Chicago InDesign User GroupMeeting Notes Archive
Thursday, March 25, 2004
After a quick show of hands for which version of InDesign® people are using (about half and half for InDesign 2.0 and InDesign CS), our featured speaker for the evening was introduced — “Her Geekness,” the illustrious Anne-Marie Concepción of Seneca Design and Training, a longtime publishing guru going back to ADEPT days (at least a few of us remember that!). She is an accomplished cross-media graphic designer and has been an authorized Adobe and Quark training provider for over 10 years. Anne-Marie gave us a detailed and thorough presentation on styles in InDesign CS — all the pros, and a few cons here and there…
…starting with what happens when you import styles from another InDesign CS or 2.0 doc into the current one using Load Styles. Anne-Marie had almost all good things to say about InDesign styles, but importing styles is one of the areas where help is needed. So why can’t you “pick and choose” which styles you want or don’t want when you import styles into CS — dare I mention it — like you can in that “Q” program)? But Anne-Marie was quick to add that it was a “small complaint.” Imported styles with the same names as those in your doc wipe out their counterparts — your internal style definitions are history (hey, you can undo!). To bring in just a few styles, Anne-Marie noted you could always just copy text formatted with those desired styles from the source document and paste it into the target document.
Then she tackled the area of synchronized styles. Here’s a worm’s nest, it appears. This is, of course, a legendary workflow that has been used reliably in that other program. You name the styles in your layout program the same names used in Word. Then when the text is imported, “your InDesign styles take over” and the imported text gets restyled according to your InDesign style definitions. According to Anne-Marie, it’s a flawless method in InDesign…but only on Windows (darn!). On Mac, there’s a snag. The InDesign style definitions don’t get applied, the text looks the same as it did in Word and the style names show a “+” for the overrides. Forcing the styles means simultaneously wiping out all the bold and italics throughout the text and also having to manually restore that styling by the sweat of your brow (good grief!).
Being a good detective, Anne-Marie noticed that all styles in Microsoft Word for the Mac are based on the “Normal” style. Unraveling this mystery, she discovered that this two-tiered style definition is, in fact, the culprit. Even creating a “Normal” style in InDesign didn’t help. But the good news is that style synching will work if, in Word, you delete that “Normal” style base for all those styles in Word’s Format>Style dialog. Hmmm…an encouraging word.
Note: In further exploring the issue, Anne-Marie and I discovered that sometimes synching styles between Mac Word files and InDesign docs works just fine, just as it does in Windows and as described in the online help. Her advice is, if it doesn’t work — if the Word paragraphs retain their Word formatting in InDesign and the entire paragraph elicit an override (“+”) by the InDesign style sheet name — try editing the Word style sheet definitions so they’re based on no style rather than “Normal” style, and replace the file. This fixes the problem when it occurs.
Anne-Marie showed us a Word file sent to her by a client who couldn’t get it to import properly into InDesign with styles. The client had inadvertently applied Word’s built-in character style “Strong” throughout the doc. To make it even juicier, the client also applied numerous and varying local formats on top. How in the world to get this mess down to the bare-bones text so that applying InDesign styles would be trouble-free? After printing out the text file to have as a reference, Anne-Marie copied the text from Word and pasted it into InDesign CS, which by default strips text formatting, so the text takes on the attributes of the receiving text frame. InDesign CS, there’s a new general preference to strip it down — Preserve Text Attributes When Pasting (off by default). In InDesign 2.0, however, you have to paste the text into Word Pad or Text Edit first to make it “plain,” and then copy it again from there to strip out the formatting. However — Anne-Marie to the rescue here — the URL for the free plug-in for Mac/Windows InDesign 2.0 users strips the formatting from text in the clipboard:
Once your text is in InDesign, and you try to remove local overrides, InDesign has an added benefit that those other layout programs don’t have. As in the past, you can remove local overrides by Option/Alt-clicking the style name. But that’s only half the story, because while it removes the local formats, it also retains text formatting applied with character style attributes. By adding shift to Option/Alt, you can strip out everything. And this one completely escaped me — you can also take any styled text down to a humble Times 12 by Option-shift-clicking the No Paragraph Style tag!
