Indesign Secrets

David wrote up a great post the other day about how to use Nested Styles with a non-OpenType font so that any numbers in the text use a different typeface automatically — an expert set of Small Caps that’s part of the same typeface family. Toward the end of the post he said, “Now, I would be remiss in my duty if I didn’t also add that it may just be time to upgrade your fonts to OpenType versions, which may have expert or SC fonts built in. That’s so much easier to deal with!”

So true; but it reminded me that for some unlucky people, OpenType Small Caps can turn nasty, at the most inopportune times.

I posed a question to Thomas Phinney at Adobe recently (master of all things font-related) regarding the priority that InDesign considers fonts. That is, if you have four versions of Arial or Times or some other font on your computer, which one is InDesign really going to use? In some cases, the answer is “All […]

As I mentioned (but didn’t go into great detail about) in my May 2008 column for CreativePro.com, one of my favorite InDesign techniques is to lift interesting silhouettes from photographs to use as InDesign text, image or unassigned frames that I fill with a color or something.

For example, you can convert these three images (all from the Photoshop Samples folder, inside the Photoshop application folder):

Nathan wrote:
We use a font that has a SC (small caps) version and in our Body copy (which is regular) we would like all the numbers to be SC. Is there a way to use nested styles to change all the numbers to a different font or different character style inside a paragraph?
Nested styles are […]

I was having terrible troubles with Data Merge last week because I was getting this message about “the data source file you selected either has no records or is not a supported file format” every time I tried to choose the tab-delimited file that contained my data:

This was just a simple file exported from Excel! I opened the file back up…

My co-host here, Anne-Marie Concepción, is so modest and humble that she’s not going to stand up here and shout about the other work she’s been doing, so I figger I’d better do it for ‘er. Here’s the deal: If you haven’t been reading her new column at CreativePro.com (titled “HerGeekness Says”, you’re missing out. […]

Why do so many people want their all the text in their documents converted to outlines? Don’t answer that; I’ve heard the reasons, and they all make me sad. Nevertheless, some people do want all the text converted, and they find themselves up a creek because Type > Create Outlines doesn’t always give them what they want. Specifically, paragraph rules (rule above/below) disappear. Bullets and numbering disappear. Underlines and strikethroughs disappear. All kinds of stuff disappears, and that’s not good.

Fortunately, there is a better way to convert text to outlines…

It’s late Wednesday night as I type, and I’m just buzzing with excitement about The InDesign Conference in Toronto this week. We had a great two-day event, with over 200 attendees coming from around Canada and the United States. (And elsewhere! I had a lovely chat with a woman who few here from Qatar.) Speakers […]

Adobe informed its trainers today that people who are InDesign CS2 Adobe Certified Experts (ACEs) have until May 31, 2008 to take and pass the InDesign CS3 re-certification exam and thus remain current with their ACE status. (Otherwise they lose their certification and have to “start over” with the the full exam, which is more expensive, longer, and can only be taken at a proctored location.) The new date is a full month past the original deadline of April 30, 2008.

We’ve received two emails this week regarding leading — or, more specifically, InDesign apparently ignoring or changing the leading values of paragraphs.
For example, G. wrote:
…The problem arises when we copy and then paste a text frame into a new document — some of the text blocks (not all) change their leading. But this is the […]