Join me at PePcon in San Francisco, May 14-16, 2012! When you sign up, use the code SFCM88, and get a $25 discount on the cost of any registration!

The schedule and slate of speakers is shaping up to be a full house; I can’t wait!

Hope to see you there!

The forms auto-recognition feature in Acrobat X Pro is powerful and fast — it creates form fields based on elements in the PDF (such as lines, boxes, circles, etc.), and names them according to nearby text. While you often have to tweak the results  — for example, creating fields it missed, renaming fields with paragraph-long names — it can be a timesaver. So why wouldn’t you always use it?

Recently, I worked on a large project with lots of numbered fields, and that experience sort of sharpened my thinking about auto vs. manual. Because I needed short, concise field names on pages with tons of neighboring text, I decided that renaming would take as long as creating from scratch, with less chance of error. On pages like the one shown above, I could’ve created all 40 fields almost instantaneously by letting Acrobat auto-recognize them, but I elected to create them by using the Place Multiple Fields feature.

That probably sounds like the long way around, but there was a method to my madness. I’ve created two videos to explain.

In Part I, I show how I created the fields using the Place Multiple Fields feature.

In Part II, I show how Acrobat’s auto-recognition feature would’ve handled it. Yes, it’s much faster, and no, I didn’t do it the “long way around” for billing purposes
At the end of Part II, I explain how important the field naming conventions are, and why my method allows me to take advantage of that, whereas Acrobat’s approach messes that up.

Oh, and just so you know, creating this 40+-page interactive form is really fun — I love the mechanics of creating and refining forms (how twisted is that?)

Place the AI file in InDesign; the dieline spot color is added to the Swatches panel. So far, so good.
Select the dieline art and choose Edit Original.
In Illustrator, change the spec for the dieline spot color to, say, red, and save the file.

Return to InDesign. Although the Links panel shows that the link is updated, the swatch appearance and the artwork appearance have not changed.

The only way to fix this is to delete the artwork, then delete the swatch and and re-import the artwork.
NOTE: Sometimes it DOES work as it should (i.e., updating the link DOES change the appearance of the artwork and swatch.) But most of the time, it doesn’t.
And…If you use a genuine PANTONE spot color from one of the sanctioned color books, it behaves as it should: change to another PANTONE color in Illustrator, and InDesign will update the swatch and the placed artwork.

Since you’d probably be using the homegrown-spot approach only when you’re creating components such as dielines and varnish plates, the actual color really isn’t important: It’s only important that a plate is generated. But it’s still odd that either InDesign ignores the change, or Illustrator doesn’t successfully communicate it. Guess it’s Just One of Those Things.

I love the concept of Kindle — and it’s not limited to the Kindle device. I can read a bit on my Kindle, then pick up my iPad and, with the Kindle app, continue a book. I can even crank up the Kindle app on my Android phone and continue to read. Let’s hear it for the Kloud!

A couple of months ago, Amazon notified me that my account had been compromised, and thus had to be shut down: I would have to create a new account and start over. The result was that all the Kindle purchases under the old account would be wiped out. While there are a number of books I wouldn’t want to buy or read again (that’s another post), some of them are important keepers. I had to deregister my Kindle, iPad, and smartphone, losing all the archived titles in the process.

How would I remember all the books that were held in archive in the Kindle Kloud? Well, Amazon was kind enough to send me a list of every book I’d purchased in the last two years. I blanched when I looked at the list — holy cow, I’ve been spending a lot on books! Of course, that’s the beauty (and danger) of the Kindle: It’s so painless to buy a book with a simple click.

I’d just resigned myself to the expensive prospect of repurchasing the books I wanted to preserve, or having to request that Amazon reinstate my purchases to the new account, when I received another email from Amazon customer service, informing me that they’d given me a gift card in the amount of all my Kindle purchases since the beginning! And it was not limited to the books I’d purchased: it’s just a blanket credit to my Amazon account.

Now that’s customer service with a smile! And a hug. I was stunned.

I would’ve just repurchased my favorite books anyway; it never occurred to me to ask for reimbursement. Now, with thoughtful customer service, Amazon turned bad news into a gift, and created a lifelong customer in the process.

But it seems (initially) to be broken in Acrobat X. Since you’re already traumatized by the radically-changed interface in Acrobat X, you may just assume that the old zoom shortcut is broken. You press Command+Spacebar, and nothing happens. You just figure, well, it was fun while it lasted.

All is not lost, however; you just have to use a bit of finesse. It’s a one-two punch: press and hold the Spacebar first, then — a half-second later — press and hold the Command or Control key. Voilá (which is French for “Zoom tool”), you can now click and zoom. It’s still the same combination of keys; you just have to press them in order (then hold) rather than simultaneously.

And no, I don’t know why. It’s one of those Great Mysteries.

In that spirit, I propose this change to the Buttons panel in InDesign, to be deployed in the Southeast U.S., where I live:

(We don’t click buttons down here in Georgia. We mash ‘em.)

Can the Star Trek TriCorder™ be far behind?

1. First, you have to be able to glom the pages together. Create a three-page document. Then, in the Pages Panel menu, UNcheck “Allow Document Pages to Shuffle.” At one time, this read “Keep Spread Together,” but that made too much sense. Essentially, InDesign insists on maintaining spreads: If a page is deleted from a multi-page spread, the following page “shuffles” up to fill the void. Unchecking the Shuffle option stifles this behavior, so you can stitch pages together and pull them apart as you wish.

2. Drag Page 2 up and glue it to Page 1 (below).

3. Select the Page Tool, and click on Page 2. In the Control Panel, use the Transform Proxy to anchor the left side of the page, then change the width of the page in the Width field in the Control Panel.

4. Drag Page 3 up and glue it to the right side of the spine. Place all your artwork and text, and you’re done (or so you think).

5. At about this time, in the Real World, your boss would call in a panic and tell you that the verbose author has submitted another chapter — you’ll have to change the width of the spine. While you’ll have to massage the artwork, changing the spine width is painless. Just select the spine page with the Page Tool, and enter the new width in the Control Panel. This will result in the spine either overlapping the front cover (p. 3), or leaving a gap between the spine and cover. But that’s easily rectified — just use the Page Tool to reposition the cover page, and you’re done.

Poking through the Adobe forums, though, I came across a thread on the same problem. One poster found that deleting the SING.InDesignPlugin cured the problem.

Sure enough, that did the trick! She is now SBBD-free, and InDesign launches and runs with no problem. I didn’t have this problem on either my desktop Mac or my laptop, so I don’t know why it affects some folks but not others. But I’m passing it on in hopes it will help others.

The plug-in is here:

Applications> Adobe> InDesign CS5> Plug-Ins> Text> SING.InDesignPlugin

The forum thread is here (search for the poster “lipstickdesign”):

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3024920