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From the Editor

Editorial Editor in Chief Terri Stone, tstone@indesignmag.com Editorial Director David Blatner, david@indesignmag.com Senior Editor Sandee Cohen, sandee@indesignmag.com Contributing Writers Diane Burns, Conrad Chavez, Renée Dustman, Mordy Golding, Chuck Green, Jamie McKee De s i g n & Te c h n o l o g y Design Rufus Deuchler, www.deuchler.net Jennifer Steele, Steele Design Business Director of Advertising & Marketing Jeff Lalier Contact Information www.indesignmag.com/contact.php Subscription Information www.indesignmag.com/purchase.php Published by CreativePro.com, a division of PrintingForLess. com. Copyright ©2009 CreativePro.com. All rights reserved. Reproduction and redistribution prohibited without approval. For more information, contact permissions@indesignmag.com. InDesign Magazine is not endorsed or sponsored by Adobe Systems Incorporated, publisher of InDesign. InDesign is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated. All other products and services are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners and are hereby acknowledged.

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Why subscribe to this magazine? After all, Adobe InDesign is easy to use. And Adobe has an online Help Center if you do have a specific question. There’s no need for a magazine subscription, right? Here’s Why ❱❱ Manuals tell you what a program does. We tell you how to use the program for real work. ❱❱ You may not know there’s a better way. You can’t look for an answer in the Help Center when you don’t even know you have a question. ❱❱ Dozens of heads are better than one. Our articles are written by top authors and leading industry experts from diverse corners of the InDesign community. ❱❱ We review other programs that InDesign users are interested in. You’ll know what’s a smart investment and what’s a waste. ❱❱ Because we’re a PDF-only publication, one click on any underlined word takes you to a corresponding Web page or e-mail address. We also attach relevant files to support particular articles and even embed

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movies when appropriate! ❱❱ Every regular issue includes InDesigners, a picture-packed profile of interesting projects recently published. ❱❱ Every regular issue also keeps you on top of industry and product news, upcoming events, and contact info for InDesign User Groups around the world. ❱❱ Regular issues, which come out every two months, average 60 full-color pages that you can output to an inkjet or laser printer. I hope you enjoy this sampler, and that you share the download link with your friends and coworkers. Whether they’re in a bustling city or a remote cabin in the woods with just a dog for an office mate (not that I would know anything about that), InDesign Magazine will keep them in touch with a worldwide network of the brightest experts and most interesting users. And I can’t imagine a better reason to subscribe than that.—Terri Stone, editor in chief

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Table of Contents

WoodWing Smart Image Create your caption and credit text frames...

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4 Color Me Simple Chuck Green lets you in on nine simpleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;but super-effectiveâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; ways to work with color in InDesign.

11 Transparency: No Longer Forbidden Fruit As Mordy Golding and RenĂŠe Dustman explain, now you can reap the rewards of transparency effects without fearing that thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll be hell to pay at the printers. 17 InTips: More than Meets the Eye to Anchored Objects Diane Burns proves that anchored objects can be useful in unexpected waysâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and even fun!

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21 InDesigner: Rob Schultz Terri Stone interviews Macworld magazineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Art Director. 26 InQuestion Sandee Cohen answers burning InDesign questions. 29 InDepth: Make the Align Panel Your Ally Conrad Chavez shows you how to line up and space out using InDesignâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Align panel. 34 InDepth: From InDesign to a Flash SWF File Sandee Cohen demonstrates how easy interactivity can be. 39 InReview: ProperFraction/ProperFraction Pro Jamie McKee recommends an automatic fraction formatter. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a must for anyone who cares about proper typesetting.

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Simple!

Color Me

By Chuck Green

Nine simple tips for using color in InDesign

InDesign lets you do wonderful things with color. But despite the program’s strength and depth, many of the techniques are actually quite simple— if you remember them. Think of this article as a refresher: nine super-simple ways to use color in InDesign.

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Affordable. Virtual. Versatile.

1. Pull a Foundation Color Every design has a visual starting point, some hint of an idea that kick-starts the creative process. It might be a typeface that captures the mood you want to convey, a memory of another layout that used lines to segregate text from images, or something more tangible, such as the physical size or shape of the media. One proven strategy that enhances visual continuity is to start with a foundation color—one color that anchors all the others. The trick is to choose it from one of the document’s primary images. Sample the color from a pervasive hue or tone in the image and then choose the other elements of the layout to fit the same family (Figure 1). To find and sample a color, place the image on your page and zoom in on the range of colors you want to sample (set View > Display Performance to High Quality Display so you see as much detail as possible). Make sure no object is selected on the page (even the image), or else the next step will change its stroke or fill color. Select the Eyedropper tool from InDesign’s Tool panel and load it by clicking it on the color. Now right-click (or Control-click on a Mac with a one-button mouse) on the Fill selector and choose Add to Swatches. 2. Dig for a Theme Some designers believe that certain colors trigger specific emotions, even physical reactions. In the book Color Harmony, Hideaki Chijiiwa says, “Our eye instinctively prefers bright, vivid colors; dull colors

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Get top-notch Adobe training from the experts in your PJs! Attend live, interactive training for Adobe Creative Suite and Adobe Technical Communication Suite in a virtual classroom led by a Top 5 Adobe Certified Instructor—all from the comfort of your home or office. Figure 1: I sampled the blue sky in the photo and repeated it in various hues throughout the brochure.

are annoyingly vague and diffuse.” And in the Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color, Leatrice Eiseman reports that the “pituitary gland really springs into action when it sees red.” The problem with such broadbased views, no matter how well-documented, are that they apply to a certain set of circumstances, for a certain audience, at a certain place and time. But as long as you keep that caveat in mind, you can enjoy some great online tools for building, discussing, sharing, and employing palettes and their themes. Adobe’s kuler.adobe.com is a Web-hosted application with a comprehensive set of tools for experimenting with your ideas and a forum for reviewing and sharing themes with others. Kuler and many other color-generation tools and sites let you save your theme as an Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase) file and import it into InDesign.

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You can also use kuler to build a set of colors based on the foundation color you picked in Tip #1: 1. Find the CMYK or RGB values for that color. 2. Open the kuler site, click Create, and then type those color values into the fields below the Base Color swatch. 3. Click one of the Rules listed at the top of the screen, such as Complementary or Triad.

4. Click the Save button to save your theme. You must be signed in with your AdobeID to do this. Setting up an AdobeID account is free. 5. Click the Download button to save the generated swatches as an .ase file to your computer. 6. In InDesign’s Swatches panel menu, choose Load Swatches, and choose this .ase file. The whole process is a bit clunky, but it takes less time than it sounds like it would. Colourlovers.com (Figure 2) offers similar tools, plus beautifully illustrated posts about color use and trends. I particularly like to pour over the palettes of the popular magazines and Web sites listed under the Trends tab.

Figure 2: Colourlovers.com and kuler are all about color.

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3. Build a Client Color Swatch Library A typical graphic standards manual includes the palette of colors the original designer specified for reproducing an organization’s logo. It ensures that no one needs to guess at matching the original color values. You can easily translate that idea to InDesign by creating a client-specific color swatch library. Instead of limiting your palette to just the logo, I suggest you take a few minutes to expand it to include a secondary palette that covers all the other colors used in a particular client’s publications. To build a custom color swatch library, display the Swatches panel (F5) and choose New Color Swatch from the panel’s menu. Disable the Name with Color Value checkbox and give each color a specific name so your client’s colors are set apart from the

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Figure 3: Giving your coworkers and clients premade swatches ensures color consistency.

others (Figure 3). You might also consider adding solid (spot) colors and RGB equivalents of the same colors for configuring future documents for various methods of output. When you have all the colors loaded into the Swatches panel, choose Save Swatches from the panel menu. After you save the Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase) file, you can import it into other InDesign documents, or even into Illustrator and Photoshop. Here’s one more method for making a “library” of colors that you can add to a document quickly: Create a number of small objects (frames or lines—one for each color swatch you want to save), and apply each color from the Swatches panel to an object. Now group those objects and use File > Export to save them to disk as a snippet file with your client’s name in it. The next time you need those colors, place or drag the snippet file into your InDesign document. The colors appear immediately in the panel. You can delete those “dummy” objects and the colors remain.

