Document Geek

PatternMaker Weave: Chinese Carpet Pattern

2012-01-04T12:11:00.000-08:00

Last night, my husband took me to a dinner at a nice Chinese restaurant. On the back wall of the restaurant was a large mural of traditionally-dressed people sitting on a red mat, presumably drinking tea. The mat was red and had a basketweave pattern. I knew I could recreate the pattern using PatternMaker. So let's get started.

I made a frame, filled it with red, and then chose the "Weave" pattern. I then set the angle to 90 degrees.

I wanted the pattern to have a perspective skew, as did the original, so I used the Shear tool to shear the frame. Interestingly, the pattern skewed along with the frame. Cool!

I wanted the mat longer, so I made the frame a bit taller. When you do this, you'll need to reset the pattern so that it fills the frame with a new graphic using the same settings.

So I Reset the Pattern (see the little red arrow in the screenshot below). I fully expected to have the pattern reset to a non-skewed version, but instead, the pattern retained the skew settings. I never really thought about it before, but apparently, you can modify the skew settings of both the graphic and the graphic fill independently. When you Reset the Pattern, the new pattern-graphic (which is an embedded EPS) will automatically reset to not just the settings specified in PatternMaker, but also to the skew settings of the graphic frame.

If you like basketweave pattens, check out one of my other blog posts about this same topic. In that post, instead of PatternMaker, I created the pattern two different ways: one using tables, and one using knitting. Here's the post: Using InDesign Tables to Design a Geometric Color Block Pattern

PatternMaker Squares

2011-12-29T10:25:00.000-08:00

I love TeaCup PatternMaker, and so I have decided to regularly explore its pattern possibilities and post my findings here. Some people sketch or doodle. I make patterns. Enjoy!

All of the patterns here use the same three colors:

A grey fill on the frame
A medium blue for the fill of the pattern, and
A dark blue for the stroke of the pattern.

In the first example, by making the element gap and Square size very close, we get squares that stack on top of each other, like fish scales, only square.

In the second example, I increased the Element Gap to 47 and adjusted the Pattern and Shape Angles.

The Shape Angle refers to the orientation of each square. The Pattern Angle refers to the angle of the entire pattern (as a whole) within the frame. So in this example, a Shape Angle of 180 degrees has the same effect as a Shape Angle of 0 degrees. And the entire pattern is rotated by the pattern angle, which is 45 degrees.

By expanding the Element Gap, the squares move farther apart. This next example has a shape angle of 90 degrees, but because the shapes are squares, they look visually the same as if they would have a shape angle of 0 or 180 degrees.

Next, I increased the square size quite a bit, and also increased the element gap by just a little. Now the squares are larger, and close together. Also, because the pattern angle and shape angle are in increments of 90, the squares align straight up and down.

Here is the same pattern, only with "Has Fill" UNchecked. Now, it appears as though each square has a double stroke, but that's because the 50 pt squares overlap one another, because they only have a 40 pt Element Gap.

How to Avoid Accidentally Auto-Expanding Your "Live Corners"

2011-12-13T12:36:00.000-08:00

I've run into some difficulty when trying to edit the shape of rounded rectangles. Let's say that I want a rounded rectangle that looks like it's in perspective. So I start with a rectangle, add the rounded edges, and then start to move the points and edges around so that my rectangle is in the correct perspective.

So let's start with a plain rounded rectangle, before attempting to reshape it.

Rounded Rectangle with Live corners

My first inclination is to simply drag one side of the rectangle using the white arrow tool. But when I do do this, the corners are no longer live. (See how each corner now has two small points near the corners, but no points actually on the corners?) Hey! That's not what I wanted! Undo, undo...

So next I tried just dragging one of the corners to put just that corner where I want to it to go. But, instead, this moves the entire rectangle, PLUS expands the corners. Again, this is not what I wanted! Undo, undo, undo...

Dragging a corner moves the entire rectangle AND expands the Live Corners

My corners are now dead!

So after a bit of experimentation, I finally figured out the trick to not accidentally expanding Live Corners:

First, select a corner (or a side) with the white arrow.
Then nudge it a bit using your cursor keys.

Once you've nudged part of the rectangle, you can use the white arrow tool to click on any of the corners and any of the sides and drag them wherever you want them to be. The live corners will still stay live.

You might think (as did I), that the act of clicking-on-and-nudging a corner point would have the same effect and clicking-on-and-dragging a corner point. But alas, no.

Now interestingly, the little yellow square indicating "Live Corners" has disappeared. But you can still edit the corners by going to Object > Corner Options.

This rectangle still has Live Corners even without the little yellow square

I'd like to think that this behavior is a bug, and that Live Corners wouldn't automatically expand on accident. If I were to change the behavior of the feature, I would set Live Corners to NEVER auto-expand without me telling them to expand. There really should be a separate command for that in the menus.

The Trick to Getting Column Strokes to Be in Front

2011-12-07T05:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was working on a table that needed to have red column strokes and white column rows. The column strokes needed to be on top. I thought it would be easy. I went to the Table Options dialog box (or command+Shift+Option+B...similar to the Text Frame Option dialog box, with a couple other modifier keys thrown in.)

The screenshot below shows the dialog box as it was set initially. I thought, "This should be simple. I just nee to change the stroke drawing order." So I then changed the stroke drawing order to Column Strokes in Front.

Row Strokes in Front

But nothing happened. I attempted it several times, but gave up, thinking I could tackle the problem again after a good night's rest. But the next morning, I came back and the problem was still there. Row Strokes were in front, even though I told them not to be.

I thought maybe it a screen issue. For example, sometimes when viewing a page in Acrobat, if the page has a table with all the same stroke weights, sometimes some of the row strokes seem thicker than others. But I've never seen InDesign display stroke weights incorrectly before, so that couldn't be it. I thought maybe by modifying the weight of the column strokes, I could fatten them up enough visually that they would seem like they were in front. Sort of like visual dot gain.

Column Strokes should be in front, but they are not!

So I changed the column strokes to 2 pt and they were now magically in front. I changed them back to 1 pt just to see what would happen and they were still magically in front. After a little experimenting, it turns out that InDesign doesn't actually change the drawing order unless you go back and modify the strokes (whichever ones you want on top) again. For example, if you change the settings to be Column Strokes in Front, after exiting the dialog box, you'll need to then go back into the table and modify your column strokes somehow. Change the color, change the stroke weight, whatever you want. But somehow, the act of modifying the column stroke tricks InDesign into doing what you had asked it to do in the first place.

Likewise, if you change your settings to be Row Strokes in Front, you'll then need to go in and somehow edit your row strokes for the setting to actually take effect.

Now column strokes are really in front

A Closer Look at the Sub-Level Sorting When Sorting Comments by Color In Acrobat 9

2011-11-30T16:35:00.000-08:00

Let me start of by saying that this article is all about sorting comments by color in Acrobat 9. You may ask, "Why are you writing about features in old software? Acrobat X has been out for over a year now." Well, sadly, Sort Comments by Color (my favorite Acrobat feature) was removed in Acrobat X. So I still use the old software. Lest I digress.

Sort Comments by Color is at the heart of my production workflow. I have a dozen or so colors that I use to color-code pertinent parts of my documents. Each color represents a similar type of information. So when I'm working an a project, I'll start with the pink comments, then go the gray comments, then to magenta, and so on down the line. The Sort Comments by Color feature allows me to group all the similar information together so that I work on it more easily.

So, once my comments are sorted by color, there is another secondary level of sorting that Acrobat uses. It doesn't sort as you think it might. It sorts not by where the comments fall in order of creation, nor where they fall in the page sequence (as you'd think they might), but rather, Acrobat sorts them based on the Y coordinates. Like so:

In the example above, I have two purple comments: the first is on page 1 at the bottom of the page, and the second is on page 2, near the top of the page. In this example, the comment on the second page will appear at the top of the list when sorted by color.

If you'd like to read more about Sorting Comments by Color: check out my other article on the topic: Acrobat Rectangle Tool: Why Do You Disappoint Me So?

When Text Won't Left-Align

2011-10-17T18:34:00.000-07:00

I recently came across a bit of text that wouldn't left align. It would center-align and right-align just fine, but it wouldn't left align. (Note that my left-indent was set to zero, and my left-cell padding was set to only 0.08 inches.)

I tried what normally works to fix alignment isues: I went to the Text Frame Options. I figured that maybe there was a mysterious text-wrapping on an object nearby. So I checked the Box "Ignore Text Wrap." I figured that would solve the problem. But no.

So then I went though all the paragraph settings and tried to see what would cause left aligned text to NOT left align. I didn't find anything that would cause weird indent issues. However, I found that this paragraph style (H4) was based upon another paragraph style (H1).

So I applied the H1 paragraph style to the text in my table, and it magically left-aligned as it should.

I then reapplied the H4 style, and tried copying and pasting the offending H4 text into a new text frame, and it left-aligned as one would expect it to.

So then I went back to the H4 paragraph style options and examined the differences between the H1 and the H4. After a little digging, I found that the H4 had an "align to decimal" tab stop.

I removed the tab stop, and presto! The text now left-aligned as it should. (See the fourth row?)

I'm not sure why the "align on decimal" tab stop was there... I most certainly put it there intentionally at some point in time, though I don't know when, nor why. For some reason, I was trying to align digits, and had set the tab to align on a dollar sign. (Click on photo to enlarge.)

Based on the fact that the same text behaves differently when placed in a table, I am inclined to think that there is a bug in inDesign, that when you use an "align on" tab stop within a table, InDesign will not honor your left-align paragraph settings. Though I have used the words "Left Justified" in my screenshots, this issue holds true for both left aligned, as well as left justified text within a table.

Diamonds, Dots, and Waves: Stroke Style Options for InDesign Tables

2011-10-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

For today's episode of Fun With InDesign Tables, I started out by to experimenting with the White Diamonds stroke style.

I made a table 4 columns by 2 rows and gave it a 35 point White Diamond stroke. Just a note: "White Diamond is the name of the stroke, but you can color the diamonds however you want. I suspect that the name "White Diamond" has to do with the fact that the center of the diamonds appear as white (paper-colored)...that is, unless you give the stroke a gap color.

Then I colored the outside border red, and the inside column strokes to yellow.

Next I took the same table and widened it a bit, and then added a black gap color to the table strokes. I thought it was interesting that the gap color stayed confined to the border of the diamond shapes, and made inverse white knockouts in the corners of the table.

Next, I took the same table and gave it a stroke style of Japanese dots. Notice how the black gap color now extends to fill out the rounded corners. This one sort of reminds me of the beaded counting toys that I remember from my childhood

Here are a few more tables, with different stroke styles.

Straight Hash Stroke Style

Think-Thin-Thick Stroke Style

Wavy

Dashed

Note that the only thing I changed in these 6 tables is the stroke style. The stroke width, stroke colors, and gap color remained the same.

The British Flag as an InDesign Table

2011-09-30T15:00:00.000-07:00

This post is a continuation of my other posts about diagonal lines within tables. Now for those of you who are British, please don't get upset that I didn't get the diagonals quite right. But my goal was to: using a single InDesign table, replicate the British flag as closely as possible.

Technically, the diagonals should line up exactly from one corner of the table to the opposite corner of the table, but InDesign diagonals run from one corner of the cell to the opposite corner of the same cell. In this case, our table is 2 cells wide by 2 cells high, so the diagonals aren't perfect. But you get the idea.

My mental starting point for this table was a graphic containing geometric specifications for the British flag. You can find it here.

Because the specifications graphic listed proportions for the stripe width, I was able to create custom stripe stroke styles based on those proportions.

First, I made a table; then I filled the table with Blue and then started working on my strokes. I made a three custom stroke styles: one for the horizontal and vertical lines, and two for the diagonals. Then I applied a thick white stroke, set the gap color to Red, and applied my new custom stroke styles.

So, download my sample files, make 2 row by 2 column table, with the cells each 15 points high x 30 points wide. Then apply these cells styles to it. Voila! An almost British flag.

The stroke style for the horizontal and vertical table strokes (10 pt white stroke with gap color set to Red )

Stroke style for the right-slanting strokes (6 pt white stroke with gap color set to Red)

Stroke style for the left-slanting strokes (6 pt white stroke with gap color set to Red)

If you're puzzled by the logic that InDesign uses to apply stripe stroke style to diagonal lines, well, you're not alone. Check out one of other articles where I have a bit of a writeup about it, as well as some samples of a larger variety of stripe stroke styles applied as diagonal lines. Data-less Tables: InDesign meets Knitting

The Case of the Possessed InDesign File - Mystery Solved

2011-09-29T16:59:00.000-07:00

I recently encountered a problematic file that locked up every time I got to a certain point in my editing tasks. After restarting InDesign a few times, I attempted to go right back to where I left off, only to have the program lock up again. Here are the things I attempted before I was able to pinpoint the problem:

Restarted InDesign
Deleted preferences
Deleted my InDesign recovery files
Restarted my computer
Tried editing the fie from a different machine

Then I tried editing another section of the file (a different page), and all was fine... until I went back to that troublesome editing spot, which, in this case, was a table. Every time I touched the right-hand border of the table, InDesign locked up. I found that I could edit the text, and pretty much anywhere else in the file, just not the right hand border. So I decided to get rid of the table.

But I didn't really want to retype the whole thing, so I converted the table to text, then converted the text back to a table. And now I was able to move the right border without my program freezing.

For instructions on how to delete your InDesign Recovery files, see Anne Marie's instructions at the bottom of one of my other posts: "InDesign Crashing and Making Me Crazy.

10-8-11 Edit: After thinking on this for a few days, I suspect the problem may have to do with Keep options. I had all the cells in my table set to "Keep with next row," but I also had a few paragraphs to "Keep with the next 1 line." I think there may have been a conflict between the two, and when I tried to make move the right-hand border of the table, InDesign just didn't know what to do, and so it froze up.

The next time this happened (and I'm confident that it will), I will closely inspect the keep options and document my findings here.

Fun with Geometrics! Stripe Stroke Style + Tables + Diagonal Lines...

2011-08-25T22:39:00.000-07:00

I came up with this stroke style idea while driving around town, slightly distracted at the geometric patterns used in traffic signage. Perhaps I should pay more attention the street names, and less attention to geometric patterns around me. Needless to say, I often get horribly lost. Here is what I saw that made me inspired to combine a stripe stroke with diagonal lines. This is offically known a "bicycle priority lane."

Here is my version: It is a 2-column, 2-row InDesign Table. The cells are filled with blue, and I made a custom Striped Stroke Style, which I then applied as 48 pt crossing diagonal lines at 50% tint.

There is a trick to getting the diagonal lines to line up perfectly both horizontally and vertically. You must have the space at the top of the top stripe be an equal distance from the bottom of the bottom of the bottom stripe. In this example:

The top stripe starts at 5% and extends 10% of the width of the stroke. That makes the ending point of the first stripe is 15%. Then I have a 10% blank space.
Then second stipe begins at 25% and extends down to 35% . Another 10% blank space.
Third stripe goes from 45% to 55%.
Fourth stripe goes from 65% to 75%
Fifth stripe goes from 85% to 95%

So there is a 5% blank space at the top (from 0-5% and another 5% blank space at the bottom (from 96-100%).

Here are the diagonal lines settings that I used for these cells.

In this next example, I changed the diagonal lines from crossing diagonal to right slanting diagonals. Then I added a 48 point cell stroke (using my aforementioned custom stroke style) around all the cells. (Click on the pictures to enlarge them so you can see the stroke panel). This one is orange because I had the cells highlighted so the stroke settings I used would show up in the panel.

Here is the same design, unhighlighted, so you can see the original blue.

Something cool that I discovered is that because the pattern is created within the cell settings, when you increase the number of rows and columns (by holding down Alt/Option and then dragging on the table or cell borders), when more rows are added, they inherit the same size and styling as the cell you're dragging from. So it works like a dynamic step and repeat, only it's accomplished through just option-dragging. The pattern enlarges magically, right before your eyes.

Here is another example of a 2 row by 2 column table, 48 pt wide x 108 pt H, with a 108 pt crossing diagonal lines cell stroke. Because the cell diagonal lines are equal in stroke weight to the width of the column, they line up perfectly and make tidy little diamonds.

Just to mix it up, I decided to add some gradients and color it all pink. Does it remind you vaguely of a ski sweater? It should. This is a common graduated color technique used in Fair Isle and Norwegian knitting. Only they don't typically use pink.

You can more easily utilize reversed gradients by first making one gradient swatch, then swapping the colors and making a second swatch. Like so:

If you're want to investigate this technique further, or use my stroke style for your designs, here you go. I made a zip file with an CS 5.5 INDD, an IDML, and a PDF. Enjoy.

Using InDesign Tables to Duplicate the Window Structure Outside the Lincoln Memorial

2011-08-15T18:20:00.000-07:00

Last May, I was able to attend the 2nd annual InDesign Secrets Print and ePublishing conference in Arlington, VA. I spent each day at the conference surrounded by fellow InDesign aficionados, talking about prepress, interactive graphics, searchable PDFs, and best practices for publishing workflows. Those conferences are more fun for me than any theme park. I was on InDesign overload, and loving every minute of it.

On the last evening of the conference, my husband and I took some time to tour the National Mall. Since I was recovering from the aforementioned (self-induced) InDesign overload, all I could think of was patterns. (If you've read my blog for awhile, you may have read some of my other posts about patterns.)

While I was touring the several-hundred-year-old buildings and streets, I snapped a few photos of some of the more interesting patterns in the architecture, with plans to recreate the geometry using InDesign tables.

This photo is of the concrete window-type architectural details on the Lincoln Memorial. If you're inside the memorial, and about to head back down the stairs, stop and turn to your right. Walk two columns past the main entrance and look at the face of the wall. That's where you'll see these window cutouts. These tiny little windows are so small when compared to the rest of the memorial, that they're nearly impossible to see on most of the Lincoln memorial photos I found on the web. But fortunately, I found a photo that displayed the little windows on both sides of the Lincoln Memorial. See the little windows? (By the blue arrows.)

Here are the windows up-close.

Since my plan was to recreate the geometry of the windows in InDesign, let's get started. There are a couple of different ways to create these windows. Both methods use Diagonal Lines.

Table Cells with Crossing Diagonal Lines
Make a table with two columns and three rows, with crossing diagonal lines, as shown below. Using the Crossing Diagonal Lines method, each cell has an X through it, and so if you choose to fill your cells with colors, they will be limited in that the entire cell has to have the same fill color. This is definitely the easier of the two methods, as each of the cells have the same stroke and diagonal lines settings.

2 Columns, 3 Rows, Crossing Diagonal Lines

2 Columns, 3 Rows, Crossing Diagonal Lines (Colored Cells)

Table Cells with Single Diagonal Lines
Another way to create this window pattern is by making a table with 4 rows, and 6 columns, and manually formatting each of the cells with a single diagonal line. I explored this idea in another blog post: Data-less Tables: InDesign Meets Knitting.

Using this method, you have more flexibility in your color choices because there are so many more cells.

Something interesting that I discovered while working with diagonal lines with that they can have different stroke properties than the other cell strokes. By increasing the vertical and horizontal stroke weight (and leaving the diagonal lines at a smaller stroke weight), you can create some interesting effects. For this example, I created a separate orange-filled frame behind the table. I also added a drop shadow to the table frame.

By adding some color to the strokes, and then shearing the table, you can create some very unique geometric designs.

Windshield Repair Logo Turned Into a Custom Cake

2011-07-25T18:25:00.000-07:00

This is the first in a series of posts about my graphic designs turned into cake. One of my friends is a pastry chef, and several times, she used my designs as a starting point for her amazing pastry creations.

Years ago, my husband and I started a mobile windshield repair business. Since I was a designer, together we designed the logo, web site, and all marketing collateral for our new business.

About a year ago, we sold our windshield repair business to our nephew, Trevor. Trevor recently had a birthday, and to celebrate, our-dear-friend-the-pastry-chef made Trevor-the-young-entrepreneur a very special birthday cake. As you can see, this is no ordinary birthday cake. Our pastry-chef-friend specializes in very fancy, completely custom cakes. Her cakes are not only totally amazing to look at, but without a doubt, the tastiest cakes I've ever eaten.

I'd like to point out a few things about this cake that make it so special.

The shape: it's shaped like a windshield (wide at the bottom, narrow at the top)
The road: Not only did our-friend-the-pastry-chef manage to dye fondant completely black (which I'm guessing is tricky), she also made the road hang slightly off the left edge of the windshield, just like on the original logo.
The font: for the words, "OnCall," we used a font called Wild Ride. While my baker friend only had a limited character set to work with, I say she did a pretty amazing job of keeping true to the styling of the letters. Notice how the letter "a" is 2-story, and the lowercase "o" is elliptical, slightly off center, and thicker on one side.
The windshield damage: Notice the large chip in the lower left hand corner of the windshield (passenger side). And in the top right hand side (driver side) of the windshield is a star break. And on both sides of the windshield are edge cracks. Here are the corresponding graphics from the OnCall web site.

We are so proud of our nephew Trevor, for taking over our business. If you are in the Portland area and need your windshield repaired, give him a call at 971-404-1247. He was trained by the best (my husband), and offers a lifetime guarantee on his work.

And we are equally proud of our dear friend Charlene, who, in my opinion, makes the best cakes in the world. She's just as good as the best bakers on the Food Network.

How to Incorporate Chapter Thumbnail Images into an Auto-Generating Table of Contents

2011-07-13T07:21:00.000-07:00

In May of this year, I attended the InDesign Secrets Print and ePublishing Conference. Once again, I decided to try my hand at speaking to several hundred people. (I'd like to note that public speaking is my geeky version of a roller coaster thrill ride.) So I mustered up all my courage and gave a 5-minute presentation to a room full of strangers. My topic this year was about how to "Make a TOC with Thumbnail images."

For the entire writeup about how it works, check out my article over at InDesign Secrets. They were nice enough to let me be a guest contributor. This article was something I'd been working on for a couple of years, and I wanted to make sure it got published somewhere very special, with plenty of InDesign users.

And here is a photo of me after completing my presentation. I got a 2-thumbs up from Anne-Marie! Plus, I got a special "Speaker Bag."

If you ever have the chance to do an Ignite presentation, go for it! It will rock your world. I did one last year as well, and I have to say, the second time around is much less scary. Of course, I was well prepared and has been practicing for months this time around. In case you're interested in my presentation from last year, here is the writeup.

How to Make Your Own Custom Business Cards for About $10

2011-07-10T15:16:00.000-07:00

As a freelance designer, you need business cards, right? But what if you're on an extremely tight budget or need your cards within a day or two (as opposed to a week or more)? Let's explore a few options for the budget/time-conscious. First I'll discuss how I chose my final business design and printing method, which meets my budget requirements and still has a cool factor that makes other designers closely examine them with curiosity.

My current business cards are printed on snappy, sparkly, iridescent pink paper. They're girl-ish, but subtle. For a long time I didn't hand them out because I though people might think the paper was weird because it's a little thinner than normal cardstock. But recently, I handed a couple of them out and gotten very positive responses from both men and women alike. One person even asked me, "Did you have these done in San Diego?" To be truthful, I made them. In my home office. And they were free.

So, how does one go about making your own free/cheap business cards? Well, let's find out! But first, let's discuss a few different printing options that I explored before settling on the final paper choice and printing method.

Letterpress Printing
Since I first discovered letterpress printing, I've wanted to purchase my own letterpress business cards. However, seeing as I work from home, and hand out approximately 10 (ten) business cards per year, it seems a bit excessive to spend several hundred dollars on fancy letterpress business cards.

Online Business Card Websites
Online printers, such as VistaPrint.com, PrintingForLess.com, and Moo.com offer very affordable pricing because they will gang up your business cards with dozens of other orders, and print them all on the same paper stock, at the same time. While you will get 4-color offset printing, your paper choice is somewhat limited. These large-online print shops often offer gloss UV coating or a lamination. Adding a glossy UV-cured coating means that the business cards are dry immediately. That in turn means that the print shop can speed up production and pump out even more business cards, even faster (making them more affordable).

Some of the online printers, such as Moo.com, even let you choose different background images for each and every one of your business cards. Many of these online printers will even offer "free" business cards. All you have to pay for is shipping and handling. However, "free" typically means that their company logo or URL is somewhere on the card. If that's not a big deal to you, then these "Free" cards may be a good way to go.

Local Print Shop
Offset Printing
Local print shops will print offset and digital, which means you can get your custom Pantone colors and use whatever paper you like. However, since your job is custom, they'll have to print your job all by itself, and not gang-up any other projects with it. In turn, that means that your job has to be profitable for them all by itself. It's not uncommon for print shops to have a 1000 card minimum order for offset printing. 1000 business cards would last me approximately 200 years.

Digital Printing
Digital printing is often mistakenly referred to as "color copying" (which is not technically correct). There's no copying taking place. Each page is printed from the original digital file. With digital printing, there is no make-ready for the press. There are many other differences as well, but the most important one for the sake of this project is that you can print as few as one page and as many pages as you want. Digital printing offers the quantity that I'm looking for.

Local print shops (especially smaller copy shops) typically have a rack of paper stock in the back of the shop. They'll have a selection of something like Classic Crest Linen and Laid paper. The paper is already cut down to 8.5x11 and they use it to run business cards and stationary packages. This paper, though it is more interesting than the standard 80# white cardstock, is still pretty everyday-ish and doesn't really offer the wow factor that I'm looking for.

And while local print shops do have a decent selection of stationary paper, if you want something that they don't have in stock, they'll have to order it for you. Local print shops buy paper by the ream, and often in whole cartons. So if you want fancy paper from a print shop, you're going to have to buy a lot of it.

So we need to find a place that sells beautiful, unusual paper by the sheet.

Paper By The Sheet
I wondered for several years how to find cool paper by the sheet. There are a couple of places that I know of.

Retail Paper Supply Store
The first is a paper supply store, like Xpedx (think "Dunder Mifflin" in a retail storefront). Paper vendors are the suppliers from which printers purchase their paper. If you can ever manage to take a trip down to one of the paper vendor retail storefronts, I highly recommend it. I was in the printing industry for about 8 years before I finally went to one. I wish I had visited there back when I was first starting out! It was awesome. They'll likely have the same types of paper that you'll find at a local printer, only a lot more of it. They might have 100 different types of invitation envelopes alone. Plus they'll have all the matching paper in cardstock and text weight...and you can buy all of it by the sheet, or by the box. They also have lots of other cool stuff like rulers, artist's tape, and raffle tickets. If you're a paper junkie, you'll have tons of fun there.

But as much paper as they have, they tend to only keep in stock the common papers (the type of paper that small print shops would use for stationary packages and general office use). So how do you go about finding really cool paper by the sheet?

Scrapbook Store
One evening, I was out walking my dogs in our small town, and I saw a new business that had just opened: it was a scrapbook store.

In case you've never been to a scrapbook store (men, this is for you), they sell all kinds of interesting stuff. Besides really cool paper and cardstock, they sell envelopes, scoring and folding tools, stickers, ribbons, tiny little rivets, embossing dies, stamps, different kinds of glue, shiny stuff, sparkly stuff, textured stuff... Visiting the scrapbook store is like sensory overload, but in a good way. Great scrapbookers are great designers. Only instead of software programs, they use stamps and glue and heat guns. Did you know that scrapbooking stores sell equipment and supplies that will let you make your own 1-off raised thermography designs? Neato!

So, if you've never been to a scrapbooking store, I encourage you to take a field trip to one. And hey, while you're there, pick up a few sheets of cool paper and follow along as we create the 8-up business file in InDesign.

Okay, just kidding, I've already prepped the 8-up file. All you need to do is take your design and place it into the file I've made. But first you need to choose your template.

Using the Business Card Template
I keep several business card templates, for various designs and paper sizes.

8-up, on 8.5 x 11", for business cards with bleed.
10-up, on 8.5 x 11", for business cards without bleed.
15-up, on 12 x 12", with bleed
15-up on 12x12", without bleed

8-up, on 8.5x11", with bleed

10-up, on 8.5x11", without bleed

15-up, on 12x12", without bleed

15-up, on 12x12", with bleed

For you, my beloved readers, I have decided to make my templates available for download. Both the 8.5x11" templates are in one file, and the 12x12" templates are in a second file. I have CS3, CS4, and CS5 files, but for those you you who still have CS2, I've also provided a CS2 inx file. (And for those of you who haven't upgraded, did you know that by joining an InDesign User Group (which is free to join), you qualify for Adobe software discounts?)

Click here to download the business card templates.

Working With A Local Printer
If you've already got a good relationship with a local printer, you've already accomplished the most difficult aspect of this project. If you don't already have a relationship with a local printer, try to develop one. Different printers have different specialties, and you should choose your printer according to the size and specs of your print job.

Some printers specialize in high-quantity, offset press work. Others are geared more towards small business owners and digital printing. These smaller print shops are the type you'd find in a retail storefront. This business card project would be better suited for one of the independent print shops located in a retail storefront.

Hopefully, your local printer will already be familiar with using odd sized paper. Bring in a few extra sheets in case they have any problems with the paper. They shouldn't, since paper from scrapbooking stores is generally laser-compatible. But since this is a special, short-run job, go out your way to make the project easy for your printer. Bring extra sheets. Give them a few extra days. And I've found that bringing them high quality chocolate or homemade cookies never hurts, either.

Many small printers will charge a "digital download fee" for opening your file. This fee can range from $2 - 20. Generally, it's around $10. In my experience, if they charge this fee, they'll charge it whether you send them press-ready PDF, or natives file that will require them to unzip, install fonts, preflight and relink. So it may be a good idea to ask them if they charge a digital download fee.

Impose your 1-up design

I'm intentionally brief on this, because I'm assuming that you have already designed your business card, and you already know how to place images into InDesign. If not, check here. Then come back.

Trim your cards
For the business cards without bleed, I place the cards all next to each other in the template, to make for fewer cuts. Cutting isn't a big deal when you have a hydraulic chop-cutter, but when cutting at home using an X-acto knife, the fewer the cuts, the better.

But first, put in a new X-acto blade in your knife. You've got fancy paper and a beautiful design, so don't ruin it by using a dull blade.

Celebrate Being Frugal!
So you've bought paper, imposed your design, found a printer, got your cards printed, and trimmed them. And it's probably cost you about $10. So how did I get mine for free? Well, I was making some custom notecards for someone, using the aforementioned sparkly paper, and there was extra room at the bottom of each sheet. So I filled it with my business cards.

Granted, this whole process did take a few hours of time, but when you're short on money and have a little time to spare, there is still a way to have really cool attention-grabbing business cards.

The Pitfalls of Editing InDesign Hyperlink Destination Names

2011-06-24T16:00:00.000-07:00

Today I was working on updating a old document with my email address in it. I decided to create a hyperlink from my email address. In the Hyperlink Panel, I chose: New Hyperlink From URL. Pretty simple so far.

Bu then I remembered that I needed the link should have a "mailto:" at the front of it. So I double click on my email link then click on my email address next to Destination Name. Then I choose "email." That should do the trick.

So now I have my email address set up, the destination says it is set to my address, it all looks good.

But then I hovered over my hyperlink. And guess what I saw? My old email address from 3 years ago! What?!

It turns out that the URL referenced in the Edit Hyperlink dialog box isn't updated until you close the dialog box. I doubled click on the hyperlink to investigate, and this is what I saw:

You see, a few years ago when I originally set up this document, I didn't like the name that InDesign gave to my hyperlink destination. It was full of code and was unattractive looking. I wanted something cleaner looking, and shorter. So I went in and edited the ugly name of the hyperlink destination to something more attractive. Doesn't the short pretty name (email) look much nicer?

Ugly Hyperlink Destination Name

Pretty Hyperlink Destination Name

Now, fast forward three years, to today. I had completely forgotten about having edited the name of this hyperlink destination. But when I chose to use the old named hyperlink destination "email," I unknowingly created a link to the incorrect email address.

The moral of the story is to never trust named Hyperlink Destinations. You need to double check to see that they reference the correct URL.

By the way, if you know of a way to take a a screen shot while still showing tooltips, please leave a note in the comments. Once again, I had to take a picture of my screen using my iPhone. Thanks!

How to See Hidden Conditional Text in InDesign, Without Making the Condition Visible

2011-06-19T16:53:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wanted to know what's hiding in your conditional text? If you've ever tried to locate a string of text that is in a hidden condition, you'll be familiar with the following error message: "Cannot find match.

Why, you ask? According to the Adobe help file:

"Text in a hidden condition is always omitted from searching."

Lovely. Well, you figure, "maybe it will show up in the story editor, like notes do." But alas, no.

So how can you see what's hiding in that hidden conditional text?

Well, you could simply unhide all your conditions and then search for the bit of text that you want. But, what if you have a large number of of conditions, let's say 20 or 30 in one document? If the conditions aren't applied perfectly to your paragraph returns, then showing and hiding conditional text can really mess your paragraph styling. H1s can turn into body type, body type can be turned into headings, etc. And then you'd have to go back and fix it all.

So randomly showing and hiding all your hidden conditions may not be the best way to find out what's hiding behind that little conditional text indicator marker.

For the sake of this discussion, let's say you set up your conditions many months ago, and forgot the rationale behind your setup. Or, perhaps the conditions were set up by someone else entirely, and you've inherited the document.

I stumbled across an interesting discovery recently and I wanted to share it with you. It's obscure, but that's why I love it.

Edit 10-11-11: Please see note below for more recent (and better) understanding of how this feature works.

First, in "Normal" mode, select your hidden conditional text indicator marker. The easiest way to do this is to put your cursor near the marker, and then use your arrows keys till you get over to the marker. Then shift+arrow to select the marker. It will just look like a little sliver is selected.

Now, go back to the bottom of the toolbar and change your viewing mode from "Normal" to "Preview." I've usually find it easier to simply press the W key to switch back and forth, but since I've got text selected now, pressing W would replace my hidden conditional text with a W. So, for the first time ever, I have a found a need to use the mouse to click on the view options button at the bottom of the toolbar.

Now, without deselecting the text, hover over the conditional text marker. Be patient. Sometimes the pop-up will show up right away, sometimes it takes a few seconds. You may need to try hovering over the top of bottom of the highlighted sliver. It's a little finicky. But be patient. Wait for it...

Please forgive the poor picture quality. Remember how I said this feature was finicky? Well, pressing any keystroke to take a picture made the little dialog box disappear. And waiting more than about eight seconds also made the dialog box disappear. So I had to quickly take a photo with my iPhone and then colorize it in Photoshop.

So you can't Find-Change hidden conditional text, but you can still find out what's behind it...if you're patient.

If you want to learn more about find-change with conditional text, check out this InDesign Secrets article: Find/Change with Conditional Text.

Edit on 10-11-11: After working with this feature for a few months, I finally figured out the logic to get the hidden conditional text to display in a pop-up. It turns out to have absolutely nothing to do with the Preview mode. The trick is that you need to have your text insertion point within the ~~story~~ frame containing the hidden conditional text. Then, hover over the hidden conditional text marker, and the yellow pop-up will appear.

Edit on 10-26-11: I recently discovered that you CAN see hidden conditional text within the Story Editor. It works similarly to seeing hidden conditional text in Layout view. All you have to do is hover your mouse over the hidden conditional text marker and you'll get a little yellow pop-up window displaying the text.

I'm happy to announce the launch of Verity Church Media!

