Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
Alan Gilbertson
ParticipantWhen I want to do a purely visual comparison, I usually do it by having both versions open at the exact scale and superimposed, then toggling them back and forth. The eye sees even tiny differences as movement, so they are very easy to spot.
For a single or double-sided piece, opening both versions as layers in Photoshop, one below the other, is a slightly roundabout but very precise way to do this, since you can just drag the opacity slider on the top layer back and forth or use the “Difference” blend mode. It's all but impossible to miss a change, even things as subtle as minor letterspacing differences in body copy.
ParticipantA good find, nonetheless. In hindsight, it has perfect engineering logic to it. There are several examples in ID of things that make total sense from an engineer's viewpoint, but are baffling, or at least counter-intuitive, when seen from the other side of the UI.
ParticipantCreeDo said: I haven't had to deal with the super minimized window yet, knock on wood.
Do you have a dual monitor setup? I have a suspicion that might be a trigger for that problem. If you're single-monitor and have never seen the problem, that would be a clue. (Always looking for clues I can pass on to the engineers!)
ParticipantID's misbehavior with Windows OS functions is a long-standing annoyance. I reported the “bottom of the window hides behind the taskbar” bit way back in CS3, from what I recall. ID starts in a restored (windowed) mode that is almost indistinguishable from full screen. It does this almost regardless of what its window size was adjusted to last time out. No idea when they're going to fix that behavior, or any of several other issues with Windows chrome (like the fact that a “New Folder” in a Save dialog is created without its name field open for editing, or that none of the Save or Open dialogs are scrollable with a mouse wheel until you click in the directory listing, sometimes more than once).
The one that annoys most, though, is ID's trick of “opening” as a tiny, super-minimized window partly outside of the top left corner of the screen.
Report the bug. The more who do, the more likely it is to be addressed in the next round (or even in a dot release).
ParticipantGreat to see you here, Scott! Professional Design Techniques is a favorite on my bookshelf, where it sits beside Real World InDesign, InDesign Type and Claudia McCue's marvellous Real World Print Production.
I'd add to your and David's remarks that there's a new and growing niche for book design. Between the shrinking cost of production and the new dominance of online marketing and sales, authors new and established are finding self-publishing an attractive alternative to the conventional publishing process.
At any given time, I almost always have at least one book project in hand that's for a private edition or intended for print-on-demand publication. Self-published works aren't a matter of vanity publishing any more, and, similar to the indie recording and movie scene, I don't see this doing anything but grow. These days, ePub versions are also needed pretty much simultaneously with a print edition, making CS 5.5 a very happy arrival on the design scene.
ParticipantI don't recall seeing this issue with CS2, but I no longer have it installed anywhere to be able to check. If you can work around the issue with PDF, then I'd suggest going with that. You might have better luck on the Adobe user to user forum.
ParticipantYou should design to a larger size. Very few users (relatively speaking) are on 1024×768 screens. 1280×1024 is about the low end of 4:3 screens, and the dominant sizes are in 16:9 ratios for both desktop and laptop screens. If you don't watch the user to have to scroll down, you'll be safe with a max height of 800 px, and let the width fit the aspect ratio you choose.
ParticipantYep. The articles panel works with objects-as-a-whole, so a long story with “embedded” illustrations requres that you anchor the objects in the right places. The good news is it's mind-bogglingly easy with the new drag and drop anchoring function.
ParticipantJeremy, the musicians I'm talking about are touring musicians, people who've made their careers performing on stage and still earn their living that way. The piracy issue has seriously affected their earnings, because as less and less money comes in from royalties, the artists they play for can't afford the salaries and benefits any more. Live performances are fairly constrained in terms of earnings, being squeezed by expenses on the one hand and how much you can charge for tickets in any given market. It has nothing to do with opulence, but with paying an ordinary mortgage and sending kids to school.
It isn't a matter of “the occasional teenager.” It's thousands upon thousands of teenagers, twenty-somethings and other demographics. They aren't learning to play guitar (or trying to launch a career), they're just downloading music, movies and programs for free because it's easy and they haven't been taught to care one way or the other.
And really, “something valuable acquired for nothing, without the consent of the giver” is the basic legal and moral definition of theft.
April 22, 2011 at 3:56 pm in reply to: a normal save will not work, Indesign asks me to save as and where????? #59395ParticipantReadingG said:
I open up a document to work on it.
I make a few changes and then click save.
The save as window pops up asking me where I want to save it and what name do I wish to give the document.
This is made more annoying by the fact that the place where it offers to save it is the last location visited/used but usually not the location of the document that I am working on.
It sounds like you are opening documents created using an earlier version of InDesign than the one you are using. When you open the document, does the word “[converted]” appear after the original document name? If so, that is definitely what's happening. InDesign can only Save As, because the versiion of the document that you now have in memory is no longer compatible with the original that you just opened.
