Meeting Notes Archive

Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Hosted by the Apple Store, Michigan Avenue, Chicago

Topic: New Features of InDesign® CS2

Presenters (in order of appearance):

Eda Warren
Adobe Certified Training Provider, Adobe Certified Expert — InDesign CS, Desktop Publishing Services, Inc., Chicago, Illinois
Author of InDesign Annoyances, to be published this year by O’Reilly Publishing

Cathy Palmer
Adobe Certified Expert — InDesign CS, Digital Design Tools Trainer, C2 Graphics Productivity Solutions, Madison, Wisconsin

Jim Maivald
Graphics Trainer/Graphic Designer, Desktop Design, Skokie, Illinois

Both Cathy and Jim are contributors to Eda’s book, InDesign Annoyances.

It was invigorating to have our big CS2 debut at the Apple Store — only two days before the all-day Chicago event that Adobe put on for its customers. So lots of excitement! Being at the Apple Store downtown always generates a sense of expectation. And this night was no exception. Thanks to our InDesign user group member Jennifer Mindel, everything tech-wise for our meeting went smoothly. Jennifer has been providing training and support at the Apple Store for several years and is now, we are proud to announce, a newly appointed creative, in which position she will be available for one-on-one consulting for Apple and Adobe software in a new experimental service at The Studio on the second floor at the downtown store. We also have to thank our gracious host, Craig Burns, who runs the Theater Studio, Series Classes, and The Studio at the Apple Store.

Adobe god Tom Petrillo did a quick welcome and set the stage for the night’s events. Too bad Clint Funk, our fearless leader, could not be there in this great moment of CS2 delight. We also missed “Her Geekness,” Anne-Marie Concepción, who was scheduled to present but at the last minute had to take a “real gig” out of town. Be sure to watch for her new book, InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs, which will be out on the shelves by the end of June. Anne-Marie co-authored the book with none other than David Blatner, author of the much-loved and much-used The QuarkXPress Book, which most people cracked their teeth on way back when. This is Anne-Marie’s second book, and I know it will be fantastic! Go girl!!

Eda Warren started off the demos with a bang (pretend I’m not writing these notes for the moment!). Clint had divided up the list of features among the three presenters, and Eda’s batch included some of the best in the areas of style enhancements and placing graphics and text. In the style enhancements category, object styles is probably the most exciting new feature and one of the best new CS2 features overall. If you know paragraph and character styles, you’ll fall right into place with object styles, which lets you apply object attributes more consistently and more efficiently to one or more objects, as well as share object styles with your team.

It’s easy to make an object style. Simply make a text or graphic frame or draw a line, a polygon, or a Bezier — whatever — and then style and color it. Just like with paragraph and character styles, give your object style a name. You can easily option- or alt-click the New button at the bottom of the Object Styles palette to bring up the dialog and name your style as you create it. InDesign naturally picks up all the attributes from the selected object. And while you’re naming it, notice in the dialog the no less than 11 categories of attributes, including Fill, Stroke, Corner Effects, Transparency, Drop Shadow, Feather, Paragraph Style, Text Wrap, and more. An object style is also like a text style because it can be based on another style and applied with a user-defined keyboard shortcut.

While there are some default object styles — one for text, one for graphics — you can make your own a default by simply dragging the text or graphic default icon in the palette to the new one you’ve just created. Eda took an utterly bland and boring text frame and, with one click, applied a pull-quote object style, adding color to fill and stroke, changing the frame’s square corners to the new “inverse rounded” scallop corners, and even auto-applying a paragraph style to the text. Amazing. Note that as part of an object style, a paragraph style can be applied only to an unlinked text frame. (You can handle it.)

Another style enhancement is quick apply, a feature that will surely appeal to former typesetters, styles freaks, and keyboard geeks. When you have a long or complex document with so many styles, you can’t see all the style names in the palette at one time. Avoid scrolling the Styles palette by using quick apply to easily apply a paragraph, a character, or even an object style, using the keyboard. Engage the Quick Apply menu using Cmd-Return or Ctrl-Enter, and then type a few letters of your style name. The great thing is that you don’t have to remember the name exactly. You don’t even have to type the letters in any particular sequence. As you type, InDesign starts dropping off the list all names that don’t include the letters that you’re typing. Usually by three letters you have just the one you want. Then hit Return or Enter to apply. You can also use your arrow keys to highlight the ones farther down rather than typing more. You can apply a paragraph style and remove both overrides and character styles by pressing Option-Shift-Return or Alt-Shift-Enter. You can apply a paragraph style and remove overrides only with Option-Return or Alt-Enter. And if you don’t use the correct keys and you undo to start over, remember that you have to repeat the initial keys that open the Quick Apply menu.

On the other hand, you might not as easily run out of space on the Styles palettes because you can now display your styles using Small Palette Rows from the palette menu. Bravo! Another change to the Styles palette is that instead of No Paragraph Style in CS and earlier, you now have a Basic Paragraph Style — the difference is that in applying the Basic Paragraph Style, you’re changing the type attributes, whereas in applying No Paragraph Style you removed the style tag but didn’t remove any type attributes. The interface change makes it easier to set text back to the way it was or to flag that the paragraph is not yet formatted.

