Publicious: Publishing Tech & Tools

Police InTerrogation Room: The cold metal chair beneath me creaks as I lean back and squint. The voice of Jimmy Cagney blares rapid-fire from behind a searing white light. “Where were you on the night of December 12th 2006 at 9:03 PM?”

I smirk. Slowly lighting a candy cigarette, I cooly reply, “That’s easy. I was sitting in front of my laptop, saving a file called CheeseFace3.jpg.”

“We got ourselves a comedian here. What was the resolution of that file?”

“72 ppi.”

“Colorspace?”

“sRGB ICE61966-2.1″

“Very funny. Where’d you save it to?”

“Macintosh HD:Users:Mike:Desktop:pixels_de_frommage”

A frustrated Cagney crumples his paper coffee cup. “Alright, you’re free to go. But watch yourself. We’ve got the ASPCA hot on your trail for using the Liquify Filter on your cats.”

He’s got me dead to rights there, but I won’t crack. I know where the smoking gun is and he doesn’t. I’m a free man.

How did I know about the CheeseFace file? Warrantless government wiretapping?
Ha ha ha. Heck no, that would be illegal.

Am I some DTP Rain Man? 15 minutes to Blatner… always have cheese balls and juice boxes before the podcast...

The Infinite Sadness of Google? Not yet. No, it’s something much more humble.
My Photoshop Edit Log.

Not THAT log, yew eedeeot!

Go to your Photoshop General preferences and you’ll see an item (unselected by default) called History Log. Happy happy joy joy.

Think of it as a limitless, text version of the History panel. Everything you do in Photoshop, down to the decimal point, can be dutifully enshrined in monospaced glory.

You have three options for where to record this info, and three levels of info to choose from. With Text File, you create or select a .txt document to be the repository of your deeds. With Metadata, you append this info to the file itself, so wherever it goes, so goes its history. You can see metadata by choosing File > File Info, or in Bridge, go to the Metadata Panel, and tip open Edit History. Oops, nothing to see here.

Or you can put on belt and suspenders and choose Both. In terms of what gets logged, Sessions just gives you the times you open and close files. Concise gives you openings and closings, plus a sequential list of the tools you employed. And Detailed is the version used by the other Police. Every breath you take, every move you make, every pixel you break, it’ll be watching you.

Why would you want such a log? I’ve used mine to keep track of how much time I spent on freelance work, and to remember settings I used, so I could replicate successful techniques. With the history log, I can do things like look at a printed book and compare the image on the page to the Smart Sharpen settings I applied months earlier. I’ve also used the log to see where I saved long lost files. I suppose I could use a notebook, but I write enough already, so I let Photoshop do the work.

I also just get a kick out of seeing my Photoshop habits. Looking at one log I kept from May 3, 2006 to February 4, 2007, I can see I worked on exactly 1003 files. I used 3 times as many curves as levels (473 to 185). More than a quarter of those files (277), I took into LAB. I was fairly decisive, choosing Undo 457 times. But I probably spent too much time touching up layer masks and adjusting opacity. The day I applied 202 consecutive brush strokes still bugs me. There must have been an easier way. I think you can learn a lot about how you use Photoshop from keeping a log. It might even help you improve your habits.

Despite its uses, part of me wonders if I should even be publicizing this feature. There is a capacity for evil here. Is the world ready for such radical transparency? Do we really want our employers to know how many times we’ve had to Undo? Or that we spent 63 minutes tweaking a layer mask? Mostly I think it’s OK because an employer who doesn’t have anything better to do with their time than to sift through the minute details of your edit log, might not be in business much longer.

If you do go with a detailed log, I think it’s a good idea to start a fresh one from time to time. They tend to get rather longish. If you’re lucky enough to work on one project at a time, you could start a new log with each project. For simultaneous projects, you could have a separate log file for each; you’d just have to remember to switch the preference to point to the right one. Or you could just turn logging off for projects you don’t want logged, and flip it back on again when posterity demands documentation, or when you’re just trying something out and want to be able to replicate it later.

There’s no special protection on the text log file, so you’re free to rewrite history, if you choose. If you’ve been warping your poor pets into hellcats, be sure to doctor the log before PETA comes knocking on your door.

Playing with XML in an InDesign template tonight when I figured out what was causing one of my pettiest pet peeves.

The Problem: When you choose Map Tags to Styles you get a jumpy, flickering beachball/cursor, lasting for a very long time. I’ve waited more than a minute to regain control of the application. And the flickering back and forth between a normal cursor and a beachball is more irritating than a plain spinning beachball.

The Culprit: Preview is checked in the Map Tags to Styles dialog.

This is a sticky application preference, so InDesign will remember if you left it on last time, even in a different document.

My advice is keep Preview unchecked and test out your mapping before opening the dialog box by applying some styles manually. You still may suffer the flicker when you click OK, but it seems to be shorter in length when you map specific styles. It’s almost like Preview is loading every style into memory. And this way, you only flicker if you choose to go ahead with the mapping in the current document. If you do Preview, uncheck it before leaving the dialog.

By the way, my flickering problems were always on a PowerBook G4. The problem may not happen as much on a speedier Intel. I’ll have to check that out when I get a chance.

It’s the topic that just won’t go away, at least in my mind. InDesign’s Fit Selection In Window command. In his comment, David injected a dose of reality on my overhyped enthusiasm for this command. In my joy at finding such a hidden gem of a feature in my live-in application, I overlooked some limitations. So I spent a little time taking a closer look at when this command works really well, when it doesn’t, and what you can do about it. Here are a few tips for understanding and making the most of Fit Selection in Window.

• FSIW adjusts the view so that the bounding box of the current frame(s) is centered and occupies no more than 50% of the window in any direction. Because of this, it will zoom a lot closer on frames that are squarish, than ones that are much wider than they are tall, or vice versa.

Employ FSIW on a square frame and you’ll zoom roughly twice a much as you will on a frame 4x as wide as it is tall.

• The amount of zoom is also dependent on the amount of real estate available in the window. FSIW zooms the most with a fully expanded window. It doesn’t play well with tiled windows. For the same reason, your screen resolution matters. The higher the resolution, the greater the zoom.

• Selecting text does not affect the zoom (it would be a lot cooler if it did). A blinking cursor yields the same zoom as selecting any or all the text in the frame. But the good news is, selecting a table or a cell within a table does affect the zoom. Selected tables and cells are zoomed on just like frames.

• FSIW will zoom on inline frames and anchored items when they are selected with a selection tool, not with the type tool.

• With text frames, the zoom is always greater with the type tool than either selection tool but the difference gets smaller with bigger frames. This shot shows four frames and the zoom percentages I got when I used the Selection tool (top) and the Type tool (bottom).

• Since the nature of the command is to fit the entire frame in the window, the larger the frame, the less readable text will be. If you try it on a column that spans the height of a page, you will zoom out. Way out, to some village near Athens (where all your text is Greeked).

• In those situations where FSIW just won’t zoom close enough, let your fingers do the walking. Since the key command here is command-option-= it’s a piece of cake to just lift a finger (the one one on the option key) and then hit command-= again as needed to zoom closer. After you do this a few times it becomes second nature.

Alright, I think I’ve exceeded the recommended daily dose of InDesign SubMicroMinutae. So that, my friends is the last I will be writing about Fit Selection In Window.

Today.

; )

Won’t you please help me help you?

Do you have any problems using InDesign or Photoshop? Ongoing struggles? Unanswered questions? Do you lie awake at night thinking there must be a better way of doing a particular task? Do you wish you were better trained in some little aspect of either of those programs? Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your errors.

I am starting a new project where I will be collecting and answering as many burning InDesign and Photoshop questions as I can. Not here, but on another famouser website, to be named later.

I’m looking for specific, finite questions that can be answered in a couple minutes or so. Quick hits. Things like “When is it better to use a vector mask instead of a layer mask in Photoshop?” or “Is there a way to update all missing links at once in InDesign?” Stuff like that. As long as it’s specific, no question is too simple, too obscure, too weird, too whatever.

If you have a question, post it here as a comment or shoot me an email at jmvrankin [at] gmail.com. I’d like nothing better than to have an inbox full of your problems. Thanks!