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4. Find and Use a Hardcopy Swatch The only way to achieve true, consistent color is to begin at the end. If your project will be printed, you can’t trust what you see onscreen. You have to find a color sample printed on a device similar to the device you plan to output from (e.g., a printing press versus a color laser printer), printed on stock similar to the stock you’ll use (e.g., coated versus uncoated stock), and then match the color formula of the sample. To discern the color formula, you can take a color reading with a gadget such as Pantone’s Color Cue, or you can use a printed deck. The Pantone Color Bridge Set consists of two fan decks printed with solid color inks, one on coated stock and one on uncoated stock. The decks show a swatch of the Pantone solid ink color alongside the closest process color (CMYK) equivalent; it also includes the RGB and HTML formulas. The Pantone system is the gold standard of color matching; it’s also a disheartening reminder that many of the most

Figure 4: Pantone released the Goe system in 2007. While it has several advantages over the Pantone Matching System, many printers aren’t yet equipped for Goe.

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vibrant inks cannot be reproduced using standard CMYK. The newer Goe system (Figure 4) has greater range, but many print shops don’t yet have the inks necessary to match the Goe swatches. The Trumatch Colorfinder offers another system of two decks that can be reproduced using nothing more than standard CMYK. These guides are logically organized into 50 hue families in the order of the color spectrum, with tints and shades of each hue. There are also countless color formula books and other types of gadgetry for matching real printed samples to the digital realm. My favorite is David E. Carter’s The Big Book of Color in Design, which pictures hundreds of print and packaging examples along with swatches of the primary palette colors and their CMYK formulas. Once you have a hardcopy swatch, record the formula. InDesign includes color swatch libraries that correspond with the Pantone, Trumatch, and several other color matching systems. To specify a color, choose New Color Swatch from the Swatches panel menu and select the name of the library you’re using from the Color Mode pop-up menu. 5. Choose the Best Black A typical process-color job uses at least three versions of black (Figure 5): Registration black (C=100, M=100, Y=100, K=100). Reserve this for printing the marks required to register the four printing plates on the printing press. Inexperienced users are forever mistaking Registration for [Black] in the Swatches panel, causing havoc on press.

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Figure 5: You need different “blacks” for registration marks, black text, and solid black areas. The Appearance of Black pane of the Preferences dialog box lets you control how these display.

To banish Registration black in the live areas of your document, close all your documents, open the Swatches panel, and drag the Registration swatch to the bottom of the list, away from [Black]. Any change like this that you make while no documents are open will be reflected in all documents you create from then on. Process black (C=0, M=0, Y=0, K=100). This is the K in CMYK. (The etymological consensus is that the “K” stands for “key,” as in “key line.”) It’s also the black you get with the swatch labeled [Black]. Generally speaking, use process black for thin lines and strokes, text, and any other small, delicate elements. However, note that straight black ink often appears charcoal gray when used in very large type and wide areas. Rich black (C=varies, M= varies, Y= varies, K=100). Use this version to make black blacker. It’s especially important for reproducing large areas of black; i.e., larger than a standard coin. Generally, rich black is made by combining a plusor-minus 50-percent mix of cyan, magenta, and yellow with 100-percent of black. (For example, you might use a CMYK mix of 30/20/20/100.)

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The thing to remember is that you need to match your rich black formula to the output device you plan to use. What works best on one device does not necessarily work on another. If your final output device is a color laser printer, you can easily get away with 100-percent of all four colors. On newsprint, you want less ink; a sheetfed press can support more ink. The folks who run the presses can tell you exactly what rich black formula works best with their equipment. Nine times out of ten you’ll hit it right without asking; it’s the tenth time that makes good communication so critical to producing great work. 6. Use a Fifth Color You may have noticed that reproducing a bright, saturated orange is simply impossible when you use nothing other than CMYK inks. The sad truth is there are many colors that your eyes can see, and that a

Figure 6: Eight-color presses are fairly common pieces of equipment.

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computer monitor can display, that even the highestquality printing press cannot reproduce using the four process colors. If you must match a particular color or you want to add a specialty ink, such as a fluorescent or metallic, the solution is to use solid color ink (also called a spot color), either on its own or as a supplement to process colors. For the uninitiated, a “solid” color refers to the physical color of an ink—if you opened a can of Pantone 1505 you’ll find bright orange syrup. A “process” color is an optical illusion—what your eye perceives when layers of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black tints are sandwiched together. (For more on specialty inks, see the article “Somewhere Over the CMYK Rainbow” in the December 2007/January 2008 issue.) Adding a fifth color requires a six- or eight-color commercial printing press (Figure 6). To print both process and spot colors, the sheet is printed in turn by cyan, magenta, yellow, and black rollers, then by other rollers loaded with additional spot colors—for example, CMYK plus up to four more colors or varnishes on an eight-color press. 7. Choose the Proper Paper Is it just me, or has the proliferation of inexpensive process printing on white coated stock killed some of our enthusiasm for experimenting with paper? Paper types and finishes change color (intentionally and unintentionally) like no other aspect of a design. Uncoated paper sucks up ink and mutes color; coated sheets hold more ink on the surface and produce brighter, crisper images. Paper color can

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Figure 7: Pick a paper, any paper!

warm and cool, simulate the look and feel of materials such as linen and leather, and provide large areas of bold color without drenching a page in ink (Figure 7). To demonstrate the effect color has on the printed page, open one of your color documents in InDesign and choose View > Proof Setup > Custom. Choose an output profile (such as one of the uncoated profiles in the Device to Simulate pop-up menu) and turn on the Simulate Paper Color checkbox. When you click OK, you see what the colors look like on the paper of the simulated device. It’s a reminder of the technical and aesthetic importance of paper choice. The large paper manufacturers are happy to provide designers with sample books and printed examples of the papers they produce in the hope that you will specify their paper for your next project. Call your printer or a local paper distributor and see what they have to offer!

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8. Add Depth with Transparency Transparency is as close to magic as InDesign gets. Used creatively it can make heavy things light, bold things graceful, and simple things complex. To adjust the opacity of an object, select the object, right-click (control+click), choose Transparency from the Effects submenu, and enter a value in the Opacity field (Figure 8). (Note too that you can select Stroke or Fill and add different Opacity values for each.) While you’re there, take a minute to turn on the Preview checkbox and to check and uncheck the list to see what other transparency effects are possible.

Figure 9: This threeimage series shows how the simple act of changing opacity can radically shift an image’s center of attention.

9. Crop to Change the Color Focus Color often plays a key role in forming the focal point of an image—the visual center of attention. One interesting way to control color is to emphasize (or deemphasize) areas of an image. Changing that emphasis also addsw to the layout’s visual interest. The image communicates without words and guides the reader from element to element. To begin, place an image, select it, and choose Copy from the Edit menu. Change the opacity of the original image to 50 percent and choose Edit > Paste in Place. Now you can simply use the Selection tool to drag the handles of the top frame in from the edge until you have changed the focus—the result is a picture within a picture (Figure 9).

Chuck Green is the author of five design books, including The InDesign Ideabook and Design-It-Yourself: Graphic Workshop. He is the host of ideabook.com, a popular center for the exchange of print and online communication ideas, and the principal of Logic Arts Corporation, a design and marketing firm.

Figure 8: Look at the blue box in both versions of this page to see what transparency can do. Solid, the box is too heavy. But make it semi-transparent, and you not only lighten things up, you add a bit of mystery.

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Manage text changes in InDesign and InCopy

CtrlChanges is a plug-in for InDesign and InCopy users that require a clear and accurate solution to a common problem, to visually be able to see and manage changes in the document.

CtrlChanges tracks and displays all text changes performed in the document- right there, in the Layout View! The screenshot also shows the management panel in CtrlChanges Pro, with full step functionality, filtering and sorting etc.

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By Mordy Golding and Renée Dustman

E R P R C N T A SA N Y

No Longer the Forbidden Fruit

Now your designs can reap the rewards of transparency effects without fear of repercussion. Long, long ago, Adobe gave us transparency in InDesign version 2, and it was good. Not great, but at least a step in the right direction. Designers reveled in the ability to add drop shadows and feathered edges to objects directly in InDesign. It wasn’t until those early adopters tried to print documents with those new effects—and often failed—that they realized transparency could be problematic. With each subsequent version of InDesign, Adobe has added ways to enhance documents with transparency, making it even more enticing. The Flattener Preview panel debuted in the first Creative Suite. In CS2, Adobe improved compatibility with

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native Photoshop and Illustrator files. And in CS3, there are a host of new effects, such as gradient and directional feathers and inner and outer glows. (You’ll find these and more on the Effects panel, known as the Transparency palette in earlier versions). There’s one thing that hasn’t changed, however, and that’s the need to flatten transparency for output to a PostScript device. Until the day comes when flattening is no longer required (in fact, that day is here in some spots already, as we explain in the sidebar “Workflow Of The Future”), it’s essential for everyone involved to understand why flattening may be necessary and how it doesn’t have to spoil the good looks of your original documents.

