Posts Tagged ‘David Blatner’

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

InDesign Secrets: Using compositional highlighting to detect problems

Published by | Thursday, February 16th, 2012

In this week’s free InDesign Secrets movie, Anne-Marie Concepcion reveals the useful mysteries of compositional highlighting in InDesign. As exotic as compositional highlighting may sound, my guess is you’re quite familiar with the Substituted Fonts indicator that shows pink when your document has missing fonts, and not-so familiar with the four other highlights you can turn on to reveal potential problem areas in your document. As InDesign lists them in the Composition panel, these four lesser-know highlight options are:

Keep Violations—Lets you know where InDesign has had to violate any keep settings you’ve applied to your paragraphs (like “keep the heading with the next two body sentences”).

H&J Violations—Reveals wherever your hypenation or justification tolerances have been breached.

Custom Tracking/Kerning—Shows you where someone has hand-set kerning rather than rewriting text.

Substituted Glyphs—Reveals wherever you have used alternates for standard glyphs.

Each of these highlighting options are represented by a different color wherever they appear in your document. You can find them by opening the Preferences panel (Ctrl-K or ⌘-K), and then choosing the Composition panel where you can turn on the check boxes. Since InDesign automatically chooses what color will appear for each compositional highlight, and there’s no color-key to help you discern what color is designated to each highlight, I’ve taken the liberty of creating the following image to help you. (Note that Keep Violations occurs so rarely, not even an InDesign goddess like Anne-Marie could force one to happen, so I left that one color-free.)

Meanwhile, for lynda.com members we have an exclusive movie this week from Anne-Marie’s partner in InDesign secrecy, David Blatner. While Anne-Marie is sharing a secret to whip your document into shape, David’s got the goods on managing your workspace with Managing your InDesign panels.

See you back in two weeks with two fresh secrets from Anne-Marie and David!

Interested in more?
• All the InDesign Secrets on lynda.com
• Courses by David Blatner on lynda.com
• Courses by Anne-Marie Concepcion on lynda.com
• All lynda.com InDesign courses

Suggested courses to watch next:
• InDesign CS5 Essential Training
• InDesign CS5.5 New Features
• InDesign Styles in Depth

Tags: , ,
Posted in Design | No Comments »

InDesign Secrets: Gaining perspective with the New Window command

Published by | Thursday, January 5th, 2012

As is appropriate for starting off a new InDesign Secrets year, this week’s free video features David Blatner showing you how to get several useful perspectives on your document by using InDesign’s New Window command. Opening multiple windows on the same document allows you to work on detail while keeping the big picture in mind. For instance, let’s say I was obsessed with creating a meticulous text-wrap path around the snowflake image in my winter newsletter, but also wanted to keep track of how the entire text block was shaping up across the page. By using New Window to open two windows and using the Arrange command to set them side by side, I can carefully move the anchor points on my text wrap while keeping an eye on the overall outcome without the distraction of visible guides and frame borders:

Example of InDesign's New Window command

David also points out some other good uses for multiple windows, including previewing a text color change. Since New Window allows you to see two perspectives of the same project, you can keep the text selected (and thus reversed in color) in one window, while seeing the effect of the color change without selection-highlight in the other.

Meanwhile, over in the Online Training Library®, David’s partner in InDesign secrecy, Anne-Marie Concepcion, has a member-exclusive video explaining how to put images on a stroke. And since every frame edge is a stroke, she also shows you how to surround your images with other images.

See you back in two weeks with another InDesign Secrets from Anne-Marie and David!

Interested in more?
• All the InDesign Secrets on lynda.com
• Courses by David Blatner on lynda.com
• Courses by Anne-Marie Concepcion on lynda.com
• All lynda.com InDesign courses

Suggested courses to watch next:
• InDesign CS5 Essential Training
• InDesign CS5 New Features
• Up and Running with InDesign
• InDesign FX series

Tags: , ,
Posted in Design, InDesign Secrets | No Comments »

InDesign Secrets: Why is text missing from my frame?

Published by | Thursday, December 15th, 2011

In this week’s free InDesign Secrets video, Anne-Marie Concepcion explores the case of the missing text. Quite often, you’ll find a blank area in your InDesign document where you know there should be text, but for some unknown reason, it’s missing from its frame. In this week’s free video our intrepid detective and keeper of InDesign secrets Anne-Marie takes you through a troubleshooting checklist to retrieve your lost words.

