Seattle InDesign User Group Meeting Notes Archive
Tuesday, March 9, 2004
Well, March’s meeting kept up the momentum for InDesign® users all over the Seattle area. We had a good group of over 80 people who came to share ideas and solutions. And our friends from the Onus Group showed us a couple of plug-ins that can dramatically increase our productivity while using InDesign.
Jeff Kazanow and Shailendra Chauhan of the Onus Group joined us to present the InDesign solutions they provide using WoodWing’s Smart plug-ins. If you have any questions about their products or presentation, you can email them at solutions@onusllc.com.
Learn more about WoodWing plug-ins on this site.
Jeff and Shailendra showed off four of their solutions with WoodWing’s products, including Smart Styles, Smart Layout, Smart Catalog, and Smart Connection. For those of you who are interested in getting your hands on these products, you can check out their 30-day tryouts.
Smart Styles extends the style capability of InDesign; it uses the preexisting styles in InDesign and adds a sequencing to the application. It can turn multistep styling into one quick step. Smart Styles comes with some pre-defined styles and allows you to create your own style sequences in InDesign. Smart Styles is cross-platform-effective.
Smart Layout supports the article concept, turning multiple components of an article into one item that can be manipulated as one.
Smart Catalog allows you to easily export data from a database into an InDesign layout, allowing you to create catalogs with the click of a button.
Smart Connection connects InCopy® editorial stories with InDesign layouts.
Solutions…
As we love to do, we spent about an hour helping out our fellow InDesign users with their issues and queries. Below is a list of questions and answers that came up at the meeting. Maybe you’ll find an answer or two for your own work in there.
| Q. |
When I import an Adobe Illustrator® CS file with black text into an InDesign CS file, it comes in as four-color. Why is that and how do I fix it? |
| A. |
Color management may be turned on and black might be defined as four-color there. |
| Q. |
What are in-RIP separations? |
| A. |
They do the RIP function in the separation; the user is probably working with a service provider that has this functionality built into its system. |
| Q. |
When creating a PDF file from an InDesign CS file, random letters from a placed Illustrator CS file drop out. Why And how do I correct that? |
| A. |
1) You might have multiple layers in the PDF document (a PDF within a PDF)
or
2) You could be the character sets that have been established
or
3) If you are using font management, you might want to standardize the way you load and manage fonts. |
| Q. |
How do you flip an image? |
| A. |
Control palette — Flip Horizontal/Vertical; it is recommended that you do this in Photoshop®, but it can be done in InDesign too. |
| Q. |
How do I scale groups of images? |
| A. |
Group the images and use the scale tool, holding the shift key; if you are doing this with text, it will overse rather than expand or decrease. The scale tool scales the frames. To scale the text with other objects, hold cmnd and the shift key while using the Scale tool. |
| Q. |
In a long document, how do I add pages to a spread? |
| A. |
In the Pages palette, select Allow Pages to Shuffle. |
| Q. |
How do I copy paths from Illustrator and paste them into InDesign documents? |
| A. |
Make sure to set up Illustrator properly. In preferences, select the file- handling clipboard, and then turn off PDF, turn on Illustrator CB. |
| Q. |
After deleting a linked graphic in InDesign 2.0, the imported swatch cannot be modified or deleted, even when it is not used anywhere in the document. How do I get rid of this? |
| A. |
This is a known problem in 2.0 and should be fixed in CS. In order to work around this in InDesign 2.0, you can select the entire document and paste it into a new document. The swatches are now editable. |
| Q. |
How do I convert a style from one document to another (associating the InDesign styles over an imported style)? |
| A. |
Use the exact same style name in both documents (caps, spaces, etc.), or find and change the format. |
| Q. |
Can you script the find and replace function? |
| A. |
Yes! Almost everything in InDesign is scriptable. |
| Q. |
How do I edit shortcuts? |
| A. |
Edit>Keyboard Shortcuts; there is a “show set” capability that provides an example of all the keyboard shortcuts in InDesign. There are functions in InDesign that are completely undocumented — these can have a keyboard shortcut associated with them.
Also, shortcuts can be given context — use them all the time or only when doing certain functions. Keyboard shortcut sets can be created based on other sets.
|
| Q. |
Can keyboard shortcuts be assigned to a workspace? |
| A. |
No. Each user must create and select his or her own shortcuts. |
| Q. |
When I create a document in InDesign CS PageMaker® Edition, a person using the non-PageMaker edition opened the document and received an alert saying the Document Framework plug-in was missing. Is this common? |
| A. |
This sounds like a one-off problem that can be addressed offline. People using either version should be able to work with files created in either version of InDesign CS. |
| Q. |
My service provider can’t output spot colors in transparency. What do I do about this? |
| A. |
This is problematic on some older equipment, or it may be an issue with the service provider. Let Adobe know about the issue via sp-resources@adobe.com, and they will work with your service provider to update its system and output your files. |
| Q. |
Why would a printer have issues printing out InDesign files with placed Illustrator or Photoshop files? |
| A. |
The placed files may be too large for the printer’s system to handle. |
Thanks for the Ideas!
For those of you who have topics you’d like to see presented or questions for the next meeting, please email those to our chapter representative. We’ll address them and any others that come up at the next meeting.
Thanks for the Prizes!
Thanks to Adobe, Adobe Press, and Total Training, people walked away with some great books and training resources. That stellar copy of the Adobe Creative Suite was snapped up pretty quickly. And some wonderful plug-in software is headed for a couple of new homes, thanks to the Onus Group.
And Thanks for the Help!
Thanks to all who helped out with the meeting. This help is really important in making the meeting easier to run and organize. We also thank Adobe for the facility, the pizza, the support, and the incredible InDesign resources we have here in Seattle — we’re really lucky! Anyone interested in helping out with the meeting, or anyone with an idea for a future topic, send an email to our chapter representative.
Finally, we asked whether you all like getting the notes emailed to you after the meeting, and the response was a resounding YES! We will continue to send this information out after each meeting.
Meeting Notes Archive
View notes from past meetings of the Seattle InDesign user group.
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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.
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