Here is the UI for Line Styles and GREP Styles:

These features give rise to a practical question: if a nested style, line style, and/or GREP style overlap, which formatting gets priority?

According to the composition engineer:

There can be ranges of text that have overlapping character styles
applied using GREP styles, line styles & nested styles all interacting.
If the style definitions don’t clash, they will ALL apply. For example,
if the first line is all-caps (line styles), and the first word is bold
(nested styles), then the first word will be both all-caps & bold.
Pretty trivial example, but they can stack. In the case where there is
a clash, the choice is pretty fixed:

Line-styles are lowest priority

Nested Styles are next

GREP styles are top priority

If you have multiple GREP expressions that match the same text, then the
styles will still stack, and the order of the expressions in the dialog
controls this.

A colleague here at Adobe shared this link with me, and I thought it was cool enough to post here. This is a rather wild example of how to make useful signage on 3-D surfaces.

Eureka Carpark Melbourne

There's a new product available now from FoldRite that's designed to take the worry and hassle out of setting up different types of folded documents in InDesign. I played with it a bit the other day, and I found it to be both a valuable and easy to use utility. If you create folded printed pieces, you'll definitely want to have a look at this one, because it just might eliminate a lot of headaches for you.

The product is available in two forms, a plug-in utility (available at a discounted price of $299 until July 31st), or as a hosted online service where you can construct and download a template for $9.99.

You can find an animated online demo here that shows you how the interface works.

You use the animated interface to select and (if necessary) modify the settings to create the template you need. FoldRite creates new InDesign file that contains the rules and marks required to construct your job.

The finished product is an InDesign template that's ready-made with the required fold guides and markings necessary for printing and folding your document.

One of the very cool features of the plug-in version is its ability to "update" (remodel, really) an existing document. Suppose you're half-way thru a project that you're not sure you've set up correctly. You can run the FoldRite plug-in on an already existing InDesign document to get the correct setup applied to your file.

We’re also noticing, however, that some users are still hitting a problem that was introduced by a VersionCue 3.1 update last year. For a subset of users, the update did not install the VersionCueUI framework. As a result, when invoking a NavServices dialog (i.e., place, relink, save as, etc.), they will crash--not because of a Leopard problem, but because their VersionCueUI framework was not updated.

If you've installed 10.5.4 and are still experiencing a crash when invoking the Place or other system navigation dialogs, then please review the information below.

We’ve had a Knowledge Base article on this VersionCue updater issue late 2007. We have sent the email below to users that have sent us crash logs in the past couple months:

You’ve recently submitted an InDesign crashlog for a crash you hit when attempting to open one of the system file dialogs (Open, Place, Save As, Export, or Relink). The cause of this crash is a failed installation of a VersionCue update. Here is a link to an Adobe support webpage that will give you some more detail and a solution:
http://www.adobe.com/go/kb402521

If you area also running MacOS 10.5 (aka Leopard), I highly recommend that you get Apple’s latest update, 10.5.4, which was posted yesterday. To get this, choose “Software Update...” under your Apple menu. This latest update fixes another common case of InDesign unexpectedly quitting when attempting to access these dialogs in Leopard.

Finally, earlier today, Adobe posted an update to InDesign CS3, version 5.0.3, which fixes several critical bugs in other areas of the product. To get this update, choose “Updates...” under the Help menu in InDesign CS3. Alternatively, you can download the 5.0.3 updater from: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3961

Thank you for submitting crashlogs. Although we cannot respond to every submission, we review them regularly and work to address the most serious issues.

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.
  

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.

The limited work-around:

For every new session of InDesign (session being: every time the Application gets shut-down/relaunched):

• 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
  
• Then you should be able to open an existing document and fix up links as necessary.