Next Style will now be more popular. Before CS2, you formatted paragraphs using Next Style only when typing in text and applying styles at the same time. Now you can highlight a sequence of paragraphs and apply the appropriate style to the first paragraph so that the following paragraphs can be styled automatically. For example, set the subhead style as the Next Style for a headline style. And set the body style as the Next Style for the subhead. Then simply apply the headline style and the following two paragraphs get formatted with no extra work. However, here’s the limitation. If you use Select All and apply your body style, as most people do, the Next Style feature will probably be a lot less useful.

In the page-layout and production category, the big news is anchored objects for callouts, pull-quotes, art, sidebars, and other objects that you want to stay locked to a specific point in the text. Even when that text is edited and now farther forward or back in the layout, the anchored object keeps its lock on that text. We’ve seen this capability in Quark with the feature of the same name, although in CS it was called “inline graphics.” But the big news is that anchored graphics can now be anywhere on the page, not just at the spot where they're dropped in. Another round of applause.

After you get the anchored thing in place (cut with the Select tool and paste into an insertion point with the Type tool), then the fun starts. There are three positions for an anchored object: inline (default, sits on the baseline), above line (positioned above the anchor point), and custom — whatever you want. Once you change to custom using Anchored Object Options, you can just drag that anchored thing anywhere on the page and it’s still anchored. With a facing-pages doc, you can even set position attributes to locate that thing relative to the spine (center fold), so that if that anchor point falls on the facing page, the position of the anchored object is symmetrically positioned, closer either to the trim edges or to the center fold.

Other neat features, quick mention: an enhanced Pathfinder palette with nine buttons to convert a selected something to a different shape or line; frame-level baseline grids so you can set up different baseline grids for, say, body text and sidebars on the same page; and Transform Again, an Illustrator® favorite — now part of the InDesign cadre, but with different shortcuts (try Cmd-Option-3 and Cmd-Option-4 — the latter does a sequence!). Fitting commands has a new addition — Fill Content Proportionally — which crops the image so that it fills to the larger dimension and leaves no white space in the frame. Last, make consistent PDFs by setting up a PDF preset that’s stored in a shared location, and then access it from any CS2 app. Yes!

Next, Cathy Palmer stepped up to the plate. She’s a design trainer from C2 Graphics Productivity Solutions, who drove down from Madison, Wisconsin, just to present the next set of CS2 new features to the group. Thank you, Cathy! Her section of the presentation covered new features in the areas of color and transparency effects, as well as XML and data-driven layouts.

There are several color-management (CMS) improvements in CS2. Cathy showed how with new preferences you can now control the appearance of black as it displays on your monitor so you can tell where you have used either a 100% black (K=100) or a rich black (mixture of CMYK). Very cool. In the Appearance of Black preference, the default setting, Display All Blacks Accurately, means that you’ll see your 100% black display as a dark gray while your rich black displays instead as a “real” black that’s RGB=0 on your monitor. Either way, your file prints out with your CMYK settings unchanged, regardless of how it looks on the screen. If you change the preference to Display All Blacks as Rich Black, all blacks look solid black, with no distinction. You can also make those same choices regarding printing to a non-PostScript desktop printer or exporting to an RGB file format — such as you might use with an all-RGB workflow. Cathy shared her special rich black recipe (60/40/20/100), which she learned back when she was a teenage typesetter in Chicago. Who knew there was so much to talk about with something so basic as black?

Another CMS feature is the Safe CMYK Workflow, now the default setting in InDesign and Illustrator CS2. The new default in the Color Settings dialog ignores the embedded profiles of your imported images (which had been the default in CS) and instead preserves the images’ original color numbers — in short, your images are no longer color-managed. It’s a “feature” because, this way, if you’re not using a CMS workflow, you can ensure that color conversion to an RGB workspace doesn’t happen by mistake. Cathy placed onto the page a photo of the C2 Graphics training team wearing ninja gear, and then showed lots of options to override the Safe CMYK setting by either accessing or changing the embedded profile. You can restore a color-managed workflow by going to Edit>Color Settings and changing the Color Management Policy back to Preserve Embedded Profiles.

Another new color feature lets you share swatches between Adobe CS2 applications. In addition to pulling in swatches from any CS2 doc with Load Swatches, you can make your palettes available to others with Save Swatches for Exchange, creating an Adobe swatch exchange (.ase) file. You or your team can access the swatches in any other CS2 app for consistent color every time. Cathy applauded a fast catch by an eagle-eye in the audience, revealing that only basic color swatches can be exchanged — that is, not any of the tints, gradients, or mixed inks that you may have built in InDesign.

The new noise and spread settings offer a chance to create more “realistic” drop-shadows in CS2. Rather than a super-smooth soft blur at the shadow edges, Cathy included some “noise” (artifacts) for a rougher or grainier look. This added a little bit of randomized texture for a more visually convincing result. Next the shadow edges were fine-tuned with a combination of blur and spread — all adding up to a drop-shadow with true grit. Tip: When using the new noise and spread features, it’s a good idea to use a high resolution display setting for the on-screen preview. And definitely run high-res output tests to determine optimal settings.

And last, some new XML features. Cathy used examples of her company’s mailers and some motorcycle sell-sheets to demonstrate the data-driven capabilities and improvements in CS2. The big news here — linked XML files! Link to the XML data files on import, and then easily update XML content when the original file changes. Also, Smart XML Import definitely streamlines the process by cloning matching elements to preserve styling. The option to match up the XML data with the layout is a huge advantage for designers who might otherwise be overwhelmed by a host of tags. Either by bringing in only the data elements that match the layout or by deleting layout items that don't match the data, these new controls for import will be a boon to all XML users.

Finally, Jim Maivald of Desktop Design gave us a whirlwind tour of the many new features related to placing graphics and text and smart text processing. Here’s a quick run-through. InDesign finally supports the display and output of layered files from both native Photoshop® and native Acrobat® files. Choose the layers you want to place with PSD and PDF files. Then, using the new Object>Object Layer Options, you can turn layers on or off both for on-screen display and for output, even with Photoshop layer comps.

Automatically place multiple pages from a PDF file. When you place a PDF, you can choose which pages you want to place, whether one, several, or all pages, with no problem. Step through a preview of each page, and then specify the pages you want. You can place them sequentially and InDesign will reload the place cursor after each click. Or you can option- or alt-click the place cursor to place a cascade of pages all on the same InDesign page.

Microsoft Word import enhancements. There are no less than 15 options when you import a Word or RTF file into InDesign with Import Options on — and a dialog that’s about double the size it was in CS. All the new options are in the formatting area, with extensive options for the two big choices — Remove (or Preserve) Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables. If you remove styles and formatting, you can opt for preserving local overrides. When you choose Preserve, you can choose to import inline graphics (that’s a big one) and unused styles (that’s a throwaway). And, best of all, you have multiple choices when the imported Word styles match the internal InDesign styles. Handle it systematically, or customize your response based on the particular style name. When you’re done muddling through all the choices, spare yourself for next time by saving a preset for reuse. Very impressive.

Smart text processing. Jim showed the new ablity to drag and drop text within or between text frames, views, or documents. The new feature is on by default for working in the story editor, but if you really want to see the sparks fly, go to Type Preferences and also turn on Enable in Layout View. You’ll see a special drag and drop text cursor after highlighting text, which lets you know you’re ready to go. As you drag, a vertical bar indicates where the text will be added. Press Cmd or Ctrl after you start dragging to drop the text into a frame newly created. Press Option or Alt instead and you’re making a copy. Your drag and drop should look great every time because of a new type preference that’s on by default — Adjust Spacing Automatically when Cutting and Pasting Words. Three cheers! For an encore, you can also drag and drop text from another app, and drag a text file into your layout from the Macintosh Finder or the Windows Explorer.

Unformatted paste. Another type preference that some people will relish — choose whether your pasted text will match the formatting of your destination text or retain the formats it had originally. Choose either All Information to preserve original formatting or Text Only to remove it. This affects pasted text within InDesign and even when pasting from other apps. Make sure your Word or RTF import options don’t conflict (remove or preserve formatting).

Footnotes. Believe it or not, InDesign now supports footnotes — not just importing from Word or RTF (that’s old), but you can now create footnotes in InDesign and then control their numbering, formatting, and layout. A boost for technical documents.

Dynamic spell-checking and automatic text correction. More surprises that almost make you think you’re in Word — but better! Enable dynamic spell-check with Edit>Spelling>Dynamic Spelling. Misspelled words then display with a red underline. Bring up the Context menu with a right-mouse-click or a control-click (one-button mouse) to see a list of suggestions with three additional options, including adding the word to the user dictionary. You can also set up the new Autocorrect preference so that InDesign corrects your text as you type.

Dictionary management. When it comes to hyphenation and spell-checking, you can create and link to multiple user dictionaries and easily share those dictionaries across a workgroup. You can even import word lists into and export them from user dictionaries.

Wysiwyg font preview. No more guessing about what your fonts look like. You now get to preview samples of every font family in the Font menu of both the Control and the Character palette.

Story editor enhancements. This little-used view is now a lot more robust since you can now see exactly where your text oversets. And with new View menu options for story editor, you can display a vertical ruler to measure the depth of text. A new Story Editor Display preference also lets you fine-tune how text is anti-aliasing, just the way you like it.

It was a very full evening that ended — you guessed it — with some big raffle prizes, including a copy of InDesign CS2. Some very happy winners this time! Join us next time, most likely in July, for more on InDesign CS2.

— Yours truly, Eda Warren
Adobe Certified Training Provider and Adobe Certified Expert on InDesign CS
http://www.go-training.com/

Thanks a bunch to Cathy Palmer for providing detailed notes on her presentation.

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