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• • November 18, 2009 at 1:08 pm #53784
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I had an InDesign dream last night… happens sometimes, especially when I'm in InDesign a lot during the day. I dreamt that I found a way to uncover the “character angle” feature — a way to select an individual text character and rotate it in place. I know the feature is in there, under the hood, because it's part of the Japanese InDesign. Maybe it's even scriptable. But in my dream, I clicked on something and there it was in the Control panel.

    Are there little features like this that you dream of (at night or during the day)?

  • November 18, 2009 at 1:16 pm #53785
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I often day dream that if you didn't have any character styles and you hit the Ctrl (CMD) B or I or both or any sort of character format, that InDesign would just a Character style rather than apply a local override. It would be just great if InDesign recognised that as the shortcut to create and apply a style for that format.

  • November 18, 2009 at 2:06 pm #53791
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Hank/Eugene: I have a feeling that I will often reply to posts on this forum with, “yes, but you can do that with the Blatner Tools plug-ins.” In fact, you can do this (if you have Blatner Tools installed):

    1. Make a Bold character style (the “Create Basic Character Styles” feature in the character styles panel menu will do this for you)
    2. Select it in the panel, right-click on it, and choose Add to Blatner Tools menu. Choose a slot (1-10) for it.
    3. In the current free beta, you have to then go to the Keyboard Shortcuts panel to assign a shortcut; we're redesigning this so that the shortcut can be applied much easier, in step 2. But either way, apply Command-Shift-B (or whatever) to the Character Style 1 (or whatever slot you used) feature.

    Now, when you press that shortcut, it will apply the character style instead of the local formatting!

    (This was one of the first features in Blatner Tools that I specced… the ability to apply KBSC to styles is crucial for an efficient workflow!)

  • November 18, 2009 at 2:15 pm #53792
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    The only problem I see with this is that I have fonts like “MetaPlusNormal” which only has Italic in it's family, “MetaPlusBold” is a different font, which also has an italic version. So for text with MetaPlusNormal, and applying bold, character style or using CTRL Shift B still wouldn't do anything with the font weight, or add a bold style to the text.

    A solution would be a brief dialog box, “No Bold Found – choose another font” or something, you choose that font, it creates the character style called something appropriate (or user defined) the dialog box could have a tick box to say “always do this”.

    But now InDesign has to remember how all this works – this is getting complicated.

    Dream on Euge, dream on.

    Yes I've used the Tools that you helped develop. They are an excellent set of tools. I must look into them more, I'm sure there are lots of other things I missed.

  • December 15, 2009 at 2:51 pm #54245
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Ok here's an easier one.

    Just on the Indesign forums over at Adobe. And someone is working on a multi-lingual document. The only problem is that they imported a pdf that has layers and each layer is to do with a different language, but the layers are all named the same in InDesign.

    What they wanted is the ability to be able to control the layers in the Object via the Layers panel.

    Which you can't do – but why can't you MAP layers to InDesign layers? Seems easy enough, you can map styles, right?

    So why not just say for

    Hank.pdf map layers styles

    PDF layers – InDesign Layers

    UK Names – UK

    Spanish Names – Spain

    German Names – German

    Then when you turn on and off layers in InDesign, the Object Layer options are turned on and off also.

    I'm sure there would be plenty of uses for this?

    What do you guys think?

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