To start, Anne-Marie will show you how to spot troublesome hidden break-characters and describe the insidious ways these creatures can work themselves into your document. If that’s not it, you’ll see how to use the Story Editor to reveal text trouble spots and help gather clues. From there it’s all about troubleshooting. Is it a break instruction included in a paragraph style? Is your text color set to Paper, thus rendering it invisible? Are the indent and spacing settings correct in your Paragraph Styles? Or is something else afoot? Anne-Marie will help you unlock the mystery and free your missing text.

For members of the lynda.com Online Training Library® Anne-Marie’s partner in InDesign secrecy, David Blatner, has an exclusive video this week, Preview and Presentation Mode, that helps you navigate and select the preview and presentation preferences that work best for you. (Because once you find your missing text, you’ll want to check it out accurately and be able to present it to your audience.)

Interested in more?
• All the InDesign Secrets on lynda.com
• Courses by Anne-Marie Concepcion on lynda.com
• Courses by David Blatner on lynda.com
• All lynda.com InDesign courses

Suggested courses to watch next:
• InDesign CS5 Essential Training
• InDesign CS5 New Features
• Up and Running with InDesign
• InDesign FX series

Tags: , ,
Posted in Design, InDesign Secrets | 3 Comments »

InDesign Secrets: Aligning decimal points in a numbered list

Published by | Thursday, December 1st, 2011

This week’s InDesign secret is all about getting yourself (and your decimal points) properly aligned. In this week’s free-to-all movie, David Blatner shows you the subtle adjustments you have to make to your bullet position, left indent, and hanging indent to get the decimal points in your numbered list lined up correctly. David’s quick and clear advice helps you define, locate, and implement your bullet and indent position options in InDesign, resulting in an upgrade from the unkempt figure on the left to the tidy one on the right:

Example of decimal points aligned in InDesign

Meanwhile, over in the Online Training Library®, David’s partner in InDesign secrecy, Anne-Marie Concepcion, has a new member-exclusive video this month (Running a Script) that shows you how to install and use scripts in InDesign. Scripts are little sets of instruction that allow you to automate behaviors in InDesign, such as the merging of two tables, to save yourself hours of work and strained patience.

See you back here in two weeks with more InDesign Secrets.

Interested in more?
• All the InDesign Secrets in the Online Training Library®
• Courses by David Blatner in the Online Training Library®
• Courses by Anne-Marie Concepcion in the Online Training Library®
• All courses on InDesign in the Online Training Library®

Suggested courses to watch next:
• InDesign CS5 Essential Training
• InDesign Styles in Depth
• Up and Running with InDesign
• InDesign FX series

Tags: , ,
Posted in Design, InDesign Secrets | No Comments »

InDesign Secrets: The elusive mysteries of backward compatibility

Published by | Thursday, October 20th, 2011

InDesign-based projects are often collaborative efforts. You may need to share your InDesign document with a whole host of editors, writers, and designers, some of whom may not be using the same version of the software as you are. Unlike Office, Photoshop, or Illustrator documents, which can be opened in earlier versions of the applications that created them with little hassle, InDesign backward compatibility requires that you export your document to a special file format that can be understood by earlier incarnations of InDesign.

In this week’s free InDesign secret, Anne-Marie Concepción shares what you need to do, what you need to know, and what you need to watch out for when converting your document to IDML (InDesign Markup Language) so that it can be opened with CS4, CS5, or CS5.5. She demonstrates the somewhat confusing ‘missing plug-in’ warning that is often just InDesign’s way of telling you you’re using an older version of the program than that which created the document you’re trying to open. Anne-Marie will also show you the things you’ll need to be on the lookout for, like missing previews and matching text. She’ll even reveal how to see the guts of your document in human-readable code.

Meanwhile, Anne-Marie’s partner in InDesign secrecy, David Blatner, has an exclusive movie just for lynda.com members over in the Online Training Library® that shows you how you can use conversion to IDML (or its earlier analogue INX for CS2-CS3 team members) in order to fix format problems that may otherwise confound you.

And we’ll see you back in two weeks with more InDesign Secrets.

• All the InDesign Secrets in the Online Training Library®
• Courses by Anne-Marie Concepcion in the Online Training Library®
• Courses by David Blatner in the Online Training Library®
• Courses on InDesign in the Online Training Library®

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Design | No Comments »

InDesign Secrets: Selecting through and into objects

Published by | Thursday, October 6th, 2011

One of the more natural things I like about InDesign (as opposed to, say, Photoshop) is that you can more easily grab the elements you want and move them around or edit their contents. However, if your layout becomes complicated with grouped and stacked and otherwise hard-to-grab objects, you need an arsenal of tips for selecting the item you’re aiming for. That’s exactly what David Blatner has for you in this week’s free InDesign Secrets episode.

