Aug. 29, 2008
If your manager asks, I didn’t show you this…
When deadline is near and your heart is pounding under the stress, feeling as if it’s going to burst, the lapse of every second adding another tonne of weight upon your already crumbling shoulders, your eyes burning more with every new detail, your mind about to explode in concentration, InDesign is there beckoning to take away all your troubles…
Go to the “InDesign” menu and choose “About InDesign”. Type the word “butterfly”. Now take out all that frustration on those innocent little butterflies. Once click pins ‘em to the screen… Option click kills ‘em…
Everyone deserves a break once in a while, right?
Video Instructions (all videos are quicktime movies): 1. Click on the “CLICK HERE TO WATCH TUTORIAL” hyperlink, a new window appears, once the video has downloaded completely (speed varies depending on internet connection) the video will commence. 2. Right click on the “CLICK HERE TO WATCH TUTORIAL” hyperlink and choose “DOWNLOAD LINKED FILE AS” to save the video to your computer. Once downloaded open the .mov file in Quicktime to watch. 3. Subscribe to the creativementor.com.au now Podcast through iTunes.
Posted by Neil Oliver in Interface | 4 Comments
Aug. 27, 2008
When managing your assets in Bridge you get a high quality preview, InDesign files included…
In this post I want to bring your attention to an often dismissed preference in InDesign that makes viewing InDesign files in Bridge seem a little more practical. I often hear people complaining that they really like sorting images in Bridge, however when it comes to InDesign files there is an element of frustration. It would seem that when you preview an InDesign file in Bridge you get nothing more than a medium 256 x 256 pixel preview of your file. Well there is a preference available to make this preview as large as 1024 pixels, let’s take a look.
You need be be aware that when you preview your InDesign file in Bridge you need to be looking at your file preferably in the “Horizontal Filmstrip” or “Vertical Filmstrip” workspaces to get the largest possible view of your InDesign file. The workspaces are found in Bridge by going to Window > Workspace.
To change the preview size of your InDesign files, make sure you have no files open and choose InDesign > Preferences > File Handling (Mac OS) or Edit > Preferences > File Handling (Windows). Once you’ve located the “File Handling” tab find the “Saving InDesign Files” section and change the “Preview Size” to “Extra Large 1024 x 1024″. All files saved from now on will have a preview of 1024 pixels when previewed in Bridge. It’s important to note you only get a preview of the first spread in the document, unfortunately there’s no option to toggle through the other pages within the document.
If you would prefer to leave this preference off by default you can save a preview of your file at your discretion. Choose File > Save As. In the lower left of the Save As dialogue that appears you will see the option “Always Save Preview Images with Documents”, choose this and a preview will be saved within this file for viewing in Bridge. The size of the preview is determined by the current preference setting.
Video Instructions (all videos are quicktime movies): 1. Click on the “CLICK HERE TO WATCH TUTORIAL” hyperlink, a new window appears, once the video has downloaded completely (speed varies depending on internet connection) the video will commence. 2. Right click on the “CLICK HERE TO WATCH TUTORIAL” hyperlink and choose “DOWNLOAD LINKED FILE AS” to save the video to your computer. Once downloaded open the .mov file in Quicktime to watch. 3. Subscribe to the creativementor.com.au now Podcast through iTunes.
Posted by Neil Oliver in Preferences | No Comments
Aug. 6, 2008
Resetting your preferences can eliminate the little demons…
It’s surprising when talking with people, to find that many don’t know they can reset their InDesign preferences back to the default out of the box configuration. One person told me they had printed out screen grabs of each individual tab in the preferences dialogue, and when they wanted to revert back to InDesign’s defaults they used their printout as a reference.
There is a way to revert to the default out of the box preferences in InDesign, but before I show you how to do that, let’s talk about why you might want to do this. One reason would be to eliminate any of the weird and quirky things that sometimes happen in the InDesign environment. For instance, I have had a document that for some reason or another the links panel wouldn’t display the links that were obviously on the page. My options at that stage were either exporting the doc as an InDesign Interchange (.inx) file or resetting the preferences back to their default out of the box configuration. I decided to try resetting the preferences first because I noticed some weirdness on another doc I was working on the day before. I went with the hunch and bingo!
Resetting these preferences can sometimes go a long way to eliminating all sorts of technical quirks, so the next time InDesign goes AWOL give it a go, you may be surprised. Oh, make sure you know what your old preferences were so you can go through and set them up just the way you like. Enough of all that, lets look at how to reset them.
Well first of all make sure you have quit InDesign. Mac Users, while pressing Shift+Option+Command+Control, start InDesign. Click Yes when asked if you want to delete preference files, this dialogue will appear twice. Once you choose Yes to both dialogues you can release your fingers from the keyboard. Windows users, start InDesign, and then press Shift+Ctrl+Alt. Click Yes when asked if you want to delete preference files, this dialogue will appear twice, once you choose Yes to both dialogues you can release your fingers from the keyboard.
Video Instructions (all videos are quicktime movies): 1. Click on the “CLICK HERE TO WATCH TUTORIAL” hyperlink, a new window appears, once the video has downloaded completely (speed varies depending on internet connection) the video will commence. 2. Right click on the “CLICK HERE TO WATCH TUTORIAL” hyperlink and choose “DOWNLOAD LINKED FILE AS” to save the video to your computer. Once downloaded open the .mov file in Quicktime to watch. 3. Subscribe to the creativementor.com.au now Podcast through iTunes.
Posted by Neil Oliver in Troubleshoot | No Comments
Aug. 5, 2008
A friend and long time InDesign user came to me last week and said “I find it so frustrating that I can’t toggle through my open InDesign documents without having to go up to the window menu. I wish Adobe could give me a shortcut to do this”. It got me thinking. How many other everyday InDesign users possibly don’t know that there’s a keyboard shortcut to do exactly that? It’s so convenient I thought I would share it with everyone.
If you choose Command & ~ (Mac) or Control & ~ (PC) you will find yourself toggling gracefully through all your open documents. That’s one for the memory bank!
Video Instructions (all videos are quicktime movies): 1. Click on the “CLICK HERE TO WATCH TUTORIAL” hyperlink, a new window appears, once the video has downloaded completely (speed varies depending on internet connection) the video will commence. 2. Right click on the “CLICK HERE TO WATCH TUTORIAL” hyperlink and choose “DOWNLOAD LINKED FILE AS” to save the video to your computer. Once downloaded open the .mov file in Quicktime to watch. 3. Subscribe to the creativementor.com.au now Podcast through iTunes.
Posted by Neil Oliver in Interface | No Comments
Aug. 4, 2008
Next Meeting…
For all you Sydneysider’s the next InDesign User Group meeting has been scheduled for Wednesday, Aug 13, 2008. Anyone who hasn’t been to one of these meetings is missing out. It is a perfect opportunity to learn new things about InDesign from leading industry experts, as well as bounce all your questions off them. Check out all the details relating to the Sydney chapter at indesignusergroup.com . You do need to sign up and register (for free) via the InDesign User Group website to record yourself in attendance for the event.
In this upcoming meeting, Cari Jansen from Typefi will introduce you to the powerful XML features in InDesign. Cari will show how you can leverage the XML support in InDesign to streamline document layout. Cari will also briefly demo AutoFit, a very neat and absolutely free InDesign plug-in. Michael Stoddart from Adobe will polish off the evening with an overview of Acrobat 9, explaining the significance of this new version for creative and print professionals.
