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The Complete Resource for InDesign Professionals
Sampler Issue of the PDF Publication
From the Editor
InDesign Magazine was born in 2004 out of our belief that Adobe InDesign is an amazing page-layout tool that gets even more amazing the better you understand it. Just as strong was the belief that understanding doesn’t come from dry white papers or feature lists. Instead, the magazine’s mission is to enlighten in an enjoyable way: To publish articles by real designers who know from their own experience what tricks save time. To let real prepress professionals explain in plain language how to avoid expensive pitfalls. To share the high-quality projects being created by true “InDesigners.” And to speak with an independent voice, outside of Adobe’s influence, so you can count on agenda-free reviews and reporting. CONTENTS
2 InDepth: Tips of the Trade Leading InDesign professionals share their favorite tricks for working more efficiently (and having more fun).
12 InStep: Picture This Branislav Milic helps you place an image inside text and even apply a gradient without losing the ability to edit the text.
16 InQuestion: Q&A Sandee Cohen answers readers’ burning questions.
20 InDesigners: Vince Frost Pam Pfiffner talks to a cutting-edge designer.
24 InSide: New OpenType Fonts John D. Berry explores two fonts with astonishing capabilities.
29 InReview: Making History InDesign veteran Scott Citron puts plug-ins through their paces.
32 InStep: Layer It On Thick Pariah S. Burke makes the most of Photoshop Layers and comps—inside InDesign!
38 InStep: Building a Varnish Plate David Blatner puts old clipping paths to new uses.
Get the Dish Digitally. InDesign Magazine is not a print publication. When you subscribe to this PDF publication , we’ll send you an email the moment each issue is published. That means no waiting for the mail to arrive, no need to find a place to store back issues, and instant access to anything in any issue. Just search the PDFs by keyword. And since you’ve reading this, you’ll get a special rate of just $39 for one year (six issues)! Page-layout guru David Blatner and I, editor in chief of Creativepro.com and this publication, are very proud of InDesign Magazine. We know the in-depth features and lively step-by-step how-to’s in this special sampler will expand your creative horizons and make you more efficient. And just think how you could benefit from this level of expert help month after month! We hope that after you finish this issue, you go to www.indesignmag.com and subscribe. To receive the special $39 rate, click on Purchase Today, then enter the Promotional Code “trial.” We look forward to hearing from you.—Terri Stone
COLOPHON Produced on the Macintosh with
Cover designer: Louis Fishauf has won many awards for magazine design and for illustration. An Apple master, Louis’ work has been featured in numerous books and international design publications. To see samples of his projects, go to www.fishauf.com.
Adobe InDesign CS2, Photoshop CS2, Illustrator CS2, Acrobat 7 Professional. Fonts are Adobe Minion Pro, ITC Franklin Gothic Standard, Bauer Bodoni Standard, and Blackoak Standard (all OpenType). Proofed on a Xerox Phaser 8850DP. Photo of Terri Stone courtesy of Kevin O’Conner.
InDepth: Expert Tips
Tips of the Trade Want to work faster and smarter in InDesign? Check out these tips from leading InDesign professionals. You’ll learn the best ways to work with type, graphics, colors, and more.
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love InDesign tips and tricks. Whenever I learn a new technique that makes my work easier, I get all warm and fuzzy inside, and I want to share the joy with everyone. That’s why I’m especially excited about presenting “Tips of the Trade”: dozens of the coolest tips and tricks from some of the hottest InDesign trainers and authors in the world. To help you find tips more quickly, we’ve divided them into sections: type, graphics, tools, documents, and colors—all of the building blocks that go into your documents. The tips work in both InDesign CS1 and CS2 unless otherwise specified. Of course, the tips don’t stop here. In each issue of the magazine, we include more tips to speed Working with Type 3 up your workflow and widen your creative options. When you discover Working with Graphics 6 your own tips, write to us at tips@ Working with Tools 7 indesignmag.com. If we get those Working with Documents 8 warm-and-fuzzies, we’ll include it in a future issue and give you credit! Working with Colors 10 —David Blatner
sunflower image courtesy photospin.com
Table of Contents
InDesign Magazine * www.indesignmag.com
Working with Type No More Rasterized Text Drop shadows and other transparency can be very effective, but not when small text such as a caption rasterizes in the flattening process at print time. For worry-free designs, create at least two layers in your document: One at the top level for all of your text, and one at the bottom level for all of your images. Text that appears above a transparency effect in the stacking order will never rasterize. —Mordy Golding
What’s That Override? (CS2) To see local formatting overrides, hold the mouse over the plus sign of the name of a paragraph or character style name in the Paragraph Styles and Character Styles palettes. —Jamie McKee
Fast Word Replacement (CS2)
Figure 1: Autocorrect is for more than text errors. Use it cleverly and you’ll be spared a lot of tedious typing.
Create your own shorthand dictionary for words you type all the time (or ones that tend to slow you down) by using InDesign CS2’s new Autocorrect feature. The secret is to create a string of text that would not otherwise occur; this is a placeholder for your desired text (Figure 1). For instance, if you routinely butcher the capitalization of the word “InDesign,” set up the text “qq” to stand in for “InDesign” by opening the Autocorrect pane in Preferences, choosing Add, and entering the Misspelled Word (qq) and the Correction (InDesign). Now when you type the word “qq,” Autocorrect swaps the correct text for the placeholder. Autocorrect ignores the string of text if it occurs within a word. —Erica Gamet
Speedy One-Word Spell Check (CS2) InDesign CS2’s new Dynamic Spelling feature—it flags misspelled words as you type—is useful and convenient for on-the-fly corrections, but it can be distracting, especially when you’re trying to concentrate on something other than spelling. For the best of both worlds, assign a keyboard shortcut to Dynamic Spelling with Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts. Keep the feature turned off (it’s off by default), but when you’re curious if a certain word is spelled correctly, use the keyboard shortcut to briefly toggle it on. If the word is misspelled, it’ll sprout a (non-printing) red underline. Right-click on the word to choose the correct spelling or add it to the dictionary from the contextual menu. If the word is spelled correctly, nothing changes—no underline appears. Press the shortcut again to toggle Dynamic Spelling off and continue with your work. —Anne-Marie Concepción
www.indesignmag.com * InDesign Magazine
Linking Multiple Text Frames You can easily link three or more text frames using the Option/Alt key. To link existing text frames, click in the overflow box of the first frame, then Option/Alt-click in each subsequent text frame. To create and link text frames on-the-fly, create the first frame, click in its overflow box, then Option-click and drag to create each subsequent frame. —Erica Gamet
Thread Backwards Figure 2: One headline can span two or more columns—all in one text frame!