2011-06-16T20:07:00.000-07:00

My husband and I have spent fifteen years in ministry. With my husband Steve as a worship pastor and video editor, and me as a graphic designer, together we have created Verity Church Media. Our mission is to provide quality, affordable worship media for churches. Our site is a membership-based site. Once you purchase a membership (choose between 4 months or 12 months), you can download all of the videos and still images we have available.

In case you don't go to church and wonder what I'm talking about, it's like this: Many churches use video loops and still images as backgrounds when they project the song lyrics onto the screen. While there are many websites that sell these types of video files, they can get very expensive. Being very familiar with the budget constraints of small churches, we have decided to offer a more affordable solution.

Teal Tile Mosaic

For our videos, we offer two sizes (16x9 HD and 4x3 non-HD), and two formats (.mov and .wmv). All the still images and videos are designed, sized, and tested to work perfectly in MediaShout and ProPresenter. For those churches who use Powerpoint, the still images will work great as song backgrounds. We even have a free section, for churches who want to test out our files for themselves before purchasing a membership.

Here's a sample of one of our nature videos. This is from La Jolla shores.

Check out our site. We have worked very, very hard on building it. We hope you like it!

http://www.veritychurchmedia.com

Quick! I need some 1950s style floor tiles in my design!

2011-06-07T15:33:00.000-07:00

Sure, you could make a table, alternating the fill of every cell in every column and every row. Or you could draw a four black and white squares and then step and repeat the whole bunch. Or you could make a pattern in Illustrator. But why would want to do any of those things...when you could simply do this:

Thanks TeaCup PatternMaker. You're amazing! And so, for attending the InDesign Secrets Print and ePublishing Conference, I got another copy of the Pattern Pack. Jealous? You should be.

Fotolia.com Review

2011-05-30T07:54:00.000-07:00

I was recently asked to review Fotolia.com, a popular stock photo website. I spent a month using the site, and overall, I enjoyed it. Here are my thoughts.

Pricing
You can choose from either a subscription plan, or a credit bundle. The subscription plan (which I had) lets you download a certain number of credits worth of images each day. Since vector files cost more credits, you can't download as many per day as you can with raster.

There's also a bundle plan, where you buy a bunch of credits and then download files at will, rather than being limited to using a certain number of credits per day.

Downloading
Once I had some items in my lightbox, I couldn't figure out how to download them. The website was seemed to be pointing me toward purchasing credits, but I had a 1-month subscrition. It seems that if you have a subsciption plan, it should automatically select the "Subscription License" for each photo, rather than have me choose between 6 or 7 different licenses and sizes. I'd like to have the checkout/licenses selection process a little easier. When I have a bunch of items in my cart, there are literally hundreds of radio buttons on the page (about as many as 8 for each image). It would be a little easier to use if all of these options were in a dropdown menu for each image, rather than having all the radio buttons.

I liked how there was a dropdown menu to enable me to select the same license type for everything in the cart. Ironically, I didn't find this dropdown menu until my subscription had ended. Perhaps that's because the dropdown is very small, gray, and located waaaaayyyyy at the bottom of the page.

I also liked the option to create a zip file for everything in the cart. If you select that option, you'll be emailed an encrypted link to the zip file containing your images.

How I'd Make it Better
I think overall, the interface needs to be simpler. There should be bigger buttons, so it's more obvious for those of us that skim the page rather than reading all the details (think Southwest.com or Crashplan.com).

I wish the thumbnails in the lightbox were a little bigger. On my laptop screen, the little thumbnails were about 1/4" square. They have a nice big pop-up comp image when you mouse over each thumbnail, but if the images in the lightbox are similar colored to one another, it can be a little tough to find the one you're looking for.

I'd make the free photos easier to find. Their marketing material says they offer a lot of free images, but when I typed in "Free" in the keyword search, I got pictures of horses, dandelions, and smiling children. I couldn't actually locate any of the free images.

Summary
The pricing is more affordable than other stock photo websites. The user interface is not as slick as other stock photo websites, but the price is definitely better. What I especially like is that you can choose the number of credits you want to purchase. That way, if you only need 14 credits to buy the image you need, you don't have to purchase 25. That is a great consideration for price-sensitive, budget constrained organizations.

Would you like to try Fotolia? They gave me a coupon code for a 2-week subscription, with 3 image downloads per day. But I only have one code. So if you'd like it, please email me (kelly at documentgeek dot com) and I will send the code over to the first person who asks for it. Once the code is gone, I'll post a note in the comments indicating that.

Simple Explanation of How to Make a Seamless Illustrator Pattern

2011-05-26T07:24:00.000-07:00

I learned this trick at the Print and ePublishing Conference, courtesy of Dan Rodney. Years back he met an Illustrator engineer and she explained how to create seamless pattern swatches, and Dan was kind enough to pass the info along to me.

Illustrator Patterns have baffled me for years and I have always avoided them. But now I no longer have to be afraid of and frustrated with them. Here is a tutorial for making a simple fishscale pattern.

What's different about this method is the order you do the steps. Most pattern tutorials have you start with a square (clipping mask), and then tediously fit all your objects within the square. But with this method, you can just make a design that looks cool, and then get the measurements you need to make the correct sized square/clipping mask. Its much more designer-friendly.

1. Create an object.

2. Duplicate it a few times.

3. Group the objects.
4. On the group: Effect > Transform > Horizontal (write down the increments you used for the horizontal transform)

5. Make a second effect: Effect > Transform > Vertical (Write down the increments you used for the vertical transform.) "This will apply another instance of the effect." Click OK.

6. Make a no-fill/no-stroke rectangle using the measurements you wrote down from the horizontal and vertical transform.

7. Drag the rectangle to over your objects. Anywhere is fine. It doesn't really matter where. Just make sure it's not too close to the edges.
8. Send the rectangle to the back.
9. Select both the rectangle and the group of objects and drag the whole bunch into the swatches panel.
10. Drag out a new square and fill it with your new pattern swatch.
11. Celebrate!

One of the coolest parts about this method is that because it uses live transform effects, you can edit and change the pattern design with a live preview, BEFORE making the Pattern Swatch. Simply double click to go into the group and they can edit the pattern live! Then when you are happy with the design, you can create the pattern swatch by Option+dragging whole bunch over your old pattern swatch to redefine it.

Just by changing the colors of some of the circles, and scooting them around a bit, I got a totally different pattern.

This pattern uses a square, but you can use a rectangle, too. Just be sure to use the measurements from the transform dialog box. (Negative transform numbers should be used just like positive numbers when calculating your rectangle size.)

If this peaks your interest in Illustrator patterns, here are a couple of other good resources I found:

Remove Trailing Whitespace Gotcha! Underline Tab Stops Disappear

2011-04-29T06:56:00.000-07:00

As a book designer, I often design study guides. They're small little workbooks that are used in a roundtable discussion group. The workbook is designed to be written in. And of course, like every book designed to be written in, there are handy little lines on which to write. I have set up a paragraph style to format these lines. (Click on the images below to see a larger version of them.)

To format my line in InDesign, I have set up my document with a right-aligned tab stop, with an underscore leader, and then adjusted the tracking to tighten it up a bit.

Some people instead like to make underlines by creating an underlined tab (rather than a tab with an underscore leader), and then adjusting the thickness of the underline in the underline Option sections of the Paragraph Styles dialog box. Either way works fine.

But I discovered something yesterday that I feel compelled to share. I often use InDesign's built-in GREP find/change to clean up formatting. My favorites are "Multiple Return to Single Return", Multiple Space to Single Space", and "Remove Trailing Whitespace."

While wrapping up a project yesterday, I ran these GREP find-changes, clicked "OK," and then was about to scroll back through my document to give it a final look before making a PDF. But what did that dialog box just say?

Well, hang on a minute! I know that I had some extra space at the end of paragraphs, but 465 replacements seems a bit excessive. Remember how I had all those nicely formatted lines for writing on? Now they are all gone!

Apparently, InDesign's default GREP expression for "Remove Trailing Whitespace" also removes tabs at the end of a paragraph. But my tabs served a very important function: they provided the lines on which to write.

So, if you use InDesign's default "Remove Trailing Whitespace" GREP Find/Change expression, be aware that it can affect much more formatting than just the few extra spaces at the end of your paragraphs.

Extract Vector Logos from PDFs

2011-04-25T20:48:00.000-07:00

So it may seem like awhile since I've done a blog post. The truth is, I've been busier than ever writing new articles. However, the reason I haven't been posting here is because I'm actually started to work with an editor to get my articles posted on another popular blog. So, please take a moment and visit CreativePro.com, and check out my latest blog article there. You'll learn how to extract a vector logo from a PDF, using only Acrobat.

Creative Pro Article: Extract Vector Logos from PDFs

How To Remove Reader Enablement in Acrobat

2011-04-05T09:55:00.000-07:00

Today I am filling out a W-9 form. The IRS usually does a pretty good job making their forms fillable. I was successfully inputting my data and got about halfway down the page, when I came to the signature line.

I couldn't sign it.

Normally,when a form is properly setup, the signature field looks like this. See the little red "Sign Here" arrow?

With most PDFs, when I need to sign a document and there is no signature field, I can just make one. But with this PDF, that option is grayed out.

So I did a little research online and it turns out that this document had Reader Usage Rights enabled. Which is great for most people, because they can fill out the form on their computer, then print it and scan it back in.

But, I am not most people. I will go out of my way for an hour (or more) to avoid printing out a form and filling it out by hand. My husband asked me this morning, "Wouldn't it just be easier to fill out that form by hand?" To which I replied, "But Honey, what would blog about if I did that?"

So I tried following the instructions for removing the Reader Usage Rights. According the the dialog box, and several very popular forums, all I had to do was Save a Copy. Easy!

But despite three attempts at saving a copy of this file, I still couldn't make a signature field. So I decided to try a workaround. If you'e read my other posts about Acrobat, you may know that it doesn't always do what I need it to do. And I have found a great solution for making PDFs...more accessible. ;)

That solution is Mac Preview. It's the free little application that comes on every mac (sorry Windows users), and is the default image viewer on a mac. Of course, as graphic designers, the first thing we do is change the default image viewer to Photoshop, and leave poor Preview to collect dust in the back of the Applications folder. But bring it out and have some fun! You'd be surprised what it can do. Check out my other articles about Mac Preview.

So I opened the file in Preview, saved a copy, and then reopened the file in Acrobat. And now I could make a signature field!

Adventures in Exporting: A Lesson in Patience

2011-04-04T12:50:00.000-07:00

Today, I had a problem with Exporting a PDF file from InDesign CS5. I'm working on a 8-page newsletter, with lots of photos, illustrations, transparency, and such. I've been designing this quarterly newsletter for several years, without much complication.

Yesterday, I got the Dreaded "Failed to Export PDF" message. Apparently, this happens to many other designer around the world, but it has never happened to me before. I was able to track down the offending file and finally make a PDF. But it took 2 days and at least 30 or 40 attempts.

The source of the troublesome file was a word doc with charts in it. Call me stubborn, but I'm a die-hard mac user. I don't own any Microsoft products. Maybe I should break down and buy MS Office, but thus far, I've come up with workarounds to allow me to successfully view and extract data from Office documents. So, I'm still holding my ground as an all-mac office. But sometimes I need to come up with creative solutions to view certain file types. Normally it works pretty well. Today...not so much.

To designers around the world who have ever had a rough day and seemingly got nothing accomplished: I dedicate this post to you.

Open the word doc in Preview. Charts don't show up.
Upload the word doc to Acrobat.com.
Save it as a PDF.
Open PDF in Illustrator.
Redraw/fix all graph artwork from Word. Use 3D, graphic styles, nice typography, etc.)
Since there are multiple graphs, repeat Step 5 several times.
Save as an AI file.
Place into InDesign.
Export PDF. Fail!
Grumble.
Try different PDF export settings. Fail!
Grumble again.
Export INDD file as IDML file.
Open IDML file and repeat steps 11 and 12 for an hour.
Repair disk permissions.
Give up and go to sleep.
Wake up.
Restart computer.
Repeat step 11 and 12 a few more times.
Surf the web looking for solutions.
Quit all programs and relaunch InDesign. Export the PDF with no other programs open, and without paging through the document. Fail!
Try saving the AI file as an EPS file. Relink the file in InDesign.
Repeat steps 11 and 12.
Search again for more help on forums and websites.
Read a forum where the designers tell you to outline all your fonts in order to fix the problem.
Gasp in horror.
Find a different website with an alternate solution.
Try creating a postscript file and distilling. Fail!
Remove graph images.
Export PDF. Success!
Place offending graph images in their own InDesign document and Export a PDF. Success!
Place resulting PDF into original InDesign.
Export PDF. Success!
Export another PDF with different DPI setting (just to verify that it actually works). Success!
Take a lunch break.
Confidently make change/edits to the graph illustration.
Update file in workaround-INDD document.
Export a PDF.
Update linked PDF in original newsletter layout.
Export a PDF. Fail!
Repeat steps 11 through 12 a few times.
Try creating creating and distilling a postscript file. Fail!
Export a flattened PDF. Success!
Export another flattened PDF, this time for the Spanish version, which has different layers. Success!

So when I send this file to press later this week, I'm thinking about including a letter of apology. What do you think?

And oh, by the way, I wanted to include a screenshot of the "Failed to Export PDF" error message, but of course, now I can't get the error message to show up. Seriously?!

Creative Ways to Track Down Vector Logos

2011-03-28T21:09:00.000-07:00

As a designer who works with non-profits, I often get artwork submitted to me that is a lower quality than I'd like to use. So I always go out of my way to find/recreate raster logos so I don't have to use JPGs, GIFs, or PNGs in my printing. Even for presentations going on screen, I will replace raster logos with vector logos. If a logo looks bad at one inch tall, it's surely going to look worse at three or four feet tall.

A typical reason I see for getting raster logos is corporate sponsorship. Let's say I'm designing for a non-profit group or educational organization, and they work hard all year long doing their best to raise awareness, help people, and contribute to the betterment of their community. And they've managed to find businesses who believe in their cause and are willing to give them thousands of dollars to further the worthy cause. And the corporate sponsors' reward? Generally, it amounts to warm fuzzies and a ten second splash of their corporate logo at the annual banquet. And maybe the logo also gets posted on a website or in a newsletter somewhere. And perhaps they'll even get a very small banner on the outfield of a community baseball field. So their corporate logo is basically all that other supporters will see from corporate sponsor. In my opinion, their logo it needs to look its best. Web images might look suitable to most people, but not to me.

So I ask the non-profits for vector logos and the response is generally something along the lines of, "What's a vector? This is the only logo I have."

The folks I work with at the non-profits are not designers. No do I expect them to be. I am grateful that they take the time to gather photos, write some articles, and happily send everything over to me so that I can make it look nice for them.

Here are some ways I've figured out to make my client's artwork look its absolute best. This list goes in my preferred order of use. I start at the top, and work my way down, as I get more desperate.

Brands of the World Website

I am so grateful for the designer who told me about this. That designer was also the one who encouraged me to go freelance after the printing companies I worked for kept going out of business. Anyhow, Brands of the World has got thousands of vector logos, many of which I'm sure you have heard of, but many more that probably no one has heard of. One logo type you won't find there: major league sports team logos. Those organizations have the tightest vector logo-protection that I've ever seen! I once needed a San Diego Padres logo for a non-profit newsletter, and I had to get in touch with their Communications Director to verify that the project was legitimate.

Contact the Corporate Sponsor's In-House Marketing Department

If the corporation is large enough, they'll likely have their own marketing department. If you can track down a phone number or an email for someone in the marketing department, you have a good shot at getting a vector logo. As a passionate designer, I am impressed and grateful when I encounter other people who are concerned abut logo quality. And apparently, I am not alone. Marketing department people have been very nice to me, and when I have managed to track them down and talk with them, they always give me the vector file I need to make their company look its best.

I once had to recreate a form for a fire department, and I didn't want to use the grayscale logo that I had scanned from the hardcopy. So I contacted the city's marketing department and they happily sent me the 6-color vector logo. (That was years ago during the boom years, and that particular city had 6-color business cards with a gold foil emboss and a design that did not easily accommodate business card masters. I can't help but wonder if that city has redesigned their printing to be more affordable...probably not!)

Very large institutions, like military forces and colleges, often provide vector logos right online, on their own websites. Some even give usage guidelines. If you can find the logos posted on the corporate website, they often offer the logo in different color combinations and different orientations, to accommodate different printing and designs needs (1-color versus 4-color, etc).

Use Google's Advanced Search

I figured out this one while working in the marketing department of a civil engineering form. My job was to create marketing graphics for water treatment project proposals to city and county governments. So I had to track down all sorts of city and water district logos. While we had a decent in-house collection of logos, I wasn't satisfied with using existing raster based images for my work. As a picky designer, I figured that other picky designers also preferred to use vector logos in their designs, and those designs would often end up as PDFs posted on the web. Unless you're working for a place that has tight communication between the marketing, legal, and IT departments, chances are good (excellent actually) that you can find a logo embedded in PDF on the website of most larger organizations.

In Google's advanced search, choose the domain within which you want to search, and then choose filetype: PDF. As more and more people are creating and uploading PDFs, you'll have more and more documents to sift through. But there are very few times when I haven't been able to find what I need using this method.

If you want to quickly filter out a lot of PDFs, you can also add the words untitled, .indd, or .qxp to your search. "Untitled" is the default name that InDesign gives to a new document, and it's not uncommon for designers to save files first as "Untitled.indd" and then go back and change the name to something more meaningful later on. So unless the designer changes it, chances are good that the word "untitled" will be located in the metadata somewhere, usually in the Title (not to be confused with the file name). The same thing applies to .indd and .qxp.

Once you find a PDF that looks like a good candidate, zoom in really close. If it's vector, you can generally open the file in Illustrator and extract the logo from there. But if you are extracting logos from PDFs in Illustrator, be very careful and be sure to grab all the parts and pieces of the logo. PDFs from InDesign can be very complex when opened in Illustrator, and they are riddled with ridiculous numbers of clipping paths and groups. I like to select each part of the logo individually with the direct select (white arrow) tool, and then cut and paste into a new document. Double check your work, as it is easy to mess this up.

One thing to note about university logos: they are often tightly controlled. Universities have a variety of logos in different color combinations, orientations, and uses. Some university logos/seals are restricted for use only on official documents, like letters from the president, or diplomas. Other logos are restricted for use only by the athletic departments. These athletics logos are often used on t-shirts, hats, and other items for resale. Try to locate the "Logo Usage Guidelines" document and follow it closely. In addition to offering very detailed information about acceptable use of the logos, another bonus of locating this document is that typically, all the vector logos are located all in one place. How handy!

Search for Annual Reports

If Google Advanced Search doesn't work for you, or it generates more results than you want to search through, search Google for an Annual Report. From this designer's standpoint, the Annual Report is typically the most respected document in the year of any organization. For the Annual Reports, many organizations will do fancy layouts and get high-end printing. And you can bet that any annual report that's been designed by a professional designer will have a vector logo. Not all organizations put their annual reports on the web, but many do. Non-profit groups and credit unions are good examples.

Contact the Web Designer

Sometimes, corporate sponsors are large enough to make big contributions, but not large enough to have their own in-house design departments. But many of these types of businesses do have very good websites. And behind every good website is a good designer, or maybe even a team of them! Look at the bottom of the web page to see if the web designer has a link to their own page. Sometimes, web designers are modest, and they don't put their contact information in the visible part of the page, but they'll hide it in the source code near the top. If you can find the web designer's contact information, give them a call and see if they can help you out with a vector logo.

Whenever I have tried this, it's been successful. My conversation/email usually goes something like this: "Hi there, I am a graphic designer So-and-So and I see that you designed the website for Big Corporate Sponsor. It is really beautiful and nicely done. Well, I'm contacting you because Big Corporate Sponsor recently made a donation to My-Client-The-Non-Profit. I'm working on the slideshow for the My-Client-The-Non-Profit's annual fundraising banquet, and I'm trying to track down the vector logos so that the Big Corporate Sponsors look good. Would you be able to assist me with this?" And the answer is yes!

When All Else Fails, Rebuild It

I warn you against doing this unless are a really good, experienced, hot-stuff designer who's insanely particular about little details. Organizations (especially large ones with very good logos) have spent thousands of dollars designing, perfecting, and controlling their logos. Many of these organizations even have legal departments dedicated to prosecuting people who infringe upon their copyrights and trademarks. If you recreate someone's logo and you get it wrong, and they find out (and care), you could be in deep trouble, both professionally and financially. But if you skilled and detailed enough to recreate the logo correctly, probably no one will be the wiser. But again, recreating well-known logos is something that should be reserved only for professionals. I have seen designers recreate logos incorrectly, and besides demonstrating a lack of thoughtfulness and care, and it degrades our profession.

Conversely, recreating logos is an excellent way to gain experience with font recognition. I worked for about a year at a small, mom-and-pop print shop. Customers would bring in their old business cards and want us to scan them and use the logo on new design pieces. Not on my watch were they going to get scanned-and-reprinted logos! These customers were almost exclusively small businesses, and their logos were typically just their business name set in a standard typeface; so recreating these logos was generally pretty quick. If you're going to rebuild someone else's logo for use in your designs, start with something simple and work dilligently to get it correct. (And please, don't choose a major league sports team.)

First, you need to match the fonts. I like whatthefont.com for it's character recognition engine. When that doesn't work, I go to identifont.com and answer questions about the qualities of each typeface. In worst-case scenarios, whatthefont.com has a font forum where all the font geeks hang out and identify typefaces that the rest of us can't recognize.

In either case, the font websites will refer you to page where you can purchase the font that matches. If you want to keep the integrity of the design (and you should!), purchase the font. Font designers work very hard to design all the little details of their letters. Typefaces, especially serif typefaces, are extremely time consuming to try to trace. Just buy the font. But if you work for a design firm or printing company with an extensive font library, they may already have it in-house.

Once the type is completed, you'll next need to recreate the company's icon. While you can trace in manually with the pen tool, Illustrator's Live Trace feature can also give excellent results. Live Trace was introduced back in CS2, and is a great tool for quickly creating vector paths from a raster image. The images that work the best are high-contrast, and well defined edges. Logos are the types of graphics that work particularly well with Live Trace's capabilities.

Take the image you'll be tracing and place it into Illustrator. You can set it on its own layer as as template layer, or you can simply lock the image down. By default, template layers will screen back the opacity of the layer by 50%. I prefer to keep the placed image at 100% opacity and instead, screen back the opacity of the object I'm tracing. But that's just my personal preference. Set the type as described above. Now, open the Links panel. Go to Window>Links. I'm an avid InDesign user, so I naturally press Command/Ctrl+Shift+D, which brings up the transparency grid. That's not what I wanted! (Because I've never found a use for Illustrator's transparency grid, I change Illustrator's keyboard shortcut for the Links panel to be the same as in InDesign.)

So once you have the type set and the Links Panel Open, click on Edit Original. This will open the placed image in whatever program you have set to open that that type of raster image. It will likely be Photoshop, but depending on your setup, it could also be a different program, such as Apple's Preview, or Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. But regardless, you need to open the graphic in Photoshop.

Once you have the graphic open in Photoshop, you'll need to erase the text. Be sure to set the background color to white first, or press "D" to reset the foreground and background colors to the default setting. Sometimes, the type within a logo crosses over or touches the "icon" part of the logo. But do your best to erase the type. You want to isolate the icon part of the graphic. It can also be helpful to clean up other parts of the image in Photoshop by using the Posterize and Find Edges commands. Now, Once you have erased the letters and cleaned up the tracing image, save the image with the same filename. Now go back to Illustrator. You'll get a warning about missing/modified links. Click Yes.

Now, Live Trace the image. There are a variety of presets and settings you can use for Live Trace. For a great how-to on using the finer details of Live Trace, check out a CreativePro.com article dedicated to Live Trace.

As a professional designer, take pride in your work and make sure you have permission to use logos. Whenever I have used any of the techniques listed here, it has been on projects that directly involved the Big Corporate Sponsors. It seems that the biggest potential legal problems come when stealing logos for use on items for resale, such as t-shirts, hats, etc. But of course you would never do that.

Good luck and may all your logos be vector!

For another way to extract logos from PDFs, check out the article I wrote for Creative Pro: Extract Vector Logos from PDFs.

Using Mac Preview as a Workaround when Acrobat Pro Won't Open a PDF File

2011-03-21T19:35:00.000-07:00

I recently had a problem file that was submitted to me by a client. When I tried to place the PDF into InDesign, I got the following error message: "Failed to open the PDF file."

So I decided to try to open the file in Acrobat to investigate what might be wrong. But instead Acrobat opening the file, I got the following message: "There was an error opening this document. The file is damaged and could not be repaired."

I decided to try an alternative to Acrobat. For certain tasks, I like to use Apple's Preview software. So just out of curiosity, I wanted to see if Preview would save the day for me as it has on several other occasions. (Check out another one of my uses for Preview.) So, I opened the same file in Preview and it opened without any problem whatsoever. I saved it with a different name and then imported the file into InDesign.

Out of curiosity, I checked out the file in Acrobat. All the fonts were embedded properly, and everything checked out properly from a prepress-standpoint.

I'm not sure what the problem was, but it sure is good to know that I have a workaround to rescue problematic PDF files when they don't want to open.

How to Make a Gingham Pattern in InDesign

2011-03-11T10:58:00.000-08:00

This technique is easy when using TeaCup PatternMaker.

The gingham pattern is popular in weaving. The plaid effect is achieved by a stringing the loom (vertical warp threads) in a striped pattern. Then, when you're weaving your horizontal threads (weft), you weave in the same striped pattern. The darkest blocks of color are occur where the dark warp threads and the dark weft threads intersect. The mid-tone color occurs when dark warp threads overlap light weft threads (or vice versa). The white areas occur where white warp threads meet white weft threads.

1. Make a rectangle and fill it with the Lines patterns, using the settings shown below. (Click on the images to see a larger version.)
2. In the Effects panel, set the blend mode to Multiply and the opacity to 50%.

3. Copy and then Paste in Place.

4. Rotate the square 90 degrees. Done!

That was so much fun I made four different colors!

If you like this article, be sure to read my other article: Using Teacup PatternMaker to Mimic Knitted Garter Stitch.

An Easier Way to Open Web-based PDFs from Safari

2011-03-10T18:41:00.000-08:00

In the past, I struggled with how to easily work with PDFs from Safari. I used to save the PDF to my desktop, then launch Acrobat, and then open the PDF in Acrobat. I wanted to find an easier way. Here are some of the ways I use web-based PDFs on an everyday basis.

Filling in PDF form fields and saving the completed document...with completed form fields intact
Saving PDFs that are loaded as part of a web archive
Properly viewing PDFs that I know have interactive features such as buttons and rollovers
Because I'm curious, I want to see the Document Properties of the PDF (who made it, if there are any keywords applied, if it has embedded fonts, and most importantly, if it was created by a respectable software).

To demonstrate how to more easily work with PDFs, we'll go through the task of downloading some PDF bank statements from online banking.

I've got twelve different PDFs that I need to download, so I need to find a way to make the process easy. And it should be easy, right? PDFs make everything better, don't they?

So, I've got my first PDF loaded, and I try to save it. But it is saving as something called a .webarchive. A what? I don't know what a .webarchive is, nor what types of files it could contain. So I want to stay away from this mystery file type.

I know my bank statement is a PDF, so I just need to find the best way to save it as a PDF. In Safari, when you are viewing a PDF, if you hover near the bottom of the PDF, you'll get a little pop-up that allows you to save the PDF to your download folder.

Unless you've changed the default setting in Safari preferences, the files will automatically download into your Downloads folder.

So saving to the downloads folder seems like a pretty good solution. So one by one, I save the PDFs to my Downloads folder. But then I take a look at the file names and they are very cryptic and need to be changed.

So I went back and looked at the other buttons that show up at the bottom of a PDF viewed in Safari. The button on the far right is "Open PDF in Preview." I love Preview and use it every day for certain purposes, but it's not my first choice when I want to view the metadata of a PDF. (To see what I use Preview for, read my blog article about it. Also see the Design Geek article on the same subject.)

So I know how to open a PDF in Preview with 1-click, but what I really want is to be able to open a PDF in Acrobat Pro with 1-click.

And a few weeks ago, I found it! While viewing a PDF in Safari, right click and then choose "Open with Acrobat Pro."

Ahhhh...that's better. Now I can open my PDFs is Acrobat, and easily save them wherever I want, with whatever file name I want.

I want to mention that this article is based on using Acrobat Pro 9, on a Mac. I've heard Acrobat X is totally amazing, and I look forward to using it, but currently, there is no Mac trial available (and I don't like to buy software without first testing it out for a few weeks). Bummer.

PMS to CMYK Press Sheet

2011-03-07T14:15:00.000-08:00

Years ago, while working at a sheetfed litho shop, I was bored one day and looking for something to fill my time. The prepress supervisor asked me to make a press sheet with all the PMS color chips, plus all of their corresponding CMYK values right underneath the color chips. He seemed puzzled at how excited I was to take on the task. Preparing this file was fun! We used that press sheet for a couple of years (until, sadly, the printing company went out of business). This color chart was particularly helpful in helping us color-match on our large format solvent roll printer and UV flatbed printer.

I saved the file and stumbled across it recently. Click here for a downloadable PDF. It is a 38" x 25" press sheet, complete with gripper. Enjoy!

New Web Site for Our Publishing Company

2011-03-04T11:27:00.000-08:00

Besides blogging about InDesign and Acrobat, I actually have my own publishing company. I am pleased to announce the we have just launched the newly redesigned website for Verity Yacht Publications. Verity specializes in graphic design and technical documents for the marine industry. We'd love to get your feedback on our new look. Leave a post in the comments. Looking forward to hearing from you!

www.verityyachtpubs.com

Using InDesign Tables to Design a Geometric Color Block Pattern

2011-03-03T22:35:00.000-08:00

This article is about how I designed a knitted afghan to mimic the floor tiles on the Fox News network.

Fox News Floor Tile Afghan

For years, I have been fascinated with garter stitch, which has a magical 2:1 proportional ration of rows: stitches. I wrote about this quite extensively in one of my other blog posts, Data-less Tables: InDesign Meets Knitting. While that article focused on diagonal lines and triangles, this post will focus on stripes and squares.

I have provided instructions for two ways to create this pattern:

How to Create the Squares Using Knitting

How to Create the Squares Using Adobe InDesign

The project we'll be creating is basically a bunch of squares set in a checkerboard pattern. And instead of cold hard floor tiles, our result is a soft, fluffy blanket. Knit as it as big you want, just by adding more squares...or in my case, knit it as big as you can until you run out of yarn. Then try desperately to find more yarn of the same color (which is impossible when the two colors of yarn you used are either backordered or discontinued). Finally, knit a border of your choosing and stitch it on. For my border, I chose Twin Leaf Lace from Nicky Epstein's Knitting on the Edge. I wanted to add the border on all four sides, as was done on the floor tile design at Fox News, but again, I ran out of yarn. So my blanket just has a border on two sides. I still think it looks pretty.

How to Create the Squares Using Knitting
First let's look at how the individual square is constructed. It consists of five stripes, with the top and bottom stripe being a little bit thicker than the center three stripes. I want my squares to be about 7"x7", and I have already determined my gauge to be five stitches/in, so I need somewhere between 30 and 40 stitches in my square. The trick is figuring out the number of rows for each stripe that will give me the correct stripe heights, and yet still have the overall shape be perfectly square. After doing a little math and making some sketches, I determine that the top and bottom stripes need to be 8 ridges (16 rows), and the center three stripes each need to be 5 ridges (10 rows). The total number of ridges is 31 (62 rows). Since in garter stitch, the number of ridges is equal to the number of stitches, we'll be knitting a square 31 stitches wide.

So the basic square pattern goes like this:
Cast on 31 stitches.
Knit 8 ridges (16 rows) in black.
Knit 5 ridges (10 rows) in tan.
Knit 5 ridges (10 rows) in black.
Knit 5 ridges (10 rows) in tan.
Knit 8 ridges (16 rows) in black.

You can bind off on the last row and have a complete square, or you can leave the stitches live and knit one live stitch from the first square together with the last stitch on each row of the next square (which you'll knit at a 90 degree angle to the first square). I like to leave my stitches live, because I find that knitting the live stitches together makes for a smoother join than binding off and then picking up the bound off edge.

Knit each square perpendicular to the adjacent squares. Be sure that when you're starting a new square, that you have the right side facing you. Because garter stitch is so rhythmic, so soothing, that it is all too easy get in the groove, happily knitting away...and then when you're done with a square, realize that you've knitted it onto the afghan with the back side facing forward and then you have to rip it out and redo it. This is especially problematic when knitting late at night, in a dimly lit living room, after a long day of mentally challenging work. Pay attention when starting a new square and double check your work! Reknitted yarn never looks as good as yarn that's only been knit once. But hey, if (when) you mess up, at least garter stitch is easy to pick back...it's a lot more forgiving than brioche or spanish lace.

How to Create the Squares Using Adobe InDesign
Step 1: Like any graphic design project, I first need to consider my final output size and create an appropriate sized document. My final output of this design will be laser printers, outputting standard sized paper. So I first create an 8.5" x 11" document.

Step 2: Inches are my preferred unit of measurement, but I want to use the same numbers for my measurements that I am using for my stitches. Since I'm using a 31stitch pattern, I need to now choose a unit of measurement where I can have 31 units (whatever my units end up being) and still have my objects fit on a standard size page (which I set up when I created the new document). After a little experimentation, I figure out that millimeters will work well for this purpose. 31 mm is almost 1.25", so I can fit several squares on the width of an 8.5" wide page. Now I simply go back into the Units and Increments section of the Preferences dialog box and change the Horizontal and Vertical units to millimeters.

Step 3: Next, create a square text frame equal to the width of two squares. Because each square is 31 stitches wide, our text frame needs to be 62 mm high by 62 mm wide.

Step 4: With your text insertion point in the frame you just made, insert a Table 10 rows by 10 columns. We'll be merging some of the rows and columns to create the final design.

Step 4: Because we'll be using this table to create blocks of color with very specific measurements, we don't need any of the strokes. So select the entire table and set all the strokes to 0.

Step 5: Start setting up your column widths. Because the first stripe is 8 ridges tall, we need the first row to be exactly 8 mm high.

Step 6: Next set the next three rows to be exactly 5 mm high.

Step 7: Set the fifth row to be exactly 8 mm high.

Step 8: Merge the first five cells in the first row.

Step 9: Do the same with the next four rows.

Step 10: Add colors to your first five rows.

Step 11: Repeat steps 8-10 for the lower right set of cells to make up the second square. You can either merge the columns manually, or simply copy and paste from the top left square. But be sure to note that the copy and paste function does not copy the width and heighth of the cells. It only copies the content (which in this case, is how the cells are merged, as well as their fill color).

Step 12: Set the height of the cells to match the square in the top left (8, 5, 5, 5, 8). You'll notice that the table now perfectly fills the 62 mm square text frame.

Step 13: To create the next two squares, merge the rows similarly to how you merged the columns for the first set of squares.

Step 14: Set the column width to the same measurements used for the first set of squares: 8mm, 5mm, 5mm, 5mm, 8mm.

Step 15: Add fill color to the second set of squares. I find that the easiest way to add fill colors to a cell is by dragging swatches and dropping them on whichever cell you want to fill. It just too easy to accidentally select too many rows/cells. Interestingly, you can also drag and drop swatches onto frame strokes, but it's a lot harder. You have to position your mouse just right, and if your table is the same size as your text frame, chances are pretty good that you'll drop the swatch a little too far over and inadvertently fill the cell instead of coloring the object stroke. So I like to stick with using drag-and-drop coloring just for fills.

Step 16: Step and repeat to quickly make the afghan design bigger. By creating as a grid, and setting the horizontal and vertical offsets to exactly the same size as the table, we can instantly make the design huge.

Step 17: Now that the square/table design is done, I would finish designing the rest of the page, adding a pattern name, knitting instructions, a photo of the completed afghan, and contact info. But if you've gotten this far, you're probably a designer and already know what to do next. If you're really ~~obsessive~~ particular about small details, you can even rename your swatches to indicate what colors of yarn you used.

If you like this article about InDesign and Knitting, you may be interested in one of my other articles, Using Teacup PatternMaker to Mimic Knitted Garter Stitch.

Using Teacup PatternMaker to Mimic Knitted Garter Stitch

2011-02-28T18:36:00.000-08:00

This is a continuation of my pursuit to use InDesign to help me more effectively design knitted afghan patterns. One of my previous blog posts, "Data-less Tables: InDesign Meets Knitting," focused on replicating perfect right-angle triangles using diagonal lines in InDesign tables. Today's post will focus on my attempts to use InDesign to accurately mimic garter stitch, so that I can create more realistic illustrations of my designs.

In case you haven't read my previous post about garter stitch, I'll summarize it here. Garter stitch has a 2:1 proportion of rows : stitches. So if you knit a piece of garter stitch 40 rows tall and 20 stitches wide, it will be perfectly square, perfectly flat, and will look exactly the same on both sides. Knitting each row gives you a ridge. So if you knit two rows, you get two ridges, one on the front, and one on the back. Taking it a little further, if you knit 40 rows, you'll have 20 ridges on the front, and 20 ridges on the back.

So the effect I am trying to replicate is getting InDesign to make wavy lines where the number of waves equals the number of lines, with just a little bit of space in between. The trick is getting this to fit perfectly inside of a square frame.

The above photo shows the effect I'm trying to replicate. After a bit of trial and error (and admittedly a few months of wondering how and if it could be done), I finally stumbled upon the solution. It is Teacup PatternMaker. The solution is deceivingly simple, and I've had the capability for quite some time and didn't even realize it.

In case you're not familiar with PatternMaker, it's a very cool plugin that generates customizable postscript patterns on the fly, right inside of InDesign. As an attendee of the InDesign Secrets Live 2010 Print and ePublishing Conference, I was thrilled to receive the entire Pattern Pack as part of what I'll call my digital gift bag. I am fascinated by geometric patterns, so this Pattern Pack was like an early Christmas present.

As you can see in the graphic above, my square has 8 ridges and 8 stitches (called "Waves" in Pattern Maker). By saving this pattern as a preset, the next time I want to design anything in garter stitch, all I need to do is fill the appropriate frame with this pattern, and then edit the colors.

And case you're wondering what the little red rectangle is at the top left corner of my pattern, that's FrameReporter, by Rorohiko. It gives little snippets of information about the selected frame...and happens to be one of my favorite plugins.

More articles on InDesign and Knitting coming soon!

Hey Rounded Corners—Quit Messing with my Paragraph Rules!

2011-02-08T18:00:00.000-08:00

This post is about a rounded corner workaround I found that will work in both InDesign CS3, CS4, and CS5.

This all started because I had a project which required me to create call-out boxes. I had been analyzing the callout boxes in my favorite study bible, and I wanted to duplicate the effect in InDesign. The top edge of the box had two lines (different tints and different thicknesses). The bottom edge of the box had rounded corners. I knew I could accomplish this effect with a couple of frames, grouped together (one for the rounded corners, and one for the text frame), but I wanted the flexibility to resize my text frame as needed, without having to ungroup, regroup, and risk distorted text and corners...

So my first task was to create the top rules, using two paragraph rules in the top line, one Rule Above, and one Rule Below.

My next task was to add the rounded corners at the bottom. At first, I tried the popular method of running the Corner Effect script. This script doesn't actually use live corner effects (like CS5 does), but actually edits the corner anchor points.

The script is less than intuitive. You have to know which points (first, second, third, and fourth) correspond to which point on the rectangle. After a little experimentation, I figured that I to get bottom rounded corners on my rectangle, I would need to choose the last two points. I was so perplexed at the logic behind the order of the rectangle points that I wrote an entire article about it: A Designer's Guide to Understanding Polygon Point Order when Using InDesign's Corner Effects Script.

So, the Corner Effects Script seemed to work pretty well, until I took a look at the paragraph rules in the top line of my text. For some mysterious reason, adding rounded corners messes with the paragraph rules in the top paragraph. They now no longer extended to the edge of my text frame, despite the fact that I had set paragraph rules to span the entire column width. My guess is that somehow the rounded corners alter the object geometry which determines how wide the paragraph rules extend. But I'm just guessing. I really don't know.

I was working in CS3, so I figured that this was probably fixed in CS4...but it did exactly the same thing. Here is the same text box with the colors nice and bright to highlight the problem.

So I next tried rounded corners using in CS5. I rounded just the two bottom corners...but again, the same thing happened to the paragraph rules in the top line. It seemed to work at first, until I resized the text frame. As a workaround, I adjusted the paragraph rule Right and Left Indents to account for the short paragraph rules. But not all of my text boxes needed to be the same size, and when I made the text box wider or narrower to fit my design, the paragraph rules were almost always the incorrect width (the correct width being equal to exactly the column width).

I also tried the CS5 new Rounded Corner Effect, but again, the paragraph rules did not function as expected. See the little magenta peeking out behind the right side of the header?

So I decided to try a solution that had nothing at all to do with real Rounded Corners, and everything to do with Faking Rounded Corners. I would achieve rounded corners at the bottom of the text frame using a big, fat, paragraph rule. Here are the settings I used:

By making the paragraph rule the same color as the text frame, the rule has the same effect as rounded corners, but without messing up the object geometry in the paragraph rules in the top line. And I can also now resize the text frame at will, without inadvertently changing the corner size. And the best part is that this workaround isn't just for the latest version of InDesign, but works exactly the same in earlier versions as well. Here is the text frame with a gray paragraph rule and frame fill, so you can see how it all worked together.

Designing for Small Non-Profits: Preparing Flexible Files to Be Used with Consumer-Grade Software

2011-02-03T17:35:00.000-08:00

Some of my clients are small non-profits. These hardworking folks are typically volunteers, managing teams of volunteers. They work with limited resources and have to find very creative ways to get things done on a limited budget. I have a deep appreciation for the effort required to run a successful non-profit. That's why, for special clients like these, I adjust my workflow in order to better meet their needs.

In addition, when designing for small non-profits, I never truly know how the files are going to be used or where they will end up. The graphics I create could end up in an email campaigns, newsletters, newspapers, on t-shirts, websites... you name it. So in addition to choosing file formats that my clients can actually use, I also try to make the files as editable as possible, all while maintaining a high quality. If any of these files do end of at a professional printer, they'll print reasonably well.

Small non-profits want to have attractive graphics, but typically lack the tools and knowledge to create them on their own. Their tools usually include consumer-grade programs such as MS Word, MS Publisher, and Photoshop 6 or earlier.

As much as I may urge my non-profit clients to switch to the Creative Suite, I understand that learning professional software is not something to be done casually, and so I never actually expect any of them to convert to the Creative Suite. These wonderful clients want to create their own graphics using the tools they own and already know how to use. Though I may help them with certain special projects, most of their day-to-day designs are done in-house, by volunteers.

To assist my clients in creating higher quality graphics while still using their existing tools, I choose file formats based upon what is compatible with their tool set. These file formats are very different from what I use in my professional high-end projects, but work perfectly for my non-profit clients and their tools. The file formats I choose are:

WMF

As modern professional designers don't typically use WMFs, your experience with WMFs is likely limited to clip art books such as the somewhat fictitious "10,000 Cheesy Clip Art Images for $49."

There are several reasons I don't like WMFs: they don't support bezier curves (all curves are converted to a path with bunches of corner points - see image below), they are incapable of containing XMP metadata, they only have an RGB mode. WMFs were originally developed for a 16 bit windows operating system, and some websites say they cannot be placed inside graphic programs, but interestingly, WMF can be placed into InDesign documents, even on a mac. However, WMF's can't embed fonts, so you'll either need to have the fonts available wherever the file is being output, or outline the fonts and then go to great lengths to make sure the final result looks acceptable. We'll explore how to do that below.

Different software programs seem to have different methods for converting their native file formats to WMFs. For a brief period of time, I had a job where I had to use Corel Draw. It converted WMFs quite differently that Illustrator does. Corel gradients export as vector, but AI gradients export as raster. But if you want to achieve vector gradients in an AI WMF, you can create your gradient using a blend. If you have more than one vector editing software available, test which one does the best job of converting your files.

But for as much as I dislike WMFs, they are useful in a few circumstances. WMF stands for Windows Meta File. It is a vector format compatible with MS Office products. While using EPS files in Office products has varying degrees of success (depending on how far you backsave the EPS), WMF files work well with the MS Office suite. WMF files preview properly, are scalable, and print crisply. Within an MS Office program, you can even ungroup them, and they will act as native shapes drawn with the Office drawing tools. As a designer, the challenge lies in generating a WMF file that is respectable by modern day graphics standards.

I found that converting the curves to straight lines results in very ugly type. After some trial and error, I found that by enlarging the text (or graphics) prior to exporting a WMF from Illustrator, the distortion of the curves is not as bad. It's still ugly, but workable with a few adjustments. The image below illustrates the difference in curve conversion (in)accuracy at 12 and 24 points.

The trick is:

Design your AI file at at least 10 times the size you finally need it.
Outline the type.
Export a WMF.
You'll need to resize the WMF when you place it into the Word doc.

The larger curves in the 240 pt example result in a larger number of points during the WMF export, and correspondingly, more accurately resemble the original shape of the outlined text.

EMF

This is pretty similar to WMF, with the main difference (for my purposes) being support of curves. Well, in theory anyway. The curve conversion at 24 point actually looks worse than the WMF version at the same size.

PSD

I use this file format for clients who like to use Photoshop for page layout. By copying the paths from Illustrator and then pasting into Photoshop as a Shape Layer, you have a scalable vector logo with a transparent background, and can very intuitively edit the color. Be sure to maximize compatibility when saving the file. If I was ever to give my clients a logo as a jpeg, they eventually will want to have it with a transparent background, and they would likely attempt to erase the background using the magic wand tool. This format prevents magic wand attempts and it retains the accuracy of the original Illustrator paths.

Again, I want to emphasize that these formats are not recommended for high-end production workflows, but will assist organizations with consumer-grade software to have attractive graphics. Having spent my entire adult life Christian ministry, I always look for ways to do more with less. I recently read a great book that illustrates how non-profits get more accomplished while spending no money. I highly recommend this book: Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business

Variable Data Meets Large Format Printing

2011-01-26T19:34:00.000-08:00

A little history...

This project came about as an attempt to market a newly formed large format printing company. A month or so after I got hired, the company announced that they were going to expand by starting a large format division. We were to get 10 foot wide solvent printer, a 5 foot x 10 foot UV flatbed printer, a digital die cutter (camera guided computer driven table router), and a really big laminator. I was tasked with developing a workflow and a marketing campaign for the new division of our company. So armed with about 3 pages of instructions and $350,000 in equipment, I was off on a new adventure.

Prior to purchasing the large format equipment, this printing company did strictly sheetfed work (shockingly, we did not even own a color laser printer). So there was a considerable amount of education to do with regard to large format printing.

The challenge:

Educating traditional print buyers (designers and print brokers) about large format substrates and capabilities

My personal objectives:

To design a mail piece so cool that people not only would not throw it in the trash, but would pin up on their cubicle wall and show it off to their friends.
To push to the limit the complexity of what my team and equipment was capable of producing.

The project:

Customized MarketMail pieces (non-rectangular) on Sintra board, with variable data graphics, text... and engraving.

Each postcard that we would product would be completely unique. I had seen custom printed postcards before (utilizing different pictures and text). I had also seen CMM postcards before, batch produced by the thousand. But our postcards were going not only combine an unusual shape and custom printing, they were going to have the recipient's name engraved on the front.

The USPS website has a fairly decent writeup about CMM. Basically, it's unusual shaped postcards. They can be weird shapes, have holes die cut through them, they can be even have stuff hanging from them. I heard about a business that sent out flip-flops as CMM mail pieces. Pretty cool!

I chose to use 3M Sintra board for our postcard. Sintra board is an extruded PVC material. It is waterproof, stiff, has perfectly squared edges, and comes in big sheets and various thicknesses. It's great for engraving, and the UV ink doesn't flake off of it like some other substrates.

Here are the step-by-step instructions for creating your own engraved diecut mailers. These instructions are intentionally brief. I am assuming that if you attempt this, you'll already know how to set up templates, do data merge, use InDesign and PDF layers, clean up files in Illustrator, etc. This is more of an overview of a process rather than a tutorial on specific software features.

Note: In many large format workflows, they actually set it up so that the software does the work of imposition, creating cut files, and so forth. You can send a single PDF to the RIP, and the RIP will separate out the Cut file and the Print file. In an ideal world, our workflow would have been set up that way. But for reasons beyond my control, our RIP software didn't communicate with our cutting software. So we did everything manually.

Step 1: Create a 1-up postcard template in InDesign

Front:

Graphic placeholder (Orange Oval)
First name placeholder (Data Merge placeholder for engraving) Note: I chose Arial Rounded for the font, and just gave it stroke, no fill.
Cut Path (magenta line)
Drill holes (green circles)

Back:

Graphic placeholder
Address info
Salesperson contact info

Step 2: Arrange objects on layers in InDesign

Print layer: everything that is going to be printed
Cut layer: everything that is going to be cut or engraved (Cut path, drill holes)
Engrave layer: name for engraving

Step 3: Data Merge

Choose your data source and merge your data.
Now, depending upon your version of InDesign, save the merged file for placing into the imposition, OR
Export a PDF for imposition (including Acrobat layers).

Step 4: Prepare an imposition file, page 1

Prepare a template.
Make four layers: Print, Cut, Engrave and Registration Marks.
Put placeholder frames on the Print layer.
Add registration marks in a triangular position. (The registration marks are what the camera guided table router uses to know where to cut. They work so well you can even put your board on the table crooked and the router will still cut correctly because it uses the registration marks as reference points. These registration marks have nothing to whatsoever with litho registration marks that a pressman uses to align various plate colors. They are similar in the sense that they help with alignment, but that's about where the similarity ends.)

Step 5: Prepare an imposition file, page 2

Duplicate the placeholder frames onto a second page.
Add registration marks on the first page.

Step 6: Prepare an imposition file, part 2

Duplicate placeholder frames from Print layer onto the Cut and Engrave layers.

Step 7: Impose 1-up, only Print layer

Front: left to right, top to bottom
Back: Right to left, top to bottom

Step 8: Prepare Cut Paths in Imposition

Place a page (any page) of the 1-up file into the placeholder frames on the Cut Path layer.
Be sure to Show Options: show ONLY the Cut layer.

Step 9: Prepare Engrave Paths

Do a multi-page import of the 1-up front file
Be sure to show options: show ONLY the Engrave layer.

Step 10: Export Print File

Hide the Cut and Engrave layers.
Showing only the Print and Registration Marks layers, export a PDF.
Depending on your RIP, you may want to rasterize and save as a TIFF.

Note: I know traditional litho prepress folks may gasp in horror over this statement, but large format RIPs typically use this as a workflow. As much as I liked the idea of sending to the RIP unflattened PDFs with native transparency, it just didn't work well. Since TIFFs are the preferred file format and the industry standard for large format RIPs, I figured I was not going to change an entire industry. So we used TIFFs.

Step 11: Export Cut/Engrave File

Hide the Print layer.
Showing only the Cut, Engrave, and Registration Marks layers, export a PDF.

Step 12: Clean up the Cut File in Illustrator

Using, Illustrator, open your the PDF cut file you just made.
Delete all empty paths (view in outline mode first)
Outline type (I used Arial Rounded)
Create separate layers for each type of object: Cut, Engrave, and Registration Marks.
Offset the stroke by 1/2 the diameter of the router bit you'll be using. (I like to use an Effect for this, then expand the object. That way, there are no extraneous paths to delete.)

Step 13: Go to Production!

Print board - Side 1
If using a non-square substrate (like cardboard, polystyrene, coroplast, etc.) square up the board on the flatbed cutter.
Print board Side 2
Engrave names
Drill holes
Cut out postcards

Tips:

Have plenty of time on your hands.
Don't have a project budget.
Work directly with equipment operators: the guys who run the flatbed printer and table router).

The Finished Product

This was the actual postcard that I mailed to myself when I mailed the postcards to our customers. On the back of the postcard in the top left, you can actually see the tire marks from where it got run over by the mail truck.

Postcard Front

Postcard Back

On a slightly different note, I originally prepared this as a Ignite InDesign slideshow for the 2010 InDesign Secrets Print and ePublishing Conference. I feel I should give a disclaimer that this slideshow was done before I owned a laptop, and I had to prepare the slides on the hotel lobby computer the night before, using Acrobat.com. So in case you think the most of the graphics in this tutorial look a little clunky, you're right, they do.

