Reno InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Lisa Forrester, from Adobe Systems, kicked off the meeting at the Magic Underground, just south of downtown Reno’s River Walk.

She briefly introduced Jim Cooper as the new chapter representative. Jim described his background and gave a brief history of his other presentations for IDUGs. He confirmed his intentions to meet more regularly, and turned the meeting back over to the “star” of the show, Adobe Creative Suite 2.

Lisa Forrester started with an overview of the various timesaving facets of Adobe Bridge, which is a powerful asset included with any of the Creative Suite components.

Adobe Bridge is used to organize, browse, and locate the assets you need to create print or web projects. For image files, utilize Bridge to view, search, sort, manage, and run batch commands. Also, designers will be very pleased with the Adobe Stock Photos feature, available from the Favorites pane in Bridge. You can search leading stock libraries for royalty-free images, download low-resolution, complementary versions, and experiment with them in your projects before purchasing.

If you have the entire Creative Suite, you can take advantage of these other productive Bridge features:

Version Cue®
Create a project and have the ability to browse all the necessary files in one place without having to start the native application for each file, including non-Adobe application files. All versions of the project files are available for browsing, which gives users the added ability to create alternative layouts using a different version of the same file.

Color Management
Use Bridge to synchronize color settings across applications to ensure that colors look the same, regardless of which CS application you use to view them.

Bridge Center
Use this feature to see your most recent activity, read about tips and tricks for using Adobe products, save groups of files, and much more.

Lisa then dove into some striking InDesign CS2 features:

Saving Backwards
Use the InDesign CS2 Export feature and save the document in InDesign CS Interchange (.inx) format. The InDesign CS user can then open this file as an untitled document. Of course, content created with features exclusive to InDesign CS2 are subject to some degree of modification.

Snippets
Select an object or objects on an InDesign page and drag them onto your desktop or into Adobe Bridge. InDesign saves those objects and their relative positioning as a snippet with a thumbnail preview. This file carries an (.inds) file extension. Any InDesign CS2 user can then drag and drop a Snippet into a document. In addition to Object styling and text formatting information, the snippet file (same premise as the .inx method for transmitting document info) will preserve layer information and even the X and Y object placement coordinates.

Library Enhancement
You can choose to add all items on a page to the library as separate items.

Some frequently requested feature enhancements have now found their way into the latest release. Lisa won many nods of approval when she confirmed our ability to load paragraph and character styles selectively. A close second to that would be our ability to replace deleted styles with another selection in the document.

Some other timesaving capabilities in CS2 proved to be crowd-pleasers as well. Apply Next Style allows us to format a series of paragraphs at once, wherever a next style has been chosen in the style definition. With your text cursor “active” within a frame, access the Quick Apply palette and begin typing the required style name to locate it quickly from a “compiled” list of paragraph and character styles.

Rounding out the text-related features, Lisa showed us wysiwyg font preview, drag-and-drop text, unformatted paste, and dynamic spell checking with automatic text correction. Add that to our ability to create, connect to, and share multiple dictionaries, and we have a whole-new array of typographical features at our immediate disposal.

Let’s not forget our new ability to “map” Microsoft Word style sheets or formats to InDesign paragraph or character stylesheets and, even more impressive, save this “mapping preference as a preset to eliminate the need to repeat this process for subsequent imports.

Lisa deftly interspersed the typographical improvements with some great object-type improvements as well, starting with one new and powerful palette, Object Styles. By creating an object style (just as intuitively as you create a paragraph style sheet), you can easily transfer settings for stroke, color, transparency, drop-shadows, Paragraph styles, text wrap, baseline options, and more. Better still, you can select which of these settings you want to apply to an object style. For instance, if you want to apply a consistent drop-shadow to a number of objects, you could create a “dro-shadow” object style and apply it to multiple selections at once. If you want to alter the specs later, do so on the object style definition, and all objects that have that object style applied will change accordingly!

Speaking of some terrific object-based improvements, how about the ability to assign baseline grids at the frame level? Small things like adding noise and spread controls to the drop-shadow dialog reflects Adobe’s commitment to our satisfaction.

One of the most improved features at the object level is sure to be Anchored Objects. Far beyond the capabilities of inline graphics, we can now apply intelligent specifications to objects anchored outside of the frame containing the “reference point.” This means, where specified, we can ensure that anchored objects always appear on the “outside” of either a RH or LH page and automatically shift position, as needed, during text edits.

Lisa closed with a quick review of the “shared” CS capabilities, like shared swatches and shared PDF-creation presets, along with reinforcing the color management coordination.

We concluded with a raffle that awarded the full version of Adobe CS for Mac and the complete “Total Training for Photoshop® CS” series, among other things.

As always, thanks to Lisa Forrester for her time, patience, and key contribution to a memorable evening. We also want to thank Allycia Lindsay-Dietrich for her work in founding the Reno chapter of the InDesign user groups. Special thanks to the good folks at the Magic Underground for their hospitality.

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