Just about everyone knows that you can click on the out-port of a text object with the Selection or Direct Select tool to click on or draw another text frame that creates or continues a text thread. But you can also click on the in-port of a text frame— even if it’s the first frame in the thread—to start the thread in a different frame. This is especially useful when you place a story, then realize you want the headline in its own frame so you can give it a drop shadow. —Mordy Golding
Multicolumn Text, One-Column Headline Making one headline span several columns of text in a multi-column text frame takes some trickery. Here’s one way to do it (Figure 2). Use the Text tool to create a text frame. In Text Frame Options, choose the desired number of columns. Use the Type on a Path tool on the text frame outline and type the headline. Position the text brackets so that the text begins and ends above the text frame. Thread the text frames by selecting the headline out-port and connecting it to the text frame. 6. To vertically distance the headline from the body text, apply a baseline shift to the headline. Why bother with all these steps? Because you can use Object Styles and Apply Next Style to format this type of frame and its content with one click. Also, both the headline and the body appear together in the Story Editor. —Rufus Deuchler 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Edit Text Frames You can edit text frames just like graphics frames and transform them into almost any shape. Use the Selection or the Direct Selection tool to select the text box, and then use the Pen tool to add anchor points. You can manipulate these anchor points just as you would any vector path. —John Feld
InDesign Magazine * www.indesignmag.com
Easy to Use Apply a style simply by clicking in a palette. Define your style with a user interface familiar to anyone who’s worked with tables before. Or even easier, create a new style based on an existing table or cell in one easy step.
Easy to Share
TableStyles and CellStyles 1.1
Define your organization’s standard cell and table styles and share them with your colleagues via the import function.
Master the Art of Tables in Adobe InDesign
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TableStyles and CellStyles bring one-click styling to tables in Adobe InDesign. Create your styles and then click once in a simple palette to apply all the styling you need to a whole table or to an individual table cell. Best of all, when you update the style, all your tables and cells get updated too, automatically!
New in TableStyles and CellStyles 1.1 Pro With powerful new enterprise features, 1.1 Pro delivers versatility and sophisticated control – working with spreadsheets and XML files has never
Easy to Learn
been easier! • Maintain table formatting when linked Excel spreadsheets are updated • Associate paragraph styles with cell styles • Map table and cell styles to XML tags
Anybody who’s ever formatted a table or cell will feel right at home with the familiar user interface of TableStyles and CellStyles.
TableStyles and CellStyles 1.1 Pro retains the time-saving features of the standard version, with added dynamic features for an effortless experience. Available online at www.teacupsoftware.com! Table/CellStyles Standard: $99 Table/CellStyles Pro: $299
Easy to Automate A simple scripting interface lets you automate cell and table styles in Applescript, VBScript or JavaScript.
Working with Graphics Better Fake Duotones
Figure 3a: This colorized grayscale image is dull.
While colorized grayscale TIFF and PSD images are fine for monotone effects, fake duotones (with the image one color and its frame another) tend to look dull (Figure 3A). For more control over the outcome, try this: 1. Place the grayscale TIFF or PSD file. 2. Duplicate the frame in place (Copy, then Edit > Paste In Place). 3. Select just the top frame and drag a color swatch onto the image to colorize it (Figure 3B). 4. Set the topmost frame to Multiply. 5. Fiddle with opacity settings to modify your duotone (Figure 3C). While you don’t have the fine control afforded by Photoshop, you can modify duotone effects on the fly within InDesign. —Claudia McCue
Maintain Vectors from Illustrator Paths and shapes from Illustrator or Freehand can be placed and edited directly in InDesign. Simply copy the item or items from the source document (Illustrator or Freehand) and paste into your InDesign document. The paths are now fully editable within InDesign. To copy paths from Illustrator 10 and up, be sure that both AICB and the Preserve Paths button are turned on in Illustrator’s File Handling & Clipboard preferences. —Erica Gamet
Preview Image Moves Figure 3b: The duotone in process.
When moving a cropped image inside a frame using the Direct Select tool, hold down the mouse button for about a second before you move the object. You’ll get a ghosted preview of the whole image in the frame. —Jamie McKee
View Image Scaling with a Shortcut Assign keyboard shortcuts to Select Container and Select Contents (Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts > Product Area: Object Menu). Now when you have an image frame selected with the Selection tool, you can quickly see the image’s true scaling amount in the Control palette’s Scale fields by using the shortcut for Select Contents. Press the shortcut for Select Container to get back to where you started (the frame). —Anne-Marie Concepción
Use Layers on Master Pages Figure 3c: This false duotone looks a little more tasty.
InDesign Magazine * www.indesignmag.com
When you want master page items (such as automatic page numbers) to sit on top of document page objects (such as a background image), create a new layer and put your master page items on it. As long as this new layer is on top of the layer that contains the background image in the Layers palette, the master page items will be, too. —Erica Gamet
Working with Tools Quick Duplications You probably already know you can hold down the Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) key to drag-and-duplicate objects. The Option/Alt key can perform the same duplication function during other operations, too. For example, you can hold down the Option/Alt key as you choose Flip Horizontal from the Control palette menu. InDesign will duplicate and then flip the selected frame (Figure 4). Or place the cursor in the X field of the Control palette and change the value. Then press Option/Alt-Enter and InDesign moves a duplicate of the object to the new location. —Claudia McCue
One-Click Selection in Palettes If you’re manually clicking or dragging inside of fields in palettes to select the fields’ contents, you’re doing it the hard way. Just click the label or icon to the left of the field—its contents are automatically selected, ready for you to replace it with new values. Remember that you can press the Up and Down arrow keys on your keyboard to increment a field’s current setting. —Anne-Marie Concepción
Sort Menus Alphabetically If you want to sort menus in the menu bar in alphabetical order, select the required menu while holding Ctrl+Shift+Alt (Windows) or Shift+Option+Command (Mac). This shortcut sorts the menu and sub-menus in alphabetical order; it’s also useful for sorting fonts in the Type > Font menu. —Eliot Harper
Figure 4: To simultaneously duplicate and flip an image, hold down the Option/Alt key as you choose Flip Horizontal from the Control Palette menu.
www.indesignmag.com * InDesign Magazine
Working with Documents Thread Frames Fast So you’ve found yourself in this situation: Big story in a frame, no existing empty text frames to thread it to, can’t autoflow for whatever reason. Solution: The fastest way to manually thread a story, starting with just a single overset text frame, is to click on the overset icon with the Selection Tool to load the overset text in the cursor; then hold down the Option/Alt key and drag out successive text frames. Every frame you Option/Alt-drag is automatically threaded to the previous one. —Anne-Marie Concepción
Change Proxy Views By default, the print dialog’s page proxy (in the lower left-hand corner) displays a normal view, which shows the document page size and printable area. You can change the page proxy view to a page information view by clicking on it. Now it displays general dimension and scaling settings. Click on the proxy a second time to display a cut sheet preview that shows the page offset, gap, imaging direction, and other cut-sheet information. This view is useful for PPDs that support custom paper sizes (typically for roll-fed media output devices). —Eliot Harper
Create Column Gutter Rules I love using hairline rules between columns, but I hate figuring out when they’re centered properly. If the gutters later change in number or width, the problem is compounded. Here’s a trick that makes this design element fun to use. With the Rectangle tool, create a frame with no fill and no stroke, then use the Line tool to draw a vertical line the same height as the frame. Make the line the thickness you want the hairline to be. Select both objects and choose Align horizontal centers and Align top edges from the Align palette. Your line should now be perfectly centered lengthwise down the middle of the frame. Group the two objects. Snap the left side of the group to the left side of the first column gutter. Now, using the Selection tool, drag the corner or edge handles of the group until it snaps to top and bottom page margins and to the right side of the gutter. Once in place, hold down the Option/ Alt key and use the Selection tool to drag a copy that snaps into the next gutter. Because the frame and line are grouped, the line always stay centered regardless of the width of the alignment frame. Plus, as you change the height of the group, the line stretches to fit. Try dragging the group wider or and longer to see what I mean. To change any attribute of the line, select it with the Direct Selection tool, or use Object > Select > Content from the Object menu. —Scott Citron
InDesign Magazine * www.indesignmag.com
Align Guides to Objects Of course, you can align objects to ruler guides. But you can also align ruler guides to objects (Figure 5). Just select the object and aim for one of the object’s handles as you drag the guideline. The guideline will snap to the handle. —Claudia McCue
Show Options when Placing
Figure 5: Did you know you can snap ruler guides to objects?
