Everybody who enjoys the copious amount of tweaking necessary to make tabular data look beautiful in a page layout application, please raise your hand. If your hand is up, skip to John Nack’s blog.
Everybody else, read on, because I’m about to show you how to make short work of formatting tables in InDesign CS3. In fact, we’ll do it in less than 30 seconds.
It could be that you don’t have your web-cam on hand, or maybe last night was just rough enough that this morning you don’t want to broadcast your face to the world. Whatever the reason, there are times when you want to use Voice over IP (VOIP) in your Breeze meeting, but not the camera portion of the Camera and Voice pod. At the same time, you’d rather have a photo of yourself in the room to give the place a more personable feel instead of the generic icon shown in the AV pod when video is not being used.
Here’s a trick that’ll get you what you want…
500 separate paths or shapes is the maximum allowed when copying and pasting editable paths from Illustrator into InDesign. If a set of paths is too complex, ID will place the paths as an embedded EPS rather than editable vectors. When using Illustrator’s Live Trace feature, pay attention to the number of paths listed in the lower right just below the Preview button (number of anchor points is irrelevant…ID isn’t looking at those). 501 or higher will get embedded as an EPS. When you plan to copy and paste into ID, 500 is the magic number.
Thanks to Tim Cole for this tip.
Q: If text is stroked and then converted to outlines in InDesign CS the stroke just pushes too much into the text. Is there a way to avoid this?
A: When text is still text, ID is designed to draw the stroke on the outside of the path IF the text has a fill color applied. If you assign a fill color of none, then the stroke will draw centered on the path, just like any ID frame. When you convert the text to outlines, it’s now a frame, and so the stroke draws centered on the frame path. You can make the stroke draw outside the path (or inside the path) using the stroke alignment buttons on the stroke palette. Then it will look like stroked live text with a fill color.
Thank to Tim Cole for this info.
Day 1 has arrived and we are all very excited. Many people have visited both the Adobe and Macromedia web sites today, eager for information about what is happening with their favorite products. Upon arriving at either site, visitors will have noticed a few changes. If you are interested in the thought process behind the changes to the two web sites, please visit David Hatch’s blog where he describes the design goals for Day 1 and outlines the plans for the future of the sites. It’s a great read!
Tuesday, October 25, 2005, 1pm.
Hurricane Wilma, blowing up from the southwest, is supposed to rendezvous with some sort of weather front that will become what we here in the NY/NJ/CT tri-state area call a Nor’easter. The car service is due to pick me up at 1:45pm and deliver me to Newark Liberty International Airport’s terminal C where I’ll hop on a short Continental Airlines flight to Rochester.
I’m sitting here on the train to Rochester trying to figure out what voice, what feel, I want to give to my bio for this blog. “Should I,” I wondered, “use the standard blah, blah, boring author bio, or my shorter, but equally as boring speaker bio?” In the end I have decided to simply pick out a few points that I think sum me up the best and leave it at that. So here are the points in no particular order:
