Chicago InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

Thursday, November 6, 2003

This meeting of the Chicago InDesign® user group focused features in Adobe’s new Creative Suite®.

Clint Funk
His favorite InDesign features.

Gary Adcock
InDesign’s interactivity.

Tom Petrillo
Version Cue and more.

Clint Funk
Our new InDesign User Group Chapter Representative!
Some of his favorites from InDesign CS (not all are new to CS):

Control palette. InDesign now has a Control palette, which looks a lot like PageMaker®’s and helps offset some of that challenging palette clutter. The Control palette has both object and text-formatting modes. When an object is selected, the Control palette pretty much replaces the Transform palette. With text highlighted, you get most of the typesetting options. Don’t miss the palette menu button on the right end of the Control palette for a lot more commands!
Coolest InDesign shortcut. Double-click on text with the Selection tool and your pointer morphs into the Type tool and the text is magically highlighted!
Collapsible palettes along the screen edge—another tactic to reduce that smothered-by palettes-feeling. Click on a palette tab to expand it and again to collapse it. Store a palette by dragging from the palette name to the screen edge.
Keyboard shortcuts: set up your own, going to Edit> Keyboard Shortcuts, where all commands are listed with their shortcuts.
Toolbox orientation. Double-click the Toolbox’s title bar to cycle through the horizontal or vertical orientation of the toolbox, as well as options for single or double rows.
Save Workspace command from the Window menu lets you save and name your current palette configuration, remembering the size and position of palettes on screen. Retrieve your workspace from the same menu.
Bleed and Slug. There’s a More Options button when creating a new document, with settings for the new Bleed and Slug areas. Enter sizes for the bleed and slug (the area where specs for the job can be entered off the page and still be printed). Copy your first setting to the other 3 values by clicking the Make All Settings the Same button, opposite on the right. Use File> Document Setup to add the bleed or slug after the file is open.
Preview Bleed or Slug, as well as the default preview, from the Preview button at the bottom of the Toolbox (press and hold for flyout options). The Print dialog also has a Bleed and Slug area in the Marks and Bleed panel.
Native files. Enhanced support for native files—psd, ai. and pdf—transparency, vectors, layers and spot channels. Photoshop layers are not accessible in InDesign but they are retained in the same file that can be reopened in Photoshop—fewer files and versions.
Info palette. When you highlight text or click an insertion point with the Type tool, the Info palette displays the number of characters, words, lines and paragraphs. With an insertion point in a story that has “overset” text, two numbers are displayed—587+78 refers to the current number in the text that’s placed plus the number in the overset text. When you select an imported graphic or image, the palette displays the Actual as well as the Effective ppi resolution, based on how it’s been sized in InDesign.
Multiple drop shadows. Set drop shadows for text and graphics at one time by selecting them together.
Place Word and Excel tables right into InDesign, then work with them using InDesign’s enhanced table features…
Tables. Very cool feature for a series of linked tables. You can convert the top row of a table to a “header row” to have that copied to the top row of all the other tables in that threaded set. Context menu is fastest with > Convert to Header Rows. Can also convert to a footer row or back to body rows. Highlight the row first with the Type tool before converting.
Nested paragraph styles—apply a paragraph which also specifies that “nested” Character Styles are applied to the first so many characters, words, specific letters or any other of 15 qualifiers. For instance, you can have a drop cap of a contrasting font and color using character styles you’ve already set up, followed by all the words up to a colon, say, having another font, size and color, while the remainder of the paragraph has the paragraph attributes with a third look. Now that is truly amazing!
Paragraph Style Options now has more attribute sets with the new Underline Options and Strikethrough Options.
212 fonts come with the Premium Suite, 100 come with Standard.
OpenType—one file per font (no longer two on Mac) and they are cross platform! Postscript fonts allow only 256 characters but OpenType has slots for up to 65,000 characters. One way to access them is from the Glyphs palette with flyout alternative characters. Check out those magnificent swash characters!
Story Editor, big request from PageMaker users, gives you lightening fast display of your story without the frills. Mostly just the keystrokes displayed in a default font and size that’s easy to read on screen and does not reflect the look or line breaks in the layout view.
Separations and Flattener Preview palettes. With Separations Preview on, see each separations color on the page in grayscale or in color, with two or more colors turned on. The Flattener Preview palette gives you eight ways of identifying objects on pages that use transparency or are affected by it. Open palettes from Window> Output Preview > Separations and > Flattener.
Package for GoLive®. Text and art can be bundled and made ready for web prime time. This command replaces the HTML export of previous versions. The intent of this feature is to let you easily transfer the content of an InDesign file to a related web page/site you’re designing. Although the command specifies GoLive, the package can be opened by other competitive programs such as Dreamweaver. The package is a collection of XML files previewed as a PDF in GoLive CS. You can drag and drop the elements onto your web page as GoLive smart objects. Text and even paragraph styles are converted into CSS!