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TRANSPARENCY

Figure 1: Transparency is behind the simplest effects, such as the drop shadow in this layout.

Flattening Isn’t a Four-Letter Word Anyone who has used transparency in InDesign knows what it can do for a layout. Transparency breathes life into a design; it adds shadow and light, depth and dimension (Figure 1). By definition, transparency admits the passage of light and permits a clear view of objects beyond. The term flattening is rather obscure, however. To better understand the purpose of flattening, let’s start with a simple fact: Transparency requires flattening when saving or exporting to a format that

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Workflow of the Future doesn’t support it (such as PDF 1.3, EPS and DCS) or printing to a PostScript raster image processor (RIP). Here’s another fact: Once you’ve flattened transparency, it’s no longer “live”—you can’t edit it. Many issues surround transparency because sometimes the flattening process produces unwanted artifacts that don’t appear in the original art. After flattening, parts of lines or other vector objects might rasterize; portions of text might look chunky or pixilated; there might be noticeable shifts in color between raster and vector elements (called stitching); or you might get unwanted white boxes surrounding transparent elements. These ill affects of flattening are all unacceptable, but they’re also explainable and preventable. At this point, you may be thinking, “I just won’t use transparency in my documents. Then I won’t have to worry about the affects of flattening.” Easier said than done. You might, for example, place a native .ai Illustrator or .psd Photoshop file that contains live transparency into your document. And if you avoid transparency entirely, you’ll miss out on opportunities to take your designs to the next level.

Tip

Always ask your print shop what PostScript level they’re using to output an InDesign document before you submit it. Some shops prefer that you submit InDesign files as PDF/X files, which are flattened; while others may prefer you to submit an unflattened InDesign or PDF 1.4 (or later) file.

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Imagine a time when flattening transparency in PDF files is no longer necessary for print. The inherent issues associated with flattening are nothing more than distant memories, and designers and print vendors work harmoniously in a PDF workflow. For some, this is a dream already come true thanks to Adobe’s latest PDF raster image processor (RIP) technology. The Adobe PDF Print Engine is a relatively new printing platform being incorporated by OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) into printing products, such as RIPs, previewing and proofing software, and workflow systems. The Adobe PDF Print Engine allows PDF documents to remain unconverted and independent of printing devices throughout the print workflow. There’s no need to flatten transparency at any stage—previewing, proofing, or printing. The Adobe PDF Print Engine uses JDF (Job Definition Format) to capture and control process information. (For more on JDF, see the article on page 24.) This makes it possible to decide at the last minute where to print a job, eliminating scheduling delays or the need to rework the file to accommodate a different device. The RIP applies trapping and other settings specified in the JDF file, and the PDF file remains flexible throughout the process. This may sound too good to be true, but Sells Printing Company in New Berlin, Wisconsin, offers proof. Sells staff have been working closely with Adobe InDesign since prior to version 1.0’s release. When Sells decided to upgrade to the Kodak Prinergy 4.0, the Adobe PDF Print Engine came as part of the package deal. Sells has been using the new workflow system since August 2007 and now prefers it to a standard PostScript workflow. “We liked the results more and more,” says James Wamser, Adobe certified instructor and print specialist at Sells, “and now we love it.” In both new and traditional PDF workflows, Wamser says they encourage their customers to submit InDesign CS3 files as PDF/X-4 standard PDF files. Sells recommends that customers using InDesign CS2 create Adobe PDF 1.4-compatible files for the live transparency component. In any case, it’s important to ask your printer how they prefer you to submit PDF files. Wamser also recommends sending test files.

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Tip

TRANSPARENCY Behind the Scenes InDesign uses its own flattening technology to convert transparency to a form PostScript understands. It does this by cutting apart overlapping areas of transparent objects—including text and graphics that interact with transparency—and rendering them opaque. For example, where two transparent objects overlap, the flattening process breaks the art into several distinct pieces: the two objects and all the areas that overlap (Figures 2 and 3). Although this creates an opportunity for error, you can achieve perfect results every time with the correct flattener settings and careful page layout.

Figure 2: Artwork with transparency applied.

Figure 3: Flattening cuts apart the affected areas and renders them opaque.

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Predetermine Results The Transparency Flattener in InDesign determines how the application will flatten transparency. It’s a tool of power—and possible peril. Always discuss flattening with your print vendor, and don’t take on this task unless given consent and the proper specifications. Choose Edit > Transparency Flattener Presets to take a closer look. Select a preset in the Presets window to view its settings in the Preset Settings window (Figure 4). There are three default presets: ❱❱ Low Resolution: Rasterization occurs when necessary and at a suitable resolution for desktop printing. InDesign converts to outlines strokes and text that interact with transparency. ❱❱ Medium Resolution: Rasterization occurs when necessary and at a suitable resolution for laser printing. InDesign clips complex regions. ❱❱ High Resolution: InDesign rasterizes vector objects only if absolutely essential and at a resolution suitable for offset printing.

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Adobe recommends working with native file formats to preserve any live transparency in files you place in InDesign. This workflow not only lets you continue editing transparency effects in placed graphics, it can also improve final results.

You can’t edit these default presets, but you can create your own when necessary. Simply click the New button (Figure 5) to access the following six options: ❱❱ Raster/Vector Balance: This slider controls how liberal InDesign is about rasterizing complex regions (where there are many overlapping objects affected by transparency). A number closer to 0 gives InDesign more freedom to rasterize at will, resulting in faster print times. A number closer to 100 restricts rasterization but increases print time. Set at 100, InDesign doesn’t rasterize objects simply for performance reasons. In cases where files are

Figure 4: You can choose one of three default Transparency Flattener presets or create your own.

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Figure 5: When you create a new Transparency Flattener preset, you can specify how InDesign flattens transparency.

taking extremely long to print (or crashing the RIP altogether), however, consider adjusting this slider to a slightly lower setting. Note that InDesign also rasterizes regions when there is no way to preserve their appearance in vector form—such as when a photo with a soft drop shadow overlaps a background. The drop shadow is a raster effect and the background is a vector object. The only way to preserve the effect in PostScript is to rasterize the background with the drop shadow. ❱❱ Line Art and Text Resolution: InDesign either converts to outlines or rasterizes line art and text affected by transparency. To ensure quality output, set the appropriate resolution for the intended output device. The High Resolution preset, for example, specifies a resolution setting of 1200 ppi—appropriate for commercial printing. ❱❱ Gradient and Mesh Resolution: InDesign uses this setting to rasterize elements that can afford to be set at a lower resolution. Gradients and meshes (the resolution of drop shadows and glow effects) are continuous tone, so they don’t require a resolution as

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high as line art or text. In fact, anything twice the line screen for the intended device is probably getting thrown out anyway. The High Resolution preset uses a value of 300 ppi—typical for commercial printing. ❱❱ Convert All Text to Outlines: Rasterized text can look a bit chunkier than regular vector text. To compensate, you can turn on this option to convert all text to outlines, giving a consistent, chunkier look to all of your text—not just the text that interacts with transparency. ❱❱ Convert All Strokes to Outlines: Similar to the previous setting, this compensates for disparity between vector and rasterized strokes by converting all strokes to outlines. ❱❱ Clip Complex Regions: Raster images are always rectangular in shape, which means it’s possible for innocent bystanders to become rasterized simply because they intercept a complex area. More often than not, this results in stitching or noticeable white boxes and color shifts (primarily when output on a medium-resolution device). The Clip Complex Regions option limits this by creating a clipping mask around rasterized complex regions, so the rectangular-shaped raster is masked by the vector outline of the object. This makes for even more complex files and can result in longer print times. Once you’ve finished tweaking these flattening options, name your new preset and click OK. The new preset displays in the Transparency Flattener Presets dialog box. Or, you can load external preset files, which some print shops supply. The presets in this dialog box are also in the Preset pop-up list on the Advanced panel, in both the Print and Export To PDF dialog boxes.

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The best way to preserve the appearance of text is to position it on its own layer above all other layers. This prevents the text from being converted to outlines or rasterized during flattening.

Seeing Is Believing The easiest way to tell if there’s transparency in an InDesign document is to look at the Pages panel. Pages with transparency effects display a small checkerboard pattern icon just below their page icons (Figure 6). (Versions earlier than CS3 display a checkerboard pattern on the page icons.) That’s great, but how do you know if a layout has complex regions or text that will be rasterized? InDesign has something called the Flattener Preview panel. Simply choose Window > Output > Flattener Preview and you can see how InDesign will flatten transparency in your document. This preview palette is more than just a handy way of seeing what InDesign is doing. It’s also a tool you can use to help make adjustments to your files or your flattener settings for better results—all before you spend time and money printing film or plates. You can

Figure 6: Pages with transparency on them display a small checkerboard pattern icon just below their corresponding page icons in the Pages panel.

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Figure 7: Use the Flattener Preview panel to see where you might need to adjust your layout to prevent unwanted flattening.

preview the following in the Flattener Preview panel: ❱❱ Rasterized Complex Regions ❱❱ Transparent Objects ❱❱ All Affected Objects ❱❱ Affected Graphics ❱❱ Outlined Strokes ❱❱ Outlined Text ❱❱ Raster-fill Text and Strokes ❱❱ All Rasterized Regions For example, choosing Transparent Objects from the Highlight list shows you the location of all transparent objects on the active page or spread. To see which elements will be affected by transparency, choose All Affected Objects from the Highlight list, and then choose the preset you want InDesign to use to output the file from the Preset list (Figure 7). If you choose All Rasterized Regions and see that certain text is affected by a nearby or overlapping transparent object, you can make an adjustment in your layout to avoid the text from being rasterized or converted to outlines (Figure 8). And if you see that InDesign is being too liberal about rasterizing complex regions, you can make an adjustment to the Raster/

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Tip Figure 8: You can preview whether text will be rasterized or converted to outlines and then do something about it.

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Other useful tools are Overprint Preview (View menu) and Separations Preview panel (Window > Output > Separations Preview). Both enable you to proof documents onscreen to see if flattening will have an adverse effect on the colors in your document.

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TRANSPARENCY Vector Balance setting in a the custom preset that will be used to output the file. Choose Transparency Flattener Presets from the Flattener Preview panel menu to make quick and easy adjustments to a custom presets. Know Thy Print Standards As we mentioned earlier, the PostScript level and PDF compatibility of the intended output device play a huge part in how transparency is handled in your InDesign documents. All PDFs are not created equal! If you intend to export your InDesign document to PDF, make sure that you select the correct standard and/or compatibility option in the Export To PDF

Tip

Before printing or exporting an InDesign document, look at the Edit > Transparency Blend Space menu and make sure the correct blend space is selected.

dialog box (Figure 9). PDF/X-4:2007 is the latest standard and Acrobat 8 (PDF 1.7) is the latest format (available only in CS3). PDF/X-4 supports transparency in addition to everything its predecessors support, such as spot color and color management. Acrobat 5 (PDF 1.4) and later also supports transparency. However, not every print shop has upgraded its equipment to these latest standards and formats, which is why we’re having this conversation in the first place. Ask your print shop for the preferred standard and format. And In the End Designing with transparency lets you create layouts that used to be difficult to implement, allowing you to save valuable time while being even more creative. Now that you know how transparency works and what’s necessary to use it in your workflow, give it a try. You’ll be happy you did.

MORDY GOLDING is the author of Real World Adobe Illustrator CS3 and SAMS Teach Yourself Adobe Creative Suite 3 All in One. You can find Mordy online at his blog or at www.mogo-media.com. RENÉE DUSTMAN is a freelance writer and graphic designer and the former editor in chief of Inside Adobe InDesign. Figure 9: The Standard and Compatibility options play a major role in how transparency is handled in your documents.

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InTips: Anchored Objects

Anchored Objects: More Than Meets the Eye Anchored Objects can be used in ways that aren’t always so obvious

Figure 1:The Anchored Object dialog box has two key control areas, one for the object, the other for the position to which you want the object to anchor.

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By Diane burns We all know that InDesign’s Anchored Object feature can be useful. After all, the ability to position objects that move with text is essential in certain layouts, and can save hours of manual re-positioning. And since InDesign CS2, anchored objects can be the more familiar inline object, anchored to the baseline of text, or can be moved anywhere on a page with custom positioning. Anchored objects are easy to create. Simply click on any object using the Selection Tool. Cut or Copy the object to the Clipboard, then click your text cursor next to the text you wish to associate the object with, and Paste. You can then use the controls in the Anchored Objects dialog box to position the object (Object > Anchored Object > Options). The dialog box for custom positioning of anchored objects can be a little intimidating at first, but it’s really pretty straightforward (Figure 1). In the top section of the dialog box, choose the point on the object you wish to use as a reference point. In the bottom section of the dialog box, choose where you want the object to be anchored, relative to the text or the page itself. Also, take into consideration whether or not you have Relative to Spine checked or not.

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You can also just grab the object after it’s pasted and position it visually. However, we’ve found this doesn’t always set up the most efficient relationship in the dialog box. It can be better to position the object visually, and then open the Anchored Objects dialog box to make sure the correct side of the object, and where you’re anchoring it, is chosen. Once you’ve set up the position of the anchored object, the information can be stored as part of an Object Style, making it easy to re-apply the settings. And, if you lose track of where the object is anchored to, simply turn on Show Text Threads; a dashed line will appear from the Anchored Object to its anchor point. The ability to anchor objects in a custom position can be a very powerful production tool. Most of us, though, think of this feature only in its classic application, where images that need to run in a margin alongside text are anchored to the appropriate word, most commonly used in books and reference publications of various kinds. However, there are other, less obvious situations where the feature can come in handy. We’ve whipped up a few examples of these in the next pages to give you some ideas of new ways to use this oft-forgotten feature.

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InTips: Anchored Objects

Lil’ Bits ‘o Fun Ingredients 1 headline 1 set of Paragraph Rules, above & below 2 anchored shapes 1 chair to sit in, after viewing results! This real-world recipe involves a trick with both paragraph rules and anchored objects. The publication has a heading at the top of every page, and every couple of pages the heading changes. The heading contains a box drawn around the text, with two small dingbat squares on either side. The box around the word is drawn with two paragraph rules, of course, using the settings shown here. Since InDesign allows the Rule Below to slide under the text, but on top of the Rule Above, the two can be combined to appear to draw a box around the text (see Volume 1, Issue 4, February/March 2005 for more cool tricks with Paragraph Rules). But the magic that keeps the small dingbat characters attached is achieved by making them Anchored Objects. The dingbat characters are cut or copied into the Clipboard, then pasted immediately in front of and behind the text, thus anchoring them on either side of the word. Once the dingbats are positioned correctly you can double-click the word, edit it, and everything is still perfectly lined up. Delicious!

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Figure 2: Paragraph rules and anchored objects are used to make this heading easy to edit.

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InTips: Anchored Objects

Setting a Splendid Table Ingredients Your favorite table of text or images, or both Anchored object Imagination to taste This recipe comes from Michael Murphy, creator of the excellent podcast, The InDesigner. It uses anchored objects to give a really nice finish to tables. In the example above, small triangles are created that are

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the color of the adjacent cell. They’re then anchored to the beginning of the first word in the next cell, and positioned to the left of the word. This way, it appears the triangle is part of the previous cell. In the second example, a similar technique is used, this time employing a circle, again anchored to the beginning of the first word in the cell, but positioned down and to the left of the word, so it falls in the intersection of the cells. In both of these examples, an object style can be created that sets the positioning

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correctly, or you can simply select the object once it’s anchored and copy and paste throughout the table. Try different shapes to give the look you like best. Simply delectable! In the final example, images are anchored to the text in table headings. The nice thing about this technique is if this row is set as a table heading (Table > Convert Rows > To Header), the images repeat, too, along with the text headings as the table runs from frame to frame or page to page.

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InTips: Anchored Objects

Column Topper Ingredients An alphabetic list Letters for column topping Anchored Object options The real key to thinking outside the box—or frame— when working with anchored objects is to understand the different orientations of your layout an object can be anchored to. Most of us think of anchoring an object to the edge of a text frame, but you can also anchor an object relative to a specific column, margin or even the page itself. Because the settings give a lot of flexibility, it’s easy to set up all kinds of anchor relationships that can be big time savers. Here we show a simple alphabetic list with headings at the top of each column where name in the next letter begin. Because the heading letters are anchored to a specific name, the letter will travel appropriately, regardless of how the list is edited (assuming, of course, the name to which the heading letter is anchored is not deleted). Even if the list is changed to a different number of columns, the headings still line up, right where they’re supposed to be. A tasty little topper, indeed!

Figure 3: Anchoring the column headings keeps them in the correct position, even when the number of columns is changed.

Diane Burns is an Authorized Adobe Instructor and president of TechArt International. She is also a frequent contributor to InDesign Magazine and speaker for the InDesign Conferences.

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InTips: Anchored InDesigners: Rob Objects Schultz

Rob Schultz Position: Contact:

Art Director, Macworld magazine www.macworld.com

Rob Schultz has been a publication designer since college. Now the Art Director at Macworld magazine, he also has stints at Computer Gaming World, PC/ Computing, and T3 magazines under his belt. How would you describe your style? I love type and composition. The tone and feeling of just about any story can be evoked through the use of type and different type treatments. It’s my job to draw a person into a story, and I try to do that with bold, interesting type treatments. A strong type treatment should be able to stand on its own if necessary—it shouldn’t need art or photography to prop it up. The art and type design should complement each other. When I compose a headline treatment, I look at it as a combination of shapes—similar to how someone might compose an abstract painting. It comes down to how all of the different pieces work together. I find inspiration on the web, television, other magazines, even the composition of a certain photograph or piece of art. How many designers work at Macworld? There’s one designer in addition to myself. My job is just as much design as it is art direction. Describe a typical Macworld feature article design process. The designers and editors together discuss the article. First, the editors summarize and describe the general tone of the article and supply the art department

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with thumbnails so we have a good understanding of the basic elements required for the story. We then collaboratively brainstorm general illustration or photography concepts before deciding on a final. Next, we assign the illustration or photography to an artist we feel best fits what’s needed. We then work on a general layout, review it with editors, and proceed with a final design. Why did Macworld switch to InDesign? Macworld had used Quark for years, and it felt like Quark had stopped evolving. The company hit a wall and possibly got too comfortable with their product. We have such a small staff that we felt that using an InDesign and InCopy workflow would make us much more efficient. We needed a layout program that would let editors make live edits during production as opposed to making edits on paper, which a copy editor would then have to input. InCopy gave us that ability. Now we can get a lot more done in the same amount of time for a variety of reasons—from nested styles to an editor and designer being able to work on a layout at the same time. InDesign feels much more intuitive. It has a ton of features that I had always wished Quark had. There’s so much more I can do in InDesign now rather than doing various tasks in Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.

Terri Stone is the Editor in Chief of InDesign Magazine.

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You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin, Right? A spread from the cover feature of the March 2008 issue.

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All About the iPhone: The cover of the August 2008 issue.

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InDesigners: Rob Schultz

Taking Care of the “Honey Do” List: An opening spread from the July 2008 issue of the magazine.

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Mad scientist: This feature in the August 2008 issue seems inspired by horror movies.

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InDesigners: Rob Schultz

Well-Matched: In this opening spread from the August 2008 issue, the clean lines of the illustration work well with the clean lines of the type.

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InQuestion: Sandee Cohen

Find a Baseline’s Y Measurement, Round One Corner, Q Apply Master Items to Blank Book Pages, A More Text Variables

By Sandee Cohen

Find the Y Measurement of a Baseline There are times I need to find the Y measurement of the baseline of a line of text. Is there any way I can discover that measurement? —Lynne Bass

InQuestion is a regular column devoted to answering subscribers’ questions about working with InDesign.

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Not easily. Turns out that while there are several places where InDesign will recognize where the baseline of text is (align to bottom of frame, first baseline position in a frame, and align to baseline grid), there aren’t any places where you can find the vertical coordinates of the text baseline. Fortunately, I posed this question to my good friend Chuck Weger, the genius behind Elara Systems Inc. It didn’t take Chuck long to come up with a script that not only finds the vertical coordinate of a line of text, it also finds the coordinate for the left position of the character (Figure 1). Once the script has run, you have the option of creating guides for the intersection of the x and y coordinates. And amazingly, it even calculates the vertical point even if a baseline shift has been applied! Chuck has agreed to allow me to distribute the script via InDesign Magazine. You can download the script from http://downloads.indesignmag. com/supportfiles/FindBaseline.jsx.zip. Once you’ve downloaded it, place the file in the InDesign application folder > Scripts > Scripts Panel. You can

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now open the Scripts panel in InDesign, and the script will appear. To run the script, click an insertion point in any text, and then double click the name of the script. Figure 1: Chuck Weger’s Find Baseline script allows you to find the Horizontal Offset and Baseline coordinates.

Going Round the Bend I know how to apply the Corner Options to make rounded corners around a rectangle. But is there a way to apply a round corner to just one or two corners of a rectangle?

One way is to use the CornerEffects script that ships with InDesign. With your object selected, double click the CornerEffects script in the Scripts panel. This opens the CornerEffects dialog box (Figure 2, next page). Choose the Rounded options and set the Offset amount for how much you want

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InQuestion: Sandee Cohen

to round the corner. Then use the Pattern menu to choose which corners should be rounded.

Figure 3: Click with the Pen tool to add a point to the rectangle.

Figure 2: The CornerEffects script opens a dialog box that allows you to round individual points in a rectangle.

Watch Me! Click on the image below to start Sandee’s movie, showing this cool rounded corner frame technique.

Next take the Direct Selection tool and drag the new point over to the corner (Figure 4). Release to place the point over the corner of the bounding box. This causes the corner effect to disappear. Figure 4: Drag with the Direct Selection tool to move the point over to the corner of the bounding box.

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The longer I work in this field, the more I am stunned by the sophistication of the questions that come to me. In this case, would have never expected this problem, but you’ve isolated an interesting quandary. Let’s say you have several documents in a book, and each one ends on a right-hand (odd) page. You might want each following document in the book to start on a right-hand page. You don’t have to manually add a left-hand page to the end of each chapter, you just choose Book Page Numbering Options

The only problem with the script is that while it’s easy to apply, it’s not helpful if you need to change the offset amount or which points you want to modify or if you want to scale the object. That’s when you need to apply a more manual method. The first thing to do is to apply the rounded corner option (or any of the other corner options). Then switch over to the Pen tool and click to add a point a little bit away from the corner that you need to turn off the effect (Figure 3).

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Apply Master Items to Blank Pages in a Book Is there a way to automatically apply master page items to the blank pages of a book? —Laronda Arnold

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InQuestion: Sandee Cohen

from the Book panel menu. Then choose “Continue on next odd page” from the Page Order options (Figure 5). Then click Insert Blank Page to have InDesign automatically to keep the correct number of odd and even pages. This automatically adds a left-hand page to any document in the book that ends on an odd page. It’s a very convenient way to make sure that all the documents in your book start with a right-hand page. However, here’s the wrinkle in this automatic page insertion: the pages that are inserted are always based on no master page. They come in totally blank which means they won’t have any header or footer information. If you want those blank pages to have a footer for a folio or other master page information, you have to manually drag a master onto those added pages. As far as I can tell, there is no way to automatically tell the Book panel to insert an extra page based on a specific master. Figure 5: The Book Page Numbering Options dialog box allows you to ensure that all new chapters in a book start on an odd or even page, and will insert blank pages if the previous chapter doesn’t end on the correct page.

I’ve never noticed this behavior before because I always add the blank, left-hand page to my chapters manually. Or, if I did allow InDesign to insert the extra page, I would want that page to be totally blank. I don’t want a header or footer to appear on a totally blank page.

Figure 6: The Text Variables dialog box lets you define a new text variable. The New Text Variable dialog box lets you choose a File Name as a variable.

More About Text Variables You recently gave a tip of the week that said you can “define a text variable within InDesign for the File Name of a document.” But you don’t say how or in which menu item to find that option. —Larry Miller

Sorry, I should have been a little more specific. What I should have said was, choose Type > Text Variables > Define. This opens the Text Variables dialog box. Click the New button which opens the New Text Variable dialog box. Set the Type menu to File Name. This allows you to define the File Name variable (Figure 6). Check the Include Entire Folder Path to display the entire file name starting from the volume. To insert the text variable that you just defined, choose Type > Text Variables > Insert Variable. The variable you defined will be listed in the submenu.

Sandee Cohen is the only third-party author to have written educational materials for all versions of InDesign. Her latest books are the InDesign CS3 Visual QuickStart Guide and Real World Creative Suite 2.

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InDepth: Align Panel

Lining Up and Spacing Out

Exploring the Expanded Align Panel in InDesign CS3

by conrad chavez You’ve seen it, or you’ve done it: Leaning into the monitor, staring intently at an InDesign layout zoomed in at 4000% while dragging an object an infinitesimal distance to line it up perfectly with other items in the layout. Stop! Don’t waste your time working by eye. Instead, you need the Align panel (choose Window > Object & Layout > Align). The Align panel is your headquarters for setting up relationships among the objects on your page, letting you line up or distribute (evenly space) selected objects. As we’ll see, many of these features also appear in the Control panel, ready for a quick click when you most need it. InDesign CS3 offers some new features that can help even more by accelerating page layout. These features go beyond the alignment and distribution capabilities of many vector drawing programs.

By default, the pop-up menu is set to Align to Selection, which is how alignment always worked in previous versions of InDesign. That is, the Align Objects and Distribute Objects buttons are applied relative to the objects you’ve selected. For example, if you click Align Vertical Centers, all objects align to the vertical center of the combined selection area (Figure 2). When you distribute objects, all objects are distributed between the outermost selected objects (Figure 3, next page). I’ll cover the other options in that pop-up menu later. Figure 2 (below): Aligning selected objects: Before (top) and after (bottom) clicking the Align Vertical Centers button.

Aligning and Distributing Objects: The Basics The Align panel appears to have two sections, but there are really four: Align Objects, Distribute Objects, an unlabeled pop-up menu that applies to both the Align Objects and Distribute Objects buttons (Figure 1), and a fourth (often-hidden) feature called Distribute Spacing, which I’ll explore later in this article. That unlabeled pop-up menu is new to CS3. Figure 1 (left): The Align panel.

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InDepth: Align Panel

Why So Many Distribute Objects Buttons? Many users are confused by the various Distribute Objects buttons because sometimes, clicking any one of them appears to have the same result as clicking the others. This response occurs when all of your selected objects are the same size. If you select differently sized objects, you’ll see why InDesign provides choices here. The four objects in Figure 5 have different widths, so when I Figure 3: Distributing selected objects: Before (top) and after (bottom) clicking the Distribute Horizontal Centers button.

If you can’t tell what each button in the panel does by its icon, just hold the pointer over a button to see that button’s name as a tool tip. If all you’re doing is simple alignment or distribution, you don’t even need to open the Align panel. When objects are selected, the align and distribute buttons also appear in the space-saving Control panel (Figure 4). If you select objects and don’t see the align and distribute buttons on the Control panel, either your monitor is not wide enough to display them (they appear toward the right side of the Control panel, so they don’t appear when your monitor is set to 1024 pixels wide), or you might have customized your Control panel layout to hide them.

Figure 5. The Distribute Object buttons produce different results when objects aren’t the same size. From top to bottom, with the affected edge marked in red: Original positions, Distribute Left Edges, Distribute Horizontal Centers, and Distribute Right Edges.

click Distribute Left Edges, Distribute Center Edges, and Distribute Right Edges, the results are different because the distances between the corresponding edges of each object are different. Aligning Objects to the Layout In previous issues of this magazine, you’ve seen tricks for centering an item or group on the page in CS and CS2. InDesign CS3 doesn’t require any tricks: Centering to the layout is easy and instant, thanks to that new unlabeled pop-up menu at the bottom of the Align palette (Figure 6). Let’s call it the “Align To” pop-up menu. By default, you’ll see that the Align To pop-up menu says Align to Selection. As I mentioned earlier, this means that InDesign aligns or distributes within a rectangle based on the outermost selected objects. In other words, if you click the Align Left Edges button, everything aligns to the left edge of the left-most object. To align objects to the page instead of aligning to other objects, choose Align to Page from the pop-up menu. You can also choose Align to Margins or Align to Spread.

Figure 6: New options in the Align panel pop-up menu simplify tasks such as centering an object on the layout.

Figure 4 (left): The align and distribute buttons are also available in the Control panel.

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InDepth: Align Panel

When you choose Align to Margins, for example, InDesign treats the page margins almost like a selected object. That means objects will automatically align or distribute with the margins. The Align To pop-up menu also appears in a small pop-up menu that looks like a button in the Control panel. A Perfect Layout in Two Steps You can quickly organize objects on a layout by combining alignment and distribution with one of the options in the Align To pop-up menu. In Figure 7, I’ve dragged four image frames onto the page, but they’re a mess. I want them to be a nice, even row along the top margin. Fortunately, I can straighten this out in only two quick steps. 1. In the Align panel, I choose Align to Margins from the pop-up menu, and then I click the Distribute Horizontal Centers button. The left-most object snaps to the left margin, the right-most object snaps to the right margin, and the other objects are then evenly spaced between those two, based on their center points. 2. I click the Align Top Edges button. Because the Align panel pop-up menu is set to Align to Margins, the top edges of the objects align to the top margin of the page. And it’s done! Spacing Objects Numerically The space between distributed objects depends on their original positions, but sometimes you want to specify a precise amount of space between each

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object. You can do this with the Use Spacing option in the Distribute Objects section of the Align panel. When you turn on the Use Spacing checkbox and click a Distribute Objects button, the spacing between object edges is the value you enter for Use Spacing. The catch is that the spacing is measured between the same edge of each object, just as you saw in Figure 5. For example, if I turn on Use Spacing, enter 1 pica, and click Distribute Left Edges, this puts 1 pica between the left edges of each object (Figure 8). Unless my objects are smaller than 1 pica, these settings create an unwanted overlap. I’d have to enter a Use Spacing value that’s wider than an individual object. But when the objects are different widths, one value won’t produce even spacing between them. Am I out of luck? Not at all. If my goal is to insert the same amount of space between each selected object, regardless of their widths, I need to reveal a hidden option in the Align panel. To see it, choose Show Options from the Figure 7 (top right): Four objects laid out in two steps. From top to bottom: original positions, Distribute Horizontal Centers within page margins, and Align Top Edges within page margins. Figure 8 (right): The Use Spacing option for Distribute Objects lets you specify a precise distance between the same edge of all selected objects, which does not account for object widths. Small values result in overlaps.

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InDepth: Align Panel

Align panel menu, or click the double-headed-arrow expansion button in the Align panel tab (Figure 9). Instead of measuring the space between the same edges on each object, these hidden Distribute Spacing buttons measure the space between the facing edges of adjacent objects, guaranteeing consistent spacing for objects of any width or height. Turning on Use Spacing in this section lets you enter a precise distance between objects when you click a Distribute Spacing button. I often use the Use Spacing option to help keep layouts consistent with production specs. For instance, let’s say images must be separated from their captions by 6 points of space. I leave Use Spacing turned on and set to 0p6, and then all I have to do is select any image and its caption’s text frame and click the Distribute Vertical Space button. No thinking, dragging, or nudging required!

Aligning and Distributing from the Keyboard The default shortcut for the Align panel is Shift-F7, but you can change this in the Keyboard Shortcut editor (choose Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts). If you frequently align or distribute objects, you may want direct keyboard access to Align panel features. To see and edit shortcuts to each Align Panel button, choose Object Editing from the Product Area pop-up menu in the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog box. For example, you could assign a shortcut to Align Left or Align Top. Alternately, the Quick Apply feature (press Command-Return, or Ctrl-Enter on Windows) also lets you apply an alignment or distribution option. When objects are selected, typing horiz, verti, top, bott, left, or rig into Quick Apply can help list alignment options more quickly. (Assuming, that is, that you haven’t turned off Include Menu Commands in the Quick Apply flyout menu.)

Figure 9: Click the button in the Align panel tab (circled) to reveal the Distribute Spacing options. I turned on the Use Spacing option for Distribute Spacing, entered 1 pica, and clicked the Distribute Horizontal Space button.

Tips for Aligning and Distributing If alignment and distribution aren’t working the way you want, see if the following objects and attributes might be factors:

Locked objects. When a selection includes a object that’s locked (by using the Object > Lock Position command), all other selected objects align to it. When distributing objects, locked objects won’t move. This can be annoying, but you can take advantage of it. For example, if you want to align the right edges of objects to an object that isn’t the right-most selected object, just lock that object. Stroke weights. Thick strokes affect how objects align. The Align options always use the outside of an object’s stroke. This is not usually a problem unless you change an object’s stroke weight after you’ve aligned the object (Figure 10) or if you wanted to align to the path rather than their strokes. If you have lots of objects and expect to change their stroke weights, plan ahead. You might want to defer alignment until you finalize your stroke weights. Text. When text frames are part of a selection, the Align panel aligns or distributes them by the size of the text frame. If the text frame is much bigger than the text inside it, you may not get the alignment you expected. The specifications inside a text frame affect Figure 10: If you change a stroke weight of an object after you align it with others, it won’t be aligned anymore.

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InDepth: Align Panel

text position independently of Align panel options, so when you’ve used the Align panel correctly but type is still not lined up the way you want, check settings such as the following (Figure 11): ❱❱The Vertical Justification and Inset options in the Object > Text Frame Options dialog box ❱❱The Align buttons, Align to Baseline Grid button, and indent options in the Paragraph panel ❱❱ For tables, the Cell Insets and Vertical Justification options in the Cell Options dialog box Everybody… Get in Line Once you unravel the secrets of the Align panel, you’ll find it to be an indispensable tool for fast, precise layout production.