When you place content into your layout, click the Show Import Options checkbox to intercept a file and perform certain functions, such as stripping formatting from a Word file. You can access the Import Options dialog by holding the Shift key when you click on the Place button in the Place dialog box. —Mordy Golding
Zoom-sensitive Ruler Guides Hold down the Option/Alt key while dragging out a ruler guide to make it visible only at the current zoom level and larger. If you zoom out, the guide will disappear. When you zoom back to the previous magnification or above, the ruler guide will reappear. —Keith Gilbert
Navigate Footnotes from the Keyboard (CS2) You can assign a keyboard shortcut to Type > Insert Footnote. Not only is it faster to add a footnote this way, but the same keyboard shortcut gets assigned to Type > Go to Footnote Reference, allowing you quickly jump back to the main text flow with the same shortcut when you’re done writing the footnote. (Go to Footnote Reference appears in the Type menu only when the cursor is inside footnote text.) —Anne-Marie Concepción
Switch Measurements Quickly
Libraries: Templates in a Palette Libraries are really handy. You can drag and drop commonly used items and groups of items into libraries and then drag out items whenever you need them. (If you’ve never used libraries, go to File > New > Library to create one). But did you know InDesign remembers the coordinates of the items you add to your libraries? To use the objects with their original coordinates, select Place Items from the Library’s flyout. As long as page size is the same, all items will appear exactly where they’re supposed to. And any Styles used in the original will come along for the ride! —Tracey Lawrence
To use a unit of measure other than the one displayed (for example, centimeters instead of inches), type in the amount and abbreviation for your desired unit of measurement and InDesign converts it for you. —Erica Gamet
www.indesignmag.com * InDesign Magazine
Working with Colors Make Tints You can easily create a named, tinted color from any color in your Swatches palette in InDesign (including CMYK builds). Open your Swatches palette (Window > Swatches), choose the color you want to start with, type a percentage in the Tint box, then immediately click the New Swatch icon at the bottom of the palette. The new color is named the same as the original with the percentage indicated to the right of the name. Changes to the original color are reflected in the tint based on that color. —Erica Gamet
Find that Color Find/Change can’t search for a color swatch unless it’s applied to text. If you need to find all instances of a color used in a document, temporarily turn it into a spot color (if it’s not already) from its Swatch Options dialog box. Choose View > Output Preview > Separations, turn off all color plates except the new spot in the Separations palette, and scroll through your document. You’ll see black “ink” appear everywhere the color is used. (For very long documents, you may find it faster to print only that spot color plate to separations and leave the Print Blank Pages checkbox off so you only get the pages with spot colors on them.) Don’t forget to change the color back to its original color mode if necessary when you’re done. —Anne-Marie Concepción
Apply Swatches to Frames and Tables You can apply a swatch to any frame or stroke by dragging a swatch from the Swatches palette and dropping it in a frame or on a stroke. Try this method for tables, too; you can apply a swatch to any table cell or cell border. —Eliot Harper
Change Color Modes Quickly To change the color mode (RGB, CMYK, LAB) in the Color palette, Shift-click on the color spectrum bar (the color picker). If you see an out of gamut warning (the yellow triangle with exclamation point), click on the symbol to force the color to the nearest in-gamut color. —Erica Gamet
Switch Swatches The New Swatch button on the Swatches palette duplicates any selected swatch. To duplicate the swatch and open the New Color Swatch dialog, hold down Option/ Alt while clicking it. To create a spot color version of a swatch, select the swatch and hold down Command/Ctrl while clicking the new swatch icon. You can also switch among RGB, CMYK, and Lab modes inside the Color Swatch dialog box by holding down Shift while clicking on the color proxy. —Eliot Harper
10 InDesign Magazine * www.indesignmag.com
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InStep: Place a Picture Inside Editable Text
Picture This: Editable Text! Put a picture inside some text and keep the text editable? Impossible! Actually, like so many of the best tricks, it’s easy once you know how.
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By Branislav Milic t’s child’s play to put a picture inside text in InDesign: Just convert the text to outlines and place the picture inside the resulting frame. But even though InDesign can do incredible things with text and images, it can’t place one or more pictures inside editable (non-vectorized) text. Or can it? In fact, it’s been possible since InDesign 2! All you need are a basic understanding of blending modes and four simple steps. 1. Ready the Text Frame
On top of one or more background pictures (Figure 1), draw a text frame and place text into it. Choose a Bold or Black typeface so that the image will be visible through it. The trick here is that the text frame must completely cover the picture frame. 2. Fill with White
Figure 1: By the end of this process, this background image will be visible only within letters.
Fill the text frame with the [Paper] swatch (Figure 2). You shouldn’t be able to see the images anymore. Make sure you add some text inset (using Object > Text Frame Options) on the four sides so that the text sits inside the white area. 3. Set the Text Color
While the text frame is selected, color all the text with the Registration color (Figure 3). This color is 100-percent of every color (cyan, 12 InDesign Magazine * www.indesignmag.com
Figure 2: Fill the text frame with the [Paper] swatch.
Figure 3: Color all text with the Registration color.
magenta, and so on)—it’s one of the few times you’ll ever want to use this color. If you have the text frame selected with the Selection tool, remember you can colorize the text inside the frame by typing “J” (to change the focus of the fill to the text, rather than the frame), making sure the Fill icon is on top in the Tool palette (press “X” if it’s not), and then clicking on the Registration color in the Swatches palette. 4. Set the Blending Mode
Figure 4: You can see the underlying image after you apply the Lighten blending mode.
Finally, in the Transparency palette, apply the Lighten blending mode to the text frame (Figure 4). Because paper is the lightest color, it always knocks out the image below it. The Registration color is the darkest color in InDesign, so in this mode, it always becomes fully transparent. The image shows through the text: Job done!
Making an Opacity Blend Upon seeing this effect, one of my most demanding clients wanted the text to disappear progressively—that is, a blend from fully transparent text to fully opaque text. And I wanted the text to remain editable. Even this is possible with a few more steps.
Figure 5: To begin the opacity blend process, deselect everything and choose New Gradient.
5. Create A Gradient Swatch
Deselect everything (Command/ Ctrl-Shift-A) and choose New Gradient from the Swatches palette flyout menu (Figure 5). Use the gradient stops to create a blend that goes from white (zero percent of
www.indesignmag.com * InDesign Magazine 13
all CMYK colors) to a registration black (100-percent of all the CMYK colors). 6. Blend the Text
Figure 6: The interaction of the blend mode with the image results in an unattractive reddish area.
To apply the gradient to the text (as opposed to the text frame), select the text frame with the Selection tool, press “J” (to set the focus of the fill to the text rather than the frame), then choose the Gradient tool from the Tool palette and drag across the text. In this case, you want to drag from the bottom of the text to the top of the text because the white end will be opaque and the black end will be transparent. 7. Potential Color Casts
The photo I chose for this trick is made of a black and white butterfly and a lot of green. The interaction of the blend with the image has caused a reddish area in the middle of the gradient (Figure 6). Fortunately, it’s easy to remove. First, deselect all the items on your page, then double-click the gradient you created in the Swatches palette. Turn on the Preview checkbox so you can see the effect of the change you’re about to make. 8. Fiddle with the Color
Figure 7: You can remove the unwanted red by reducing the value of Magenta.
This effect doesn’t always cause color casts, but in this case we can remove the rusty area by selecting the black gradient stop and reducing the value of Magenta to about 60 percent (Figure 7). Remember that the gradient text is in Lighten mode, so reducing a color allows more of the background image’s color to show through—here the image shifts closer to its green mood (Figure 8). 9. Edit At Will
Figure 8: Your final picture looks great, and your text is still editable.
Remember that this trick works only on white backgrounds. It seems like you could change the background fill of the text frame to some other color, but only Paper is the lightest color, so only Paper will override any other color in Lighten mode. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you: Select the Text tool and edit the text. Yes, the best part of the trick is that the text remains editable. Branislav Milic is one of Europe’s most acclaimed InDesign gurus. Based in Brussels, Branislav is a freelance journalist for many Web sites and magazines. He has been editing the French-language InDesign Web site www.milic.net/ indesign/ since 1999.
14 InDesign Magazine * www.indesignmag.com
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InQuestion: Sandee Cohen
Word Count, Text on a Path, and Formatting Text with the Eyedropper By Sandee Cohen
InQuestion is a regular column devoted to answering subscribers’ questions about working with InDesign. Word Count for a Story
Q. I’m having trouble getting a word count on one of my long documents. In Quark, you can run spell check to get a word and character count. Is there a way to do this in InDesign? Jasmin Rubero Penquin Group
A. I mean no disrespect, but this is one of those times when you’re still thinking like a Quarker. You don’t need to run the spell check to get a word count. Just click in the text frame that has the text and look at the Info palette. (If you don’t see the Info palette, choose Window > Info (Figure 1). This palette counts characters, words, lines, and paragraphs—tons more information than you get from QuarkXPress’ Spell Check. Even better, if you have any overset text, you’ll see a plus sign next to the characters, words, and paragraphs listings. The number after the plus sign tells you how much text is overset.
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The only drawback to the Info palette is that it gives you only the information for text in a single story or linked frames. If you need the word count for multiple text frames, you have to link the frames together, or write down the word counts and add them up.
Type on Top of a Circle
Q. When I draw a circle and then type text on a path, selecting the second area on the paragraph palette, the type ends up at the bottom of the circle. How can I center the text at the top of the circle? Also, in FreeHand it was simple to put text on the top and bottom of a circle—all I had to do was insert a paragraph return between the two lines of text. But I can’t find a similar technique in InDesign. Any advice? Stumped in St. Louis
A. Let’s take these questions one at a time. Start by creating the
Figure 1: The Info palette shows you information on the amount of text in a story. The plus sign indicates how much text is overset.
circle you want to put the text on. Then click with the Type on a Path tool to create an insertion point on the circle. Type the text you want and then choose Align center in the Paragraph palette. Your text flies down to the bottom of the circle. That’s what we need to fix. Switch from the Type on a Path tool to the Selection tool. As soon as you do, you will see a small line appear in the middle of the text. That is the position anchor. (You will also see two lines and squares at the top of the circle. That’s the in-port and the out-port for the text along the path, but we don’t need to fiddle with them.) Drag the position anchor around to the top of the circle. Make sure you don’t move the cursor inside the circle or the text will flip to the inside of the circle. When you reach the top of the circle, release the mouse. Your text is now positioned where you want it (Figure 2). Now, what about putting text on both the top and bottom of the circle? That is easy in FreeHand. Sadly, InDesign (and Adobe Illustrator) require a few more steps.
Start by copying the frame that contains the text. Now, choose Edit > Paste in Place to paste the copy exactly on top of the original. Next, drag the anchor position line to move the text from the top of the circle to the bottom.
Look carefully at the text at the top of the circle and the bottom. Notice how the text at the top of the circle extends outward but the text at the bottom of the circle is cramped inside the circle. Select both circles. In the Character palette, apply a negative baseline shift to the text (Figure 3). Stop when the circle intersects the middle of the text. Now change the text at
Figure 2: You can reposition text at the bottom of a circle by dragging the position anchor from the bottom (six o’clock position) to the top (twelve o’clock position) of the circle.
Figure 3: I applied a -5 pt baseline shift to reposition the text on the two circles.
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the bottom of the circle and you’re done. Rather than use Baseline Shift, you can also choose Type > Type on a Path > Options, and choose Center from the Align popup menu.
Question about the Eyedropper Tool
Q. I use the Eyedropper tool to copy text styles. It usually works well, but my problem comes when I make text white and add a transparent shadow. If I click on this with the Eyedropper and try to style other parts of my text, it just makes my text box white. Am I out of luck? Daryl
A. You can use the Eyedropper tool in this situation. You just have to be careful when you click with the Eyedropper. When you sample the white text with the Eyedropper, watch your Fill control to make sure that the Eyedropper picks up the white of the text. If the Eyedropper is not directly over the text, it picks up the fill color of the frame (which is most likely none since you have a drop shadow behind the text). To change the color of the text, not the text frame, position the filled Eyedropper (with the black ink) inside the text area. Look carefully; you should see a small I-beam next to the Eyedropper cursor. This I-beam indicates that the Eyedropper can be used to change the formatting of the text (Figure 4). By the way, if you hold the Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) key, you
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can change the Eyedropper back to the sampling mode. Don’t click with the Eyedropper. Drag the Eyedropper across the text that you want to format. This will change the formatting, which in your case will apply the white text. One thing you need to keep in mind, however. You can’t pick up both the color of the text along with the drop shadow applied to the frame. Those are two separate attributes. If you pick up the white for the text, you won’t be able to also pick up the fill and drop shadow for the frame itself. You need to pick up the drop shadow attributes with a separate Eyedropper sequence. Sandee Cohen is the only third-party author to have written educational materials for all four versions of InDesign. Her latest book is the InDesign CS2 Visual QuickStart Guide. Have a question for Sandee? Send your questions to sandee@indesignmag.com. Please indicate if you don’t want your name used. We reserve the right to edit questions for space and clarity. Not all questions can be answered, nor will they be answered privately.