Gary Adcock
InDesign’s interactivity
Gary showed a newsletter for the Final Cut Pro Chicago User Group that had links all the way through. Anchors set in the document become bookmarks in the exported PDF file. This 8-page color InDesign document became a 500K PDF, not bad.

Create hyperlinks to text on another page by first setting up text anchors, using New Hyperlink Destination from the Hyperlink palette menu. Then set up the link to that anchor by highlighting the text that will become the hypertext source. Go to New Hyperlink from the Hyperlinks palette menu or use the New button at the bottom of the palette to set the destination and appearance of a link. For destinations that are other pages or URLs, go direct to New Hyperlink with your text or graphic selected.

Set up a character style and apply that to your hyperlinks to make them look like linked text. By default, links display an outline box around the hyperlink in InDesign and in the exported PDF.

Show/Hide Hyperlinks. That default rectangle around the hyperlink can be visible or invisible using View> Show/Hide Hyperlinks.

Update Hyperlinks option from the palette menu.

Bookmarks. Set up in InDesign for easy navigation through the exported PDF document. Bookmarks set up in InDesign appear in the Bookmarks tab in Acrobat or Reader. When you make a TOC, those entries automatically become bookmarks in the PDF file.

New Button tool let’s you make interactive buttons! Click and drag out a rectangular button and open the States palette from Window> Interactive>. From the palette menu, or Context menu, choose Interactive > Button Options to set whether the button is visible/invisible, printable or not and what event (mouse up/down/enter/exit, etc. triggers any of 15 behaviors or results, such as going to another page or a URL or even playing a movie. Yes, you can now place a movie file (.mov) on an InDesign page. You can also use any selected shape or picture as a button, choosing Convert to Button from the Context menu.

Rollover. To make a selected button into a rollover, choose New State from the palette menu or the New button at the bottom of the palette. The second state automatically is the rollover and the third state is for the mouse down position. With a state selected in the palette, click the button Place Content into Selected State to import the rollover artwork.

Export PDF. Build your document in InDesign, export to PDF, then program your fields in Acrobat. Embed movie files, which is much easier than before in Acrobat 5. Can use any of 7 Presets (besides Custom) or use Screen for onscreen reading. You can embed or link a QT file or an audio file. Embedded movies are supported in Acrobat 6 not Acrobat 4 or 5. For Acrobat 6 compatibility, you must have QuickTime 6 installed on your Mac or PC and must have Acrobat Reader 6.0.

Recommended features to turn on when exporting: Interactive Elements, Optimize for Fast Web View, Bookmarks, Hyperlinks and eBook Tags, as well as the Multimedia option Embed All. Advanced panel—set or leave color as RGB or Leave Unchanged.

More on flattening. Flattening happens to any objects that are within the bounding box area of a transparent object. When that object is rotated, flattening occurs within the horizontal and vertical outside boundaries of the shape, an area which is probably considerably larger than the object’s bounding box. You can test this out using the Flattener Preview palette (see above). If another object, such as a text frame, falls within that flattener area of a rotated object, there may be a problem. Certainly onscreen, that affected type will likely look wrong—we saw an example of this with fragments of gray text turned red as a result of the frame falling within the flattener region of a rotated headline. Solve the problem by putting the non-transparent text frame at a higher stacking order. Be on the lookout! You could also have a print problem. BTW, when the rotated object is a text frame, the rectangular flattener area is defined by the limits of the text characters, not the frame.

Photoshop saves—don’t save to EPS or TIF anymore—save PSD or PSD, the native file format, to retain transparency, editability, layers, drop shadows with a curve contour and alpha channels. Be sure to check the Save Transparency option in the PDF dialog.

Tom Petrillo
Version Cue and more
Version Cue is an integration tool that works with all programs in Adobe CS to enable users to work collaboratively, keeping track of multiple files and versions saved by multiple users. Version Cue can also help the solo user keep track of the latest version.

Turn on Version Cue from Preferences > File Handling. Select Enable Version Cue, then click OK.

Opening files. Now, when you choose File> Open, you see a Version Cue button which you click to open a file within Version Cue so that file can be tracked. Same button appears when you save.

Tracking activity. Multiple people at a time can have a file open. Each person with a given file has the option to Save, Save a Version or Don’t Save. Everyone can save locally. When the files are uploaded, a new version is appended.

Promote to the Current Version. File> Versions has a button to Promote to the Current Version or “latest” version. The user’s name goes at the end of the file name—and it’s time-stamped and ordered.

Set permissions in Version Cue in the advanced administration. This is an InDesign feature not a Version Cue feature.

File Info. Check out a lot of information on your InDesign file from the Info palette menu> File Info or the same command from the File menu.

— Delivered to you fresh every day by Eda Warren, Adobe Certified Training Provider and Adobe Certified Expert on InDesign 2.0. Thanks to Tom Petrillo for help in preparing these notes.

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