Figure 11: Although the text frames of the photo captions are perfectly aligned, the captions themselves are not, because of inconsistent text frame options and formatting applied to the frames and the text inside them.

Conrad Chave z writes about Adobe Photoshop and the Adobe Creative Suite. He co-authored the recent book Real World Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Adobe Press).

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InDepth: Interactivity

InDesign CS4: The Flashiest Version Ever Learn how to convert InDesign files to interactive Flash movies.

by sandee cohen One of the coolest features in the past several versions of InDesign has been the ability to export files as PDF documents with interactive buttons that navigate through the document, play movies and sounds, as well as a host of other features. As a fan of all things interactive, I am thrilled to report that in InDesign CS4, it’s not only easier to create interactive PDF files, but you can convert InDesign pages to interactive Flash movies.

Figure 1

1 Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button Tool? Another CS4 change to interactivity isn’t the addition of anything. It’s the disappearance of the Button tool! You can still create a button—just use the command Object > Interactive > Convert to Button. Also, an icon on the Button panel converts objects into buttons. So there’s no reason to bemoan the loss of the Button tool.

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Set the Interactive Workspace The easiest way to discover the new interactive features in CS4 is to choose Window > Workspace > [Interactive]. This sets the panels and menus to display all the interactive features. On the right side of the screen are the familiar panels for Pages, Links, Layers, and Hyperlinks. Underneath, however, are the new panels for Page Transitions, Buttons, and Sample Buttons (Figure 1). Chooses the Interactive workspace colorizes those menus with new features. One of the new panels in the Interactive workspace is the Sample Buttons panel. Strictly speaking, this isn’t a panel, but a library of sample items you can drag onto layouts. The library opens as part of the Interactive workspace. To find the Sample Buttons library without switching to the workspace, go to the InDesign application folder: Presets: Button Library and open the file ButtonLibrary.indl.

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Create a layout Start with any layout of three or more pages. There’s nothing special in the layout I created for this tutorial. However, I did change the usual portrait orientation to landscape so the document is easier to read onscreen. I also made the document single-pages, instead of facing. Onscreen theres no need to work with left-hand and right-hand pages. Of course, if you have a facing-page document, you can leave it as is.

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InDepth: Interactivity

Add the navigation buttons With the master page active, open the Sample Buttons panel and scroll down to the last two buttons, numbers 51 and 52. Select those two items in the library and drag them to the bottom center of the master page (Figure 2). The two items appear on the master page and all the document pages. (You may notice a smart guide that appears to help you position the guides in the center of the page. This is another new feature in CS4.)

Check the interactive actions The sample buttons from the library are more than pretty objects. Select the left button you

just placed on the master page and open the Buttons panel (Figure 3). Rename the button to something more descriptive, such as Previous Page. The panel shows that the object already has a rollover state, as well as an action that moves to the previous page. Similarly, the right button displays a rollover state and an action that moves to the next page. All the arrow buttons have navigation actions to go to the next or previous page. Other sample button actions go to a URL or a specific page in the document. Figure 3

Add the Click state to the buttons The sample buttons come in from the library with two states: a Normal state for how the button appears with nothing near it, and a Rollover state for how the button appears when the cursor appears over the button. You can add a state for how the button appears when the mouse is pressed down. With the left button selected, click the eyeball column for the Click state. This adds the click state for the button (Figure 4). The click state picks up the Figure 4

Figure 2

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InDepth: Interactivity

Figure 5: Click below to watch the movie!

Export as SWF When you export as SWF, you create a Flash movie that can be played by any browser with the Flash player installed (the vast majority). Choose File > Export and select SWF from the Format menu. Note: This differs from the Adobe Flash CS4 Pro (XFL) interchange file format. You can open and edit XFL files in Flash CS4. Name the file and click Save. This opens the Export SWF dialog box (Figure 6).

setting from the Normal state, which is a dark blue fill with a satin effect. To change the appearance of the Click state, select that state in the Buttons panel and then select the C:100 swatch. This changes the appearance of the button when pressed. Repeat by selecting the right button and clicking the eyeball column for the Click state. Then change the swatch color to C:100. While you can’t test the rollover and click states in InDesign, you can select each of the steps to check how they’ll look in the exported documents. As you click each state in the Button panel, the button changes appearance accordingly.

Figure 6

Set the page transitions Page transitions are electronic effects that are applied as one page changes to another, like the dissolves and wipes in movies. Being able to apply them in InDesign is new to CS4. Open the Page Transitions panel and choose one of the transitions from the Transitions menu. The preview in the panel shows you how the transition will appear. Click Figure 5 to see a QuickTime movie showing the Page Transition panel in action. My favorite transition, Page Turn, is applicable only when you output the document as a SWF file, not a PDF.

Set the page transitions for all the spreads Once you set a transition, InDesign applies it to the active spread. You can apply different transitions to each spread, or you can click the

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Apply to All Spreads icon at the bottom of the Page Transitions panel, or choose Apply to All Spreads from the panel menu.

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InDepth: Interactivity

Setting the SWF Size options With the Export SWF dialog box open, use the Size (pixels) area to set the size of the SWF movie. You can set the Scale to 100% to maintain the same size as the original InDesign document or scale it up or down. But since most SWF movies are played onscreen, it’s easier to set the Fit to menu to a specific pixel output. You can also type in a custom Width and Height.

Setting the Pages controls Use the Pages controls to set which pages to output and whether to combine any spreads into a single page. You can also set the pages to be rasterized into images. Since SWF movies are viewed within HTML pages, you can create an HTML file that contains the instructions for opening the SWF movie. Finally, choose View SWF after Exporting to automatically open the SWF file to check your work.

Setting the Text output The Text menu in the Export SWF dialog box lets you choose how text in the InDesign file will be handled (Figure 7). The simplest setting is to choose InDesign Text to Flash Text. You can also convert the text to Vector Paths or a Raster Image.

Setting the Interactivity options These options are the heart and soul of the SWF export. Include Buttons exports the button objects with their interactive rollovers and actions. If you deselect the option, you’ll still see the

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Figure 7

buttons on the pages, but they won’t do anything in the SWF movie. Include Hyperlinks converts any InDesign hyperlinks into SWF interactivity. Include Page Transitions applies the transitions to the change from one SWF frame to another. However, this is not the same as the Include Interactive Page Curl. The Interactive Page Curl is a separate effect that applies a hotspot area to the corners of the pages to create the effect of bending back a page to turn it. This effect only triggers the transition that was applied by the Page Transitions panel. So to create the complete effect of bending and turning a page, you need to set Include Page Transitions (when set for Page Turn) as well as the Page Turn transition for the spreads.

Setting the Compression and Quality options You need to control how any raster images will be handled during the conversion process. The Image Compression menu lets you choose Auto (which automatically picks the proper compression) or force the compression to JPEG (Figure 8). You can also set the compression to Lossless, which applies no compression.

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Figure 8

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If you choose Auto or JPEG for compression, use the JPEG quality menu to choose how much compression to apply (Figure 9). As you increase the quality, the file size of the SWF will increase, too. Figure 9

Adding Movies and Sounds to SWF export? InDesign has always allowed you to add movies and sounds to PDF files. But the export as SWF doesn’t support those features. That’s when you’ll need to use the XFL format to open the document in Flash CS4, where you’ll be able to insert movies and sounds. Keith Gilbert covers XFL in-depth in the February/ March 2009 issue (#28) of InDesign Magazine, available for download in early February.

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InDepth: Interactivity

Use the Curve Quality menu to choose how InDesign converts curves into Flash vectors (Figure 10). The Minimum curve quality may create flat segments that are visible in any curves or circles but create smaller file sizes. The Maximum quality reduces the appearance of those segments, but adds to the file size. For InDesign layouts that don’t have a lot of vector artwork, the Maximum curve quality will be fine.

Figure 11: Click below to go to the Flash movie!

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Figure 10

View your completed SWF movie Click OK to finish the export. If you chose to include the HTML, you create both an SWF file and the HTML file that contains the instructions for how to play the SWF in a browser. Your movie opens in your default Web browser. Without the HTML, you create just the SWF file, which can be displayed in the Flash Player. To see an online example of the SWF I created for this exercise that contains both the Page Turn transition as well as the Interactive Page Curl, click Figure 11.

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You can also type the following URL into any browser: http://downloads.indesignmag.com/ supportfiles/CS4_interactive.html

Sandee Cohen is the Senior Editor of InDesign Magazine, the author of many books, and an in-demand speaker and trainer.

