Claudia McCue

I’ve uploaded a Zip file containing two Photoshop exercise files and a PDF step-by-step guide to help Photoshop users overcome their fear (or hatred) of the Pen Tool. Here’s the link on the Practicalia website. It uses some simple geometric shapes, starting with straight segments and corner points, then moves up to curved segments. To get you ready for drawing around real objects, there’s a helpful bit on changing directions — corners to curves, and back again. Finally, the time-honored Photoshop ducky is used to give you a taste of using the Pen Tool on more organic shapes.

UPDATE: It’s finally been fixed! Download the 10.1 update and commence to TouchingUp.

Another reason to not uninstall your old software…

The Edit Object function (formerly TouchUp Object tool) is broken in the initial release of Acrobat X on the Mac. When you select an image or vector object, then right-click and choose Edit Object or Edit Image, it displays an error alert indicating that it can’t start the editing application.

No matter how hard you try to convince it to use Photoshop or Illustrator, it fails. Adobe is aware of the problem, but no date has been mentioned for a patch. Until this is fixed, you’ll have to use a previous version of Acrobat to do your repair work (if the original application file isn’t available), or use a PDF-editing application such as Enfocus PitStop.

Lucky Windows users — this doesn’t affect you. You can TouchUp to your little hearts’ content.

A number of my clients are construction-related groups who are planning to use InDesign for proposals and other company materials. Previously, they’ve used Microsoft Word and Publisher, and found it frustrating to be creative. If you’ve ever tried been forced to do page layout in Word, I’m sure you can sympathize!

Most of these clients want to keep the “look” of their new InDesign documents in keeping with previous materials. But it’s tough to create templates when you’re still learning the program, so many of these companies have contracted with experienced designers to create the templates for them.

Since I like to see typical client files before training (so I have an idea of what they need to know), I often have the opportunity to deconstruct these supplied template files before the client starts using them. And it’s a good thing I do. With only one exception, I’ve found that the designers are not giving my clients a very good start! Clearly, they need to be asking more questions before cranking up InDesign.

Some considerations when building templates for a client: Continue Reading »

InDesign allows you to create custom stroke styles. If you’re tasteful, you can create interesting dashed effects or multiple-stripe borders. If you’re willing to be tacky, you can use some of InDesign’s hidden Easter eggs to take it even farther.

To get started, choose Stroke Styles from the Stroke panel menu (or the Control Panel menu). Choose the Dash option (this won’t work with the Dotted or Stripe options). The settings don’t matter — what’s important is the name. Name your new custom style “Lights,” and click OK. Now you’ll see a little strand of Christmas lights at the bottom of your list of strokes. Whee!

Click OK again to exit the custom stroke style dialog. Now you can apply your festive new string of lights to a frame. While you can only apply a simple solid stroke to text, if you convert text to outlines, that restriction is lifted. Mwah-ha-ha.

Create some text (preferably bold enough to give your lights some elbow room), then select the text frame and choose Type > Create Outlines. Choose the Lights stroke style from the Stroke pull-down in the Control panel, and set the weight of the stroke sufficiently high to make the lights visible (probably somewhere in the 5-10 point range). You can apply a fill color, but your choice of stroke color will be ignored. If you choose a Gap color, it will appear behind the lights, filling the width of the stroke weight you chose.

I’m not saying it’s right. This may fall into the JBYCDMYS category (Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should), but that just adds to the fun. All we need now is Debbie Gibson Boone singing “You Light Up My Type.”

You can’t select bulbs and change their color in InDesign, but you can select the art and copy/paste into Illustrator and modify it there. Then just paste back into InDesign.
By the way, there are others: try creating stroke styles named Feet, Woof, and Happy.

Just in time for Christmas and Hanukkah! Now you can give Kindle books as gifts!

Adobe Systems has released the tenth version of the venerable Acrobat: Acrobat X (pronounced “ten,” not “ex”). Be prepared for culture shock: the interface is completely revamped. Not the “we moved some menu items around to keep you on your toes” you’ve seen in previous versions, but an utterly different environment. Like the “re-imagining” of recent Hollywood sequels, this one bears little resemblance to its ancestors.

As I explore more deeply, I’ll post more. But, for now, here’s how to find the full-fledged User Guide. From the Help menu, choose “Adobe Acrobat X Pro Help.” The Adobe Community Help application launches (as of CS5, the Help files appear in the Help application, not in your Web browser). Look for the PDF icon in the upper right corner of the interface, and click on “View Help PDF.” Once the PDF opens within the Help app, click the little floppy “save” icon to save the PDF to your hard drive.

Click the highlighted link to load the User Guide PDF, then save the file to your hard drive.

