CONTENTS
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1. LITTLE THINGS ADD A LOT TO INDESIGN
2. LAYERS IN PDFs
3. AUTORESPONDER
4. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
5. UTILITIES/UPDATES
6. HINTS
7. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
8. LAST WORD
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1. LITTLE THINGS ADD A LOT TO INDESIGN
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Among the more intriguing features in InDesign CS, is the ability to include nested styles in paragraph styles. This goes way beyond the ability to set a style with a drop cap in a different font. For example, if you have a phrase ending in, for example, a colon, you can create a style which will put everything up to the colon in one font and size and everything from then on in another. You can change style on numbers of words or characters, or on items such as tabs, forced line break, inline graphic character, and a variety of spaces.
There is also a new special character, at the bottom of the list which you can call up to add with a right or option click: the end-of-nested-style character. Inserting this (and it seems you could add it in tagged text) can change style anywhere.
We can see this being a great aid to automating the formatting of directories, classified line ads and even some semi-display trader-type ads. And to easily change between a variety of such styles -- useful if you find that two adjacent ones look alike.
And styles and nested styles can include a huge variety of underline and overline as well as the paragraph able to have its own top and bottom rules.
Sadly it seems you still cannot include a graphic specification in tagged text (which you could with PageMaker's tagged text), but if you define a nested style as changing at an inline graphic marker, the changes in styles will jump into place as soon as you insert an inline graphic. The workaround seems to be to have any classified or directory database output provide its own marker for a graphic, including the name and path to the graphic, and then have a script do the replacement.
It is an unfortunate omission in what is otherwise a very user friendly piece of software engineering.
Another small but interesting addition is a small file that specifies extra sizes which can be included in the Page Size options of the New Document dialogs. We can see this being used for advertisement sizes, with use made of the ability to crop starburst etc. The resultant PDF can be placed with a variety of choices on how it should be cropped.
And while InDesign 2 accepted scripts in varieties of Javascript (as well as in VB on PC and Applescript on the Mac) InDesign uses Adobe's own JavaScript interpreter from GoLive, which at last restores cross-platform scripting, and there's built-in debugging. All I have to do now is learn how to use it...
2. LAYERS IN PDFs
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From an interview with Aandi Inston of Quite Software at <http://www.pdfzone.com>:
"The new feature in PDF 1.5 I like the most is optional content. It's a bit like layers, though not really. Adobe might as well have called it layers, though, in the specification since that's what they called it in the user interface. Once products become available that can create PDF layers, I predict some confusion about what kind of layer people are working with. But it is well worked out and has some intriguing possibilities. I saw a sample file which was multi-lingual, for instance, and the layers work like radio buttons to switch between languages. Also, a map that makes more captions visible the more you zoom in, so you aren't swamped with tiny writing on the first view. Tools to exploit these facilities won't be long in appearing."
3. AUTORESPONDER
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4. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
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John Jordan writes: "In the Format newsletter that arrived this morning I see you noted that OpenOffice 1.1 now exports PDF directly. I thought I'd let you know that this is not a good thing. I installed OpenOfice 1.1 and didn't give it a thought. A couple days later I went to make a PDF from InDesign by writing to distiller 5.0 (rather than using the InDesign native PDF export). Distiller failed to embed all the fonts. This always worked flawlessly before. I spent the better part of a day trying to figure out what went wrong, and then I remembered that I had installed OpenOffice. After further checking I discovered that the OpenOffice PDF export function had somehow screwed up Distiller 5.0. Probably a registry setting or file overwrite or something. You may want to warn your readers."
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Brian Pylant, electronic prepress manager with Disc Makers comments on the question in Format79 from Marie Sandbeck about loss of transparency in getting WordArt into PageMaker: "If Marie has CorelDRAW there is a good chance that she could paste those WordArt WMFs into DRAW, and export them from DRAW as an EPS for placement into PageMaker - she can even use a WMF for the preview image, thereby showing transparency on-screen and to non-PostScript printers, and when the files are printed through a high-end PostScript workflow the placed EPS files will work much better than placed WMFs."