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InReview: Fraction Formatter

By jamie Mckee ProperFraction/ ProperFraction Pro Dan Rodney www.danrodney.com ProperFraction is free; Pro is $75 Mac and Windows; InDesign CS2 through CS4 Rating:

ProperFractionPro is a set of scripts for InDesign CS2–CS4 from New York trainer and designer Dan Rodney that properly formats fractions (such as 2⁄3) quickly and easily. However, ProperFractionPro can do so much more, it darn near boggles the mind. For all you cookbook designer and typesetters out there, read on to discover why ProperFractionPro is a musthave product. ⁄2 the Background on Fractions Until recently, no matter which program or font you used, fractions have been more or less an afterthought. Whether your fonts were TrueType or PostScript, your choices were typically limited to the 3 basic built-in fraction combinations: 1⁄4, 1⁄2, and 3 ⁄4. (Or you could buy a specific fraction font.) If you needed an oddball fraction, such as 11⁄18, it meant a lot of finagling with superscripts, subscripts, font scaling, and baseline shift. With the development of OpenType, progress was made to solve the arbitrary fraction dilemma. OpenType fonts that include fractions often have an expanded set of the most commonly used diagonal fractions, such as 1⁄8, 3⁄8, 5⁄8, 7⁄8, 1⁄3, and 2⁄3. Some OpenType fonts from Adobe (such as Garamond Pro, Caslon Pro, Brioso Pro, and Minion Pro) also support creation of arbitrary fractions that can use any numerals as both numerators and denominators, such as 11⁄18, or even 7,402⁄12,597. 1

Ratings Key

Not worth it even if it’s free

Not recommended

Average

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Exceptionally good A must-have

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In these OpenType cases, the numerals used in the fractions match the weight of the rest of the font better than fractions which are “fauxed” by scaling regular-size numbers. Unfortunately, the OpenType solution has three challenges: First, it’s an unhappy fact of life that many people still have to use non-OpenType fonts. Second, even if you use OpenType fonts, the font you use may not supports these features. And third, even if your font does support these features, if you have to set a lot of fractions, it’s a hassle to select each one and apply the OpenType fraction formatting. (See the sidebar tip “GREP Style Fractions.”) If you relate to any of these challenges,

GREP Style Fractions One of the coolest features in InDesign CS4 is called GREP Styles, which lets you apply a character style to any text “pattern” in a paragraph. If you make a character style that applies the Fraction OpenType formatting, you can apply it to any simple fraction in a paragraph style using this GREP Style code:

\d+/\d+

That means “one or more digits, followed by a slash, followed by one or more digits.” It won’t work if you have commas or decimals in the fractions, but it’s a good start! (Of course, you could make a GREP code to handle those situations, too…)

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InReview: Fraction Formatter Figure 1: The ProperFractionPro script.

Figure 2: The “Format Multiple Fraction” script allows you to choose what to search in.

read on to discover all the wonderful benefits of the ProperFractionPro script. How it Works Dan wrote two versions of the script. In the free version, you can select one bit of a text, and the script converts it to a fraction. The Pro version is more powerful. The ProperFractionPro script folder consists of three scripts and a preference file that you place in the Scripts Folder (inside your InDesign application folder). The download also includes a help file covering installation and use. With these scripts you can: 1. Format a selection of unformatted text that constitutes a fraction [character(s), slash, character(s)]; 2. Format multiple fractions; or 3. Access a Preference window that allows you to tweak a myriad of settings pertaining to the fraction (Figure 1). The “Format Selected Fraction” script does just what the name says: it verifies that the selection contains a slash with a character before and after, and then formats the selection according to the defined preferences. This is one area in which ProperFractionPro is already one up on simply applying the OpenType > Fractions command: it’s smart and won’t make fractions out of dates, such as 11/4/08. The “Format Multiple Fractions” script is just like the “Format Selected Fraction” script, except that it offers a scope to search for fractions: Selection,

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Figure 3: The ProperFractionPro script’s Preferences window.

Story, Document or Selected Frame(s). It then finds them all, and formats them according to your settings (Figure 2). These settings, where much of the power of ProperFractionPro lies, are found by running the Preferences script (Figure 3). This script opens a preferences window where you can tweak just about every setting for how the formatting works. Here you can adjust settings for the baseline shift, vertical and horizontal scaling, and kerning for the numerator, slash, and denominator. You can choose to use the slash character (virgule), or the more typographically correct fraction slash, sometimes referred to as a solidus. One of the most powerful features of the script lies in the ability to customize the kerning both before and after the slash for each number (0–9). This is incredibly useful for a fraction such as 317⁄445... without it, both the “7” and the “4” start to look separate from the slash. Being a type guy, I admire attention to good typographic quality,

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InReview: Fraction Formatter

such as consistent type weight and color, and ProperFractionPro doesn’t skimp here either. Included in the Preferences script is an option to stroke the numerator and denominator so that character color and weight matches the type around it (Figure 4). It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one in my opinion. The Preferences script also lets you apply OpenType styling for those OpenType fonts that do have numerator and denominator characters specifically designed to the proper size, weight, and position—which typically look better than scaled down characters. You can choose which kerning method the script uses (including Don’t Change, Optical, or Metrics), and whether the script should convert fractions in all fonts, or only specific fonts. This is a great help for cookbook typesetters, whose

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Figure 4: Different ways to format fractions in InDesign. Line 1: (Font = Times Roman) I formatted these fractions manually with superscripts, subscripts, and baseline shift. Not only was it tedious, but notice how the weight of the fractions doesn’t match the rest of the text.

Line 4: (Font = Adobe Garamond Pro) The ProperFractionPro script was used to create these fractions in the time it takes to double-click your mouse. Happily, ProperFractionPro works regardless of font style, or if the fractions have a character style applied to them.

Line 2: (Font = Times Roman) These fractions were formatted with the ProperFractionPro script with the click of the mouse, and the weight of the fractions matches the weight of the surrounding text (and uses the solidus too!)

Line 5: (Font = Adobe Garamond Pro) What if the numbers of your fractions contain commas? The OpenType > Fractions command ignores them.

Line 3: (Font = Adobe Garamond Pro) These fractions were formatted with the OpenType > Fractions command. However, you can’t select all the text and apply the command, or all the numbers in the line will be “fractioned”, including the “3.)” at the beginning of the line. Another problem is that, while you can assign the OpenType > Fractions command to a Character Style, you can’t apply two character styles to the same text, so in this example the 5/5809 fraction presents another problem to work around.

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Line 6: (Font = Adobe Garamond Pro) The ProperFractionPro script will properly scale the commas in the fractions. Notice how they match the size of the numbers, while the commas separating the numbers match the text. In order for this to work, however, you must use the “Format Selected Fraction” script, whose only concern is that the selection contains “something slash something.” It will format anything before and after the slash properly, regardless of whether it’s a number or not. You must use this command to format a nonnumerical fraction, such as “a/b.”

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The Perfect Complement to InDesign Magazine!

InReview: Fraction Formatter

directions are typically in one font, but whose ingredients list is in another. When you edit the Preferences and set a font, the settings are saved in the preference file in the ProperFractionPro script folder. This allows you to have multiple sets of scripts for use with different fonts by simply duplicating the script folder for each desired font. Finally, when performing the script on multiple fractions, ProperFractionPro can display the results at the end of its search, letting you know how many fractions it formatted and how much time it took. For instance, I see here that my simple fraction 1234⁄4321 took ProperFractionPro .14 seconds to format. (Incidentally, it took more than 70 Undos to get the fraction back to where the script started from.) To do all that work manually would be so time consuming as to be not even worth it! But That’s Only 1⁄2 the Story! ProperFractionPro cost $75. At first blush, that might seem a little steep, until you consider all the script can

do. Not only that, it still costs less than a competing plug-in product that doesn’t do as much and hasn’t been upgraded for CS3, let alone CS4. Of course, even if you don’t set that many fractions, the free version is worth getting. Plus, both the free version and the Pro version also work in InCopy CS2–CS4. Just before this article went to press, I ran the script to properly format the fractions within it, and with the click of the mouse, all the fractions (but not the date on page 40) were properly formatted, with great results. If you find yourself setting lots of fractions, you owe it to yourself to buy this product. You’ll produce better results than setting your fractions by hand... all in a fraction of the time!

InDesign Secrets.com Visit our free: 1PEDBTU t #MPH t 7JEFPT 5VUPSJBMT t 5JQT t /FXT

Jamie McKee is a teacher, speaker and typesetter for university presses throughout the country. He spends 15⁄16 of his time in InDesign and the other 1⁄16 of his time staring out the window.

plus: -FBSO BCPVU UXP OFX free plug-ins: %BWJE #MBUOFS T 5JQT BOE ,FZCPBSE 4IPSUDVUT

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