instead of a mouse. To close the shape when using the pen tool, press the Alt/Option key on the keyboard and and release the pen/mouse. If you’re using the Pen Tool, then position the cursor over the start point and when you see the small circle icon click.

Draw a series of these blobs, and ensure you have a fair overlap between the objects.

As I’m using the pencil and pen tool generate ‘unassigned’ frames. As I’m intending to set the stroke colour to “none”, I wouldn’t be able to see the frames on the page.

So, I’m changing the Content for these frames from “Unassigned” to “Graphic” (Object > Content > Graphic).

With the frames converted to Graphic Frames we can now at least see them on the page

Prior to placing images in the frames, we can set the Frame Fitting Options for the empty frames, so that images, when placed, are automatically positioned and resized according to the Frame Fitting Options set. Choose Object > Fitting > Frame Fitting Options to set these settings. The following dialog appears.

I’m entering a positive crop amount, in order to ensure part of the image still falls outside the graphic frame. Image alignment option set to centered and Fitting on Empty Frame (Frame Fitting Options) set to “Fill Frame Proportionately”, which means the image will always fully fill the selected frame without being distorted.

Click OK to enforce these settings

Placing the images

Time to find some cool graphics to place and what better application to use for that then Adobe Bridge? Select the images you want to place in InDesign. To select multiple non-consecutive images press Ctrl(PC) or Command(Mac) whilst clicking the images.

To Place the selected images in InDesign, choose File > Place > InDesign. This command automatically takes you back to InDesign and you’ll see the  Loaded Graphics Icon.

To get the images to InDesign without using the Place command in Bridge: Start dragging the selected images from the Bridge and choose Alt+Tab (PC) or Command+Tab (Mac) to swap back to InDesign and place images.

To choose which of the selected images you’ll be placing: Press the arrow-keys on the keyboard to toggle through the various graphics you have selected. The Loaded Graphics Icon will display a preview of the graphic (CS4).

If you’re not entirely sure which image is selected – it could be that all images are very similar and your previews just don’t cut it… – then take a look at the Links panel. The active graphic in the loaded cursor will be highlighted and the LP link points to the fact that these images don’t exist on the page yet, but are “Loaded in the Place cursor”.

With the correct graphic displayed click the graphic frames one by one, until all graphics are placed.

Loaded Place cursor (above)

Use the Position Tool (hidden behind the Direct Selection Tool), to select the various images and reposition or resize the images as they are displayed in their frames. To immediately see the masked portion of the graphic, double click the Position Tool and set the Position Tool Options to “no Delay”.

Feathering

Time to apply the feathered effect we see on the edges of the images in the sample at the top: Select all graphics with the Selection Tool, then  from the Effects panel Object Effect dropdown select Basic Feather.

The settings you enter really depend a little on taste and personal preference.

The Feather Width determines how wide the feathered edge will be. The Choke setting is a bit like putting the break on the feathering effect. A higher setting means that the distance over which the effect fades into full transparency is reduced. The Noise setting breaks the computerised look of digital feathering a bit by ’scattering’ the edge pixels on the edge of the effect. It will generate a smoother effect. The Corners setting controls how the effect is applied to the path it’s attached to. In the blobby example here, Diffused gives a nice look, but have a play with these effects when you’ve got rectangular or star shaped objects and you’ll notice signficant changes to the behaviour…

Nesting Frames inside Frames

We’re ready now to start inserting this collage into another frame. First let’s group the four images together. Select all graphics with the Selection tool, then choose Object > Group.  A dashed line around your artwork indicates the group’s been created.

Next draw the shape you’d like to use as your new ‘Mask’ for the collage. I’m using the Ellipse Frame Tool to draw an ellipse and am positioning it roughly in the correct position over the top of the grouped set of images.

Now select the group in the background, and choose Edit > Cut to remove the group from the page. Next select the Ellipse drawn in the previous step and choose Edt > Paste Into.

Editing after placement

You can still edit content of the grouped graphic after placement.

Double click with the selection tool on one of the graphics, to isolate the path itself and access the Direct Selection tool. You can then use the various path editing tools to change the shape of the path.

Click one more time after double clicking with the Selection Tool (which toggles to the Direct Selection Tool) to access the graphic itself and reposition it in its own graphic frame using the Direct Selection Tool.

With the image selected (Direct Selection Tool), double click one more time to jump back to the Selection Tool and have the ablity to move the selected graphic within its sub-group. Keep an eye on the cursor icon when doing this. Move by either selecting the centre point or one of the edges. (Note: Alt-clicking with the Direct Selection tool will result in selection of all of the frames that form part of the sub-group, and could be used as way of accessing content of elliptical parent frame).

To move the position of the grouped-set of graphics in its parent frame, select the Position tool and click and drag. A dashed line appears around the bounding box of the group.

Click and drag the selected content to move it. Until you’re happy with the result.

Once you have access to content within content, you can really make any change you’d like. For instance I ended up flipping the image of the Gallah and moving the two images on the left around.

The Perth InDesign User Group is having its second meeting on Thursday 4 December 2008.

The theme for this meeting will be:

Being creative with Images in InDesign CS4.
We’ll be looking at some image-magic in INDesign as well as integration wtih Adobe Bridge, Photoshop and Illustrator.

After the image-magic session, there will be a short session in which we cover the following two questions:

• How to creat a table of contents automatically in InDesign CS4.
• What’s an InDesign Library? and how can I use it?

Meeting attendance is free, as is InDesign User Group Membership.
Seating is limited so be sure to register soon!

Web-reference: InDesign User Group Perth

Then sign-up as a member for Perth’s InDesign User Group and join us at our launch event on Tuesday evening 30th September @ Edith Cowan University Mt. Lawley.

We’ll be showing you the best of the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design applications.

How much does it cost? Nothing! Membership is free. However, seating is limited, so be sure to register.

Web-reference: Perth’s InDesign User Group