Long Hours of Design

Sort of like asking “For an Army, why is a tank better than a stick?” — but an interesting thread on Adobe.com about reasons to upgrade.

In addition to experiencing it myself, I’ve seen numerous reports on the web of people having trouble pasting text from Word 2008 (Mac) to various Adobe applicaitons.

When copying text from Word, the resulting paste in, say, InDesign is a graphic, not text. ^{[ 1 ]}

While I can’t vouch for every Adobe application, the general rule seems to be:

You have to paste the text at an insertion point; ie, you have to have a blinking cursor in order to paste as text.

So, in InDesign, you would either have to drag out a new text frame, make sure you’ve got an insertion point, and then paste. Or, ensure you’ve got an insertion point blinking in an existing text frame, and then paste.

That should solve it.

You don’t need to be an acrobat for this balancing act.

Here’s a useful InDesign feature I often forget about: “Balance Ragged Lines.”

Ragged lines come up in a block of right- or left-aligned text and depend on word lengths, column width and similar variables. Instead of a natural ebb and flow of line endings, ragged lines jut out unevenly like some sort of typographical flotsam and jetsam

“Balance Ragged Lines,” buried under the Paragraph panel flyout, does pretty much what it sounds like it does. ^{[ 1 ]} It adjusts each line in the paragraph so they’re all of approximately equal length—and so there aren’t lines sticking out every which way.

Example

Here are the ragged lines I want to tackle.

Ragged Lines, Oh My!

Ragged Lines, Oh My!

Now, this isn’t actually so bad; my lines flow pretty much as I’d expect them to.

But the bottom two lines—where the URL breaks onto the last line—that’s a problem. I want that URL on one line, not two.

I could shore this up with forced line breaks—but I can’t add just one (putting the URL on the bottom line) as then I’d REALLY have some ragged lines. No, in this case I’d have to add a break to the end of every line.

I’d get this:

A Chicken for Every Pot, and a Forced Break for Every Line

A Chicken for Every Pot, and a Forced Break for Every Line

Yikes! Too much.

So let’s use Balance Ragged Lines.

Balance Ragged Lines—My Hero!

Balance Ragged Lines—My Hero!

And Viola! Well-balanced lines.

The Pièce de résistance

The Pièce de résistance

Caveats

This is a great feature, but I’d caution against its overuse.

Applying “Balance Ragged Lines” can sometimes destroy the typographic-rhythm paragraph lines have, and make them look somehow “unnatural” or “just not right.”

I’d recommend steering clear of using this everywhere—but in those places where unwieldy lines have gotten away from you, “Balance Ragged Lines” is a real peach.

I got this posted on InDesign Secrets.com.

Original Post is here

Daniel T. wrote us to report a creative use for InDesign:

My current contract had used Quark for a long time; they recently purchased CS3 with the intent to switch over to InDesign, but because no one really knew InDesign, they were slow to get started.

I was stuck revising a pretty long text document in Quark—about 32 pages worth of exhibitor listings. I started out by assigning keyboard shortcuts to my Quark Style Sheets, and manually applying these to each paragraph. This was going to take FOREVER! I wanted to quit! I longed for InDesign’s “Apply xx Style then Next Style” command.

But alas.

Then, I had a bright idea.

I imported the unformatted text into InDesign and quickly set up paragraph styles. Then, using ID’s Apply Style then Next feature, I styled the whole 32 pages in one mouse click. (Woo-hoo!)

Then I exported the text as RTF, and then imported it into QuarkXPress, selecting the option to “Keep Style Sheets.” The text flowed in with all the style sheets intact! I needed to redefine the colors, as RTF doesn’t really keep them well, and tweak a few other things in the Quark version of the style sheets: but hours and hours and hours of endless clicking and arrow-downing evaporated into about 45 minutes.

Thank you, InDesign!

Daniel wins this weeks official InDesignSecrets chutzpah award for a great use of InDesign in the face of adversity! Plus, bonus points if you can write an AppleScript to merge the QX and ID workflow automatically.

To that I add: Excellent.