And in case you're not familiar with Ignite! presentations, that's where you prepare a 20-slide slideshow about your topic of choice, and you have 5 minutes to present, while the slides auto-advance every 15 seconds behind you on the screen. And in my case, my audience included pretty much all the super heros of the publishing world (who also happen to be well-practiced public speakers), and I (not exactly a well-practiced public speaker) was doing my very best not to hyperventilate. Exhilarating? Yes, indeed. Terrifying? OMG! But hey, when I was done, they gave me a neat little magnet to hang on my fridge. It was totally worth it. I'm doing it again a this year's conference!

A Designer's Guide to Understanding Polygon Point Order when Using InDesign's Corner Effects Script

2011-01-22T15:50:00.000-08:00

This experiment came about out of a need to have a rounded rectangle text frame where only the two bottom corners were rounded. Before InDesign CS5, when we wanted rounded corners, we had to either:

Round them ourselves using the convert anchor point tool
Round them in Illustrator using the corner effects or one of Mordy's nifty rounded rectangle tricks (and then paste into InDesign as a path) or
Use InDesign's built-in Corner Effects Script (available in several scripting languages to suit any platform)

This script doesn't use live corner effects (like CS5 does), but actually edits the corner anchor points.

The script is less than intuitive. You have to know which points (first, second, third, and fourth) correspond to which point on the rectangle. You can find this information in a book on InDesign scripting (a couple of which I have read), but those books are a little dry for average designer. So here is a designer's simple guide to understanding polygon point order. Hopefully it will help reduce your trial and error when using this script.

It turns out that the numbering starts somewhere in the top (depending on the number of sides in your polygon) and goes counterclockwise. So here are the patterns I found when working with this script:

Polygons with odd number of sides (Triangles, pentagons, and whatever a seven-sided polygon is called): first point is at the TOP
4-sided polygons: (Squares and rectangles): first point is at the TOP LEFT
Polygons with even sides starting with at least 6 sides: the first point is at the TOP RIGHT.

I know for those people using CS5 (and thus have Live Corner Effects), this information maybe isn't that important, but for anyone using CS4 or below, perhaps this information will be useful. Happy rounding!

Making InDesign Absolute Links behave like Relative Links

2011-01-15T13:46:00.000-08:00

If you were to ask an InDesign user to show you a "Link" in InDesign, they would likely point you to the "Links" panel. However, there are additional types of links that we don't necessarily think about as often. These links refer to absolute file paths on your computer hard drive or server.

Cross references: linking to a specific paragraph or Text Anchor in an InDesign file
Documents in a book: the book file links to the documents within the book

So let's say that you want to start a new project that is based off of a similar one. But you want to keep the files totally separate. I used to work in a FrameMaker 7 workflow. And there are a lot of things about that workflow that I didn't like, but one thing that was cool about it was that Framemaker had the ability to have relative links. Relative links are commonly used in web development. In your design program (Dreamweaver for example) you can instruct it that all the images will be located in a folder called "images". It doesn't concern itself with anything above that, like where the images folder is located on your drive. The hard code in each html file just lists the path as images/. That way, you can upload the files to a server and the html files will simply still point to a folder called "images."

Relative Linking offers an amazing portability. Sadly (for better for worse) InDesign is not capable of relative linking. It can only do absolute links. This is typically great, but if you have a lot of files linked together and you need to reuse them for another another project, it can be a nightmare. But it doesn't have to be. Read on and learn from my pain.

If you want to use an old project (in this case a book) as a starting point for a new project, you could do the hard way:

Copy your old project folder into a new project folder.
Open your new book file and manually replace each each chapter in the book (because the book will still be pointing to the ID files in the old location).
Open each new InDesign file manually.
Manually relink your images, one InDesign file at a time.
Manually relink your cross references.
Grumble in frustration for hours.
Email your developer friends and see if they can write a script to do book-wide link updates within an entire folder.

Or you could do it the easy way.

Copy your old project files to a new project folder.
Change the name of the folder containing your old project files. I like to do something simple, like adding a dash or a space at the end.
Open your new book file and do some global action such as

Update a book-wide Table of Contents
Update all cross references
Update all numbering

For some reason, if InDesign can't find the links it's looking for (whether they are documents in a book, placed images, or cross references) it will look nearby and do it's best to find them. So if your book file in your old project was located in the same folder with all the document files, and now in your new project, the book file is still sitting right next to all the document files, InDesign somehow remembers the relationship. When you open your new book file, you'll get a little warning in the book panel. Those little yellow triangles are just letting you know that the files have changed. (They really haven't changed, but technically, they're now in a new location.)

Once you run some sort of book-wide global update, you can even go back into your old project folder and change the name back to what it used to be. Your new project is now completely disassociated with your old project.

This global-relinking is handy if for example, your server dies unexpectedly and you have to start immediately using your backup server... Or if you started a project on your desktop and then moved to your laptop (which has a different username, and thus a different file path), or you need to base one project off of another project and not have your original files accidentally updated.

I could kind of compare this to the time we moved down the street. We used to live one block away, in the exact same model of house. So this time, when we moved in, we already knew where all of belongings went. The inside structure was the same. It was just the outside structure that was different.

Acrobat Rectangle Tool: Why Do You Disappoint Me So?

2011-01-11T19:08:00.000-08:00

In today's daily adventure with Acrobat commenting tools, I decided to create different colored rectangles, and then sort them by color. I made rectangles of about six different colors, gave them all a different fill color, and removed the stroke weight. However, as you can see, according to "Acrobat's Sort by Color" feature, it only recognizes one color: red. What?!

So I have two complaints here:

Even despite my best efforts, the rectangles not only all clearly still have a stroke (albeit very small), and
The stroke color is what Acrobat uses when Sorting by Color. Lovely.

If I was in charge of redesigning the shape tools, here is what I would do:

If a user chooses "No Line" and also sets a stroke weight of zero points, I would make sure that either one of those choices would result in the stroke disappearing completely.
I would allow the user to set a preference (a radio button in the Commenting category of the Preferences dialog box) to choose to sort by either stroke color or fill color.
On another note, I would add an option to set the blend mode to multiply, so that shape tools can be used as highlighters.

For more of my thoughts on using shape tools as highlighters, read another one of my blog posts: "Highlighting a PDF That Contains No Fonts."

Edit: I learned recently that Acrobat X does not have the "Sort Comments by Color" feature. How sad for me and every other technical writer on the planet who uses this feature! I hope it is included in the next version of Acrobat.

The True Story of How Address Book and MobileMe Saved Christmas

2011-01-10T19:25:00.000-08:00

Perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration, but maybe not. Read along, and then you decide.

About thirty years ago, my mother-in-law was given a recipe for the most amazing peanut butter balls known to man. These peanut butter balls are a family tradition, and all the daughters make them every year at Christmastime. And as a daughter-in-law, I continued the tradition. But first, let's chat about recipe storage.

When I was a young bride, I bought my very first recipe box, and did my best to fill it with recipe cards. I also collected about a dozen or so recipe books. A few years after I got married, we started moving frequently. So for about 6 years, nearly all of my cookbooks went into storage. And somewhere along the way, I lost my recipe box. One of our latest moves was 1000 miles away, and required us to get rid of old stuff that had been just sitting in storage. So, I pulled out my old boxes, and I figured that if I hadn't used anything in the boxes in six years, I didn't need them and I wasn't even going to open them to see what was inside. So off to Goodwill they went.

So there I am in a new town, with no recipe box and no cookbooks. I decided to email my sister-in-law and have her send me some of the famous family recipes. In order to avoid losing the recipes, I made Address Book cards for them on my mac. I even made a Group in my Address Book, and all my recipes get filed there. I can view my recipes on my phone while working in the kitchen. How handy! Plus, because I have my address book automatically backed up, my recipes are safely stored in about 5 different servers.

This year, like every year, I made a batch of peanut butter balls. We decided to take some of them to our family vacation in California. It was actually purely for selfish reasons (snack food for the drive), not because we intended on sharing them with the family. Because, surely the family had made their own peanut butter balls using the thirty year old famous family recipe...Surely.

So we're down visiting with the family and my sister-in-law expresses great remorse; she didn't have any peanut butter balls this year because, you see...she had lost the recipe. And the other sister-in-law in Tennessee had also lost the recipe. So no one in the family had any peanut butter balls. What?! I was the sole remaining family member in possession of the Best Peanut Butter Ball Recipe Known to Man. And best of all, it was on my phone! After running to the car to retrieve the peanut butter balls from their secret location (and thus become a hero), I came back inside and showed my sister-in-law the Address Book card containing the recipe. With a few taps of the touchscreen, (Share Contact) I was able to share the recipe with her. She was intrigued about the Groups feature. She had never seen that before on her iPhone.

It turns out that I have been taking Address Book Groups for granted. Because I have a mac computer, any Address Book Groups that I create on my computer get transferred into my phone, courtesy of MobileMe. But iPhone users that don't have a mac or a MobileMe account do not have Groups. Unless of course, they buy an app that adds that functionality to their phone.

And so the moral of the story is: Back up your treasured family recipes using MobileMe and remote offsite backup.

A few tips if you decide to use Address Book cards for your recipes:

I use the Notes section of the card to type in the recipe. If you're on an iPhone, the Notes field is not visible by default. You'll need to add that field.
Another word about Notes: If you choose to export address book cards on your mac, you may need to fiddle with the export settings in order to get the Notes included. I think the older OS didn't have the checkbox to include notes. I think you just had to know to choose version 2.1.

In case you're interested, here is the Peanut Butter Ball Recipe. I am pleased to announce that this recipe once again safely in the possession of multiple members of the family. Generations of Vaughns breathe a collective sigh of relief.

How to Synchronize Acrobat Checkmarks Between Your Computers

2011-01-08T23:37:00.000-08:00

I like to use Acrobat commenting tools. Okay, it's safe to say that I love Acrobat commenting tools. Sticky notes, highlighters, stamps, text blocks...they make me sigh with happiness. In my daily workflow, I highlight the PDF documents that my clients send me, then I check things off as I work through the project.

At the end of the project, I Sort by Checkmark Status to make sure I didn't miss anything.

That all worked fine and good until I got a laptop. Then, I could work anywhere. I wasn't constrained to just working at my desk. Now I could work in my living room, in my kitchen, on airplanes, on the I-5 while my husband drove us to California for a family vacation, and so on. And with my 1 TB travel drive, I was truly mobile! The only problem was, my PDF checkmarks don't transfer from one computer to another. So suddenly, in the middle of a project, my Sort by Checkmark Status (upon which I had come to rely so heavily) was no longer as available as it once had been. Any checkmarks I made on my desktop were not visible on my laptop, and vice-versa. How sad. (Tear dripping down cheek...)

I had run into a similar problem a couple of years ago, when a coworker and I were both making checkmarks in the same PDF document. I had no easy way to see what was Completed (checked off), and what was yet to be completed (unchecked). We had to resort to "Sort by Status by Person."

Sort by Status by Person, in theory (I suppose) could be useful. If people in a workgroup had a certain selection of tasks to do, and there was never any overlap in job function between workers, and you just want to which co-worker has completed which tasks, then Sort by Status by Person would be useful. But I never need to know who has completed which tasks. Being ever efficiency-minded, I just want to know whether or not the tasks are all complete. That's why I use "Sort by Checkmark Status." And besides, the "Set Status" takes about 4 clicks, but making a checkmark only takes one click. One click sounds better to me than four clicks.

Well, a few months ago, I started using Acrobat Shared Review with one of my clients. While working on a shared review PDF one day on my laptop, I discovered that I could see checkmarks that I made from my desktop. This has to do with the fact that Acrobat on both my laptop and my desktop were set up to have the same user ID in Acrobat.com.

So now, whenever I am working on a project that I know will be split between my laptop and my desktop, I do a Shared Review, and I invite myself.

Quick confession, a couple of years ago when I first discovered the limitations of Sort by Checkmark Status when used in a workgroup, I sent a fairly harsh feature request to the nice people at Adobe, chastising them for not warning me that I wouldn't be able to see checkmarks that other users made...Well, it turns out the Acrobat team actually provided a such a warning the very first time I made a checkmark. And in my haste, I clicked "Don't Show Again." And so, to whoever got my harshly worded feature request riddled with exclamation points, I am sorry.

Acrobat Typewriter Tool: Just Embrace it!

2011-01-05T17:02:00.000-08:00

One of my long-standing issues with PDF forms is that they typically not correctly set up as Acrobat forms. People (without Acrobat) often send me forms to fill out. There are either no Acrobat forms fields, there are missing fields, the form fields are too small, the forms are scans of copies of faxes...they are truly a pain to work with. I used to go through the trouble to manually create form fields. This week, I decided to do all my forms electronically. No more printing and filling-out, and then re-scanning. No more, I say! And anyone who has ever had to read my handwriting will agree: my filling out forms in Acrobat is the preferred solution.

So today's task: fill out a form to set up my new PO box. Here is the form as it was emailed to me. It's a beauty, huh?

Tto fill out this form, here are my options:

Print the form, fill it in by hand, and rescan it.
Create Acrobat form fields by hand and type in the form fields.
Run Acrobat's Form Field Auto-Detection, then fix whatever the automated system didn't catch, and then type in the form fields.
Fill out the form using the Typewriter Tool.

I'm choosing option #4.

I long overlooked the Typewriter Tool because it's so understated... A hidden little gem without any whizbang features. It just lets you type...wherever you want. What a novel idea!

Back when I was in high school, I got a scholarship from the local county fair. My award? A typewriter. I think the people who chose the prize probably didn't know that most kids used computers, but nevertheless, I now had my very own typewriter. When I left for college, I left the typewriter with my mother, who used it in her accounting business to do... guess what...? Type wherever she wanted on her paper forms.

Fast forward about 15 years and I'm working in a corporate job (without any typewriters), when my boss asks me to add a signature line to the bottom of a PDF contract, so he can then print it out and sign it. My clunky solution was to make a custom stamp in Illustrator (containing his Name, Title, and a signature line), load the custom stamp into his Stamp library in Acrobat, stamp the document, then he could print out the document, sign it, rescan it and send it back. When I told him about this custom stamp idea, he rolled his eyes at me.

Fast forward about a year or so when I discovered the typewriter tool. I initially found it a real pain to work with because I didn't understand how Acrobat classified it, and I couldn't figure out how to work with it. Here are some lessons I've learned in using the less-than-intuitive Typewriter Tool.

Show the Typewriter Toolbar. Every time I wanted to use the typewriter tool, I had to keep going back to the menu...until I discovered "Show Typewriter Toolbar." Ah... much better.

The default Typewriter font is too big. So make it smaller. The options for changing the face face and size are hidden...until you click somewhere on your page with the typewriter tool. Then you can adjust the font settings.

Once you have typed with the Typewriter Tool, it seems next to impossible to move the text block or edit the text. According to the Acrobat Help File:
1. To move or resize Typewriter text block, select the Select tool, click a Typewriter text block, and drag the text block or one of its corners.
2. To edit the text again, select the Typewriter tool, and then double-click the Typewriter text.
If you're able to get this to work, then you have more patience than me. I gave up and found a workaround hiding in the Comments tab. If you're a designer like me, you would think that to edit the text, you would click on the Typewriter tool, and then click back in the same place where you just typed...but that makes a new Typewriter Text block. So, to easily edit your Typewriter text, click on the Comments Tab in the bottom left of the screen. Even though Acrobat classifies the Typewriter Tool simply as a "Tool" not a "Commenting Tool," the typewriter text blocks are actually found in the Comments tab. So if you click on one of them, you can edit your typewriter text. Clicking on your typewriter text block also selects the text, outlines in blue and gives it handles, so you can move it around. And see how the text in the comments tab is highlighted in blue? You can actually edit that text, and it will change the Typewriter text block on your page. Nifty!

How to Extract Text From Locked Comments within an Acrobat Shared Review

2010-10-28T19:13:00.000-07:00

Each quarter, I do a newsletter that has two versions: English and Spanish. After the English layout is done, I send the PDF to my client, who then translates the document into Spanish. I don't speak Spanish, so I needed a way to get the Spanish content into the right place without inadvertently copying and pasting back into the wrong spot in my InDesign document. With Acrobat commenting, I can copy and paste right from the Comments tab into the corresponding text of the InDesign document. We've used PDF commenting with great success, in order to avoid emailing large files back and forth. I recently decided to give Acrobat Shared Reviews a try. It enables us to avoid emailing the proofs, and also allows for multiple people to comment and we can all see their comments.

However, I discovered that using Acrobat shared reviews, I can no longer copy and paste text from the Comments tab in Acrobat. See how one of the comments has a little lock symbol next to it? That comment is from my client, and the text is seemingly inaccessible to me.

After several frustrating experiments with exporting comments and then reimporting them into a non-tracked document (with marginal success), I discovered that I simply open the pop up note, I can copy the text from there. Sweet! Another PDF challenged solved!

A new use for InDesign Notes: Sub Conditional Text!

2010-09-23T13:17:00.000-07:00

So for awhile now, I've been wanting a way to have multiple levels of conditional text. Let's say that when the main option is Option 1, I also have two color choices available: Blue triangle and yellow triangle. But neither Blue triangle nor Yellow Triangle is available for Option 2.

I have been using conditional text to turn on and off the appropriate main options. But for the additional sub-options, I have run into problems trying to find the best way to have them available within the text flow. Usually, I just put the extra graphic off to the side somewhere on the pasteboard. The problem with that is when the text reflows, that pasteboard graphic might be somewhere else, on another page's pasteboard, and I have to go looking for it.

So I thought about using a layered PSD file, and using Object Layer Options to turn on and off the appropriate layers for Blue Triangle or Yellow Triangle. But I don't want to do that. I want an inline visual indicator (and layered PSDs don't offer that).

Today I figured out that by can converting inline graphics to Notes, you can create your own quasi-sub-conditional text. InDesign conditional text only allows for either visible or invisible (not if/then). So if I have conditions (blue triangle and yellow triangle) that are dependent upon other conditions (Option 1) being visible, I need to be able to choose which one is showing when I make Option 1 visible in the Conditional Text panel.