Just going along, minding my business in a longish document, when all of a sudden I am surprised to see a little white hand wave to me from the Pages panel.

Now we know in InDesign the little hand means “drag to scroll,” and sure enough I can drag to move what’s visible in the panel. I pause and ask myself, “Self, did we know about this?” Self does not reply, which in some ways is probably a good thing. But I am left with the weird feeling that I have always known about this “handy” feature. Earth humor, ar, ar, ar. And yet it seems entirely new. Have I been doing InDesign in my sleep? Sad to say, I have dreamt about InDesign. If I ever apply for a job at Adobe, I’ll be sure to include that on my cover letter. Insanity is a good differentiator.

There may be another explanation for my déjà vu. I’ve always told people to go to the Pages Panel options and uncheck “show vertically” to fit a lot more pages into the space.

Otherwise you aren’t taking advantage of all your screen real estate.

That, plus the fact that I rarely used to work with documents longer than 10 pages, meant that I never faced a Pages panel with a scroll bar. I could always see the entire document. Either that, or I’m about to wake up and realize that the last nine years have all been a…

Cue the wavy lines and swirling harps.

Oh. Excuse me (yawn) I think I fell asleep waiting for Quark to find pieces of missing art…

Y’know, I just had the strangest dream…

A few extra thoughts on my obsession with InDesign’s Fit Selection in Window:

1. I think some of my joy stems from the fact that I am left handed and thus mouse with my left hand and do keyboard shortcuts with my right hand. So I feel very balanced using stuff on the right side of the keyboard. Righties, your mileage may vary. Still, it won’t be as awkward as the many times I visited a right handed co-worker’s desk and had to cross my arms to drive their Macs out of some digital ditch.

2. Daring Doers of Desktop Demos may also have a conflict, since they often employ command-option-= to trigger the Mac’s Universal Access System Pref screen zoom.

This is an awesome feature when you’re putting on a show and need be sure your audience can see exactly what your cursor is up to. I’ve also used it to magnify markup on scanned PDFs that was otherwise illegible (my eyes are old and bent). But if you’re not in front of an audience you’ll probably benefit by turning it off and using those keys for InDesign.

3. Laptop users, where’s the love? If you have a model with no option key on the right side, you have no choice but to go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts and assign something else. Maybe just change it to command-shift-= True, that’s assigned to Superscript by default, but I think Fit Selection easily trumps Superscript. And command-shift-0 is unassigned, so there’s your Fit Spread in Window.

Is it possible to get addicted to a keyboard shortcut? To obsess about it. To look for excuses to use it. To waste time because you go out of your way to use it. To make up off-key ditties of praise and hum them while nobody is listening. Uh, a friend told me they did that. Yeah. A friend.

The answer is true, and I am living proof. The keyboard shortcut I am about to share with you is dangerous. If you aren’t careful, it might take over your life. At least your life using InDesign. Still, it’s so sweet, you have to try it. C’mon, all the cool kids are doing it. Just don’t inhale.

Ready? It’s command-option-=. Go to InDesign, select something, and press command-option-=. I mean it. Do it now, and come back.

How cool was that? InDesign zooms in or out to frame your selection nicely in the window. Not surprising then that the name of this feature you invoked is Fit Selection In Window. Just think of it as intelligent zooming. You may remember a while back when I wrote about double-clicks, and snarkily suggested there should be a feature that reads my mind and selects the thing I need. Well, this is as close as I’m going to get till I get the GoogleBrain implant. There is no reason to ever touch the Zoom tool again. Even pressing command-= more than once makes me feel hackish now.

I just don’t understand why the good folks at Adobe didn’t give this puppy a line in the View Menu. It deserves to be there. And there was room. The Type, Edit, and Window menus are all longer than View. It does appear in the contextual menu when you right-click on a selected object. But I never noticed it before. And I’m betting that 95% of InDesign users don’t know about it because it’s been so unheralded. The only documentation I could find is lost in a bland table on page 636 of the User Guide.