When you package a document in InDesign CS5, the fonts are stored in a folder named “Document Fonts.” And there’s a special significance to that folder name. Open an InDesign file, and it looks around its current directory for that folder. If it finds it, whoopee, it automatically activates the fonts in the folder, without invoking a font manager. The fonts are active only for InDesign, only for that document, and only as long as that file is open. Those fonts are not available to other applications, or other documents (even if the “sanctioned” file is currently open). It’s a very personal relationship.

This feature ensures that the correct fonts are used when you package the job and send it to a commercial printer. But what if the printer has an established way of organizing customer files that breaks up the set? Many prepress departments have standardized directories similar to this:

Customer Name
–Job Number
—-Page Layout Files (working)
—-Support Art
—-Fonts
—-Original Customer Files

In this arrangement, the original InDesign file is inside the “Original Customer Files” folder, and its little friends the fonts are in the Fonts folder. And a modified InDesign file (altered to fix any problems or refine the file for the printer’s workflow) is in the “Page Layout Files (working)” folder. There’s no line of communication between this second-generation working InDesign file and the fonts folder. When you open the file, it assumes it’s fontless, and you get the “Missing Fonts” message and the dreaded Pepto-Bismol® highlighting.

But there’s a workaround: Place an alias (or shortcut) to the fonts folder in the same directory as the working InDesign file. Just make sure the stunt-double folder is named Document Fonts (not “Document Fonts alias” or “Shortcut to Document Fonts”) — the name of the original folder doesn’t matter. The InDesign file is happy again, you get to keep your folder structure, and all is well in Fontworld.

(Thanks to Rick @ Garner Printing for asking about this.)

Maybe I’m just resistant to change. But I don’t care for the new drag-&-zoom feature in Photoshop CS5. I believe Nature intended for you to drag a zoom marquee to enlarge an area of the photo, and it’s an old habit. In CS5, the same drag zooms the image enormously, as if it’s pulling it toward you, without centering on the area you’ve intended to capture. I looked in Preferences and the User Guide for a way to disable it, to no avail. So I settled for gingerly clicking and cursing under my breath.

I mentioned this to a group of SAS folks I was training in CS5 this week, and one of the guys sent me an email afterward, calling my attention to the “Scrubby Zoom” option in the Options bar. Doh! Now, of course, it’s obvious. If I’d known it was called “Scrubby Zoom” instead of “Pain-in-the-Butt Zoom,” I could’ve looked it up. Now I know, and I’m passing it on to those of you who like the Old Ways better.

*If you live in the South, no translation is necessary. But, for the rest of the world, the subject means: “Had it been a snake, lurking so close, in the same obvious location as the Scrubby Zoom option, it would have bitten you.”

If you’ve watched much science fiction, you know things always go wrong in time travel. Somebody drops a USB drive in ancient Mesopotamia, and next thing you know, dinosaurs are roaming the streets of New York.

Same thing goes for back-saving files for earlier versions of software; I always caution designers to avoid this if possible. However, I realize that designers often encounter mixed versions of applications, especially when freelancers are involved. I try to always keep files in their native habitat, in terms of software version and platform. The notion of opening up an innocent PC Illustrator CS5 file in a Mac CS4 version of Illustrator makes me twitch.

I’ve had my convictions strengthened this week; I’m working on a book in InDesign CS5, but the publisher wants the final files in InDesign CS4. I’m taking advantage of the Track Changes feature in CS5 to work with the editor, and that’s working great. However, when I export to InDesign Markup (IDML) — the only way back to CS4 — things fall apart. Paragraph formatting goes wonky. Styles based on other styles have forgotten the overrides that separated them from the parent styles, and the original formatting (mainly nested styles that I’d un-nested) bubbles back up. Like a zombie movie.

I don’t recall this happening when I back-saved from InDesign CS4 to CS3. I don’t know if I was lucky, or if back-saves have become more dangerous in the new version. The moral of the story? If you are forced to time-travel, make a PDF before you jump. Place the PDF in a separate layer in the converted file, and turn its visibility off and on, so you can check for issues.

Be careful out there. Watch for dinosaurs.

If you’ve used the built-in contact sheet generator in Adobe Bridge, you know it only gives you the option to generate PDFs (or Web galleries). That’s nice — but there’s a much better way.

I’ve blogged in the past about Bob Stucky’s great scripting solution, which enables you to invoke InDesign from within Bridge, in order to generate a truly editable InDesign contact sheet.

I’m tickled to announce that Bob has updated the script for CS5, and it’s even better than before. You can now include your Bridge ratings (in color!), and create separate masters for the first page and the remainder of the document. You can completely customize a template and invoke it when you create the contact sheet. It’s quick, it’s slick, it’s really trick (and I love it).

Bob has posted a video here, showing all the cool new features. Continue Reading »