Enter "Convert to Note." I've honestly never found this feature useful. But for this purpose, it will be quite handy. I can turn on the main conditional text, and then using "Convert to Note", I can keep both sub-options (Blue Triangle and Yellow Triangle) available as independent objects within the text flow. But they will only be available when Option 1 is visible.

For another great article about InDesign Notes, check out this one at InDesign Secrets.

How to Edit Font Properties Within a PDF Sticky Note

2010-09-15T17:52:00.000-07:00

I use a lot of sticky notes in my publishing workflow. Typically, I type out all of my questions in a separate document (like a Google doc, or a draft email), and then when I am ready to send a proof to the client, I put my questions into the PDF as sticky notes. The problem is, when I copy and paste text into a sticky note, it is never the same size as the default sticky note font settings. And that just looks tacky.

So, it took me a while, but I finally figured out how to edit the font properties within a sticky note. The trick is using the Properties toolbar, and having the right thing selected. If your Properties toolbar isn't showing, go to View>Properties Toolbar (or Command + E on a mac, or Ctrl + E on windows).

Now, make a sticky note and click on it. See how the information in the Properties bar reflects your sticky note? That's because the Properties toolbar is contextual, and its options will change based on what you have selected.

Now, select the text within the sticky note. See how the Properties Toolbar options change? Now the toolbar says, "Pop-Up Text Properties."

Here is where you can reduce the size of you font. The third button from the left, when you hover over it says: "Click to make the text smaller in the selected typewritten text."

Interestingly enough, you can only edit the size and color of the sticky note text when you click on the sticky note as described above. You can edit the content of the text using the comments tab at the bottom, but you apparently cannot edit the font typeface. See how the text is highlighted in the comments tab, but the Properties toolbar still says "Sticky Note Properties"? What's weird is that when you are editing the Pop-up text Properties, you can still change the color of the sticky note (though none of the other sticky note attributes).

The difference between editing the font properties of a sticky note, versus editing the sticky note itself would sort of be like editing text properties within a frame in InDesign, versus editing the frame itself. The frame is the container for the text. Likewise, in Acrobat, the Sticky Note is the container for the text.

I am still working on figuring out how to change the typeface within a sticky note. From what I've read online, everyone else that uses sticky notes is also still trying to figure this out. If you know how, please post a comment and let me know.

I thought Acrobat had some method for specifying typeface in sticky note (Because if I paste in serif type from an InDesign document, the type comes in not only with a serif typeface, but also with the paragraph indents from the InDesign document.)

But click away, and then click back on the sticky note. POOF! The serif typeface and indents magically disappear. But the font is still smaller than the standard sticky note default.

Weird! One last thing, I think the Acrobat team should coordinate their dictionaries with the InDesign team so that InDesign doesn't come as misspelled in a sticky note.

How to edit text in a PDF with unembedded fonts

2010-08-31T13:48:00.000-07:00

Last year I inherited a publishing company, which used a FrameMaker workflow. I have strong opinions on such thing as FrameMaker versus InDesign, WMF versus AI, low res versus high res, and default PDF distiller settings versus custom distiller settings. So when I took over the workflow, I changed pretty much everything about it. My workflow is much more efficient now, but due to the fact that I'm using Creative Suite on a mac, working from legacy windows Framemaker files, I have glitches from time to time, and I have to find unusual workarounds.

Previously, all PDFs in this workflow were made using "Standard" distiller settings. If you've ever attempted to create a high quality PDF using Distiller, you understand that you have to tweak the default settings to get it to do such things as embed the fonts.

In addition in inheriting a publishing company, I inherited thousands of PDFs without embedded fonts. And I have to find a way to use these PDFs from time to time, because my InDesign workflow does not allow me to open up the native FM files.

So, today's task: edit the footer of a PDF without embedded fonts.

Problem is, the footer was created in Framemaker, so I can't just go in Acrobat to Document > Header and Footer > Update. Updating footers in Acrobat only works if the footer was created in Acrobat.
So next, I tried editing the text using the Text Touch-up tool. Again, I can't because the fonts weren't embedded. (See Author note at the bottom of this article)
So next I thought about putting white boxes over all the footers, and the using the typewriter or text box tools to put the correct text back in.
But wait, what I really needed to do was to hide the text and then put new text in it's place. And then I remembered Redaction.

Redaction is Acrobat's version of a Digital Big Black Marker, to be used when you want to eliminate sensitive information. The cool thing about Redaction is that it's not just black. You can make it whatever color you want. And you can use it to cross out text, photos, whatever. You can even put in replacement text at the very same time you're crossing out the text you don't want. And the coolest thing about redaction? It works on documents with un-embedded fonts!

So go here in Acrobat: Advanced > Redaction > Show Redaction Toolbar. Use the Reaction Properties button to set your properties. I chose a white background and cyan text.

You can set your properties differently for each line you want to redact. So on the header pages, I used a different font and all caps.

Today's mission: Accomplished!

Author note: Leonard Rosenthol posted a correction to part of my article (actually, the title, upon which the entire article was based), so I have added some additional information here.

The purpose of this workaround to editing the text was that I needed a quick and dirty solution to change some text. I think before this experience, the only PDFs in which I've ever had to edit the text, were PDFs that I personally had made. So prior to this experience, I would've had all the fonts necessary already installed on my system.

So I guess a better title for this article would have been: "A Quick and Dirty Workaround to Editing Text in a PDF When You Don't (and Won't Ever) Have the PDF's Fonts Installed on Your System."

Accidentally Bypassing Acrobat Security

2010-08-13T16:08:00.000-07:00

Over the years, acrobat has tightened down the security features of PDFs. I heard stories from colleagues years ago, if you wanted to bypass security on a PDF, all you had to do was to resave it with a different name. However, Adobe's security features have gotten good enough over the years that they will (for the most part) keep people from editing secure PDFs. There are some software companies that develop software specifically for the purpose of being able to unlock PDFs. The professional version of such software costs several hundred dollars. Which, for a product that I only need to use once or twice a year, is too steep for my taste. So I will simply recreate whatever part of the PDF I wanted to use.

I often would like to unlock other people's PDFs, but for purely productive reasons: to add keywords or to annotate it with highlighters. But I rarely NEED to unlock PDFs. It's mostly a want-to.

Hold that thought.

Part of my workflow involves extracting information from old FrameMaker files. However, I don't own Framemaker. And I work on a mac, so I cannot even use FrameMaker. Most of the time, I have MIFs on file that I can open in InDesign. However, for some files that I need to convert, all I have is a PDF. Copying and pasting from Acrobat will do in a pinch, but Acrobat inserts extra hard returns at the end of every line break. However, I discovered that Mac Preview will allow you to copy and paste entire paragraphs without any extra line breaks. So I have gotten into the habit using both Acrobat and Preview, depending on what I wanted to do with the PDF.

So as I'm working, I have open the following programs: InDesign, Acrobat, and Preview. Being a big fan of keyboard shortcuts, my hands are constantly moving, and sometimes they move a little faster than my brain. Recently, I hit the InDesign keyboard shortcut for Deselect All (Shift + Command + A). The problem was that I wasn't in InDesign. I was in Preview. But interestingly enough, a little tool bar popped up at the bottom of the page. It is an annotation tool bar.

So, remember how I was wishing I could copy and paste/annotate from a secured PDF? This particular PDF (now open in Preview) was password protected. So in my mind, I shouldn't have been able to do anything with it. At least that's what Acrobat tells me. In Acrobat, this PDF had the comments tab grayed out. So now in Preview, just for fun, I tried to highlight something. It worked! Again for fun, I decided to save the file. Again, it worked! And now for the true test...hold your breath... open the file in Acrobat. It opened... and the comments are there! But the security is NOT!

Could it be true! I can actually edit locked PDFs using existing software! Now, I don't know any of the legal implications of doing this, but all I want to do it annotate. And now I can use my color-coded highlighters to my heart's desire. To me, this feels like an early Christmas present.

Data-less Tables: InDesign meets Knitting

2010-06-28T15:39:00.003-07:00

One of my recent projects took me to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where after work one day, I played in the Atlantic for the very first time. I grew up on the west coast, near San Diego, and found the Atlantic to be quite different than the Pacific. On this particular beach, missing were the throngs of people, giant parking lots, and McDonalds. Other than one or two other families, my husband and I were the only ones on the beach. It was a wonderful day, plenty hot to enjoy a nice time in the water. Since most of my days are spent in my small home office, behind a giant computer screen, I was struck by the beauty and rhythm of the waves. I decided to design an afghan based on the colors and pattern I saw there.

I am a knitter, and I love geometric patterns. Years ago, I read a book entitled “Number Knitting” which is based entirely on knitting geometric shapes in garter stitch. In case you aren’t a knitter, garter stitch is the simplest type of knitting, named because it was the pattern used on the garter of hand-knit stockings. It is wonderfully elastic, and lies perfectly flat. It goes like this:

Row 1: Knit.
Rows 2-end. Repeat row 1.

It doesn’t get any simpler. Another one of the beauties of garter stitch is that is has a magical 2:1 ratio of (rows:stitches). This perfect 2:1 ratio allows you to create geometric shapes with precision: Triangles, squares, rectangles, trapezoids... Using these shapes, you can create beautiful designs. There are a few really great books that discuss in detail about using these shapes to create designs: Woolly Thoughts (written by two mathematicians), and the aforementioned Number Knitting (which is actually a patented knitting method!). One of knitting’s most beloved authors, Elizabeth Zimmerman, was also a proponent of garter stitch, and used it’s magical proportions to create fascinating garments, often made entirely in one piece. Though Elizabeth passed some years ago, her daughter, Meg Swansen, continues the family legacy with her business, and web site: Schoolhouse Press.

So how does this relate to InDesign?
In my first feeble attempts to work through design concept I had envisioned, I tried Illustrator. But it wasn’t working for what I wanted to do. It is very difficult to get the align and distribution correct on diagonal lines. I could have gotten out a pencil and paper, a protractor, and an angle, and tried to design it freehand on paper, but I can’t draw very well and I would have to know what I wanted to draw before I attempted to draw it. I am not a draftsman or a sketch artist. What I really needed was just a simple way to make horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines. Wait! Diagonal lines are a feature in InDesign tables! I’ve never had a need for them before, but being stuck in an airport on my way home from the east coast, (with no internet connection) this seemed like the perfect opportunity to get some creative work done. Here are the features I used to create my afghan design.

Tables
Diagonal Lines
Swatches
Cell Styles

First, make a table, equal in width and height. 6 rows by 6 columns
Fill it with cyan.
Add a 10 point white stroke to the exterior border of the table.
Add 10 point white stroke to the top and bottom border of each row.
Select a single cell, and add a 10 point right slanting diagonal stroke.
Make a cell style based on each the right and left slanting cells. Apply those cell styles to each cell in the table, in a checkerboard pattern.
Now choose your colors. I chose solid colors for each row, to simulate a gradient from cyan to light green. Yarn don’t come in gradients (at least not like this), so I needed to simulate one with my color choices.

I will likely buy this yarn from a website, and I will likely choose Cascade 220, as they have a HUGE selection of colors, and I am familiar with that yarn and am a big fan. Alternately, I could commission a spinner to spin me some yarn and hand-dye it. That would be the coolest thing to do, and there are a lot of handspinners in my area of the country, so I won't have a problem finding someone to make the custom yarn for me.

So my afghan design is complete, but I started experimenting with diagonals and found that you can acheive some pretty cool effects. After applying some different stroke types to the diagonals, I learned a few things:

I wasn’t getting the diagonals to line up perfectly, so after a bit of thinking, I realized that the proportion of the triangles wasn’t quite right. It appeared that the 10 point white row strokes were encroaching on the colored squares, so after a little bit of experimenting, I figured out that to make a perfect triangle, you need to account for the difference in width between the 10 point row stroke and the 0 point column stroke. This is because the row stroke pushes up the contents of the cell (and therefore the cell’s diagonal). I tried decreasing the width of each column by 10 points. And it worked. Now I had perfect squares and triangles.
For fun, I tried adding changing the stroke type from Solid to Thin-Thick, but it doesn’t apply the way you would think. The thick side is always on makes the base of the left-most side of the stroke, and the thin side is makes the base of the right-most side of the stroke. So it fixed that asymmetry by changing the diagonal stroke type every other row.
Another interesting thing I noticed is that because the first and last column have 10 point column strokes, you’ll need to add 5 points to the width of the first and column to account for the edge strokes encroaching on the column.

Following are a few examples of different type of diagonal strokes. For these examples, I reduced the number of colors from 6 to 3, so you can easily see the different patterns.

In the event that I actually end up knitting this blanket, I will post a picture of it here.

Author Note: Did you like this article? Check out another article on diagonal lines in tables here.

Examining 2 PDFs - they look the same, but are they really? (PDF Comparator Review)

2010-05-24T22:20:00.001-07:00

I worked on a project today that required incorporating two technical datasheets into a PDF portfolio. One datasheet was given to me about a year ago. The other was given to me today. Other than the data in the top right hand corner, both pages looked roughly identical.

Now, I have come to realize that I have a high tolerance for digging through monotonous details. However, this project was on a deadline, and if I tried to compare both documents manually, the changes are fair that I might miss one of the minuscule details.

However, a few months back, I was fortunate enough to beta-test a new PDF comparison utility, by PreMedia Systems. PDF Comparator examines the PDFs, pixel-by-pixel, and instantly display the results. So it was easy for me to determine that there was more differences in these two files than just the date in the top right corner. This utility only works on OSX (as opposed to Windows). Awesome tool! Check it out.

Bulletproof, flexible files for Adobe Reader users

2010-05-18T22:57:00.000-07:00

I often send files to my local copy shop in order to have them printed. My copy shop isn't a traditional printer, but is actually more of a shipping center that also runs color copies. In addition to shipping, they sell greeting cards, packaging tape, and bubble wrap. You get the idea. They are not designers or prepress folks. They use Publisher. But I love this little copy shop because they give me good pricing and offer great service. And they are happy to see me every time I walk in the door. So I keep sending them my business. However, for certain projects I must go to greater lengths to make sure that my files for them are bulletproof. For instance, I send only flattened PDFs, and try only to use standard page sizes.

I recently did a project which required them to print a CD label. Ideally, digital color printers would actually print precisely according to the margins I set up. But I have never found this to work exactly as I hope it would. This is complicated by the fact that Adobe Reader users typically aren't aware of the default Page Scaling setting in Reader's print dialog box: "Shrink to Printable Area" (which, when checked, messes with my carefully planned layout.)

So I needed a way to send a PDF to my copy shop that they could actually manipulate. In the past, I've seen coworkers take my 1-up PDF, flatten it in Photoshop (including the text) and then import it into their page layout program of choice... just so they could move each CD label around on the page.
It was specifically for this scenario that I started preparing certain files so that my associates without the Creative Suite could still have the ability to move the individual CD labels around on the page (without butchering my files).

So how to accomplish that? They've only got Reader, so they need a PDF (as opposed to an InDesign or Illustrator file). But I need to make the parts and pieces on the PDF moveable. Starting in Acrobat 8, there has been a setting that will allow you to Enable Reader Usage rights. I think in the later version it's called Extend Features for Adobe Reader. Either way, by enabling that feature, Reader users can now do very basic things to the PDF, like save form data and make comments. And since stamps are a type of Commenting Tool, with the Extend Features setting activated, Reader users can now move existing stamps around on the page.

In one of my previous blog posts, I discussed how to create custom stamps with a Multiply blend mode and then use them to "highlight" the document. Using this same idea (creating a custom stamp) will allow us to create a flexible layout for Reader users.

Create a 1-up CD label in InDesign or your layout program of choice.
Export a PDF.
Create a custom stamp in Acrobat using the 1-up CD label you just made.
Stamp the document twice, one in the upper left and one in the lower right (or however your CD label stock is set up).
Extend Features for Adobe Reader.
Save the PDF and send it with confidence to a Reader user.
Send along extra label stock...just in case.

Pointer Lines for Technical Writers

2010-03-31T15:46:00.000-07:00

I write technical manuals. Each of our photo-heavy documents requires hundreds of photos, most of which have multiple pieces of equipment in view that need to be identified using captions and pointer lines. I recently converted a legacy FrameMaker 7.0 production workflow to a much more efficient InDesign CS4 workflow.

In my old Framemaker workflow, the pointer lines were created by placing a 2 point white stoke with rounded caps behind a .5 point black stoke. I often had to work with legacy (AKA ancient, and created by someone other than me) documents and the pointer lines were neither the same length nor aligned at the same angle. So instead of writing, I spent hours fiddling with those dreaded pointer lines.

Ideas that Didn’t Work

In converting the workflow to InDesign, and in my quest for improved efficiency and perfect pointer alignment, I had to find a better way. I thought about using a drop shadow for my lines, but that would involve transparency and would perhaps be subject to the mercy of a new InDesign user not familiar with transparency flattening. And besides that, I just really like to clean lines that vector offers.

I tried the old dreaded FrameMaker method: two lines stacked on top of each other. But alas, it worked the same in InDesign as in Frame. The only way to make sure that the two grouped strokes stayed properly aligned was to use the Direct Select tool (white arrow) to drag a box around the end points of both at the same time and move just the end points. Never in my wildest dreams would that be an acceptable work flow in a production environment. And besides, I would still be dealing with two separate objects. So whenever I wanted to make a new pointer line, I would have to: draw a line, apply a style, copy it, paste it, send to back, apply a new style, and finally Group them together. No way Jose!

I knew how to make the perfect pointer line in Illustrator. It would be a simple graphic style with two different strokes. But a placed Illustrator stroke would act as any placed artwork, and its size and proportions could easily be scaled disproportionately.