If you have a large frame selected, you’ll zoom out to something near Fit Page in Window. If you can’t see all of the object you have selected, it zooms out (or just re-centers) to show you the whole thing. But in most cases it will zoom in so that the object(s) you selected are centered with a nice amount of space around on all sides. Curiously, the zooming has a limit of 2000%, even though InDesign will go to 4000% with other methods. I can’t think of a time I ever zoomed to more than 2000% to actually do anything other than giggle, so I’ll let this slide.

plus command-option-= becomes

What makes this shortcut even cooler is:

• It works when you have text selected, or just a blinking cursor. Even in linked frames!

• It works as document navigation: when you’re zoomed way out, you can instantly zoom to anywhere in the document.

• It’s easy to remember, since we’re used to command-= (usually thought of as command-+) to zoom in. Or you could think of the = as squinty eyelids, focusing on something far away.

• It’s even better paired with command-option-0 (Fit Spread in Window). Use them to zoom in to work, and zoom out to admire your work and pick your next target.

If using command-option-= does become an addiction for you, know that you always have a kindred spirit here. We can all form a support group. Zoomaholics Anonymous.

Oh where oh where can it be?

Top Five Reasons Mike Has Not Been Blogging Lately

5. Been Photoshopping myself into the Celtics victory parade, high-fiving Kevin Garnett.

4. Been writing “I will not forget our anniversary again” on a chalkboard 5000 times.

3. Been driving hundreds of miles in search of gas under $4.

2. Been sulking since the 8-year-old’s blog scored 200 hits in one day.

1. Been designing a steampunk litterbox for the cats.

The merciless calendar mocks me. Two weeks and counting, dude. That’s like two months in internet time. Or three months in dog years. So if a dog wrote this blog, that would be like six months without any new content. WOOF! Saddest thing is, I STILL don’t have time to write anything more than this extended ping. But to assuage my guilt and give you hope that someday soon there will be new content here, I proudly give you…other people’s content!

First, we have Photoshop Disasters, a cautionary site for careless cloners. Six-fingered hands, missing belly buttons, severed hands, impossibly thin limbs, you name it. Monsters everywhere! And you only need to look a little closer at all the media around you to see them. Be warned, it is sometimes NSFW, but APDF (Always Pretty Damn Funny. I just made that up).

Oh and by the way, there might be a solution for THE WORST PROBLEM OF ALL TIME. No, not global warming. I mean the real problem that threatens to pitch civilization into violent chaos. Namely, adding a page to the beginning of a book, switching all the versos and rectos. A set of plug-ins from InTools allows you to set up any object with position relative to the spine. Genius! Stumbled on that one on an InDesign Secrets comment. I haven’t had a chance to play with the plug-ins yet, but when I do, I’ll report back here. If they work as advertised, you will hear the angels singing directly from your RSS reader.

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As an unashamed Buffy fan, I have to admit that every time I hear the word “master” I get visions of Buffy’s original Big Bad. The aged vampire who she eventually ends up beating after making a witty remark about him dying (poofing actually, since he was already dead). While he was a A Big Bad, he wasn’t nearly as Bad as he thought he was. Not if he could get beat by a snappily-dressed high-school cheerleader. And all of this is a non-subtle intro to master pages for people who think they’re Bigger and Badder than they actually are.

Over the years, I’ve talked with a lot of designers who are just as afraid of master pages as Buffy was of the Master. Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. But once Buffy was given knowledge of the Master , she became less afraid. And I think the same would happen with a designer or production person who is making or needs to use a template.

Like so many things I’ll probably end up talking about, master pages are great because they save time. Time that I’d rather spend watching Buffy, time that Michael would rather spend Photoshopping space suits on his cats, time that you may rather spend reading Tolstoy. Or, time that you may be able to spend working for another client or working for that promotion. Master pages lead to measured efficiencies. Impress your boss with that line.

This is our sample file. This is the first spread, there are other pages that follow this that contain the last bit of our story but this is the perfect example of how to begin creating a template from this document. I wouldn’t consider this a template, but some people would. It’s a point of preference and comfort. Since I often think my way is right and therefore the only way something could/should be done, I’ve become shocked lately to see how some people’s thinking differs from mine. Mine is still right, of course, but I’m willing to be understanding that they’re different from me.