Figure 4: The I-beam next to the Eyedropper cursor indicates that the Eyedropper will change the formatting of the text, not the frame.
If there is an overset, Text Count plug-in is the solution.
• overset preflight • easy overset editing • smart fit text to frame • • space estimates • statistics reports • price counting • $69 per license •
www.dtptools.com/textcount
InDesigners: Vince Frost Vince Frost Creative Director Zembla magazine www.zemblamagazine.com emeryfrost www.emeryfrost.com Frost Design www.frostdesign.co.uk
O
ne look at Vince Frost’s designs for the international literary magazine Zembla reveals that this is a man who clearly loves type. “Zembla is about ideas. I wanted bold, strong typography,” Frost says. “The tag line of the magazine is ‘Fun With Words’—that’s what I wanted the design to convey.” Editor Dan Crowe asked Frost to design a new magazine that would signal a departure from the usual dry, textheavy look of established literary titles. Frost and his team of designers used InDesign to create a publication that’s hip, witty, and smart in tone and visually rich enough to attract top-drawer advertisers like Gucci and Mercedes-Benz. “Designing a magazine from scratch is very exciting,” Frost says. “There’s no history to it. You start with a blank page and begin playing.” Not surprisingly, unlimited undo ranks as one of his favorite InDesign features. In the initial design stages, Frost riffed on the word “Zembla”— a legendary frozen island in the Arctic mentioned in the novel Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov—then explored different ways of presenting literary content. For example, strong display type marches across pages, then disappears behind paragraphs. Words are cut off at
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the paper’s edge as if interrupted midsentence. Interviews appear in sloping columns in which the two speakers literally face off in type, the text itself forming graphic shapes that mimic the diagonal cut of the letter Z. Formerly an associate partner at Pentagram in London, Frost runs his own design studio in London yet lives in Australia where he is co-creative director of emeryfrost with Garry Emery (Zembla is actually produced in three offices: the editorial offices are in London, while emeryfrost has two locales in Sydney and Melbourne). Prior to moving Down Under 18 months ago, Frost was principally a QuarkXPress user. “When I arrived in Australia I was handed a Mac G4 laptop, which was great, but there was no QuarkXPress on it, only InDesign,” he remembers. “It scared the hell out of me.” With a project due, Frost had no choice but to dive into InDesign. “People told me that it’s just like Illustrator and Photoshop—but I had never used those, either. I didn’t even know how to start a new document at first.” Now Frost uses InDesign almost exclusively, as does his studio where InDesign classes are frequently held to keep young designers’ skills sharp. “InDesign is simply a better program,” he says. “Now when I sit down with QuarkXPress I think, ‘This is so limiting.’” Frost adds with some glee, “I still don’t need to know Illustrator or Photoshop because I can just use InDesign for everything.” —Pamela Pfiffner
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Inside InDesign: ��������� OpenType
Putting Letters in Context Adobe’s Bickham Script and House Industries’ Ed Interlock display two different approaches to using OpenType’s contextual substitution. By John D. Berry s OpenType was developed jointly by Adobe and Microsoft, it’s not surprising that the Adobe type library was the first to be converted entirely to OpenType format. All of the Adobe Originals typefaces, as well as typefaces Adobe licensed from other foundries, are available as OpenType fonts. Many of the Originals, too, have been developed as OpenType Pro fonts, which include extended multilingual support and may include advanced typographic features. (For more on the subject, see “OpenType Opens Up” in the December 2004 | January 2005 issue.) As Thomas Phinney, former program manager for fonts and core technologies at Adobe, pointed out to me, the “Pro” designation actually refers only to extended Latin-alphabet language support; some of the Adobe Originals also include Greek and Cyrillic character sets, but that’s not required for a font to be called “Pro.” Nor are extra typographic features necessary, although Adobe is known for providing those. In some of its fonts, Adobe has deliberately pushed the possibilities of OpenType technology in order to show how it can make finer typography easy for a font-user to apply. In particular, the OpenType contextual features—changes that take place depending on the context of how the type is being set and what else is in a block of text—make some surprising effects possible. The most spectacular of these may be Bickham Script Pro, an extended version of Richard Lipton’s earlier Adobe Originals typeface, Bickham Script.
A Business Hand for the Eighteenth Century Bickham Script is an ambitious script typeface that makes extensive use of contextual ligatures and contextual alternates. It’s a copperplate script, based on an English writing style of the 18th century; although it may seem surprising to us now, this “round hand” style was commonly used in business correspondence at the time. Its basic letterforms are solid and even, with the high contrast and steep angle that come from writing with a pointed quill (Figure 1). An 18th-century English writing master might be delighted with the regularity achieved in Bickham Script, but what we notice, since this is a modern digital font rather than an individual’s handwriting, is the variation and irregularity that OpenType can give to the words. The spectacular part of the Bickham Script design is in its extenders and swashes, which give color and verve to an essentially utilitarian central design. This is a far cry, of course, from what we’d expect in business correspondence today; Bickham Script was developed 24 InDesign Magazine * www.indesignmag.com
Figure 1: Bickham Script Pro is an elaborate typeface based on a style of handwriting that was once considered quite functional and straightforward.
Figure 2: As you type more letters of a word in Bickham Script Pro, the font chooses the appropriate form of each letter to go with the other letters in the word, or on the line.
as a display typeface, suitable for invitations and menu headings and short pieces of large text where a fancy handwritten style may look appropriate. Since Lipton has given the typeface three weights (something unknown in the 18th century), it has a wide range of expression for a script face. Like Zapfino Extra, a very different style of calligraphic typeface, Bickham Script Pro has a huge number of alternate forms for many of the letters, and when OpenType’s contextual alternates are turned on for a block of text in InDesign, the font will intelligently substitute various forms of the letter depending on context. (Contextual ligatures and contextual alternates are turned on by default in both InDesign and Photoshop, so you don’t have to do anything special in order to use these features. In the current version of Illustrator, however, they are not turned on by default—though of course all you’d have to do to use them is turn them on, either by selecting Contextual Alternates from the OpenType palette submenu or by clicking on the corresponding icon in the palette.) You can watch this process happen as you type (Figure 2). You may turn off this feature
through InDesign’s OpenType options on the Character palette’s submenu; or you can use the Glyph palette to choose your own variant letterforms by hand. But the ease and smoothness of letting InDesign and the font itself do the work make it absurdly easy to get sophisticated typography in a document. One way in which Bickham Script Pro goes even farther than Zapfino Extra, according to Adobe’s Thomas Phinney, is that “the context can actually go across words, which means that a word like ‘the’ can show up three or four different ways on the same line, without applying any different formatting.” This requires more than one alternate form for the letters; in the case of “the,” Bickham Script Pro has nine different “th” ligatures. “Individual letters,” says Phinney, “often have 20 to 30 alternate forms.”