Redefine Style is certainly a crowd-pleaser anywhere, anytime. Locally edit text with a style applied (and see “+” by the style name), decide you like it, and then update the style to match it — from both the Paragraph Styles and Character Styles palette menus. Less flashy but still quite useful is Select All Unused, also from the palette menus, which is especially helpful when you’ve just placed a lot of text with all those horrid Word styles (that you’re not synching to). Now you can quickly delete all that clutter. Of course, in this scenario, you probably want to do a find and change and swap your client style names with yours for an alternative approach to synching styles. And that’s what Anne-Marie showed next, by way of a workaround for what doesn’t happen when you delete a style. Another “small complaint” — she’d like to see a Replace Style dialog pop-up when you delete a style. (We second the motion!)
Next she showed a new Word import option in CS that lets you remove text and table formatting, which option is off by default. When chosen, options include Convert Tables to Unformatted Tables or Unformatted Tabbed Text. Also, just below that, you can remove those page breaks that are manually entered in Word and avoid a lot of empty text frames on your page.
Nested styles is certainly one of the most winning features in InDesign CS, although some frustrated people, Anne-Marie reports, have gotten lost in the forest looking for them. Ah, they’re not on a palette — they’re paragraph style options! What are nested styles? An automatic way of applying a sequence of character attributes to a paragraph, starting at the beginning. For instance, you might start off with a cool Zapf dingbat bullet, with a size and color that contrasts with the bold lead-in text that follows. That lead-in might have another font and weight, followed by the base paragraph attributes of the remainder. If you set them up right, and Anne-Marie shows how — these formatting sets get applied to your paragraphs before you can say “nested styles”!
First, create your paragraph style. (Another wish-list item — why can’t we get those programmers to apply a just-created style to the paragraph whose attributes we’ve used to create that style?) Step two: Format any special treatments at the start of a paragraph, such as that colored Zapf dingbat bullet, or possibly a drop-cap with a contrasting font and color. Follow that with the bold leadi-n look. Then make a character style for each look. Step three, edit the original paragraph style and add the nested styles, using Paragraph Style Options. (This part takes too much detail to describe, even for me!) Now all of Anne-Marie’s paragraphs miraculously have a colored dingbat, followed by a bold lead-in, followed by the regular style — all applied with a single paragraph style! The trick is to find something to mark the change from one set of formats to the next — such as a colon, a tab, or another character. If all else fails, use an “end nested style character”, which you can manually insert into the text from the Special Characters command.
Turns out Anne-Marie figured out a brilliant way to use nested styles as a way to base paragraph styles on character styles! This has been a commonly used approach in production workflow for building a set of styles all based on a common font or other character attributes — but it can’t be done directly in InDesign. Her solution was to first create a character style for the typeface. Then for each paragraph style you’d like to base on that character style, add a nested style to it. Choose the character style you just created, but set a “stop” point that doesn’t exist in the story, such as a section marker. Since InDesign never finds a place to stop applying the character style, it’s applied to the entire paragraph.
When Anne-Marie explained her nested styles technique on the Adobe InDesign forum, none other than David Blatner called it a “genius” solution! Anne-Marie got a big round of applause for a great job on styles. By the way, you can pick up more information on styles and all her training and design services by checking out her website: http://www.senecadesign.com/.
Believe it or not, that was only the first part of the meeting. Tom Petrillo from Adobe then gave a short but concentrated demo of Adobe InCopy®, which is a separate text-editing application that works with InDesign and enables an easy exchange between designers and writers/editors so that a writer can see the designer’s layout and “write to fit,” — and also have access to specialized tools to help with text-editing tasks and collaborating with other writers.
InCopy is based on a design-initiated workflow. The designer needs the InCopy plug-ins so he or she can export one or more stories as .incd files for the writer/editor, using Edit>InCopy Stories. When the writer/editor “checks out” a story, he or she sees the layout exactly as it appears in InDesign. But in InCopy, there are additional tools, including a pencil icon in the upper left corner of a story head indicating that the writer/editor has checked out that story for editing. While he or she is making edits on that story, he or she may be alerted to changes the designer has made in the meantime (the title bar will say “Out of Date”) so the layout can be upated. No other writers/editors can check out that particular story, although they can check out and edit other stories in that same layout.
In InCopy, the writer/editor can switch between three views using tabs at the top of the document window — Story, Layout and Galley views. The writer/editor can edit in any of these views. The Story view, which displays the style names on the left, is available to anyone using InDesign CS, but in InCopy this view affords the writer/editor a powerful editing tools that make his or her job easier, such as dynamic spell-checking and a thesaurus. He or she can start a new story and save it as an .incd file. When the writer/editor is done writing or editing, he or she can check in the file so that others can use it. When the writer/editor uses the Layout and Galley views, he or she can see frame and column breaks that accuratly reflect the layout. The Galley view lets hin or her check the line count easily, because every line is numbered. In any view, he or she can add simple styling like bold and italics, which appear as local overrides on the Paragraph Style palette — but he or she can’t create any new style sheets or make changes to the layout geometry. In short, he or she can only work with the words.