However, an offhanded comment of mine about dash and gap on the InDesign forums led to a brief comment from Peter Spier which launched me into research mode into stroke styles. Admittedly, the only time I ever used InDesign stroke styles prior to this was in playing with the Christmas lights Easter egg a couple versions back. So I had some learning to do.

Using GAP settings in a non-dashed line

Apparently, dash and gap setting in the stroke styles aren’t just for dashed lines. Hmmm. The GAP portion of the stroke style effectively creates a second stroke behind your main stroke. The GAP occupies 100% of the width of your stroke. So if you have a 2 point stroke with a dash, the GAP will be 2 points. In a standard dashed line, the stroke itself also occupies 100% of the width of the stroke (in this example, it is 3 points). So by using a gap color, you would simply see another color peeking through the gaps in your dashed line.

To activate the Gap Color drop down menu in the Stroke palette, you have to first make the line type something other then “Solid.” I chose dashed during my experimenting. The choose your gap color, and the concept of dash and gap is readily apparent. But wait, we don’t want a dashed line. What now? The stroke “Type” options that appear in the Stroke palette are the default InDesign Stroke Styles, plus a couple of other like Wavy and Japanese Dots. You can create your own stroke style and it will show up in the bottom of this list. If you create your own stroke style, you can still specify a gap color, even if your stroke style is not a dashed line.

In this case, I want the bottom stroke (the GAP) to be white. That means that somehow I need to create a small black stroke on top.

Create Your Stroke Style

In the stroke styles dialog box, click New. Now choose type: Stripe. By playing around with the built-in stroke styles, I found that I could have a stroke with as many stripes as I want. All have to do is specify where the stripe starts and what percentage of the total stroke width it is to occupy.

So, I need a 2 point white stroke behind a .5 black stroke.

2 points is the total width of the stroke, and what will appear in the Weight section of the stroke palette. So I need to work down from there to get the center portion of the stroke. I need the black portion to be .5 points. Do a little math, and you’ll find that .5 (black stroke) is 25% of 2 points (total stroke width). That means I have 75% of the stroke that is going to show up as white (or whatever gap color you choose) and the little section in the middle will show up as the main stroke color. To make it even, I adjusted these values to: Start: 37% and Width: 26%.

When you create a new Stripe stroke style, InDesign automatically starts you off with two stripes. The black portion represents the part of the line that will be visible. So in this instance, we’ve got the center portion knocked off of a black line. That’s close to what I need, and I’m getting excited…until I apply the rounded end caps…Plus there’s that little black halo on the edges. Not good.

I realized that what I need was not a white stroke with the center knocked out, but a black stroke with the sides knocked out. So I went back to the stroke styles dialog box and found that I could edit each of the black stripes independently. Next to each stripe, in the percentage bar on the left, are two little arrows. The arrows are highlighted, indicating, that stripe is active. Grab the top of one of the arrows and drag it all the way down. That stripe will fall right off the dialog box into oblivion. Now, you are left with a single stripe you can edit. Plug in the values mentioned above: Start: 37% and Width: 26%.

Create an Object Style

So we’re getting closer. However, a stroke style alone won’t give me all the features I need for my pointer lines. You can’t specify a gap color, a stroke color, or end caps in a stripe stroke style. (Incidentally, you can specify End Caps, but only in a Dash stroke style, not in a Dotted or Stripe stroke style.) I found that I can assign all the remaining attributes I needed: gap color, stroke color, and end caps in an object style. So I made a new object style containing rounded ends, a 2 point black stroke, a gap color of Paper, and my newly created pointer line stroke style. Be sure to preview this on a colored background, or you’ll be left scratching your head, wondering why it didn’t work.

When InDesign Paste No Longer Works

2010-03-19T11:30:00.000-07:00

My technical publishing workflow involves figures, lots and lots of figures. I often put callouts on the photos, with pointer lines. Then I group the whole bunch together and paste it inline into my text. But last night I ran into a problem. You see, it started because I like to try to find features that no one else has ever heard of or used. And a couple of times, my ideas were even featured on my favorite podcast, InDesign Secrets. In case you're curious, I came of with a couple of the "Obscure Feature of the Week (Eek, eek, eek!)"s. They were Shared Hyperlink Destination and Sort Bookmarks.

Well, I'm having so much fun hearing my name briefly mentioned on my favorite podcast, that I decided to see if I could come up with another Obscure Feature. This time I suggested "Autotag."

To be honest, I've never used Autotag, nor XML publishing. I don't know that I ever will, and probably at least 99.9% of my fellow InDesign users never will either. But the nifty thing about Autotag is that it somehow automatically applies XML tags to the parts and pieces of your InDesign document. Interesting? Somewhat. Useful? Probably to somebody, somewhere in XML publishing land. But not to me...except for the fact that Autotag is so obscure that virtually no one except the publishing super heros have heard of it. And that level of feature obscurity could very well get me mentioned in another podcast. Which (for a geek like me) is pretty darn exciting!

So last night, I started playing around and I autotagged one of my text frames. Here is what I am usually able to achieve without any problem: Inline graphics.

But suddenly, last night, my Paste function no longer worked. After a restless night of sleep, and nearly posting this question to the entire world on the Adobe forums, I investigated a little further and found the problem: Autotag.

Autotag is easily accessible under the right-cick contextual menu when you select an object. Normally, nothing is tagged—because I don't do XML publishing. But late last night, as I was playing and dreaming of InDesign greatness, I autotagged a frame. See how "Story" is now highlighted in light blue?

Because the Rudder Angle Indicator frame is tagged, I will no longer be able to paste that text frame into another text frame. I can group with other frames, copy it, and paste it until the cows come home... just NOT inline into another text frame. InDesign cannot be fooled. And in case you're curious. If the frame is tagged as as Story, Root, and Graphic, it doesn't matter. You still can't paste it inline into another text frame.

InDesign Crashing and Making me Crazy

2010-01-21T09:52:00.000-08:00

So for years, I thought that I knew the way to fix InDesign when it was crashing. Simple, right? Hold down the four buttons in the bottom left keyboard while launching the program. That's what the Adobe help file and forums say. For the past 2 weeks, I have had crashing issues like nothing I've ever seen. Deleting preferences didn't work. Deactivating Suitcase auto-activation didn't work. Uninstalling the program didn't work...

The crashes were so bad that not only did the InDesign "submit crash report to Adobe" dialog box pop up, but another one for Apple came up as well.

So a couple of days of and lost productivity, I finally found a multi-step solution. Perhaps not all of these steps are necessary to fix the problem, but here's everything I did, just in case.

Delete the ID lock files that are associated with the files you were working on during the crash.
Unplug (or force eject) any external hard drives you have plugged (Note: when ID crashed, the files I was working on were located on an external hard drive).
Restart the computer (I had to do a hard shut-down).
Launch ID with the external hard drive unplugged.
You may get a series of errors like, 'The recovery data for "" could not be found. Delete recovery data?" ... or something along those lines. I chose to delete recovery data, just so it would quit looking for those files.
Close and reopen InDesign another time just to make sure it opens without getting any more error messages.
Plug in the external hard drive.
Try opening your selected files again.

Apparently, InDesign saves recovery data in more than one place. I thought that all the recovery data was saved in the lock file, but not so! Even after deleting the lock files, and even unplugging the hard drive, InDesign was still looking for recovery data. Apparently, there is something in the architecture of InDesign that tells it to look for recovery data... even after a complete reinstall!

I am astounded and amazed.

After originally writing this post, I got some additional input from one of my favorite InDesign trainers and a fellow Geek: Anne Marie Concepcion:

"Though I don't think ID stores recovery files in more than one place (and it's not the Lock file). I think if you would've deleted the entire recovery folder that's inside your User > LIbrary > Caches > InDesign folder, and then restarted, that would've done the trick."

The Undocumented Back Door to Organizing Your Stamps

2009-11-26T22:26:00.001-08:00

I am a big fan of Acrobat stamps. The ones that come included with Acrobat are marginally useful, but very generic. But since most of my work with PDFs involves researching engineering drawings, I have created my own set of "highlighter" stamps to assist me in keeping track of my on-screen research. I originally started out with about a dozen stamps, just to see if I liked using them - and if they really made my work more efficient. And they did! So, shortly after I made my original dozen stamps, I made more - in about 25 different colors. And since Acrobat stamps only scale proportionally, I found that I needed several different shaped stamps, in each of the aforementioned 25 colors.

So after a month or so of working with my stamps, I had a hodge-podge of colors, shapes, and sizes. There was no organization to the mess. And I had no easy way to organize them from within Acrobat. I would have to delete them all and start over, reimporting and renaming them individually...But what I really wanted was the ability to drag-and-drop my stamps into a order that made sense visually.

So after my long-winded feature request to Adobe, I finally stumbled across to solution. When a user creates a custom stamp library, Acrobat stores the stamp in an obscure location in the computer. And instead of naming the file something logical, like "Kelly's Custom Stamps," the file is named something like, "hfu74hj173890hgG89k453Xs.pdf"

No wonder I couldn't find it!

The name of the custom stamp library is actually the TITLE of the Acrobat-created PDF that contains all the stamps in your stamp category. So if you open up that PDF, you'll find that Page 1 is a blank page, and all the stamps in that library are each a separate page with the PDF document.

The pages panel! It is in the Pages Panel that I have the ability to reorder pages within a PDF document. So I opened up each of my custom stamp libraries, and reordered them according to the order of the color spectrum.

Now what I needed was a way to share my stamps with my coworkers, without first having to create a stamp library within the clunky Acrobat "Manage Custom Stamps" interface. I needed to be able to distribute PDFs directly to my coworkers and have them be able to drop the stamp PDF into a specific folder and just have it work.

Here is the location to put your stamp files:

Mac OSX /Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Acrobat/9.0_x86/Stamps

WinXP C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Adobe\Acrobat\9.0\Stamps

Win Vista or Win7 C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\ Acrobat\9.0\Stamps

Once you have placed stamp files here, restart Acrobat.

For another good article on stamp locations, read this.
If you would like to use these stamps, you can download them by clicking here.

Highlighting a PDF that contains no fonts

2009-07-04T13:38:00.000-07:00

I love the Acrobat's commenting tools. I especially enjoy the highlighter tool, with it's dozens of colors and ability to change opacity levels. Using Acrobat's highlighting tool, I have infinitely more control over colors than I do using traditional hardcopy highlighters. However, with Acrobat's highlighting tool, I've encountered a few problems that make it less than suitable for my highlighting needs:

I can only highlight actual fonts, (as seen in the document Properties dialog box).

In my daily workflow as a technical communicator, I also encounter scanned documents and CAD files, both of which typically contain no fonts. I can run OCR and then highlight the text, but often, the OCR is unpredictable, as Acrobat doesn't always go a great job of recognizing text blocks. (The following example shows how Acrobat skipped an entire paragraph of text.)

Finally, there are times when I need to highlight circular objects, but alas, I cannot. So in order to highlight these documents, I have to print them out. I have tried using the rectangle tool and ellipse tools, but they obscure the text. Even when I add a fill color and reduce the opacity, the text and objects that I'm trying to make more obvious, in reality become more obscured.

So I got to thinking about what makes key behavior of the highlighter tool different than the rectangle tool. It has to do with how the comment's color interacts with the objects beneath it. Sounds like a blending mode to me… Multiply!

So Acrobat's comments are capable of interacting with the document using the multiply blending mode...but I needed a way to make my own comments that can use take advantage of blending modes. For that, I went to Custom Stamps.

Acrobat's canned stamps are very business-like: "Sign Here," "Approved," and so forth. But you can make your own custom stamps for whatever purpose you like. You can even harken back to the early days of stamps, back in (I think) Acrobat 5, when the out-of-the box stamps were wacky monster-face clip art. (I remember thinking, "Why would anyone want to use stamps? That's dumb.") But Adobe wised up and included stamps that business professionals would actually use.

So I went into Illustrator and make a plain yellow circle and set the blending mode to Multiply. Then I save the file and create a custom stamp in Acrobat. Then I took a deep breath and then clicked on top of some text. WOOHOO! The text shows through! (The truly geeky among you will surely understand my anticipation and excitement.)

While experimenting with my new stamps, I started playing. Clicking frantically (actually, just to see how many stamps I could put down in just a few seconds). If the stamps interact with the document using a blending mode, how would the stamps interact with other stamps that use a blending mode? They multiply, as expected. But what I also discovered was that by clicking and dragging, I can control the size of my stamp. So a single stamp can make the same shape in varying sizes. And no need to hold down Shift. The down-side to this, however, is that the proportions are locked. I cannot turn a circular stamp into an elliptical stamp, or a square stamp into a long thick rectangular stamp. Bummer.

But let's say you just need to colorize drawings (CAD files, for example) and need a way to color code different circles and match them up to a parts list. The colored circles are sure a good start, but let's see how much more useful we can make this! Just for fun, I also made a circle using a gradient. Isn't it beautiful?

So let's say I have a parts list on one page that I need to match up with the drawing later in the document. I made some corresponding rectangular stamps in order to stamp the parts list. But I need to keep flipping back and forth between the two of them (parts list and drawing), color coding them simultaneously. I can't keep track of dozens of numbers in my head, but fortunately, I don't have to. Acrobat will let me see both pages at once. Go to Window>Split.

Now, I can see both my parts list and my drawing, all in one window, without my desk being cluttered by excess papers, and without being limited to the five colors of highlighting markers I have in the cup on my desk.

It did take some time to create my stamps and get them set up in Acrobat, but once I did, keeping track of technical details on engineering drawings became much easier and more efficient. And those CAD files were never so beautiful to me as when they had been stamped with sunshine gradient circles.

And so ends another day in my quest to bring visual interest to boring technical documents around the world.

Personal Studies

2009-06-13T10:16:00.000-07:00

People have often asked me how I got into graphic design. I chuckle. Then I share my story, starting my degree in a completely unrelated field.

But the more important question is not how I got started in graphic design, but rather: how did I get where I am today? The answer is hard work and daily application. I have devoted many evenings and weekends of personal time to independent study. (Thanks goes out to my loving husband for being so patient while I spend hours studying at my computer). Also, I have been blessed to have opportunities, both at my day job and in my freelance work, and to experiment with all the nifty tricks I learned the during my personal study time. The result has been the equivalent of nearly a decade of daily study, application, more study, more application.

While in college, my studies were crammed into short three or four month sessions, with the subject changing from semester to semester, typically with no application of knowledge. So consequently, I forgot most of what I learned. Now that I have a career of my choosing, I can research desired topics to my heart's content, and have the opportunity for immediate application of what I have learned. And it's a heck of a lot cheaper than college! As both an employee and a small business owner, my personal study has infinitely more value to my productivity and abilities than my college diploma (which is actually in a box in my garage).

In addition to my enjoyment of reading Creative Suite application manuals in their entirety, I love techno-books containing the kind of information that can't be found in the software manual. They offer history, design theory, and personal experience from some of the industry's top experts. Here are a few of my favorites:

Stylin with CSS (Charles Wyke-Smith)
Bulletproof Web Design (Dan Cedarholm)
A History of Graphic Design (Phillip Meggs)
From Gutenberg to Opentype (Robin Dodd)
Dynamics in Document Design (Karen Schriver)

Inline Buttons: How to make a URL in a PDF Underline on Hover

2009-05-08T20:15:00.000-07:00

PDFs have long been my favorite online medium of choice, from a designer's standpoint at least. There are no hacks, no browser issues, no cross compatibility differences. I can design a page and things stay where I put them.

However, there are some aspects of web pages that are not easily duplicated in a PDF. Since the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia, media such as flash can now be embedded in a PDF. However, seemingly less complicated features of web pages cannot be replicated in a PDF. At least not very easily.

PDF hyperlinks are typically within body text. I have often wanted to have my PDF hyperlinks be a little more noticeable, but not with a big tacky underline. This is possible in web sites by using cascading style sheets, but it is not so simple to replicate in a PDF. However, there is a way to replicate this feature, and to do so, we will be using the button palette.

In InDesign, text within a text frame can be styled with paragraph and character styles, but it takes a few extra steps to create a rollover effect for a span of text within a text frame.

Highlight the piece of text you want to create a rollover for.
Cut it out and place it in it's own text frame.
Fit frame to content. That is because the button size will be based on the size of your text frame.
Create a new character style for what the text will look like in its hovered-upon state.
Select the text frame and create a button from it.
Click on the rollover pane of the buttons panel. The button serves as a sort of container for both of its states. Both states can be stylized and manipulated independently, as can the button itself. To either of the states, or to the button as a whole, you can add a drop shadow, varying levels of transparency, any any number of visual effects.
Now stylize the text with the new rollover character style. You may find that if you use an underline, you may need to expand the text frame just a touch. Note that the two states of the button must now must be manipulated independently.
So if you need to make the text frame larger, you'll need to do it to both the normal and the rollover state of the button. If you find that your text effects result in overset text, it is a good idea to undo few steps and make the original text frame just big enough to house the effects you're going to apply. That way, you won't have to make both the normal and rollover text frames larger. This is important because if you don't make the sizes of both the normal frame and the rollover frame match exactly, the text will jump around inside the frame when you hover over it. And that's just tacky.
Once you text is styled for both states (normal and rollover), you're ready to put the text back in it's place within the flow of the body copy. So, select the button and cut it.
Place your text insertion point back into the spot you originally cut the link from. Paste the button. The button text may not rest exactly at the baseline with the rest of the text, so nudge it down a little to make it match.
Now, export a PDF with the interactivity check box checked. When you mouse over the hyperlink, it should now have a rollover state.

This is a fairly labor-intensive technique, and probably isn't suitable for documents containing hundreds of links. However, it is a nice technique to dress up a special PDF. Click here for an example of the technique in action.