Double Vision

Want to work on something in detail without losing sight of the big picture? InDesign has a solution for that.

In the lower right hand corner of InDesign CC 2015 is a button with two rectangles. Clicking on that button splits the view. (Or if you prefer menus, go to Window > Arrange > Split Window.) So you get you two views of one document in the same window. 

In the lower right hand corner of the window is the split view button.

You can also easily scroll to different pages and copy and paste from one section to another. Or even work on a master page while you look and the pages in the document.

It comes in handy, especially on a large screen, and saves time when working on complex documents.

Every Wednesday, I post a quick tip on an Adobe app.

The definitive guide to rounding corners in InDesign CC 2015

Over the last two weeks, a 2010 post of mine on rounding corners has suddenly become very popular.* I wrote it for CS4 and posted an updated version for CS5. But I wanted to revisit the tip and update it for Creative Cloud 2015.

The process for rounding corners is actually more complicated than I expected and is different depending on what shape you are working with.

Rounding corners on a square or rectangle

Rounding the corners** on a rectangle is straightforward and there are actually a couple of ways to do it.

The yellow box method: When you click on a rectangle with the selection tool, a yellow box appears near the upper right hand corner. Click the yellow box and diamonds appear at the corners. Drag the corners inward to round the corners equally.

To round only one corner, click the yellow box and then, while holding down shift, click and drag on the corner you want to modify.

(1) Click the yellow box in the upper right hand corner to edit the corners. (2) Drag the diamonds to change the amount of the corner effect. (3) Hold the shift Key to change only one corner.

The dialog box method: If you prefer a little more precision, you can go to Object > Corner Options… and set the rounded corner to a specific value. And it’s easy to round one corner.

Set the amount and style of your corner effects with the corner options dialog box. Uncheck the chain icon to set corners independently.

The control palette method: You can set a rounded corner value for all four corners in the control palette.

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The corner controls are easy to find... It's the only icon in the Control Palette with blue dots.

Rounding all corners on polygons that are not squares or rectangles

So rounding corners on rectangles is easy, but what if you don’t have a rectangle. It’s still easy, but different.

The yellow box method: Doesn't work. The yellow box appears only for rectangles. Triangle, trapezoid, hexagon… no yellow box.

The dialog box method: Works just like it does for the rectangle with one, major exception. You can’t round individual corners.  All of the corners have to be exactly the same.

Try to change the corner size or shape on a shape other than a rectangle and all but one input field is faded out.

The control palette method: Exactly the same as the rectangle method, with no control over individual corners.

Rounding individual corners on a polygon

So let’s say I want to round selected corners on any polygon. None of the normal methods will work, but thankfully, Adobe provides a script for this.

The scripting panel (Window > Utilities > Scripts) contains an Application folder with sample scripts in Applescript and Javascript. Select the “CornerEffects.applescript” or “CornerEffects.jsx.”

The top part of the dialog box essentially provides the same options as the “Corner Options” dialog box. And the offset box allows you to adjust the size of the corner. The Pattern combo box defaults to “all points,” but take a look at the options available: first point, last point, second point, third point, odd points, even points and more…

When applied to a box, it gives you the ability to round or bevel selected corners. Sometimes, it takes a little trial and error to figure out which point the “first” point is. The first point usually seems to be point in the upper left and then selection moves counterclockwise. 

Pretty much the only way to make these shapes in InDesign is with the Corner Effects Script.

You can also use the odd and even points patterns on a star shape. “Odd points” effect the inside points. “Even points” modify the outside points.

That should help you round any corner you need. As an aside, Adobe Illustrator has a completely different and superior corner rounding process. Personally, I hope that Adobe adopts the Illustrator method in InDesign.

Every Wednesday, I post a tip for an Adobe app.

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* Google works in mysterious ways.

** You can do more than just round corners. You can bevel them or create several different effects. But most people just want to round them.

Checking out the library

Adobe added a new* library feature across all of Creative Cloud. It’s easy to use and I think it will become a really integral part of design workflow in the Adobe world.

A library of random Sketchbook B assets.

At first, the library appears to be just another palette in the vast forest of palettes. But it's easy to add images, color palettes, style sheets and more to the new library via drag and drop or by clicking the icons at the bottom of the palette.

Library assets are then accessible from most Adobe desktop and mobile apps.** Drag a logo into your library in Illustrator... place it in InDesign or Photoshop.

It's also an integral part of Adobe's vision for how mobile devices fit into the design environment – an easy way to share assets between different types of devices. For example, Adobe Comp CC, a mobile layout app, uses your library to pull appropriate graphics, stylesheets and color palettes, on your phone or tablet. Even if those graphics were created in InDesign or Illustrator.

Try it out. You might find that it's a useful feature to have if you have a client library that you need to share between apps or designers.

Every Wednesday, I publish a quick tip for an Adobe app.

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* I remember a similar feature in Quark Xpress years ago. But the benefit of the new library is how you can access it from any Adobe app.

** It looks like other, non-Adobe apps can access the library, too. But I don't think anyone supports it yet.

Creative Spelling

If you’re like me, your clients have all sorts of brand names, executive names, cities and URLs that give InDesign’s spell check fits. But you don’t have to just click “skip” repeatedly during a spell check. Add these to the user dictionary.

Pull up the user dictionary by going to Edit > Spelling > User Dictionary… and add your terms here. If you want a name or URL to be case sensitive, check the case sensitive box.

This is particularly helpful for URLs with creative capitalization. If I want “sketchbookb.com” to always be “SketchbookB.com,” I add “SketchbookB.com” to the dictionary and check the case sensitive box. Now if I type “sketchbookb.com” somewhere, spell check will recommend “SketchbookB.com” instead.

Bonus tip: Using the import and export buttons, you can share your user dictionaries with your coworkers. 

I post quick tips for InDesign and other Creative Cloud apps on Wednesdays.

Hidden alignment

When you open the Align palette in InDesign, you have two groupings: Align Objects and Distribute Objects. But a third option is hidden in the flyout palette: Distribute Spacing. And I find it far more useful than Distribute Objects.

To find the hidden option, go to the flyout menu on the Align palette and select Show Options. Now, you'll have a palette with another row of options for Distribute Spacing.

Let’s say you have five rectangles of different widths. Something like this:

You want to change the spacing between them. If you select them all and click the “Distribute horizontal centers” button in the Distribute Objects section. The result would look like this: 

If you select the same rectangles and select the now uncovered “Distribute horizontal spacing” button in the Distribute Spacing section, you get this:

I find that most of the time, I’m looking for the hidden Distribute Spacing option. I have no idea why Adobe would hide that function and I’m always surprised how many InDesign users – some of them very experienced users – have no idea that function is there. It’s a big time saver.

Bonus tip: If you need a specific distance between a group of items, check the “Use spacing” option, set your distance, click the horizontal or vertical Distribute Spacing button and it’s done.

Sketchbook B's Wednesday Creative Cloud Quick Tip is back. You can find all of the previous tips over here.

That one weird little InDesign printing trick...

I was digging through InDesign CC 2015 looking for new features and found a quick little printing trick that, it turns out, was also in CC 2014.* 

Ever want to just print the spread that you are working on? Instead of going to File > Print... and trying to remember what page is selected, just go to Layout > Pages > Print Spread... The print dialog box will open with the printing range set to the spread you are working on.

A nice little feature that I had no idea was there…

* And honestly, maybe it's been there forever. I really don't know.

InDesign CC 2015: Paragraph Shading

Adobe has released the 2015 version of Creative Cloud. And that, of course, brings new versions of InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. Lots of blogs are covering the headline features, but I often find that the small improvements often impact my workflow the most. I’m still exploring the applications, but figured I'd start posting new features as I discover them.

The first one in InDesign that jumped out at me is paragraph shading. You can now apply shading to any paragraph… so no more drawing a color block behind a block of text you want to highlight.

The blue box is created using paragraph shading. Here, I've ALSO inset the paragraph margins.

A couple of obvious advantages to this:

• If you want to shade a paragraph within a long block of text, it will move and resize automatically as you make changes.
• It can be completely controlled and modified through style sheets, making it infinitely more powerful.

You can apply basic paragraph shading from the Control Palette or Paragraph Palette, but to gain full control, select “Paragraph Shading…” from the flyout menu on the Paragraph palette. The dialog box provides options to use a tint, set an offset and control how the shading is applied.

The full paragraph shading dialog box offers more options.

There is also an option for “Do not Print or Export*,” which is pretty cool if you want to highlight a passage that needs to be updated, but don’t want it to print. (I often set text that needs to be updated in 100% magenta. Now I have the option to shade it…)

* Not sure about the capitalization here, Adobe...

Fast wi-fi fix!

A few months ago, we changed our internet service from Time Warner Cable to AT&T Uverse. The service is great, but we've had an issue with the wireless signal cutting out randomly. My assumption was that there was some interference since the Uverse runs over wi-fi.

We've got an Apple Time Capsule. And when they installed the new service, we connected the Time Capsule to the new router with an ethernet cable and everything worked, until it didn't. I assumed I was going to reconfigure everything. And while I was fine with that, I just didn't have the time to mess with it. So we just tolerated the occasional frustration.

Today, I saw an article on Six Colors by Dan Moran about changing the channel on your wi-fi base station. So after following that guidance and setting my channel to 48, the internet was instantly more responsive on all my devices. Awesome.

Not quite, though. For some reason, while my Macs and iOS devices worked better, my Apple TV freaked out. So I started looking for more details and Six Colors had already posted a second story with more details on how to pick the best channel for your network. I followed their instructions and now everything is working perfectly.

I have no idea why the automatic channel selection wasn't working on the Time Capsule, but manually selecting the appropriate channel seems to work like a charm. Thanks to Dan Moran and Six Colors to solving my wi-fi issue.

(As an aside, if you are a Mac user and aren't regularly reading Six Colors, you are missing out. One of my favorite new sites. Jason Snell is building something awesome.)

Rethinking Wednesday Quick Tips

For about 9 months, I published a quick tip for Adobe apps almost every Wednesday. And while I enjoy posting them, coming up with a new tip weekly was starting to be challenging. So I'm going to scrap the weekly posting schedule and just post them as I find them. You can find the most recent tips on the Creative Cloud Quick Tips page.

Unexpected troubleshooting help

I was trying to get some materials printed yesterday at the office and InDesign was repeatedly crashing shortly after I hit print. 

I usually ignore the "Crash Report" dialog box. No offense to Adobe, because I ignore them from Microsoft and Apple, too.* But I was on a deadline and I was irritated and so I typed "Trying to print" in the text field and hit "Send Report." I started to reopen InDesign.

I didn't notice the checkbox to "Allow Adobe to suggest a solution or work around." But then, another message popped up: "Adobe has found a solution or workaround for the recent crash in Adobe InDesign CC 2014. Please click here for further details."

I'll be honest, I was so floored, that I didn't take a screen shot or really read it too carefully. (I had to recreate to crash to get the above screenshots.) I clicked the link which took me to "InDesign & Illustrator | Crash while printing to Fiery RIP." Which, by the way, was exactly the solution to my problem.

I'm guessing the error code pointed exactly to the issue with the Fiery. I have no idea if Adobe provides this kind of troubleshooting help for other known issues. I've never seen it before. I'm guessing this feature was added in a recent version on Creative Cloud. But it was helpful, and I really had no idea that Adobe** could even respond in that way.

So today's quick tip is "Don't ignore the crash report dialog box." You never know when you'll get unexpected troubleshooting help.

Every Wednesday, I post a tip on an Adobe app.

* A random note: I will fill crash reports out for small developers. I guess I think my data will mean more to them since they have a smaller installed base.

** Or that any company could automatically respond to a crash report. I really just assume that all troubleshooting info goes into some giant automated database that no one looks at...

Fixing punctuation in Illustrator

For whatever reason, I occasionally end up with punctuation issues in Adobe Illustrator. Thankfully, there is a quick – and powerful – way to correct common typographic issues across an entire document in Illustrator. Simply go to Type > Smart Punctuation...

Choose the issues you need to fix and zap all those annoying dumb quotes, double spaces after a period and awkward dashes with a single click.

Every Wednesday, I post a tip for an Adobe app.

QR Codes in InDesign

InDesign will let you create a QR codes without leaving the application. Go to Object > Generate QR code... You'll have options for hyperlink, text message, email, business card or plain text. 

Once you have all the information filled out, you can then place the QR code like you would an image.

I will freely admit that I tend to avoid QR codes like the plague. I'm not convinced of their effectiveness. But sometimes, you need to use one and generating one without leaving InDesign is helpful.

Every Wednesday, I post a quick tip for an Adobe app.

Optical alignment and the oddball, single-function Story palette

Tucked away in InDesign's Window menu is a Story palette. This palette has exactly one function – to turn on and off optical margin alignment.

You can find the Story palette at Window > Type & Tables > Story. There are two settings. The first is a checkbox to activate optical margin alignment. And the second alters the intensity of the alignment.

Optical margin alignment automatically adjusts the positioning of characters on the margin. It's especially noticeable for punctuation and letters like "A" and "W" which look a little odd lined up exactly on the margin. See the example below.

Optical margin alignment. Off (left) and on (right). Notice how the quotation mark and the lower case "w" move in relation to the margin.

I'm not sure why Adobe didn't just include it on the Paragraphs palette. Seems odd to hide such a powerful feature on a random single-function palette.

Almost every Wednesday, I post a tip on an Adobe app.

Follow the leader

Most people don't know how to use tabs properly. But tabs can be really powerful, especially if you are building a form or table of contents.

Below you see a simple form with the tab ruler above it. Select each tab and type an underscore in the "Leader" box. Whatever character you type in the "Leader" box will repeat all the way to the tab. The underscore becomes the lines on the form. Much quicker and more accurate than trying to draw the underlines yourself. And much, much easier to edit the form later.

If you are building a table of contents, you may want to have a dotted line from the end of the chapter name to the page number. Don't type a bunch of periods! Just set the "Leader" to a period. You can also use a right-justified tab to line up all your numbers correctly. Faster to build. Faster to edit.

Every Wednesday, I post a quick tip for an Adobe app.

Does anyone still use TIFF files?

Does anyone still use TIFF (TIF/.tif) files? And if so, why? Back when I was a young designer, a TIFF file was the only real choice for exporting a high quality image. But I can't really imagine why anyone would use one in today's Adobe/Creative Cloud workflow.

InDesign's support for directly placing native files – Photoshop, Illustrator, PDF and even other InDesign files – largely eliminates the need to export to another file before placing. (Although I still save logos as EPS files when they are final.) Many people don't know that InDesign has the capability to place native files or assume that it will cause significant problems in production.

For high quality, high resolution images, you can place a Photoshop file (PSD) directly into InDesign. This way you place the original image and you aren't exporting a new TIF with each revision. One major benefit is that the PSD maintains all transparency when placed into InDesign. The only drawback I see here is that file size might get unwieldy if it's a large image with a bunch of layers.

If you are sharing a high resolution image, a JPG will work fine. Many designers turn their nose up at JPGs because they associate them with low resolution, highly compressed web images. But a high quality JPG doesn't have noticeable artifacts from compression and is much smaller than a TIFF.

Greyscale and bitmap files might be the only remaining use for a TIFF. When placed into InDesign, a greyscale or bitmap TIFF can be colored. So if you are wanted to colorize a grayscale image with a spot color, a TIFF is still your best option. But as 2-color print jobs become less common, I rarely use this technique for anything except screen printing.

Every Wednesday – and sometimes Thursday morning – I post a quick tip for working in an Adobe app.