So here I am in beautiful Kauai where I just finished two days teaching the Hindu monks at Kauai’s Hindu monastery (https://www.himalayanacademy.com/).
The ten or so monks who work in the publications department are all very techno-savvy with state of the art Macintosh equipment. They’re also right on the cutting edge having already ordered their copies of Creative Suite 3. Many of the new effects and transparency controls are good, but became very excited about the idea of being able to place one InDesign into another document.
However, despite years of experience with Quark, InDesign, and other page layout programs, there were a few workflow issues that I came out to help them with.
While there were many issues that were specific to their own workflow, there was one technique that we came up with that was a lot of fun to develop.
The workflow starts with a set of 26 Illustrator files that contain the capital letters of the alphabet. Each letter was specially designed in Illustrator and saved as paths with different colors.
When one of the monks starts a new article in their magazine, they import the Illustrator artwork into InDesign.
However, they have a problem in that each issue of the magazine changes the color for these placed Illustrator files.
The problem was how to batch process each of the Illustrator files to change the color to match the new issue’s swatches. Illustrator’s actions were close, but couldn’t handle the tints of the swatch color.
That’s when I realized that we were doing it all wrong. Instead of trying to change the color in Illustrator, we needed to use InDesign’s more powerful options for working with colors.
What we needed was to first drag all the Illustrator paths into InDesign. Then apply a color we called Drop Caps. This color would be the one that changed for each issue.
We were then going to use a Library to hold all the letters, but realized that Snippets would be better. This is because two people can’t open the same Library at the same time. But two people can drag the same Snippet into their own InDesign file.
Then as soon as the Snippet comes into the ID file, the Drop Cap swatch from the Snippet changes its color to whatever the definition of the swatch is for that issue.
It’s a change in their workflow, but ends up a lot easier for the monks.
I had a wonderful time working with the monks. If you would like to see more of my trip as well as the work they do read their blog entry.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on April 7, 2007
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