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Mr.Screens
MemberIn 30 years of laying out publications, my experience with numbering conventions corresponds with what Alan describes. For catalogues and brochures, you may get a clue from the printing specs. For example, if the job is described as “28pp self-cover,” make page 1 the outside front cover. If it's “24pp plus cover,” start numbering on the first recto after the OFC.
MemberI like Eugene's approach of trying to retrain the cow-orkers, but not much can be done about outside submissions. When I get an author's Word file with only a few graphics dropped into it, I search for ^g to find them in Word, select and copy the graphic, then switch over to Photoshop, select New File, and paste, flatten, and save it as TIFF with an appropriate name like 1-1, 1-2, etc. If there are lots of graphics and the file is in .docx format, the tip in that article works great (rename a copy of the Word file with a .zip extension and expand it).
One more tale from the trenches: Years ago (pre-.docx), I received a book ms. in Word with hundreds of screen grabs in it. When I asked the author for the original files, he said they didn't exist—he had saved his screens to the clipboard and pasted them directly into Word. I discovered that if I saved his Word file to HTML, all the screens were saved as .PNG files and placed in a links folder. That left only renaming them all into sensible filenames.
MemberRoManuV, you've probably finished your project and shipped it off by now, but I thought I'd add a couple of comments to the info coreenm provided.
When I prepare a cover file for a perfect-bound book, I ask the printer to provide the spine width based on the paper's PPI (pages per inch) value. It's usually some lengthy fraction, like .6875″ (11/16″). The way I build my template is as a single page that's (page trim width x 2) + (the spine width) wide by (page trim height) high. So, for example a 5.5″ x 8.5″ book might have a cover layout of 11.6875″ x 8.5″. The tip I want to pass on is to use ID's column guides feature to create your spine area. Go to Margins and Columns…, say you want 2 columns, and use the spine width as the gutter (in this example, .6875″). That will create perfect front cover, back cover, and spine areas for. Be sure to include a .125″ bleed all around the outside edge of your cover.
When ID5 came out featuring multiple page sizes in a single document, one of the sample docs I saw was a book cover with separate pages for front, back, and spine; but I've never known a printer who wanted a cover submitted as three separate pages.
Also, in my experience there's no problem printing the inside covers of a paperback (perfect-bound) book. You just have to pay for it. I usually submit these as a separate two-page file, one page per inside cover, at the trim size of the book (I don't worry about the spine for inside covers).
MemberOne more option nobody has mentioned yet: a plug-in for InDesign that will convert a PDF to an editable InDesign file.
https://recosoft.com/products/p…../index.htm
Certainly worth a free trial to test it on your client's file.
August 15, 2011 at 12:20 pm in reply to: Any Way to Synchronize Footnote Options Across Booked Docs? #60281MemberDownloaded the script and ran it. Worked like a charm. Thanks again, Jongware!
August 15, 2011 at 12:04 pm in reply to: Any Way to Synchronize Footnote Options Across Booked Docs? #60280MemberDon't know how I missed this earlier, but I found this earlier post answering the same question:
MemberWould it be possible to find anchored objects and replace with contents of clipboard (whereon you'd have a logo of the proper size)? If you have anchored objects that are not logos, you'd have to look at each one, but it would still be faster than selecting each by hand.
MemberAs often happens, some early bad experiences can make one overly cautious (possibly beyond reason). I'm thinking here of several publishing clients who continued to forbid use of any TrueType fonts in their books—years and years after all issues with some RIPs not properly rendering them were resolved. In the case of exporting PDFs directly from InDesign, I have two tales from the trenches that put me off using it.
Case #1: In of the first projects I designed InDesign CS2, I was playing with all the cool new transparency blending effects (Difference, Exclusion, etc). I noticed that when I used Export to PDF from InDesign, not all of these rendered properly. If I printed to .ps and distilled a PDF, they were fine.
Case #2: Some years back I received instructions from a publisher not to use Export to create PDFs, because they'd found that such PDFs where not fully accessible to reading software for their visually impaired clients, whereas distilled PDFs were OK.
Perhaps in the current version of InDesign, all these issues have been resolved, so sticking with the more time-consuming distilling workflow is no longer justified. Virtually ALL the work I do is for print, though, so I don't mind losing all the layering and interactivity. Besides, distilling an 840-page textbook just took me less time than writing this e-mail.
December 16, 2010 at 6:57 pm in reply to: How do I apply a drop cap when the sentence starts in quotes? #58142MemberAccording to the Chicago Manual of Style, the open quote is often dropped when the design calls for a drop cap, and I think that this is by far the most attractive solution. CMS goes on to say that if the open quote is retained, it should appear at the same size and vertical alignment as the normal text, not be part of the larger drop cap style.
MemberYes, I have a thought. If you want the finished documents to look exactly like a Word document, why bother to import them into InDesign?
November 2, 2010 at 4:54 pm in reply to: Any Way to Synchronize a Book to Turn On/Off Layers? #57558MemberI don't know whether Caryn wants to (or should) do that, but I thought it was way to get the script to work.
There are probably hidden dangers there, depending on how consistently the layers are named and what their properties are.
November 2, 2010 at 4:13 pm in reply to: Any Way to Synchronize a Book to Turn On/Off Layers? #57556MemberThe script is working perfectly for my book project (thanks again, Jongware!), but that's because all the chapters in my book have the same layers.
The way I added layers I needed after the chapters had been started was via Synchronize Options in the InDesign Book file I'd gathered them into. By adding layers to one chapter's Master Pages, I could use that chapter as the master to synchronize Master Pages throughout my Book file, bringing in the layers.
Any chance you might be able to standardize layers across all your documents that way?
September 17, 2010 at 9:50 am in reply to: Any Way to Synchronize a Book to Turn On/Off Layers? #57034MemberWow! Thanks, Jongware! The script works like a charm. You're like a genius or something.
I somehow didn't get or didn't see the e-mail notification of your reply. Good thing I saw this topic in the Buzzworthy Forum Posts section of the InDesign Secrets Newsletter, or I may never have known you posted this script.
September 10, 2010 at 8:56 am in reply to: Any Way to Synchronize a Book to Turn On/Off Layers? #56970MemberSince I had already built 20 chapters' worth of “prelayout” (styled text flowed in but no art added yet) when these new guidelines came in, I was thrilled to be able to add the new layer to the Master Pages of one chapter, then sync Master Pages and have it magically appear in all my chapters. But turning it on and off has no effect in syncing.
This morning I had the thought, “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out.” So I deleted the Watermark layer from the sync-master chapter and again synced Master Pages, just to test that as a brute-force method (although it's not really what I wanted). It deleted all the elements from the Watermark layer on all the Master Pages, but the empty layer remained. Pretty close—effectively the result I wanted, but inelegant.
Ro, that's a clever solution, but I'm with you about not liking ghostly zero-precent opacity objects haunting every page of my final file, doing who knows what? Rasterizing all the type they “overprint”? I'd rather manually click off the Watermark layer in each chapter when I'm making the proofreader's corrections. I just like letting InDesign do the work for me whenever it will.
Thanks for your input, everybody!
MemberSo converting variables to text yields the name of the variable? That's hilarious!
I suppose creating a custom master is the right thing to do, rather than overriding every recto in the chapter. If it doesn't bite me back, it'll likely bite somebody back down the road. Thanks for the advice and insight!
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