New York City InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

February 22, 2007

On Thursday, February 22^nd, 160 NY IDUG members showed up at FIT armed with questions to hurl at a distinguished panel of InDesign experts. The event, titled “Very FAQ,” broke from the normal tradition of meetings, by giving members the opportunity to submit questions in advance with the hope of having them answered that night. From among the many questions that were submitted, 12 were chosen for the evening-long Q&A.

Questions were moderated by Adobe’s Noha Edell. The expert panel for this evening-long Q&A were:

Sandee Cohen
www.vectorbabe.com

Bob Levine
www.theindesignguy.com

Michael Murphy
www.theindesigner.com

Allison Cattellona
www.mobilemactraining.com

The Questions

When I use the Pathfinder filter in Illustrator CS2 on an Intel Mac, it crashes the app.
Launch Illustrator, close the Appearance palette, and then quit Illustrator. Relaunch Illustrator, and then reopen the Appearance palette —no more crashes.

When I use Step And Repeat, a new copy is placed on top of the stack instead of on the top of the duplicated image.
Assign callouts to a separate layer.

When I Package files I get flagged for Times or Times New Roman even though neither is used in the document.
Export the file to InDesign Interchange (.inx). Interchange cleans up the files. Open the .inx in InDesign and return to Type > Find Font. When a problem font is found, exit Find Font and try Edit In Story Editor (Edit > Edit In Story Editor), which will make it easier to spot the offending character or space. Note: Find Font will *not* remove problem fonts that are defined in Paragraph or Character styles.

InDesign Spell check includes all the stuff on master items and on every layer — not helpful to copyeditors.
Highlight the text you want to check and hide the layers you don’t want to check. Now run Spell check to search only the Selection (this also works for Find and Change).

How do I set up full-bleed pages intended for spiral-bound printing?
Create a new document with Facing Pages. In the Pages palette menu, deselect “Allow Pages to Shuffle”. Then pull the pages apart in the palette, which will allow a bleed on all four sides.

In QuarkXPress I can nudge an object 1/10 of a point. How can I do this in InDesign?
Shift+Command/Ctrl+arrow left/right will nudge any object 1/10 of whatever increment you set in Preferences > Cursor Key.

How can I have more than a two–page spread?
Deselect “Allow Pages to Shuffle: in the Pages palette menu. InDesign will allow up to 10 pages in a spread.

How do I flip an image?
Select the image and choose one of the Flip options from the Transform palette menu (Window > Object & Layout > Transform).

When I paste from one document to another, I get extra swatches. What can I do to solve this?
A:Select the duplicates in the Swatches palette. Go to the palette menu and choose “Merge Swatches.”

How do I remove unwanted styles from a Book?
Open each document, choose “Select Unused Styles,” and then delete.

Is there any way to remove the “drop shadow” that appears in the lower right of the page?
Not really, although a workaround is to use White as your Preview background (Preferences > Guides & Pasteboard > Preview Background).

Is there a way to turn off the default Paragraph composer so I can manually re-rag lines of text?
Choose Justification and select Single Line Composer (can be selected/chosen in Paragraph styles, too).

When I set a Rule Above, it sometimes goes beyond the frame. How do I control this?
(per Dan Rodney of Noble Desktop): InDesign’s Paragraph Rules don’t keep themselves within the boundaries of a text frame. This is most problematic in long documents when headings have rules above them. The rules stick out of the top of the frame and make the spread look unbalanced because one of the pages (either left or right) start higher than the other.

Insufficient or Tedious Fixes:
Some suggested fixes involve manually pulling down the top of the frame, or setting a fixed inset on the top of the frames. The problem with these is that they don’t account for when the text reflows, or with a fixed amount, both pages would move down, which still leaves their tops unaligned (one is higher than the other). The goal is to lower ONLY the paragraph with the rule above and not other paragraphs which don’t have the rules!

The Ultimate Fix:
This will handle the problem best because it only lowers text in the frame if it has a rule above it (so the rule can align with the top of the other page). It continues to work even when text is reflowed.

In the following steps, we assume that you have already set up a Master Page and a Paragraph Style that includes the Rule Above.

Go to your Master Page and select both master text frames (on the left and right pages).
Choose Object > Text Frame Options.
Click the Baseline Options tab.
Set the First Baseline, Offset to Leading. (Leave Min set to the default 0.)
Click OK.
Open the Type preferences (Mac: Choose InDesign > Preferences > Type, Windows: Choose Edit > Preferences > Type).
Make sure that “Apply Leading to Entire Paragraphs” is NOT checked.
Click OK.
Leave the Master Page and go back into the document. Find one of the pages that has a rule which sticks up and out of the frame.
Select only the first word in that paragraph with the rule above.
Start increasing the leading. As you increase the leading, the text and the rule will sink lower into the text frame. Stop adjusting the leading when you get the rule aligned with the other page in the spread.
With that word still selected, open the Character Styles palette (choose Type > Character Styles).
Choose “New Character Style” from the Character Style palette menu.
• Name it something like 1st Line Adjust
• NOTE: The only option that has been set in this style is leading.
Click OK.
Open your Paragraph Style that includes the Rule Above.
On the left, click on “Drop Caps and Nested Styles.”
Click New Nested Style.
Click [None] and change it to the “1st Line Adjust” style.
Click OK.
The entire document should now be fixed. Enjoy!

Thanks, Dan. Still with us?

Podcasts

As was mentioned during the meeting, several of the questions that came up are the subject of entire episodes of Michael Murphy’s podcasts. For example, the question about the single-line composer and controlling hyphenation is part of the episode “To Track or Not to Track.” The questions about Books and synchronizing styles was covered in the first part of his five-part series on long document features.

theInDesigner.com
To Track or Not to Track
Download [MP4: 15:45 minutes]

theInDesigner.com
Five-part series on long document features
Download [MP4: 20:20 minutes]

theInDesigner Podcast on iTunes
Direct link to the podcast through iTunes
Podcast

And you can get to Michael’s InDesignSecrets.com blog at http://www.theindesigner.com or http://www.indesignsecrets.com/theindesigner.

Notes prepared by Paul Tomzak. Thank you, Paul!

Scott Citron
NY IDUG Chapter Rep

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