I like a template to contain empty boxes/frames that are linked as needed but minimally styled. For example, my version of the perfect template for this layout to be used across all file types would like this:

How I got this was by selecting ALL, cutting, going to Master Page A and Pasting in Place. I then deleted all of the content from the text boxes and applied the “none” object style to each frame, except for the footer. Now I have the frames I need to begin creating any of the four types of files without having to remove any text. All I have to do is select a box and style it with the desired object style before I begin pouring. There are a few other things I need to do to make this template work better. By taking a few extra steps now, I’ll save myself a lot of time later.

There are just a few things I’d like to explain more. Let’s start with the red line around the outside of my spread. This designates how much bleed the printer requires of me. This number will vary from printer to printer so be sure to ask yours how much to prepare for. This particular printer asks for a p9 bleed. (That’s 9 points, for all of you who work with other measures. I hated points when I first started, but after trying to do the math with fractions, I realized points were easier.) To set your bleed line, go to your File menu and choose Document Setup. Click on the “More Options” button on the right. At the bottom of the window are selections for bleed and slug.

By adding a measurement to the bleed boxes, you’ll get the nice red line outside your spread so you can visually check that all of your images bleed off the page as required. If “Snap to Guides” is selected, it’ll be even easier to make sure that you have the right amount of bleed on frames that run off the page. It also means that you can easily set up your print styles to include this area when you print a paper copy, or print a postscript file. If you want to have the exact same amount of bleed on each side of your layout, all you have to do is input the number into the Top box and select the little chain icon to the right of the entry boxes. This will apply the same amount to each box without you having to type the information four times. “Measured efficiencies” remember?

We won’t be using the Slug yet, but if you wanted to include a frame that would appear outside the layout when the InDesign file was viewed and easily be printed or not printed you would set your slug area as desired. One possible use for slugs might be to create a box in the slug area where you can leave notes for the Designer to view.

Another time saver is to set up our file so it automatically applies the page numbers in the footer. And this is much, much easier than you may fear. Simply place your cursor where you want the auto-number to appear. Now go to your Type Menu and select Insert Special Character and then Auto Page Number. Click and you’re done. If the pagination changes, your page numbers automatically update and you never have to manually change a page number. In fact, I would highly suggest never manually changing a page number.

Now I briefly talked about layers in my first entry here on Mike’s wonderful site, but I want to revisit it. I propose a simplification and standardization of layers. Your organization mileage may vary, but there’s no reason to have dozens of layers in a file. For this layout I propose 4 layers:
Footer
Text
Art (which isn’t being used for this spread, but will be used for the spreads that come after this one)
Background

Very simple, right. You can look at the name of the layer and look at the item on your page, and probably guess on which layer that item will reside. The only thing which should live on the Footer layer are the footer boxes that contain the page numbers, and any book title, chapter title, etc. info. That’s it! This layer will begin in the unlocked position, but once you add the needed info to your master page, you will lock this layer. This will help you feel confident that you won’t accidentally edit this item.

The second layer in your palette is the text layer and it should contain any boxes that will have text poured into them. I would also suggest linking all of your text boxes together in the order you’re most likely to come across the text. This will help your pouring job easier in CS2 and even easier in CS3. I also suggest selecting all of your text boxes and grouping them together. Since the text boxes will remain on your master page, but you’ll actually begin to pour the text on the working page which means you’ll have to break the link for these items from your master page. And only these items, actually.

There are still a number of “efficiencies” we can express in this template, especially for the pages that we’re going to add to it next time. But we’ve got a really good start, I think. I may not be as witty as a cadre of Hollywood screenwriters made a high-school cheerleader sound, but hopefully I’ve at least given you a little more confidence so you can start to tackle the über-master pages in your own documents.

Just a quick note in case any of you out there were confused by the fact that my name was appearing on another WordPress blog, called Mr. Sports. I am the administrator, but the posts are actually authored by my son, who has caught the blogging bug in a big way from his old man. What he sometimes lacks in terms of content, he more than makes up for with enthusiasm and exclamation points. Funny thing is, he gets more hits than me. This is the source of great, animated debate at the dinner table. Note to self: use more exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!