Artificial “Ed”telligence At the opposite end of the display-lettering universe, House Industries released the Ed Benguiat Font Collection, a series of display faces based on the commercial lettering and type design of the prolific New York graphic designer Ed Benguiat. One of the five fonts in the series, Ed Interlock, puts OpenType’s contextual features to work to achieve a very www.indesignmag.com * InDesign Magazine 25
Figure 3: Ed Interlock is based on a lettering style that Ed Benguiat developed for Photo-Lettering in the 1960s and 1970s.
Figure 4: A few of Ed Interlock’s custom features, including two- and three-letter ligatures.
different effect from that of Bickham Script. The one thing they have in common is that both are meant to look spontaneous, as though they had just been done by hand. House Industries, in its usual wisecracking way, refers to this as “tricknological wizardry” and calls the way the fonts works “artificial ‘Ed’telligence.” The letters in Ed Interlock look bouncy and blocky, the sort you might see in playful headlines from the 1960s or 1970s (and indeed what you saw then might have been done by Ed Benguiat). Although Benguiat himself says that “I originally included a bunch of alternate letters for Photo-Lettering composition,” House’s Ken Barber drew “nearly 1,400 custom ligatures for Ed Interlock in order to mimic real hand-done lettering.” Ed Interlock has a cheerful lowercase, with the usual f-ligatures and such, but the real heart of the font is in its caps: in an all-caps setting, the wealth of multi-letter ligatures can produce a tight block of closely interlocked letters (Figure 3). The way Ed Interlock is programmed, it uses OpenType’s contextual ligatures to choose the most appropriate combination of shapes for each particular word. This involves letters of variable size that overhang each other or tuck under each other’s extended arms; the font mixes these up within a word so that the resulting shape won’t be either top-heavy or bottom-heavy (Figure 4). As in Bickham Script, you can see this happen as you type. (The House Industries’ Web site includes a utility in which you can type your own name and see contextual substitution in action.) House Industries was a pioneer in using the extended features of OpenType. “We have been shipping our fonts with extended OpenType features since we released the Simian Fonts in 2001,” says House’s Rich Roat. “The display version had ligature substitution features. We used the bare-bones Adobe Font Development Kit when we built them because there were no commercial font programs that supported OpenType.” Neutraface, released in 2002, also makes extensive use of OpenType features for typographic
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Figure 5: House Industries’ colorful explanation of the “tricknological wizardry” that substitutes the appropriate ligature or alternate within a word.
refinements like small caps, ligatures, and multiple styles of numerals. Roat says that House Industries ships all of its fonts in OpenType format except for Bullet, Scrawl, General Collection, and Bad Neighborhood. “We haven’t gotten around to them yet.” Since the time when House Industries had to do its own software engineering in order to add features to OpenType fonts, commercial font-making programs have caught up. In addition to free tools from Adobe and Microsoft, both FontLab and DTL FontMaster support the creation of OpenType fonts with rich typographic features, and some foundries, such as Bitstream, have developed their own tools for this purpose. That means that we can expect to see more and more new fonts that take advantage of the possibilities of OpenType. I’ll look at a few of them in the next article in this series. John D. Berry is an editor and typographer who works both sides of the design/content divide. He is the former editor and publisher of U&lc (Upper and lower case) and of U&lc Online. He edited the book Language Culture Type: international type design in the age of Unicode (ATypI/Graphis, 2002), and he edited and designed Contemporary Newspaper Design: Shaping the news in the digital age: typography & image on modern newsprint (Mark Batty Publisher, 2004). Mr. Berry is also a regular contributor to CreativePro.com.
www.indesignmag.com * InDesign Magazine 27
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InReview: InDesign Plug-ins and InDesign Tools Plug-Ins EasyHistoryCS 1.0 65bit Software Limited http://www.65bit.com Price: $39.99 (Mac and Windows) Download 15-minute time-limited demo from http://www.65bit.com/downloads/ downloadpre.shtm
History 1.0 for InDesign/InCopy DTP Tools http://www.dtptools.com Price: $39.00 (Mac and Windows) Download 14-day demo from http://www.dtptools.com/history
By Scott Citron If I had a dollar for every time I’ve been asked whether InDesign has a History palette, I’d own a video iPod. The answer is no. However, two European software companies recently filled this void with plug-ins that offer just such a feature. The first was British developer 65bit, whose EasyHistoryCS plug-in was released in fall 2004. Then, in February 2005, Czech developers Goldwein Research Ltd. came out with their own history palette, named History for InDesign, under their DTP Tools brand. To help you choose which of these plug-ins to buy, I installed and tested them both. The results may not be historic, but they are at least interesting.
Installation Installing each product was simple, although the nod here goes to History 1.0, which comes with a built-in script that places the plug-in automatically into your InDesign Plug-ins folder. You have to manually drop EasyHistoryCS into the correct folder. Once in place, you find both palettes listed as “History” in InDesign’s Window menu.
EasyHistory
Figure 1: EasyHistory stores its snapshots sequentially in a running list.
Open the EasyHistory palette and you’ll discover a simple interface with only a small camera icon at the bottom. As you work in InDesign, EasyHistory keeps a running list of everything you do. Place an image on your page and the palette displays “Import” followed by “Place.” As you build your document, the list grows with each command. At any point along the way you can tell EasyHistory to record a snapshot of your current page by clicking on the camera icon. When it takes a snapshot, EasyHistory places a thumbnail of your document’s state in its running list. By selecting one of EasyHistory’s few preferences from the palette’s menu, you can trigger a small dialog that allows you to name your snapshots as you go. You can
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also create a snapshot every time you select File > Save in your InDesign document. Again, all snapshots are displayed sequentially within the palette. Returning to an earlier document state is as simple as double-clicking on either a listed item or a snapshot. If, after returning to a previous state, you decide to return to where you left off, simply double-click on the listed state. Be forewarned that if you return to a previous state and then make any change to the document, all the history listed after that earlier state is deleted. (In Photoshop parlance, you could say that there is no such thing as a non-linear history.)
History 1.0
Figure 2: History 1.0’s polished interface and New Document option make it a pleasure to use.
History from DTP Tools builds on EasyHistory’s functionality by adding a few nice features of its own. Whereas EasyHistory’s UI is simple and strictly utilitarian, History 1.0 displays the proper InDesign icon in its running list (Rotate shows the rotate icon, Scale the scale icon, etc.). In addition, and perhaps most importantly, History allows users to create a new document from any recorded state by clicking a button at the bottom of the palette or choosing New Document from its fly-out menu. Furthermore, where EasyHistory places snapshots sequentially in its running list, History 1.0 follows Photoshop’s model by grouping all snapshots in the top half of the palette. And while double-clicking a snapshot in EasyHistory simply returns you to the history state in your current document, History 1.0 instead opens a new document. Both approaches work fine, but you can quickly find yourself with lots of new documents littering your screen if you click several snapshots. I also prefer how EasyHistory lets you automatically name your snapshot when chosen. To rename a snapshot in History 1.0, you must select the thumbnail and then choose Rename Snapshot from the palette fly-out.
