Claudia McCue

The Smart Text Reflow feature in InDesign is quite useful: if you add more text to a multi-page story, new pages are generated at the end of the story, avoiding overset text. It’s on by default: you can turn it off, or you can modify the preferences so that Smart Text Reflow applies not just to master text frames. It can be a runaway train, but usually it’s an asset.

However, I’ve discovered an odd (and rare) bug with Smart Text Reflow. You’ll only encounter it under specific circumstances, if you perform the steps in a particular order. It happened to me while teaching an InDesign class, and it took some time to figure out that Smart Text Reflow was the culprit. I thought I’d spare you the aggravation by describing the problem so you can avoid it: Continue Reading »

The book — “Real World Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications” (or “Son of RWPP,” as I call it)— is now in stores! It’s thoroughly updated for CS4 apps, including Acrobat 9 Pro. As you might expect, the chapters on QuarkXPress and Freehand are gone, but the general material about printing process and technology reflect some of the improvements in the intervening years, such as the spread of the Adobe PDF Print Engine in many vendors’ RIPs (we live in wonderful times).

The book is available from Peachpit Press, from Amazon, and through other booksellers.

Enjoy!

Productivity can be cool: InDesign CS3 and CS4 allow you to select multiple files in the File>Place dialog, and this is a great way to get multiple text and graphics files into the page quickly.

But did you know you can shop among multiple folders as you’re gathering up files to place in the page? You can, but there’s a little trick required.

If you choose File>Place, select some files in a directory, then switch directories and select more files, you’ll only pick up the latest group of files — earlier selections are ignored.

But if you select files from one folder, then return to InDesign without clicking in the page, you can choose File>Place again, and gather up another bunch of files. When you return to InDesign, you’re carrying all the files you selected from all visited directories.

My thanks to Bob Bringhurst of Adobe Systems for adding a comment to the earlier post. I thought it deserved its own post, since he was kind enough to share: Bob’s blog post is here.

In the circumstance that prompted my earlier post, a customer needs to add a TOC to the first page of their multi-page InDesign files in order to generate bookmarks in the exported PDFs. That’s the only purpose the TOC serves. For various reasons having to do with workflow and tracking, they can’t add an extra page (this is a retail environment, and they’re using multiple pages to hold multiple versions).

The solution is a bit of a kludge, but it works: they create the TOC, and then position the TOC text frame in the pasteboard, overlapping the left edge of the page by just a skosh. The text itself is off in the pasteboard, and doesn’t appear in the page when the PDF is generated.

There’s (almost) always a way

If you generate a Table of Contents in a file (or book) in InDesign, hyperlinked bookmarks are automatically generated when you export to PDF with Hyperlinks and Bookmarks options checked in the export dialog. Bookmarks make it easy for readers of the PDF to find information quickly: displayed in the Navigation pane in Acrobat or Reader, they serve as a dynamic table of contents that’s always available.

Sometimes I want the bookmarks in the PDF, but without a visible table o’contents in the file. In the past, I’ve generated my TOC in InDesign, but put it in the pasteboard. The text isn’t visible in the PDF, but the bookmarks are created.

Today I discovered that this trick doesn’t work in InDesign CS4! Instead, the TOC text frame has to have at least an edge hanging into a document page for the bookmarks to be created. While this isn’t fatal, it’s weird that the functionality has changed.

In previous versions of InDesign, if you dragged a frame containing a graphic to a Library, the library item would be named by the filename of the graphic in the frame. If you dragged multiple objects, the group was just labeled “Untitled.” Fair enough; it’s page geometry, and it’s up to you to pick a name for the library item.

But in InDesign CS4, everything dragged to the Library is initially named “Untitled”— there’s no recognition of a graphic filename. Bummer!

There’s no mention of this in the user guide, and no options available in the Library panel to force it to behave as it did in all earlier versions. It’s like going into a real library, and finding that all the books just say “Book” on the spine!

It’s finished! The book goes to press June 5th.

I’m pleased to announce that Real World Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications will soon be available. I updated it to reflect some of the improvements in print technology (such as the Adobe PDF Print Engine), and the software chapters are updated for Creative Suite 4 and Acrobat 9. I will say it’s easier the second time around, but I truly don’t know how Stephen King churns out what seems like a book a month. Maybe I need more compelling villains: poor press registration just can’t hold a candle to Pennywise the evil clown…

The book will be available from the Adobe Press imprint of Peachpit Press, and, of course, all the usual purveyors of books.

I absolutely love the FOLDRite Template Master plug-in for InDesign. It’s a template creator and an educational resource, all rolled (well, folded) into one. It generates templates with correct panel sizes and an abundance of guidelines to keep you oriented. If you’ve done the math for a simple three panel fold-in brochure, you know it’s a bit of a challenge. But what about laying out much more complex pieces? Check out the FoldFactory site.

Not only the the FOLDRite Template Master plug-in generate complete templates, it provides extensive information about appropriate stocks for the form factor it’s created, along with advice about mailing issues and more.

And now you can have it for $99! If you build folded pieces, you really need this little gem. And check out “A Field Guide To Folding,” Trish Witkowski’s very readable and useful resource. If you want to dig deeper, consider her fantastic, encyclopedic instant classic, “FOLD: The Professional’s Guide To Folding.” At 850 pages, it will last you at least a week at the beach, but prepare you for a lifetime of first-class folding.

And since Trish is my Folding Hero, I may have to spring for the Trish Witkowski bobblehead doll, also available on the FoldFactory site. Way too cool!

I’m sure you’ve seen and heard the flap over the Air Force One NYC flyover photo-op. It may merit the creation of an entirely new word for “stupid.”

But don’t you think it’s a great opportunity for a Photoshop ad?

I’m an advocate of neatly-trimmed filenames — I use InterCapsAsVisualSeparators  or underscores_as_physical_separators. You should avoid using the special characters that are often used to represent ?/@#$*\&! profanity, not to be polite, but because some of these characters have special meaning to operating systems.

For example, a period at the start of a filename drives it to the top of a directory list on a Mac, but if that file is uploaded to a Unix server, it becomes invisible. Whee! We’re no longer limited to the old eight-dot-three strictures (eight alphanumeric characters, then a period, followed by the three-letter extension, for you young folks out there), but excessively long filenames are truncated by some systems, which could munge your file linking in an InDesign file. (Where’s that file named “Rhododendrons in the mountains in Spring New Final Image.psd”? Oh, it’s now named “Rhododendrons in the mo~.psd”. No wonder InDesign is confused.)

For the most part, long names and special characters become an issue only when jumping platforms, but I discovered today that Illustrator CS3 and CS4 won’t allow you to place a file with a forward slash (/) in the filename. It allows you to select the file, but when you click to “deposit” it in the Illustrator file, nothing happens: there’s no error message — it just sort of turns up its nose, digitally speaking. (It has no objection to a file with a backslash (\) in the name, however.)

Oddly, InDesign and QuarkXPress don’t care; just Illustrator.

This won’t affect you, however, because you’re conscientious about your file naming, aren’t you?