As far as editor-to-editor workflow, each editor has his or her own assigned color, so the author of a given edit can quickly be identified. Track Changes, which works in both the Story and Galley views, highlights all word additions or deletions. Each editor can accept or reject one or of the all changes made by another editor and can add editorial notes that will appear in a Notes palette that the editors share. InCopy enforces no hierarchies as far as permissions go — at least not in the basic InCopy from Adobe. Onus and K4’s Managing Editor, however, are specialized InCopy plug-ins that have those kind of user controls.
System requirements for InCopy are exactly the same as for InDesign — OS X or Windows XP, 500 Mb RAM. A robust system is recommended. Everyone works from the files on the server; files are not copied down to an individual machine.
With InDesign CS, InCopy is now being sold directly through Adobe. As mentioned, there are numerous InCopy plug-ins, some very expensive and elaborate. As Tom put it, the Adobe version of InCopy is a “Honda Civic” compared to these others.
There was so much interest and so many questions about InCopy that the group decided that our next meeting in May (date to be decided) would be entirely devoted to the topic.
For our last presentation, Jim Cooper of Onus showed us a powerful approach to styles in InDesign, using WoodWing’s Smart Styles. Jim comes from an editing background and has an impressive list of credentials, including being Regional Sales Manager for QuarkXPress. But when he saw that Quark was not filling the bill, he left that job before he had any certainty about how he could make InDesign his professional life. That takes guts and commitment! Jim began his presentation by telling us some of his favorite InDesign features.
First, he loves the Book feature, which is so useful when giving a presentation because all the files he wants to show can be listed in the Book palette. He can open up each one by simply double-clicking the file name in the palette. Handy! Dynamic data for database publishing is not just a thing of the future, — it’s now! (He went into a lot more depth on this co-presenting with Cathy Palmer at last September’s meeting — check out the meeting notes.) Nested styles is a clear winner, as Anne-Marie demonstrated. Jim also mentioned that with nested styles you can, with one click, get a plain-Jane “$88.99” to look a lot slicker, with a smaller raised “$” and a smaller raised and underlined “99.” Saving designer time is a plus!
InDesign also offers terrific features for file management. One of Jim’s clients is the NCAA, which publishes long books with many chapters. They used to use a lot of text files, one for each chapter, just so they could control the pagination in their layouts. To have a story start where they wanted it to, at the top of a new column or page, they had to have each chapter as a separate story. With such long documents and separate text files for each story import, the file management was overwhelming. Now, by using InDesign’s powerful break characters — more choices than with Quark — the number of stories can be drastically reduced. When they want a new “story” at the top of the next column, the next frame, or the next page (or even the next odd or even page), they simply add a break character and the same story just keeps on going — as Jim puts it “like the Eveready Bunny.”
Speaking of saving time, Jim also really likes the fact that styles are so much easier to use than in other layout programs. When you’re editing a paragraph or character style, you can click the Preview checkbox and immediately see the effects of your changes without having to close the Style Options dialog box. Another big timesaver.
Another huge timesaver is using Smart Styles from Woodwing (www.woodwing.com), definitely in Jim’s Top 10. Smart Styles applied to text can incorporate not only all the type attributes available in InDesign, including nested styles, but also object settings such as drop-shadows, feathering, blend modes, and transparency. Interestingly enough, text styled with Smart Styles does not update when the style is edited, which, Jim added, lets you use Smart Styles for different looks by editing the style as you go along.
Nothing beats how Smart Styles works with tables! With one click, an entire selected table can be utterly transformed structurally and visually so that it looks like you’ve spent hours on it. And maybe you did — but just on the first one. After making a Smart Style from that table, formatting all the others to match it is a breeze.
Jim kept us laughing with his deadpan delivery of lines to kill (like how he scammed his wife in to marrying him), but he is really plugged into the sophisticated uses of InDesign, particularly when the workflow is enabled by WoodWing’s plug-ins. Jim is also the XML wiz of Chicago, but he’s saving that for his next presentation. (Check out the September 18, 2003 meeting notes for details on his first presentation to our group, about the wonders of XML.) Great going, Jim!
Many thanks to all our presenters — a fine time was had by all!
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