Indiana University: IT Training Tips Blog

You might have noticed while idly clicking around that in some applications, clicks and double-clicks have different functionality.  In almost every application that involves text, clicking once will place a cursor, and clicking twice will select the work that you clicked on.  This can help to quickly select some text without having to press and drag.  But have you ever tried clicking more than twice?  Thrice?  Four times?  The fabled quintuple-click?

Let's see how InDesign handles this.

Open up an InDesign document with some text.  If you don't have a document handy, then simply create one and place a text-heavy Word document, or even a web page. (From the menu bar File->Place, and then locate a file to place.  Double-click the file, and then click on the page to place).

Now, select the Type tool from the toolbox, and test out the following.

• One click places a cursor in the text
• Two clicks in quick succession(double-click) will select a single word
• Three clicks in quick succession(triple-click) will select a single sentence
• Four clicks in quick succession(quadruple-click) will select an entire paragraph
• Five clicks in quick succession(quintuple-click) will select all the text in the frame (the same effect as going to the menu and selecting Edit->Select All)

InDesign is far ahead in the multiple-click arms race.  Most applications will support up to three clicks, (Word, Dreamweaver, most web browsers), and three clicks in these applications will commonly select an entire paragraph.

The Opera web browser is somewhat of an oddball as it will support four clicks, in the same way that InDesign handles four clicks.

Experiment with some of your other favorite applications, and see how much time you can save with extra clicks versus pressing and dragging.

Unlike MS Word, InDesign won't let you "fake" a bold or italic style where the type itself doesn't include a bold or italic font. It will allow you to slant characters, but designers consider that to be bad form. Discussion of terminology of typography may help you understand why.

When people speak of fonts, they are typically using the word inaccurately. Here's the truth:

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The Pen tool is one of the most challenging and powerful tools in graphic design.  One of the major advantages of learning the Pen tool is that it is the same tool across many applications.  However, it is used differently between programs.  Pen projects in Illustrator would have different results from Pen projects in InDesign, for example.

In this video tutorial by Ashley Endemann, we are going to explore some of the uses of the Pen tool in InDesign. We will look at creating a clipping path for a graphic, custom frames for text, as well as modifying a font for decorative or design purposes.

If you don't know how to use the Pen tool, don't worry.  You can take our Pen tool class: Adobe CS4: Pen Tool Basics for Advanced Graphic Design, and get up to speed.

Using the Pen Tool in InDesign

Special Thanks to Ashley Endemann for the video.

Object Styles in InDesign are used to package a set of options for an object.  Things like the stroke, the fill, the text wrap, and other things that we can apply to an individual frame.  Styles are great, because they allow us to apply the same style over and over again, which gives us consistency.

But there's another way we can use them.  Rather than package all the styles we need at once, we can select individual traits that we want to apply, without removing the formatting we've already applied.

In this video tutorial, I will show you how to create a style like this.  In this case, we will create a style that rounds the corners of a text frame, without altering any of the other formatting.  That way, you can quickly and easily round the corners of any frame. This method can be applied to anything you can control with an Object Style.  Try it out for yourself!

Creating an Object Style in InDesign

When I teach a workshop on Adobe Dreamweaver or Fireworks, I'm always amazed by a question that participants don't ask. (No, not: "Why can't you and the laser pointer get along?"  That question, I'm afraid, has no answer.)

The question that's never asked is: "How do you come up with these colors?"  And by "these colors", I'm referring to the 6-digit hexadecimal codes that we use throughout the Dreamweaver and Fireworks workshops to designate specific colors for display on the web:

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NOTE: Special thanks to Jacob Farmer from Identity Management who helped extensively with the regular expression portion of this post.

If you missed the Adobe Infoshares with Adobe Senior Solutions Engineer Tim Plumer on Tuesday and Thursday, you missed a lot of great information.  Even someone like me, who thinks they know everything learned a thing or two about a thing or two.

One of the things that jumped out at me was GREP Styles in InDesign.  If you're not familiar with grep(traditionally spelled in all lower case on UNIX-based systems, but listed in capital letters in InDesign), it's a pattern matching tool used mainly in UNIX, but InDesign has added it's functionality to the Paragraph styles panel. grep allows us to search for a piece of text within a file, like so:

grep Adobe indesign.txt

The line above would search for the word "Adobe" inside the text file called "indesign.txt". Things get much more complicated when we involve regular expressions.  Regular expressions allow us to search for more specific information by including various symbols within the text.  For example:

grep ^Adobe

Would search for the word Adobe, but only at the beginning of a line(indicated by the '^' symbol). This is an incredibly simple example, and regular expressions are almost a programming language unto themselves.  For example:

\b(\w+)\s+(\1)\b

This regular expression will match duplicate words separated by any amount of whitespace. Often times, regular expressions are described as "Write once, read never" because they are so difficult to decipher once they are complete.

So why would an InDesign user care?

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When installing the CS4 applications available from IUWare, you might have missed some important additional content that is also available.  In this post, we'll explore what is available in these Extra Content installers, and which items should be considered essential. If you have purchased the disc version of Design Premium, this extra content will be available on the Content disc.

First of all, let's find out where to get this Extra Content.  It is available from IU Ware at the following address: http://iuware.iu.edu/list.aspx?id=196

NOTE: You should have any CS4 applications you wish you use installed before downloading and installing these files.  Fonts in these packages can be installed without installing CS4 applications.

Here you can download all of the Extra Content that is available. It is separated by program, but we will see shortly, that some of the files inside are duplicated.  First, let's list what programs have Extra Content available, and what can be downloaded.

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The request to learn how to do InDesign book and manuscript tasks is on the increase in our workshops. The reason is, more and more scientific publications ask their authors to have copy-ready papers, and InDesign is so much more cooperative than Word when designing columns with graphics.

InDesign DOES have a footnote feature, and it's easy to use. Here are the pros and cons:

The good: Footnotes and endnotes from your Microsoft Word documents can be imported into your InDesign documents.

The bad: InDesign completely disregards your own Footnote And Endnote numbering options. Instead, it reformats footnote and endnote reference numbering to regular text.

The ugly? Decide for yourself on this one: InDesign can't convert your text to approved publication styles the way EndNote, a Word and WordPerfect plug-in does, so you'll have to style them yourself.

As I said, it's very easy to do. See this excellent tutorial by David Blatner of lynda.com:

http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to/video/how-to-create-footnotes-using-indesign-cs3-3785/view/

Trying to import a Photoshop file containing a subject with a transparent background into InDesign or Illustrator can be frustrating. You need to extract the subject from an image and place it into an InDesign or Quark XPress document, like this:

In your page layout program, it might appear that you have done all you need to do by copying and pasting selections or by using a layer mask and importing it. Sometimes, even if the transparent part of the image displays correctly on your monitor, it may still come out all wrong in the printout. That's because you need to create a clipping path in Photoshop before you import it into InDesign or Illustrator.

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To the uininitiated, creating a newsletter from scratch in Adobe InDesign may be a daunting task. However, using one of Adobe's predesigned templates makes it an easy task. Here, we'll show you how you can create your own newsletter with an InDesign template.

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