So Which One?
Figure 3: Free plug-in MultiDo adds a simple list of up to 100 history states to your Edit menu.
There’s no clear winner between these two products. History 1.0 has a more refined UI and the ability to create new documents from snapshots or listed states. However, I’m not disappointed by EasyHistoryCS; I even prefer the way snapshots are handled sequentially within its running list. In fact, if you want only to undo/redo from an InDesign menu, without the benefit of snapshots and a dedicated palette, check out 65bit’s free plugin MultiDoCS for Mac or Windows. Although it’s limited to 100 history states before re-setting, it may satisfy your needs while saving you $30. Scott Citron is an Adobe Certified InDesign Instructor and print designer in New York. He also runs that city’s InDesign User Group, the world’s largest.
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InStep: Photoshop Layers
Layering It On Thick InDesign CS2’s ability to select the visibility of layers in placed PSD and PDF images will increase your production, layout, proofing, and file-management efficiency.
I
By Pariah S. Burke nDesign CS2’s new and updated features have had me playing with the application like others play video games. One of my favorite features, support for layers in placed Photoshop and PDF files, gives you unmatched freedom to experiment. By allowing greater image control within InDesign itself, the feature trumps the utility of round-trip editing with Edit Original. The ability to turn layers and layer comps on and off in placed images can also make working with multiple, closely related designs a breeze. During and after design, it can ease the headaches of preflight, asset management, and digital delivery by slashing the number of image files. With a project like this multilingual ad for REV Creativity Drink (Figure 1), a fictitious brand, the ability to choose image layers within InDesign CS2 saves plenty of time (not to mention Rolaids). Follow along, and you’ll soon leave behind your old habit of saving file after file for each variation.
Figure 1: A little layer wizardry makes the layout and graphics of this five-language advertisement a snap to design, manage, and modify.
1. Place Common Elements
Figure 2: Place any objects that will appear in all variations on a “Common Elements” or similarly named layer or layers.
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It might help to think of this process as layers within layers. Your first InDesign layer(s) in a project like this should hold all the elements needed by every version. So place your background images, static copy, and other shared objects on one layer. In this ad for REV, the background image is the only content on my “Common Elements” layer (Figure 2).
2. Cover Your Assets In Layers
Figure 3: In Photoshop CS2, layer comps control the display of the can mockup’s five variations.
In a layout like this, the three placed graphics—the logo, “new!” blurb, and REV can image— require five separate files each for the five languages in which the ad must be written, right? That is so last-version thinking. Counting the background image and the INDD layout itself, I have a grand total of five files—one five-language, layered image each for the logo, blurb, and can. For this to work in InDesign, the images must be constructed for efficiency in their source applications. The REV can mockup began life in Illustrator CS2 with one top-level layer for each of the five languages. I then saved it as a Photoshop PSD file, converting the top-level layers to PSD layers. In Photoshop CS2, I handled additional highlighting and shading as new layer overlays, thus affecting all language layers simultaneously (and allowing for changes to the can or label without losing the touch-up work). With the lighting and touch-up layers always visible, I turned on each language layer one at a time and created a layer comp. The result was one PSD file with five layer comps: English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German (Figure 3). Introduced in Photoshop CS, layer comps are snapshots of the state of the Layers palette. Turn on this layer, turn off this other one, move the third over here and give it a gradient overlay; now save a layer comp. Move the layers around a bit, change the layer style, toggle them on or off. In the Layer Comps palette (in the palette dock by default), click the layer comp created previously to instantly return the document to its previous state—this layer on, that off, another with a drop shadow and moved over here. Layer comps are great for projects like this ad, proofing, and just plain experimentation. They’re better than 30 levels of undo. The logo and “new!” blurb both live happily in Illustrator CS2. It’s a nice neighborhood because www.indesignmag.com * InDesign Magazine 33
Figure 4: By creating all the language blurbs as top-level layers in the same Illustrator CS2 document, character and paragraph style sheets and graphic styles modified once automatically apply to all versions.
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it has good schools, low crime, and graphic styles. The last enables changed strokes, fills, colors, or warps and effects on one language object to automatically apply to the other four. (I love eliminating repetition!) Like the Photoshop document, the two Illustrator drawings have five top-level layers apiece, one for each language (Figure 4). InDesign can’t do much with layers in native Illustrator AI files. But since Illustrator files have been little more than PDFs since version 10 (the last version before Venus retired to Florida), you can save any Illustrator drawing as a PDF without losing quality or editing ability. Just make sure you check Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities in Illustrator’s Save As PDF dialog. If you want InDesign to be able to toggle the file’s layers, also check Convert Top-Level Layers to PDF Layers. Once all your assets are prepped and layered (or layer comped), switch back to your InDesign layout. 3. Do It Once and For All
On a new InDesign layer, set your copy and other native InDesign objects that will change per layout variation or language. Then place (or drag in) your multi-layer assets. If you place images via File > Place (or Command/Ctrl-D), check the Show Import Options box at the bottom of the Place dialog to bring up an Image Import Options (or Place PDF) dialog like the one shown here (Figure 5). Click on the Layers tab and choose your desired layer(s) or layer comp. In the Update Link Options section, decide what you want. I strongly recommend setting it to “Keep Layer Visibility Overrides,” which preserves the layer and layer comp states you determine inside InDesign when the link updates; “Use Photoshop’s Layer Visibility” will toss out whatever you’ve painstakingly set in InDesign in favor of the last saved layer or layer comp state in Photoshop (or Illustrator or Acrobat).
If you think this setting can’t ruin your day, remember that you might not be the last person to open your layout and refresh the links before it goes to press. If you drag images into InDesign from iPhoto, the desktop, or Adobe Bridge (as I do when I need to place more than one asset), you won’t see the Image Import Options dialog. Your images will place exactly as they were saved in the source application. But don’t despair—read on for the fix. 4. Peeling Back the Layers
Figure 5: InDesign’s Image Import Options > Layers tab allows selection of individual layers, layer sets, and layer comps.
Figure 6: Use Object Layer Options to manipulate the visibility of layers on images and instances already placed in an InDesign document.