Unfortunately (and you're not the only person who gets driven crazy by this), InDesign doesn't offer to save it back to the original folder. That would be SUCH a useful preference setting…
ParticipantHi Sarah,
You're running into a somewhat-unavoidable quirk of automatically inserted variables in InDesign. What's in the flow of text is a code, and InDesign doesn't properly account for the expansion of the code into a piece of text. The code is a single character, and it behaves in some ways as a single character, no matter what the expanded text value of the variable is. As here, this can have unwanted formatting side-effects.
The solution, at least for now, is to use forced line breaks, “No Break” and soft hyphens in the surrounding text to bring things back to a reasonable appearnance. Sometimes you just have to type stuff by hand once the copy editing is final. To give you an example, a book I designed last year had an extensive glossary with Chinese characters appearing in certain entries. I used text variables to put the first and last definitions on each page as part of the page header, dictionary-style, which worked fine for the English-only entries. Because the text variable is in reality a single code, it can't have multiple fonts or styles, and unfortunately the font for the Chinese characters in the book was not the one I used for the main text, which was in English. Where an entry word showed up in the header, I had no choice but to delete the text variable and manually type that part of the header.
A similar thing to what you're seeing can happen where an automatic chapter title is part of the header. If the title happens to be longer than will fit in the frame, it won't overflow (because it's really only one character), but the expanded text won't fit, so InDesign squashes the text until it does. The solutions here are to expand the text frame or use a different chapter title.
More intelligent handling of inserted text variables is a great subject for a feature request! Add your voice to the clamor here at the Adobe website.
ParticipantThat's coming from InDesign's justification engine. It's very tricky justifying text in such a narrow column, regardless of auto-inserted items such as page references, but there are some paragraph style settings that can help.
You could turn off justification completely and allow the text to rag right, but if that's not an option you can improve matters by adjusting the Justification settings in your text paragraph style:
In the Justification dialog, try setting Letter Spacing to minimum -3% and maximum 3%, and Glyph Scaling to minimum 99% (or even 98%) and maximum 101-102%. You can set the Word Spacing minimum to 90%. These will allow InDesign's paragraph composer more freedom to create a more even text color than the defaults, but you may still have to do some copy editing to avoid super-compressed or super-spaced lines of text. The Paragraph Composer and Single-Line Composer will do their best to stick with the limits you've allowed them, but on occasion will override them where a word just can't be hyphenated. Those overrides will show up with a yellow highlight in Normal view if you've enabled “H&J Violations” in Edit>Preferences>Composition.
You can also use custom tracking, turn off the Paragraph Composer, insert manual line breaks and use No Break or soft hyphens to tweak the text.
As a general rule, it's best to go ahead and get all your text set before you make your “fine tuning” pass to tweak the typography, and it's best done from front to back, because any adjustments you make will affect the text that follows.
ParticipantIt never hurts to ask for a contract proof, and it sounds like a Matchprint or Sherpa would have been the way to go in this case. Monitor calibration and soft-proofing are really so you know what it ought to look like. Controlling what comes off the press is, as in this case, still a matter of a press check and/or a contract proof if you need color accuracy.
April 20, 2011 at 3:10 pm in reply to: Can't get page numbering to start at 1 on actual page 7 #59355ParticipantMost likely your A master will be what you'll use for most pages. Secondary masters are useful for pages such as chapter openers, where you want the top margin to be lower on the page than regular text pages, splash pages that mark the beginning of a new section of the book, full-page illustrations or any other situations where you need some other kind of variation from the most common page style. Basing your secondary masters on the A master means that if, for example, you decide that the margins need to be changed, you can change them on the A master and have them change on all the rest.
Drag a master page and drop it on a page thumbnail in the pages panel to assign that master to the page.
You can drag the “None” master over a page in the pages panel where you want a totally blank page (such as the left-hand page facing a chapter opener), but I wouldn't use it for anything else. The whole idea of having master pages is that, as with paragraph and character styles, you can make a change in one place and have it update everywhere it applies in the document. Except for very simple projects (and not even then, in my opinion), you should avoid overrides in styles or master pages. Best practice is to get thoroughly into the habit of creating styles and master pages, and don't break it!
The simplest ways to start a new section, by the way, are to a) right-click the page thumbnail in the pages panel and pick “Numbering and Section Options” from the menu, or b) select the page in the pages panel and choose “Numbering and Section Options” from the panel flyout menu. The black triangle appears only after you have established the page as a section opener.
Nigel French's excellent “InDesign Type” is a great book to get you up to speed on all things typographic, by the way. It covers all this kind of stuff and a lot more. To get up to speed fast with InDesign in general, get a subscription to Lynda.com and check out David's “Essential Training” titles for InDesign.
April 19, 2011 at 5:09 pm in reply to: Looking for english (USA) forum about graphic design/graphic industry #59332ParticipantAndreas, I think you're looking for graphicdesignforum.com. It fits all of your criteria, and is frequented by professionals from every part of the industry. It's not restricted to the US, by any means, but the it's based in the US and has plenty of active members who are based in the US.
-
AuthorPosts