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May 31, 2018 at 10:19 am in reply to: A personal AI powered Indesign assistant to offload your boring tasks #104130
Kelly Vaughn
ParticipantSelect all the table strokes with a .25 cyan swatch and solid stroke style and change them to a 2 pt wavy stroke.
ParticipantHi Gustavo,
Bluebeam Revu has a lot of great features for AEC that Acrobat doesn’t do as elegantly.
But every PDF viewer will have different capabilities. Apple preview for example, can’t handle transparency or interactive features. The first thing that comes to mind is the drop shadow. It looks like Revu can’t handle transparency. Try exporting your PDFs with Acrobat 4.0 compatibility. That will flatten the transparency.
As far as the jagged edges, it looks like Revu is handling the curved vector lines like a typical CAD program. It doesn’t render them as curved lines, but as a series of straight lines. I found this: https://communities.bluebeam.com/showthread.php?4920-Print-to-PDF-ugly-hatches-fills
– Open Revu
– Press “Ctrl+K” on your keyboard to open the Preferences
– Choose “Rendering” on the left
– Uncheck the box that says “Fill Anti-Aliasing”
– Click “OK”Give that a whirl and see if it helps.
If all else fails and everyone at your firm is switching to Bluebeam and will no longer have licenses for Acrobat, you may want to ask them to view your PDFs using the free Adobe Reader. That will allow them to be viewed properly.
If anyone at your firm decides to switch back to Acrobat, I have a Lynda course specifically for using Acrobat in the AEC industry. Perhaps it will be of use: https://www.lynda.com/Acrobat-tutorials/Adobe-Acrobat-DC-PDF-Commenting-AEC/597013-2.html
ParticipantI would consider using:
-WordsFlow Pro (in case they need to update the content of the spreadsheet)
-Conditional Text for each of the countries
-Nested Paragraph styles for the text formatting.It will be a lot of work, but it can definitely be done. I noticed that there are some gradient in the table. InDesign does handle those well in tables, so I would apply a successively light shade of gray in each cell to accomplish the gradient.
And the rounded corners on the table will be an issue. Diane Burns has a cool trick for accomplishing that. Basically you paste the entire table into a text frame that has rounded corners. That’s more of a last step in the project… Of course if all the tables are the same height, you could just create a rounded edge box on the master page, on a top layer.
ParticipantHere is one that I did: https://documentgeek.blogspot.com/2011/08/fun-with-geometrics-stripe-stroke-style.html
And another one that incorporates cell styles. https://creativepro.com/supercharge-graphic-productivity-cell-styles.php
ParticipantYou could set your TOC up like normal, so they are all on their own lines. And once the TOC is generated, you could do a find and replace.
Find: DAY 1 [paragraph return]
Change to: Day 1 [space]Find: The content for Day 1 [paragraph return]
Change to: The content for Day 1 [space]Find: Book reference [paragraph return]
Change to: Book reference [space]Save each of those Find/Changes so you don’t have to keep setting them up. If it’s something you’ll need to update a lot, I’d get the Find/Change by List script, so it will run this sequentially for you.
ParticipantI also work on large documents that have complex tables. Sometimes they crash if I even touch them. I sometimes have luck when I take the file to another computer and open it there. Maybe the auto-save data is corrupted. Since the auto-save data is locate don your hard drive, if you move the file to another workstation, it might fix the problem.
ParticipantI would definitely recommend Lynda.com. The membership is very affordable, and you’ll be able to have access to whichever videos you need, right when you need them. I’ve seen that when newbies take a full day class, there is just too much information to absorb all at once. Videos are a great way to go. David Blatner (who also run InDesign Secrets) has a number of great, very thorough courses on InDesign: https://www.lynda.com/InDesign-tutorials/InDesign-CC-2017-Essential-Training/466174-2.html
And I also highly recommend visiting this site often, listen to their podcast, and sign up for their newsletter. I got my InDesign training right here at InDesign Secrets. I never took a college class, and it was years before I even took an InDesign seminar. A hug amount of InDesign brainpower hangs out on this site, just waiting to answer people’s questions.
Welcome to the club!
–Kelly Vaughn
ParticipantInstead of having those frames on a hidden text layer, why not just make the text invisible and move it off to the side? Or have the invisible text within the body of the document, but very small, and invisible. You can still find and edit it with the story editor.
ParticipantI have similar issue and I got to thinking that I could make a custom bullet: a really long line, and use that bullet in a paragraph style. IndyFont is how I would make the custom font.
ParticipantI have trouble using Print Booklet from Acrobat. try using the Print Booklet feature in InDesign. It’s under File > Print booklet. It seems to have more options than in Acrobat, and works with better success.
ParticipantHi Melissa,
There’s no way to copy and paste a screenshot. But if you use a cloud service, like dropbox or google drive, you can simply put the file there and post the link to it. You can do the same thing with a snippet or your whole InDesign document if you want.
ParticipantCan you post a screenshot? Be sure to turn on your hidden characters.
ParticipantI would definitely go with conditional text. Different languages require different amounts of space for the text. If you use conditional text, yo can put the graphics inline as anchored objects, and they will reflow with the text, no matter how ling it is. Set up two conditions: one for English and one for German.
ParticipantI took a look at your file. That is really weird! It appears that there is something corrupt within the TOC style of the broken file. I tried exporting it as an IDML, and then reopening it, but that didn’t work. So then I decided to delete the TOC style in the broken document, and reimport the one from the working document, and it worked just fine. Give that a whirl and see how it works for you.
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