Tim Cole's InDesign BackChannel

Apple's 10.5.4 update contains more fixes for the Nav Services crash problem that manifests itself most frequently in InDesign. It also contains a fix for the file corruption problem that occurs when saving files to a remote server.

The 10.5.3 update addressed Nav Services crashes associated with Spotlight, and 10.5.4 update contains a fix for more complex crashing scenarios that actually involve multiple OS libraries. Kudos to Apple for delivering this more ambitious fix. They've worked hard on getting it tested and out the door.

The 10.5.4 update appears to repair all of the Nav Services crashes that Adobe had been able to reproduce in it's testing labs. In our internal testing with 10.5.4 we have yet to be able to reproduce the Nav Services crashes that we were able to reproduce with 10.5.3, so we believe that this update should eliminate the most commonly occuring crash problems associated with Leopard.

It's possible that there might be other related issues that have yet to be identified.

If you continue to experience issues associated with Nav Services after installing Leopard v10.5.4, please continue to send us crash logs. Adobe also recommends the following workaround:

• Before opening an existing document, open a new document (initializing the open/new dialog for the app)
• Invoke the Place dialog (initializing this dialog with no contents to resolve), then cancel out of it

At this time there is still no fix for the cmd+h keyboard shortcut issue. In the interim, a limited workaround has been identified:

• Shut-down InDesign, then restart. CMD+H should work until the OS is re-booted.
  

Posted by Tim Cole at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

I was just in Auckland, New Zealand, for the InDesign Conference put on there by Mogo Media. David Blatner, Sandee Cohen, Mike McHugh, Michael Stoddart and myself had the privilege of participating in the three days worth of sessions on using InDesign and Creative Suite. Big kudos to Mogo and Martinho da Gloria for putting the event together. It was moko-riffic, and I learned what "jafa" means while I was there. Thank you Fraser.

Adobe Australia's Mike McHugh leads a break-out session on setting type in InDesign.

I had several requests to do a blog post on a transparency tip that I showed at the conference.

See-Thru Type

Creating something like this:

is easy. Set your type to the same color as the background, and apply a drop shadow.

Something like this, however, is a little more complex:

Here the text sits on a background image, and the text has not been converted to outlines with a cloned version of the image placed inside. This is live, editable text.

Here's an even more complicated example:

In this case, there's another image behind the crumpled paper background image, and it somehow shows thru both the paper image and the live type. How is this done?

Here are the steps for this specific scenario:

1. Set your type, give it whatever fill color you want (it doesn't matter), and apply a drop shadow.
2. Clone the type. Remove the drop shadow from the clone.
3. Group the two text frames together.
4. Direct select the top text frame...the clone with no drop shadow. In the Effects panel, select Text from the list of object properties, and then set the opacity of the text to "0". This will make the text in the cloned frame completely transparent.
5. Switch your selection from the top text frame in the group back to the entire group. If you don't do this, the tip won't work. Switching from a group element to the group is easy using the Select Container button on the Control panel. These buttons make it easy to navigate within grouped and nested objects in InDesign.
6. With the group selected, click on the Knock Out Group checkbox on the Effects panel.This will cause the clone text to knock out whatever is underneath it, even if it's transparent.  Note that the drop shadow for the text in the bottom frame remains, and now the crumpled paper background shows through the text.
7. OK, nice, but how do we get the image behind the crumpled paper to show thru? By just repeating our last step with a new group. Select the text frame group and the crumpled paper image and group them together.
8. With that new, nested group selected, click on the Knock Out Group checkbox in the Effects panel again. This will cause the cloned text to knock out both the text and the image below it in the new nested group, so that the other image behind the crumpled paper now shows thru the text.

There are lots of ways to use the ideas in this tip. The point of this post is to help you understand what the Knock Out Group feature can do for you when you're wanting to create interesting visual effects in your layout.

Posted by Tim Cole at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Publishing consultant Martinho Da Gloria (creator of the wonderfully useful Layout Zone script add-on for InDesign) has made another free script available for InDesign users: SelectionToPDF. As the name would lead one to believe, the script enables you to select one or more object in InDesign, and export just that selection to a PDF file, not the whole page on which it lives. Cari Jansen has a good blog post on the script with step-by-step instructions and screen shots.

Posted by Tim Cole at 01:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Nack has posted the latest information on the file saving issue in 10.5.3. You can find it here.

Posted by Tim Cole at 11:23 PM | Permalink