The most all-purpose trick? Ctrl-click (Windows) or Cmd-click (Mac) through one object to get the item below. If your graphic frame is overlapping some text you need to edit, this is a sanity-saving measure for getting at the frame below. And David’s movie has a bunch of other secrets for selecting particular objects in a group or using layers to effectively select (or protect) items.

Meanwhile, for lynda.com members, David’s partner in InDesign secrecy, Anne-Marie Concepcion, has some more time- and mind-saving tips regarding the Swatches panel in the Online Training Library® this week.

Interested in more?
•  All the InDesign Secrets in the Online Training Library®
•  Courses by David Blatner the Online Training Library®
•  Courses by Anne-Marie Concepcion the Online Training Library®
•  Courses on InDesign the Online Training Library®

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Design | No Comments »

InDesign Secrets: Building graphs with the Chartwell font

Published by | Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

For those of you who’ve ever been disappointed by InDesign’s lack of charting features, Anne-Marie Concepción has a solution in this week’s free InDesign Secrets episode. The Chartwell font (yes, font!) from TK type makes ingenious use of ligatures in order to turn simple text numbers into bars, lines, and pies.

Anne-Marie shows you how to start by typing the mathematical equation that represents your chart numbers. You’ll turn off InDesign’s ligatures at first, then you simply apply variations on the Chartwell font and turn those numbers into corresponding charts when you turn ligatures back on.

So, for example, let’s say I started with this percentage breakdown, typed into InDesign, set in Chartwell with ligatures turned off, and each of the different values styled in a different color:

If I set the Chartwell option to the Pies font style, the result is an automatic transformation into a pie chart that’s set to those percentages:

Tip: In the video Anne-Marie explains how to turn your pie chart into the ring chart on the right by adding an alphabetical character to the equation.

If I change the font family to Bars and put spaces after each plus sign, the result is a bar graph:

Note: I changed each of the values by a factor of 10 to make a better visual example. Also, if you try this step, add a plus sign after the final value to keep the spacing (which is, of course, actually leading) between your bars consistent.

Finally, I can change the font family to Lines to get what Anne-Marie accurately points out is really an Area Chart.

Tip: Add a 1+ to the beginning of your equation for a line chart so that your graph has a starting point. (Unfortunately, the more accurate value of 0 won’t work properly.)

Anne-Marie has some other handy Chartwell tips for applying color quickly with the use of a nested character style and using InDesign’s story editor to quickly make adjustments to your charts without having to turn ligatures on and off.

Meanwhile, for lynda.com members, Anne-Marie’s partner in InDesign secrecy, David Blatner, has a new exclusive movie in the Online Training Library®. This week David shows another time-saving trick: using the eyedropper tool to pick up text formatting and apply it elsewhere in your document.

And Anne-Marie and David will be back in two weeks to reveal more secrets of InDesign.

Interested in more?
• All the InDesign Secrets in the Online Training Library®
• Courses by Anne-Marie Concepcion the Online Training Library®
• Courses by David Blatner the Online Training Library®
• Courses on InDesign the Online Training Library®

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Design | 2 Comments »

InDesign Secrets: the Quick Apply feature

Published by | Thursday, September 8th, 2011

In this week’s free InDesign Secrets movie, David Blatner reveals the often overlooked but indisputably indispensable Quick Apply feature. Quick Apply allows you to access styles, menu commands, and even scripts by employing two simple keystrokes (Cmd+Return on a Mac or Ctrl+Enter on a Windows machine), and then typing a few letters of your desired feature to immediately find and apply it. This means your fingers don’t have to leave the keyboard and your brain doesn’t have to remember where to find things in menus or panels.

For lynda.com members this week, Anne-Marie has an exclusive members-only video that demonstrates ways to customize the Links panel. The Links panel got much more informative starting with InDesign CS4, but sometimes the copious amounts of information presented is inconveniently stashed in the Link Info section of the panel. Anne-Marie shows you how to move the key information  you want about your linked files to make it conveniently accessible.

And Anne-Marie and David will be back in two weeks to reveal more secrets of InDesign.

Interested in more?
• All the InDesign Secrets in the Online Training Library®
• Courses by Anne-Marie Concepcion the Online Training Library®
• Courses by David Blatner the Online Training Library®
• Courses on InDesign the Online Training Library®

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Design | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »