October 2, 2007
The October 2 meeting launched the new season of the Cleveland IDUG with great success. 63 people attended, meeting in the new Communication Design studio at The Cleveland Institute of Art (a larger and more comfortable venue than the Future Center). Note - our next meeting will have the larger screen requested by some of you!)
We centered on Tips and Tricks for Typography, with Adobe ACE, April Clark. Questions came quickly from the Audience, primarily productivity questions about overwriting poor formating in client documents. April showed the Find Font dialog box in CS3 with the option for "Redefine Style When Changing All." This will be a great timesaver for those switching from Postscript or True Type to Open Type. We reviewed the great new Find/Change box and discussed ways to search with the GREP query's and save query's for future use.
April covered features in the Preferences Panel, such as Type Options – Font Preview Size, Drag and Drop Text Editing, and in particular, Paste without Formatting (under Clipboard Handling).
The Paste without Formatting features help control some the most troublesome issues of importing poorly laid out text from Microsoft Word in particular (notably, text that has been forced bold or italic, and automatic superscript issues with numbers). All of this formatting can be eliminated upon import, with the "Text Only" option selected. When working with Open Type fonts, however, note the combination of Open Type and the InDesign import engine, any false bolds and italics will be automatically translated into available bolds, obliques and italics contained in the font family.
April reminded us of Paste in Place (located in the Edit menu), a crucial feature that has been around for some time.
While many features of Characters, Paragraphs and Tables will appear in the menu when using the type and table tools, there are specific features in the Control Panels of each, located under Window in the main program menu. For example, in the Character Panel, the feature "no break" is available under the sub-menu, a very useful tool for phone numbers, email, etc when you have hyphenation turned on in the Paragraph Panel. The Paragraph Panel contains the options to choose either "Paragraph Composer" or "Single-line Composer". While the default, the "Paragraph Composer" is perfect for most work-flows, the "Single-Line" is perfect to switch to when you need a more traditional approach to composing text one line at a time. This option is useful if you want to restrict composition changes from late stage edits.
In the Styles panel, April covered the feature of "Next Style" to show how to set up consistent documents (those with consistent Titles, SubTitles and Body Text through using the Next Style feature.
Productivity features such as Master Text Frames, and methods of Auto-Flowing text were covered, (April demonstrated and tried out various ways to flow text - using semi flow, auto flow or Master Text Frames. Pointing out that facing pages master frames need to be linked to work properly. Frames could be set in columns or column guides could be created), along with issues and means of Justification, turning off Hyphenation, and core features of the Glyphs Panel. We opened the Glyph panel and discussed Open Type options. Pat Lally suggested that we take advantage of the number styles in Open Type fonts, and April demonstrated Tabular Lining, Proportional Oldstyle, Proportional Lining and Tabular Oldstyle.
Import features in the Place menu were covered. When you open the Place command, you can either use the OS dialog or Adobe's dialog, which mirrors many features in Bridge. When you bring in complex documents, such as a multi-page PDF, you can turn on the "Show Import Options" feature. This will allow you to bring in an entire document, or range of pages, at one time. As you place each page, InDesign reloads the graphics icon with the next page, letting you place the pages one after the next. InDesign doesn’t import movies, sound, links, or buttons when you place a PDF file, however. If you need these features, they do need to be recreated in InDesign.
Type Tips, Web Resources, and Tips of the Week
Compiled by April Clark
Download [PDF: 270 KB]
The talk ended with issues of Tables, and setting table styles. We worked through some problems of layout requests and formatting that some of the designers were working with.
Comments from the feedback forms:
"Topics -Great, Room - Great, April - Great"
"Good Discussion on Typography. I liked the Question/Answer session with members adding the benefit of their knowledge and expertise."
"Great Information, please add "on the fly" issues when time constraints and customer desires are pressing"
"Well Done - Fast Paced, Very Interactive and Positive"
"Design Tips are awesome!"
"Loved the discussions on Typography, bring in more!"
We planned topics for the next two meetings - How to create Interactive PDFs and Using Indesign With Other Programs. The next meeting date is November 7th at 6:00
The evening ended with our big raffle, Creative Suite CS3, being won by Mark Mindlin.
Mari Hulick
Cleveland IDUG Chapter Rep
Photos From This Meeting
Photos are available from this user group meeting.
See the photos
