Chicago InDesign User GroupMeeting Notes Archive
Thursday, September 18, 2003
We were treated to a wonderfully cogent, logically sequenced presentation by Jim Cooper, of Dynamic Publication Services in Indiana and Cathy Palmer, of Galvanize Graphic Design in Madison, Wisconsin, working in tandem to reveal the wonders of the “90-second rule,” as Jim likes to call it. He certainly convinced me that all this hand-tooling we’ve been doing for years, even the effort involved with applying styles in a long document, now has a flashy end in sight. Enter WoodWing’s InDesign® 2.0 plug-ins. Or, if your workflow incorporates XML, go with the flow and keep it XML. Either way, the content hits the page and it’s ready to go — even tables! That’s the fast take on both the layout process and the evening’s demo in a tight nutshell. It’s all about saving time. Check out the WoodWing Software website, where Jim and Cathy have a featured tip in WoodWing’s July newsletter.
Jim first tackled the question of “liberating” your content from Quark and getting it into InDesign, fairly easily overcoming one of the biggest hurdles, both actual and psychological, to making the switch to InDesign. Rather than bringing in all of the past “mistakes” of inconsistent styling that are likely to be found in your legacy documents, simply capture the raw text and paint on the desired new styling with a single drag-and-drop from Smart Styles.
Then, when you import into InDesign your Word doc with Excel data tucked in there, you can just update the link to get all the latest numbers. “Ah,” you say, “Smarty-pants, everyone knows you don’t want to do that because you lose all your text formatting with every update!” And that’s always been a very solid line of argument — until now. But now you can just set up the design once, capture it as a “Smart Style,” and repaint it onto every update. If you don’t have to touch that text to format it, you can just as easily reformat it every time the data have changed, because the more accurate and up to date your data, the more wham-bang in your message. No sweat is what it’s all about.
When it comes to document creation, Jim defines a three-part process. First you:
- Design and Define — That means that you design for the ideal. You don’t have to be practical anymore or make design compromises when you’ve got lots of pages to crank out. Just be sure to define your pages down to the last detail with paragraph and character styles.
- Liberate and Liquify — here’s where the 90-second rule comes into play. Up until the last possible minute, the data lives outside the page and stays fluid until the end. More on this in a minute.
- Import and Improve — redesign the workflow to make it work using WoodWing’s plug-ins — WORKFLOW #1 ($149) for SmartStyles is a miracle all its own. You drag and drop a style on a story of however many threaded frames, and then you can change five, six, seven, or more sets of attributes within a single paragraph or in a sequence of paragraphs and do it across dozens of pages at one time. How about a price list that has a drop-cap character style with the base text style, then a bold lead-in on the same paragraph (that retains the bolding for however many characters show up in that first sentence, before and after editing), and leader tabs in the next paragraph with the pricing, even using a character style to refine the leader dots to be less clunky. Then the entire sequence of detailed formatting is automatically applied to the next set of paragraphs down for the second product, name, or idea on your list. Not bad!
Find out more information on WoodWing Software’s InDesign
plug-ins on this website.
Jim did the talking while Cathy kept as busy as a bee on the demo. They had tested this sample story, a long widget price list, and found that with about seven clicks per item, it took 14 to 15 minutes a page applying conventional InDesign styles to all these products with their descriptions, pricing, etc. But with WoodWing’s Smart Styles, the whole thing followed Jim’s 90-second (per page) rule. And you don’t have to send any plug-in along with the InDesign file when the job is outputted. It doesn’t leave any “footprint,” but actually applies native InDesign specs. In a workgroup setting, everyone who has the plug-in can share the same library styles (.indl extension) to make things nice and easy.
Where Smart Styles really goes to town is with tables. As great as InDesign’s table capabilities are, they don’t include the table styles of GoLive®. Applying all those table attributes like alternating colored rows, vertical rules between columns and text formatting can be a nightmare of repetitive tasking. Frown no more. Smart Styles lets you save your table style and apply it to consecutive tables within a story, even including color-sequenced title bars for each new table header — the first table with a red title bar, the second with a blue one, etc. You can even save the “frame geometry” so that when you apply the “Smart Style,” the frame goes from one to two columns (complete with the text insets). Even the transparency and drop-shadow effects can be captured as a “Smart Style.” What does the equivalent workflow look like for this set of tables in Quark? Manually specifying the vertical table rules in one chart after another could easily take days. With tables in InDesign, you can even specify your table width in Word, and InDesign maintain the exact measurement for all of the cells on import. Then “paint” the style onto a single table or a whole slew of them with one drag-and-drop.
WORKFLOW #2 (XML) has been around for some years now, but print designers are largely clueless to its astounding benefits (well, wait a minute, this level of automation could put some of us designers out of work!, that’s an aside). Even many publishers are only just getting started thinking about XML. XML has up until now been, in most designers’ minds, the tool of the web designer, nothing to do with print! Take that content from the print piece and repurpose it for the web. But now, hold on to your seats, watch that web content hit the printed page while simultaneously becoming print-ready. Woah, you shouldda been there!
While Quark 4 on up supports XML, it doesn’t support the intuitive drag-and-drop mapping and easy click-tagging that InDesign does. When you import XML into InDesign, it opens a side panel to your document window showing the structure. This lists all the available XML text and picture content, with the option of showing just snippets of the text for each paragraph, along with the tags, for a bird’s eye view. The XML “ingredients” are then easily available for the designer to work with. You can then drag-and-drop your text and picture content onto the page from that side panel and have the layout simply whip into shape.
You make that happen by presynchronizing your InDesign paragraph styles to the XML tags — map tags to Styles — making sure that each XML tag has a corresponding InDesign style with all the attributes you want in place. You can show the tag markers and tagged frames for an easy color-coded way to see which frames and text on the page correspond to which XML tags. Then, watch InDesign take XML to a new level with variable data, from frame attributes to database gems collected off your website. What’s the name of Joe’s pitbull or Sally’s border collie? Put your chosen content, from the cutesy breed photo to the headline with their pet’s name to the appropriately sized chew-bone for their dog type to the store nearest their home’s zip code, showing that week’s store specials, along with a store map, a phone number, on and on. Micro-niche marketing — for PRINT!
Can you do this variable data on press yet? Not straight out of InDesign quite yet, but they’re working on it, especially Heidelberg’s NexPress and the HP Indigo, both developing plug-ins to be able to rip your file right to the printed customized page — customize one page after another after another — at press speeds! Requirement? Your database and tagged page template need only match up the XML. By the way, the specialized set of XML in development for this industry is called PPML — Personalized Printing Markup Language.
Be sure to check out WoodWing’s Smart Catalog. Bring in a tab-delimited text file, view all the data in InDesign and sort it, and then manually assign the styles by dragging. Or soon enough, you’ll be able to use a scripting robot and go home early. Oh, but don’t forget to turn on Smart Layout before you turn off the lights. They all work together — Smart Styles, Smart Layout, and Smart Catalog. You’re home free! What a sight for sore eyes.
But if you would have come to the meeting, you would have heard that great prairie dog joke Jim told that would have made your eyes roll and your stomach turn over.
Delivered to you fresh every day by Eda Warren, Adobe Certified Training Provider and Adobe Certified Expert on InDesign 2.0. Special thanks to Cathy Palmer for help in preparing these meeting notes.
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