I use Ctrl-F (Mac) for Fill with Placeholder Text, which I do a ton of, especially when experiementing or demo-ing.

And Ctrl-U for Update All Assignments Whether They Need it Or Not.

AM

I use Ctrl-F (Mac) for Fill with Placeholder Text, which I do a ton of, especially when experiementing or demo-ing.

And Ctrl-U for Update All Assignments Whether They Need it Or Not.

AM

You're not missing anything. Renaming stories in the Assignments panel is for convenience, ID would never rename the actual filenames on the hard drive to match, because that might cause many other problems (broken links). But there's a workaround.

The autonaming of story files when you make an InCopy assignment is an efficiency feature. The only way to control what it names those files is to not use the autonaming feature, and name the files manually the first time they're exported.

To do that, create your assignments without any stories (choose New Assignment from the Assignment panel and fill out the dialog box fields). Then export stories to InCopy format as a separate step. Start by selecting the stories that should belong to one of the assignments with the selection tool and then choose Edit > InCopy > Export Selection (any of the Export commands that don't include the word “Assignment” will work), or drag/drop the selection onto the Unassigned InCopy Content category in the Assignment panel.

You'll get a dialog box asking for the name of the InCopy files and where you want to save them. The name you enter will be used as a filename prefix if you're exporting more than one story at a time. For example, if you had selected 3 stories and entered the name “test” then the stories might be named “test-Joe Shcmoe was.icml” “test-Story1.icml” “test-As I drove to.icml” and so on. The first few words of each story are tacked on to make a unique filename.

(For the ULTIMATE control in filenaming, export each story individually. The name you enter in the Export dialog box will be the final filename. But most users export many stories at once and use creative file prefixing if that's an issue.)

In the Export dialog box, be sure and save those stories into the same project assignment folder > content folder that ID would have if it exported them automatically. It's not required but it helps keep things organized. If you don't have a content folder yet you can create it manually and put them in there.

Now your stories appear in the Unassigned category in the Assignments panel. From here you can select them and drag/drop them onto the correct assignment name. Update the assignments and you're good to go.

AM

It actually has the URL appearing in the black box? (Which I guess might push “log out” to a separate line.)

I'm not seeing that here … thinking, either your browser is having a glitch (try a different one and see if it occurs) or Pariah's working on some code and you requested the page at just the wrong microsecond. ;-) Try refreshing.

AM

Hey Colin thanks for posting that! But let's not tell anyone from the Acrobat team what we're discussing here, otherwise they'll blow a gasket. ;-) What? EPS! Distill a PostScript file! Open in Illustrator! Ack!

The trick that I'm going to write up somewhere (that one that David referred to) was arrived at with the help of Leonard Rosenthal, one of the main Acrobat gurus at Adobe. Using Acrobat's own preflight tools he showed me how you can isolate a spot color into its own PDF layer, even if the original PDF has only one layer. (A client needed to do this routinely.)

But it's complicated and actually has little to do with InDesign …

AM

Here's your answer, complete w/screen shots … I wrote it up for a blog post here a couple years ago:

https://creativepro.com/cop…..design.php

You can see me demo it if you have a subscription to Lynda.com, it's in my Acrobat 9 Tips and Tricks video title. ;-)

AM

Boy that is weird. We're looking into it.

In the meantime remember if you can't figure out the math problem, just use one of InDesign's X or Y fields ;-)

AM

Interesting question! I don't know of any offhand, but maybe someone will chime in.

Have you tried isolating the shadows and placing just a few representative ones on the ID pasteboard? Then you could experiment with replicating the shadows w/ID's tools, and save the ones that come close and that you use a lot in an ID library.

You can isolate a shadow effect from its layer in Photoshop … can't remember the exact command though. You're actually creating a real layer from an effect. Right-click on the shadow effect, the command should be there.

AM