5. UTILITIES/UPDATES/PLUGINS
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For PC users, a useful file utility will print directory lists with a variety of property information (including printing to printer, text file, Excel or HTML) but also adds a lot of other functions such as displaying file and directory cyclic redundancy checksum (CRC), searching for duplicate files, multiple file rename, multiple file change date, directory compare, file compare, and finds the largest directories and files. Details at <http://www.file-utilities.com>. The 9-day trial period seems a little miserly but the cost is only US$25 and the upgrade from any previous version is free. It's a 5.9MB download.
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There is now a downloadable version of InCopy CS priced at US$249 intended to act as the editorial front end for small publications. There's a 2.5MB PDF at <http://www.adobe.com/products/incopy/pdfs/overview.pdf>
6. HINTS
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A comment from Adobe that Apple's dfonts are safe to use in work which is handing off PDF files with all fonts embedded (subsetted is fine) to prepress. The problems come when the dfonts themselves are sent to prepress and they are using MacOS 9 or earlier or Windows, or where Apple-provided dfonts have the same names as standard Type 1 fonts. Dfonts are Apple's TrueType fonts in the data fork instead of the resource fork and there is a utility called ForkSwitcher to convert them to a regular TrueType font which is installed with the optional Developer Tools from the OS install CD.
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If you receive a stuffed Mac file which you can't open it could be because Stuffit changed their file format with StuffIt X. Older versions of StuffIt cannot open StuffIt X archives, and neither can the Windows programs such as WinZip which can cope with the previous stuffed format. However there is a free Stuffit Expander for both earlier versions of Mac OS and for Windows, though you now have to jump through some extra hoops to get it. You download the trial version (about 8MB on Windows, 6MB on Mac), and, when that expires in 15 days you are left with the free Expander part of the program. See <http://www.stuffit.com/compression/sitxformat.html>.
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In InDesign, the book palette is the obvious choice to manage multiple documents for a book. It can also be used for multiple files with a less obvious relationship. For example if you have a job for one client involving letterhead, business card, etc they could be placed into a book, giving quick access by double clicking on the appropriate file in the book palette, then when necessary create one pdf of the lot from the book menu. If you have more than one book file open they dock together in one floating palette. Suggestion comes from Steve Nichols in Australia.
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This hint came originally from Real World QuarkXPress but it applies to any program using layers: As a safety measure, before you delete a layer, make the other layers invisible. This way, you'll be sure of what you are deleting on that layer."
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In Photoshop, you can reset the values in any dialog box to what they were before you began messing with them by holding down the Option (or Alt) key and clicking on the Cancel button which has now become the Reset button.
7. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
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A useful site for information on those special characters not readily available from the keyboard: <http://www.typeart.com/special_characters.asp>. It lists how to get them on Mac, PC and in HTML.
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There are around 20 email forums for those in the printing and publishing industries detailed at <http://www.printplanet.com> and <http://www.davesforums.com>
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The Adobe Type Library Reference Book, OpenType Edition, is available for US$25.00. Details at: <http://www.adobe.com/store/products/master.jhtml;jsessionid=E4JN4CECEEAYJQFI0IKBCY4AVDJBKIV2?id=catATLBook>. This is a 300-page hardcopy book that shows all Adobe Type Library fonts, as well as useful information about the OpenType font format, typographic classifications, and character sets.'
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The meanings of more than 19,000 acronyms are listed at the World Wide Web Acronym and Abbreviation Server <http://www.ucc.ie/cgi-bin/acronym> The most popular lookup: LOL!
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An update of the Frequently Asked Questions document for PDF/X, the subset of PDF designed specifically for reliable prepress data interchange, is available at <http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=1220&nl>
8. LAST WORD
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There's been some criticism of the lack of a means in InDesign CS of saving back to InDesign 2 format. Well, we have it on good authority that's not true. There is an "InDesign interchange format" which InDesign CS has a plugin to create. There's also a means of reading the format. It may be a slight problem that the only program which has the Interchange format reader is ... InDesign CS. This means you can create the interchange file in CS and read it back into CS.
Gordon Woolf
The Worsley Press
Hastings, Australia.