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Tom Pardy
MemberWotsamatta?
Only 13 views in three days. Surely I am not the only person with this problem?
MemberThanks for your reply, David, but I’m afraid that was not it.
I checked under the View menu and “Grids & Guides > Snap to Document Grid” was not turned on. The mystery continues.
Membercdweeks’ solution is indeed brilliant. (I mean the first post. His/Her second post was written as I was writing this.) I played around with it a bit and was able to make the underline wider by specifying that the drop cap (in the paragraph style definition) should be three characters rather than just one. I then placed a hair space either side of the first character and, since the underline description in the dropcap character style applies to all three “characters” (ie., includes the two hair spaces), it seemed to achieve the result you wanted.
I see three minor problems with this technique:
- I can’t see any automated way to insert the hair spaces, whereas the paragraph style definition automates the rest of it. Perhaps those skilled at grep can come up with one but I freely admit to being a grep ignoramus.
- Inserting those hair spaces, specifically the right-hand one, probably leads to a mis-spelled first word of the paragraph — no big deal but a little annoying.
- I would wish for some way to have a little bit of white space to the right of the coloured box. As it is, the next letter of that first word and, of course, the first letter of the first word on the second and third lines (and however many lines your drop cap covers) are hard up against the coloured box.
All that aside, I think the look is pretty cool. As well as defining the colour of the dropcap character style as “paper”, I gave it a 0.25pt black stroke which I think sets it off more cleanly against the orange background.
MemberThank you, Jongware!
Do you know, I have used that dialog box dozens of times (perhaps hundreds) and the presence of that check box had never registered with me. I guess I need to stop and smell the roses occasionally.
And yes, I did realise that the font with a slightly different name was a slightly different font. Indeed, in Word, when it still showed the old version, if I changed the paragraph style description, I could see that the characters were slightly different and, for reasons that I don’t even begin to understand, the leading seemed different too. I don’t really know how to set leading in Word but it is no big deal for me as I am using it less and less. Setting line height is not quite the same thing, is it? OK, this is an InD forum, not a Word forum. Forget I mentioned it!
Thanks again. No wonder I keep coming to InDesignSecrets! :-)
MemberHappy 2012 right back at you, David!
Thank you for your reply. I went to that link and read through it (though I must admit I skimmed quite a few of the 43 postings) and I don’t think it really helps with the problem. Most of the images in the formerly PageMaker files I have been converting to InDesign files are Illustrator files so that the endless debate over 72ppi vs 300dpi (yadda yadda yadda) is not going to help. When I went through some of them looking for .tifs. .jpgs and other pixelated images, I found very few that were much bigger than a couple of centimetres across, mostly smaller. I did open some of them in Photoshop and changed their resolutions to something similar to their actual on-page resolution, then did a Save As but the change to file size was negligible.
I have known about the Save As feature from way back in the PageMaker days (I began using it about 1994 or 1995) but again, I don’t think it applies in this case as, to save a PM file as an InD file, one HAS to Save As anyway.
The embedded colour profiles thing might be worth exploring, though I am feeling out of my depth a little. There were only three references to “profile” in that thread of 43 messages and none of them seemed to offer any help. Perhaps you (or someone else who can’t leave the forum alone when it is a holiday) can point me to a suitable thread to help me begin to understand.
For the record, I am using CS5.5 on an iMac (late 2007) running Mac OS X 10.7.2 (Lion). Virtually all of my work gets printed on an inkjet desktop printer (Canon iX7000) so, although it uses CMYK inks, like all inkjets, it prefers me to send it RGB files. Only on rare occasions does a job get sent to a commercial printer in CMYK.
MemberMaybe a little from left field (is that expression known universally in English?) but it occurs to me you could achieve the desired look (as per your example shown, Johan) by using two single-cell tables, one within the other. Use the dotted border on the top and bottom borders of the outer cell and the solid ones on the top and bottom of the inner cell.
By adjusting the Cell Inset values of the outer cell (Table/Cell Options/Text…), you can control how close to each other the two borders appear. The left and right insets of this cell should, of course, be zero to bring the ends of the solid borders as close as possible to the ends of the dotted borders.
Your text, of course, goes in the inner cell and its Cell Offset values will determine how far the composite borders appear from the text. Centred text is obviously going to work best in the example you gave us. Other alignments would also work but you may need to adjust the left and right margins of the paragraph — or possibly the Cell Inset values of the left and right.
I had a few back-track steps in trying this out and suggest you set up the outer cell (table) completely before you place the inner cell (table). otherwise it is almost impossible to get back into that outer cell to make any further adjustments. I found I needed to delete the inner table before I could do so.
I haven’t tried this, but it occurs to me as I rite this that a single table (the one I have been calling the inner table) could simply be placed in its own text frame (it has to be in one anyway) and the dotted borders applied to the text frame. You could define the text frame with its own object style and the table it contains with its own table and/or cell style. That way you could repeat it whenever you wanted to without too much fuss and bother. Mind you, I acknowledge that it doesn’t solve the path problem, but maybe someone else can pick that up.
OK, I’ll slink back to left field now . . .
MemberI don’t know the answer to your question but a possible work-around would be to produce more than one (several, if necessary) documents, export each to .pdf and then combine the .pdfs using Acrobat.
November 2, 2011 at 4:03 pm in reply to: New to InDesign — Book Creation MS Word-InDesign Workflow Question #60977MemberI’m just wondering why, if your book includes chapters, they all have to be in a single Word document. Would it not make sense to have each chapter as a separate Word document and then, if you need to add a new chapter, it could be a new Word document? Each chapter can then be placed in InDesign (perhaps even in separate InDesign documents using the Book feature) and laid out as necessary. This would also allow an easy reshuffling of chapter order, should that prove necessary at some future stage.
Or have I missed a point somewhere?
MemberHow about creating those styles in a document, fine-tuning until you are happy with them? You could even delete the objects themselves from the document, once you were happy with them, provided their styles were safely in the Object Styles panel. Then do a Save As to copy that document with a new title (something like “Object Styles.indd”) in a suitable place.
Then, whenever you wanted those styles in a document you were working on, use the Load Object Styles item in the pop-out menu of the Object Styles pallet to import them to your current document.
It’s not, strictly speaking, an export. But it does give you the equivalent of a library of object styles. You could even add new styles to it as your needs changed. Once you load all the object styles into your current document, delete the ones you don’t want.
MemberDavid, I’m not sure that is what Nigel was looking for. I suspect he wants to REPLACE the images, rather than cover them up. After all, he did say he rescanned the relevant PAGES with the half tones, not just the half tones themselves.
The way to replace the page images is to select the image that needs to be replaced (just click on it in the InDesign page with the black arrow tool). This will highlight it in the Links panel. Then use the pop-out menu of the Links panel to Relink… Navigate to the rescanned greyscale image, highlight it in the dialog box, click Open and your job is done (apart from clicking OK in the dialog box that quibbles over a different file name).
Or at least your job will be done if the two images are the same size. If not, then you may need to adjust the frame edges and the fit-to-frame characteristics (using the little icons in the control panel).
Mind you, if I was doing it, I would have rescanned just the half tones, not the whole page they were on, and used David’s method.
September 11, 2011 at 4:50 pm in reply to: Control appearance of individual line segments of a frame #60495MemberHow about a single-cell table? You can control the colours, width etc., of each border of the cell independently and you can place just about whatever content you wish in the cell. The space around the content can also be set independently on all four sides.
MemberThank you, Kris!
I admire the way you and Joris are so tenacious in ironing out bugs. It is not the first time I have raised an issue with you and, as ever, you seem to be right on top of it. Well done!
I look forward to the creation of your daemon. In the meantime, I will sit back and smile each time I see “poor wee Soxy” wrestling with the great unco-operative Adobe. My money is on David rather than Goliath — at least in the long run.
:-)
MemberNow why didn’t I think of that? Thank you!
MemberYes, thank you, I can see how that might help and have now saved a preset called “Reverse Order” for that purpose.
But how can I make that preset the default? Or do I need to? When I open a new ID document and choose the Print command, it now shows “[Custom]” as the default preset (admitedly showing “Reverse Order” checked) rather than the preset I have saved. Should I be content with that?
July 10, 2011 at 4:41 pm in reply to: Rotating picture with drop shadow creates flat grey "ghost" square #60019MemberI have not experienced this problem myself but am wondering if it could be solved by adding the drop shadow AFTER you have rotated the photograph?
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