Milwaukee InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

January 13, 2005

The January meeting of the Milwaukee InDesign® user group was held at C2 Graphics Productivity Solutions (C2GPS), in the training classroom. The scheduled topic was super-powered type styles, presented by Cathy Palmer, Adobe Certified Expert in InDesign CS and software trainer for C2GPS.

We had a good turnout, and everyone helped themselves to pizza in the conference room before settling back into the classroom for the meeting.

Tom Petrillo, of Adobe Systems, started the meeting by discussing the future of the Milwaukee user group, including meeting schedules, topics, venues, and hosts. Volunteers are needed to plan and organize upcoming meetings to ensure that this user group can continue. It was agreed upon that every eight weeks would be a manageable schedule for holding future meetings (probably taking a break over the summer months). C2GPS offered their Milwaukee location as an available location for future meetings. Venues will be determined for each upcoming meeting as people express interest in hosting the group.

Cathy navigated to the InDesign user group website (www.indesignusergroup.com) and had it projected up on the screen. Tom encouraged everyone to register and RSVP for meetings through the site so that Adobe could keep track of the number of people in our area who are interested. Everyone was invited to suggest meeting topics by sending an email to the Milwaukee chapter representative.

Cathy Palmer handed out her two-page agenda on type styles (available for download below). She said that while she was writing up the advanced type styles features for the handout, there were so many questions brought up about how to work with type that she added another page as a review of the basics.

Provided by C2 Graphics Productivity Solutions
Super-Powered Type Styles
InDesign poweruser tips and critical keyboard shortcuts for paragraph, character, and nested type styles.

Download PDF file
Approximately 112 Kb download

Cathy used her handout document as the example for most of the demonstration, selecting and styling the text to demonstrate each point in the outline.

InDesign type basics covered were viewing type (including hidden characters and story editor) and selecting type (with multiple type tool clicks or by selecting the entire frame). The Overset Text view on the Info palette showed how many paragraphs/words/characters remained that did not fit into the text frame, and this started discussion about writing copy to fit in InDesign and the InCopy® overset warning features.

A review on formatting type brought up several questions from the group on the “keeps” functions and H&J settings.

Once we were all on the same page for how to work with and format text in InDesign, we moved on to styling type. The way that character styles will change only the features specified and leave the other attributes “as is” was reviewed in detail. Applying the same character style onto several different paragraph styles and noticing how only the specific attributes changed was a reinforcing example. We ran into a snag when one of the demos did not behave as expected. Troubleshooting from the crowd found the culprit: Some reverse type was set as 0% black instead of paper, so the colored character style didn’t show up in color because it was still set to 0%! Thanks to the sharp eyes in the audience for catching that one.

The “redefine” feature, through which styles could be updated to match selected examples in the text, brought cheers from the crowd. Comments like “That would have saved me so many headaches and so much time!” and “I wish I had that feature years ago” were heard throughout the room.

A discussion of formatting placed and pasted text brought on several roundtrips of text from InDesign into Word and back again, to confirm what settings would allow for raw text or formatted text to be pasted or placed.

One person wanted to preset her Styles palettes so that her regularly used type styles would be ready and waiting in every new document. This, in combination with a question about default type formats, started a whole tangent topic about determining the default text settings. Choosing text formats with no objects selected worked to predefine the settings for every new text frame, and building or loading styles with no documents open worked to populate the Styles palettes for every new InDesign document.

Cathy speced some Zapfino text in Magenta as her default, to make a dramatic visual difference from the straightforward black Myriad text used in the handouts. This eventually was referred to as the “girlie type” style, and many rounds of trial-and-error testing showed how custom settings could be locked in as the default for new documents and new text frames.

Next we listed the Type palette shortcuts, the many, many different ways to actually find and access the Formatting palettes and the Style palettes. People voiced their frustrations and confusion about the redundant places to activate these palettes, but both Tom and Cathy stated that it was a benefit to have so many ways to get to the commands that you need.

After a break, nested styles were demonstrated on a sales list document as well as in the meeting handout. Cathy prepared all of the character styles first, and then set them up in the order needed for the paragraph style with the nested feature. A discussion of delimiters brought up the fact that several different nested style settings could have the same result, so it is critical to be sure that your nesting setup works with each example in the data. The End Nested Style Here special character showed how you could get the nesting to happen even if your text didn’t have all of the delimiters required.

We didn’t actually get around to demonstrating Synchronize Styles with the Book function because we ran out of time with all of the other questions.

A couple of questions were held until the end of the meeting, to take them offline from the type styles presentation. Several questions came up about how to get the Creative Suite applications to play well together and about the best way to get editable vector paths between applications, especially from Illustrator® into InDesign. People stayed after the presentation to take advantage of Tom’s expertise and ask more InDesign questions that were unrelated to the meeting topic.

Photos From This Meeting
Photos are available from this user group meeting.
See the photos.

Meeting Notes Archive
View notes from past meetings of the Milwaukee InDesign user group.
• Read notes from other meetings!

Meeting Topics Archive
With user group chapters across the United States, Europe, and Australia, we have gathered quite a bit of information from presenters, Adobe representatives, attendees, and industry experts during the past four years.
• Read all of the notes