Tim Cole's InDesign BackChannel

As an addendum to the anchored frame tip, I also wanted to point out the usefulness of another under-used InDesign feature, Only Align First Line to Grid.

As the name implies, it's meant for those of use who are not gridphobic, and who want some flexibility in how our paragraphs work with a document grid.

In the case of this layout, the marginal notes need to align with the text to which they refer. However, the point size is smaller, and so is the leading of those paragraphs. In this situation, what I want to do in order to make the layout look good, I'm going to define the style for the marginal notes so that only first baseline of the paragraph aligns to the document grid, not the rest of the paragraph. This will enable me to keep the layout looking neat and precise, without forcing me to use too loose of a leading for the notes in order to make the first line align with the body grid.

Before the advent of this feature in InDesign, a fair bit of manual tweaking was required in order to create this effect. Now the Only Align First Line to Grid feature makes it easy.

As you can see in this screen shot, the first line aligns to the baseline grid, but the paragraph still uses its own leading setting for the rest of the paragraph.

You can apply the Only Aign First Line to Grid feature from the Style definition dialog box in the Indents and Spacing panel.

Applying this feature guarantees that my first baseline will snap accurately to the document grid, and enables me to speed up my layout process.

Posted by Tim Cole at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

InDesign's anchored frames feature is a life-saver for certain types of publishing jobs. If you're in a situation where you're creating the same type of anchored frame over and over again, then here's a tip that might help your work go much faster and save a lot of production time.

This tip is about creating a very useful keyboard shortcut that will enable you to insert a styled anchored frame automatically without having to go through multiple manual steps over and over again.

In this example, I'm laying out a book that contains a marginal outline that's supposed to serve as an aid to the reader. The marginal outline needs to track with the text, so that as the text is reflowed, the marginal outline frames adjust accordingly. This is exactly what InDesign's anchored frames are designed to do for you.

Here's a sample spread:

You can see that in a book that contains a lot of pages (in this case it was just under 400) there can be hundreds or even thousands of these marginal frames that need to be created and managed along with the flow of the body copy.

If I can streamline the process of creating, positioning and styling the text frames for my marginal outline, it would be a very, very good thing. Here's what I did:

• I created the first anchored marginal note frame from scratch manually. I did all the positioning, defined the paragraph style for the text, etc., and got the frame and placeholder text content looking exactly the way I wanted.
• I created an object style for the anchored frame that included the anchored frame settings, and the paragraph style settings (just for good measure).
• I then opened the InDesign Secrets/DTP Tools Keyboard Shortcuts palette. (Now, you don't have to have this free plug-in to manage your keyboard shortcuts, but you'd be barking mad not to use it if searching for, editing and managing keyboard shortcuts is something you do, if even only occasionally. Put another way, if you care enough about your productivity to edit your keyboard shortcuts, then you're missing out if you don't get this free plug-in.)
• In the shortcuts palette, enter the string "insert anchor", and you'll see that the plug-in has filtered out all but two of InDesign's available commands:

What I did was add a shortcut for the Text and Tables: Insert Anchored Object command. This will enable me to use a keyboard shortcut to insert a fully formatted anchored object. I used cntrl+option+i for the shortcut on my Mac, but you can assign whatever you want.

The next thing I do is set the defaults for inserting a new anchored frame. To do this you need to go to Object > Anchored Object > Insert (Defaults)... (if you don't see this command in the menu, it means you've got either an object or text selected, or an insertion point in some text; to escape your selection or insertion point, use cmd/cntrl + shift + A)

Set the object style for your anchored object in the dialog box. This, in turn, will set the rest of the options for the default anchored object for you.

Note that because I've chosen the Relative to Spine option, the anchored object will be inserted in the correct position whether I'm on a left or right-hand page.

Now I'm ready to begin constructing my anchored frames in my layout. I click an insertion point in the text in the line to which the frame needs to be anchored, and then use my keyboard shortcut to create the styled anchored object.

I'm now ready to drop the text into the frame. In this case the text for the marginal outline is provided for me, so I place that text out on my pasteboard, do a select all and apply the appropriate paragraph style. Then I open that text in the Story Editor, and tile my windows vertically. When i do that I'll see my Story Editor and document windows side by side like this:

Then what I do is drag and drop the marginal outline text into each new anchored frame as I go. I finish each marginal frame by using cmd/ctrl + option + C to fit the marginal frame to the text inside, because that's good document hygeine.

Using the combination of anchored frames, a keyboard shortcut to create the anchored frames, the Story Editor, and the drag and drop text feature, this job will progress with maximum speed. Anchored frames will enable me to make edits to the body text and have the marginal text frames automatically adjust they're layout positions, and the shortcut, Story Editor, and drag and drop will make the actual construction fly.

Posted by Tim Cole at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I answered a question the other day that came from the newspaper sector. The answer is worth repeating for the rest of the world, because it involves what I think is an under-used InDesign feature.

The question:

Is there a way to reduce the number of steps required to create a caption and go from raw text like this:

to a formatted frame and set of paragraphs like this?:

Trying to set this up using Nested Styles is far more trouble than it's worth. You can't create the appearance of different justification settings within a single paragraph without a fair bit of time consuming trickery that isn't too practical in a setting where productivity is a priority.

Fortunately, InDesign's Object Styles feature enables you to format both the text frame and the text inside of it at the same time. You can format both by simply applying the object style.

If you open an object style, you'll see that one of the properties you can specify is the paragraph style to be used on the text in the frame. You'll also notice, however, that there's an additional option sitting there under the paragraph style drop down menu called Apply Next Style.

This option enables you to leverage the Next Style setting in a paragraph style.

In this example, I'm using two different paragraph styles: photo credit, and caption. In the style definition for photo credit, I select caption for the Next Style setting.

When you do this you tell InDesign that if you're entering text with the style photo credit applied, when you hit the Return key, InDesign automatically switches the paragrah style to caption for the next paragraph you enter.

Creating this Next Style setting also enables me to apply multiple styles to paragraphs in a text frame via an object style. Because I've set caption as the Next Style in the defintion for my photo credit paragraph style, if I select photo credit for the Paragraph Style setting in the object style, I can then use the Apply Next Style checkbox to automatically apply the caption paragraph style to the second paragraph in that frame.

This is a great little feature to use to speed up the formatting of text frames that contain text that is formatted in a structured manner. In this example I can format both paragraphs in the photo credit and caption frame by just applying the object style to the frame.

This next example shows a text frame of ad copy in which three different paragraphs are formatted with different paragraph styles applied via an object style:

In this example there are three different paragrahs that require three different paragraph styles to be applied, one of them with some creative nesting of character styles as well.

By using the Next Style settings of a paragraph style in tandem with the Apply Next Style feature in an Object Style, I can--with one click--style all the ad copy and make it look like this:

Any time you have a series of styles that are applied in the same order, stepping from one style to another in a way that you can describe using the Next Style settings for paragraph styles, you can leverage the Apply Next Style feature to dramatically speed up your production.

Stimulated by David Blatner's comment on this post, here's some added detail about this last example:

The text in this frame is styled using 3 different paragraph styles applied in succession via an object style. Also notice that the decimal point in the number disappears. As David mentions, one of the ways to do this is to create a character style that's applied via a nested style and both sets the character width to 1 percent, and the stroke and fill to "none." Depending on the situation you could also apply a kern value as well.

Here is how the nested styles were set up for formatting the product price in the ad:

Posted by Tim Cole at 07:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

More interesting news regarding failure to launch and unexpect shut down problems with InDesign on Leopard: the crash logs continue to indicate that it is pre-release versions of the software (which are not made legally available to the public, I should hasten to add) that are having these compatibility problems on Leopard, not the release versions of InDesign CS3 (versions 5.0 and 5.0.1).

This casts an interesting light on a comment like this, sent to this blog earlier today:

Two superpowers: Apple and Adobe, and they cannot make the InDesign working on Leo. I am very dissapointed, very :((

It's usually very unfortunate when someone is dissappointed with us, but this is not one of those times. I think most users out there will regard it as rather obvious that Adobe feels no obligation whatsoever to make sure that pirated or otherwise (knowingly or unknowingly) illegally acquired and used pre-release software is updated to run on the latest operating systems (and I would strongly suspect that Apple has a similar attitude). One might go even further and say that even suggesting such a thing is very silly indeed.

So, if you're experiencing these problems (and dissappointed, very :(( ), do check the build number of your software as explained in the prior post. The commercially available release versions of InDesign CS3 appear to be doing just fine with Leopard based on what we're seeing in crash logs, bug reports, and feedback from both Adobe and Apple field reps and their customers.

That said, if you do have a legal version of CS3 (5.0 or 5.0.1) and have a problem, we are (as always) eager to hear from you via the crash log system and/or Adobe's Feature Request and Bug Report page.

Posted by Tim Cole at 07:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (55)