With the first layout variation finished, duplicate the layer via InDesign’s Layers palette options flyout menu—or just drag the layer onto the New Layer button at the bottom. Make the necessary changes to your text and other native InDesign objects on the new layer. Click on any layered asset and select Object > Object Layer Options (Figure 6). Hopefully you have at least a sneaking suspicion that you’ve seen these options before. Select your next set of layers (or comps), and hit OK. Note: With PSD documents, the big area beneath the Layer Comp dropdown is for Layer Comp comments you may set in Photoshop. Repeat this step for every variation you want to create. In the end, you’ll have multiple layouts in a single file (nothing new, as InDesign has had layers for a while), but also with single asset files. 5. Identify Images with Layer Changes
How do you know where you’ve placed images whose layers you’ve changed? Easy! Look at the Links palette (Figure 7). When you override the layer visibility on a placed asset, a little Photoshopesque eye appears between the file name and the location of the image on its entry in the Links palette. By the way, if you embed an image after changing its layer visibility inside InDesign (using the Embed feature of the Links palette), and then later www.indesignmag.com * InDesign Magazine 35
Figure 7: On the Links palette, images with layer overrides are denoted by an eye icon.
decide to unembed it, saving a new image file to disk, the resulting file will reflect the original graphic file’s layer visibility, not InDesign’s overrides. Sorry, Charlie. And, in case you’re wondering, layer overrides do print and export to PDF exactly as they appear in your layout. Before InDesign CS2, a layout like this, with several placed graphics, would require separate image files for each variation or language (Figure 8). For just the three graphics in this layout, that would be fifteen images you’d have to create, place, position, and update individually in the event of a change. With object layer options, the number of external files has been pared down to three—and the time it takes to update and manage them reduced dramatically. Pariah S. BURKE is the former technical lead for InDesign and InCopy to Adobe’s technical support team. He is the author of Adobe Illustrator CS2 @ Work: Projects You Can Use On the Job (Sams, 2005), and the editor of the Web site Quark VS InDesign.com (www. QuarkVSInDesign.com). He is also an instructor and consultant on InDesign, Creative Suite, and other tools and workflows in for-print design and production.
Figure 8: Switching between variations of a layout—including different versions of its placed images—is as easy as turning on one InDesign document layer and turning off another.
36 InDesign Magazine * www.indesignmag.com
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InStep: Building a Varnish Plate New Uses for Old Clipping Paths
David Blatner shows how to turn a clipping path into an editable frame that can be used as a varnish plate.
N
o one enjoys drawing clipping paths (or, if they do, they rarely admit it in public). InDesign’s transparency features spare you the headaches of drawing clipping paths because the program honors background transparency in Photoshop files. However, there are still times when a clipping path comes in handy, so don’t throw the Bézier out with the bathwater. What most people don’t realize about clipping paths in InDesign is that you can convert them to editable InDesign frames. This turns out to be extremely useful when you need an InDesign object the same shape as your image—for example, when you need to print a varnish over a silhouetted image, or emboss just the image. Here’s how to do it.
STEP 1 Dragging the Proxy Icon while holding down the Option/Alt key duplicates the object on the new layer.
1. Duplicate Your Image
After importing your image and selecting it on the page, create a new layer (Option/Alt-click on the New Layer button in the Layers palette to name the layer while creating it). Now, select your image and duplicate it onto this new layer in exactly the 38 InDesign Magazine * www.indesignmag.com
same place. To do this, you could copy it and then use Paste in Place. However, I prefer a faster method: Just hold down Option/Alt while dragging the little proxy square to the new layer. 2. Turn on the Clipping Path
Step 2 If your image is on a clean white background, you may not need to draw a clipping path.
While the duplicate object is still selected, choose Object > Clipping Path. If you have already drawn one or more paths in Photoshop and saved them with the image, you can choose Photoshop Path from the Type popup menu in the Clipping Path dialog box. If, however, you’ve sworn off drawing clipping paths—but the image is on a pretty clean white background—you can set the Type popup menu to Detect Edges. This is trickier, because you have to adjust the Threshold and Tolerance settings until you knock out the background without erasing too much of the image itself. I almost never use Detect Edges to build a real clipping path (it’s just too blunt an instrument), but it works well for this technique because a varnish or emboss plate rarely needs to be precise. Either way, turn on the Preview checkbox in the Clipping Path dialog box to make sure the clipping path looks right on screen before pressing OK. 3. Convert the Path to a Frame
Step 4 Deleting the image from within the frame leaves the shape of the object (based on the clipping path’s shape).
Now that you have your clipping path, you can swap it for a real InDesign frame. Right-click (or Control-click on the Mac) on the image and choose Convert Clipping Path to Frame from the context menu. The image shouldn’t appear any different, but if you switch to the Direct Select tool you’ll see the points and segments of an editable InDesign frame that looks suspiciously like your old clipping path. 4. Delete the Image
While you’ve got the Direct Select tool, click on the image (not the edge of the frame) to select it. Now delete it. What remains is a frame that looks like a silhouette of the graphic. Here, I’ve hidden the lower layers to make it more obvious what’s on the varnish layer.
Step 3 Right-click on the image to bring up this context menu, then choose Convert Clipping Path to Frame.
www.indesignmag.com * InDesign Magazine 39
5. Fill With a Spot
The only way to print a separate piece of film for the varnish or embossing plate is to fill your new frame with a spot color. If you don’t already have a spot color, take this opportunity to make one. I usually call it something clever like “Varnish Plate” and spec it at 15-percent yellow. (But remember to choose Spot from the Color Type popup menu in the Edit Color dialog box; you don’t want this to be a process color!)
Step 5 Fill your new frame with a spot color called “Varnish Plate.”
6. Make it Overprint
The problem is that this colored object now knocks out the image beneath it. You can get around that easily enough: Turn on Overprint Fill in the Attributes palette and then select View > Overprint Preview. Note that the spot color makes the underlying image appear slightly yellowed (of course, this is just a screen representation of the effect). Step 6 Turning on Overprint Fill in the Attributes palette tells InDesign not to knock out the image underneath the varnish plate.
7. Print Separations
Because the tip relies on overprinting a color, if you print a proof to a non-PostScript inkjet printer you’ll need to turn on Simulate Overprint in the Print dialog box. However, when you print final separations, turn that feature off and you’ll get an extra plate—the spot varnish plate in just the shape you wanted.
Step 7 The varnish shape was defined by a spot color so it prints on its own plate
Cyan Yellow Magenta Black
David Blatner is the Editorial Director of InDesign Magazine and The InDesign Conference (www.theindesignconference.com), and the co-author of Adobe InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs and Real World InDesign CS2 (Peachpit Press). You can find him at www.indesignsecrets.com.
40 InDesign Magazine * www.indesignmag.com
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Look inside this special issue of InDesign Magazine for cool answers to these burning questions! ■ Since InDesign supports transparency, is there any good reason to use a clipping path? (See page 38) ■ How can I maintain vector outlines when importing Illustrator artwork? (See page 6) ■ Does InDesign have a History palette like the one in Photoshop? (See page 29) ■ Can I put an image inside text and keep the text editable? (See page 12) ■ What’s the fastest way to link three or more text frames? (See page 4) ■ How do I place text along the top and bottom of a circle in InDesign? (See page 16) ■ It’s easy to snap objects to guides, but how do I snap a guide to an object? (See page 9) ■ Some typefaces seem to be “smart fonts.” What’s up with that? (See page 24) ■ Can I turn Photoshop layers on and off after importing the file? (See page 32)