OK most of you know I started this blog at the beginning of 2008 to help you all with software related issues. Cool tips & tricks when using various programs. And Patrick Shaw, NPower’s manager of web & database projects, has had his blog to help with questions around web design & databases.
So now what? Well these 2 blogs cover 1/2 of the services that NPower has been providing to nonprofits for the last 10 years. With a new year, it seemed like a good time to get our other 2 managers involved. We can’t have all of the blogging fun.
So we’ve combined all of our blogs into one. The new blog will cover training issues (software tips & tricks), web & databases, technology planning and network issues. You can check it out at:
http://community.npowerseattle.org/npowering/
Now for the longest time I’ve told students in our InDesign classes that the way to tell if your photo is high quality is to open in up in Photoshop. Now InDesign CS4 will tell you the resolution of your graphic in the newly updated Links panel.
This is one of those moments where I’m reminded that I don’t know everything. And when it comes to the Adobe products, that’s doubly so. Turns out that InDesign can & will tell you the resolution of your graphics in the older version. It just so happens that the Info panel, a panel that I stopped using when I switched from PageMaker, will give you that information.
Duh! Now why did I never think to check this panel out? Live & learn I guess.
Not only will it give you the PPI of your image, it will also update that information when you resize it within InDesign. That’s fantastic! Now I’ve always recommended, and still do, that you do your resizing in Photoshop. It’s just easier and you have more control.
Why did this come up? Well the folks over at GraphicMac had a posting about using the Info panel and what it tells you. Be sure to check it out, as they explain how resizing your graphics within InDesign can affect your final printed piece.
Since it’s been snowing so much here in Seattle, which is unusual for us; it seem appropriate that the folks over at InDesign Secrets have posted this handy tutorial on how to create snowflakes with InDesign. Or other really cool fractal designs.
Check it out, I’ve already creating several. Besure to ready the comments too, there are some great tips there. And you can do something similar using Illustrator, I posted about that a while back.
For those of you who’ve taken NPower’s InDesign Intermediate, you may remember this handy trick. How you can use an image and make it appear inside your “text”. So that the characters are made up of the picture. It’s a cool trick and can make your document really stand out. The folks over at InDesign Secrets have a great posting about this.
They do a great job explaining how it works, how to do it, and why the obvious method doesn’t work. That being, using the None or Paper choices in the Swatches panel. But this brings up an entirely different question.
If Paper isn’t really white then how can I print something that is white?
Well the short answer appear to be you can’t. About.com has a great article explaining how the color White works in commercial printing, it’s limitations, and suggests some ways around those limitations. The easiest answer is - if you want white in your publication, make sure you’re printing on white paper.
I know that lots of use work with Graphic Designers. We can’t all be design experts. Or you may have inherited InDesign documents from a previous staff member, etc.
And lets just say that the way the did things doesn’t quite mess with your style. One of those migh, just might, be the use of guides. I’ve opened up some documents where the author had gone whole hog with the guides. I mean they were everywhere! I could hardly see the content on the page through the forest of guides.
Now if this has ever happened to you, let me share a little trick that the folks over at GraphicMac posted to their blog. A way to delete all the guides at once, without having to select them individually. If you use the keyboard shortcut Command + Option + G then Delete if on a Mac or Control + Alt + G then Delete if on Windows. This selects all the guides on the page and deletes them.
Pretty slick! Besure to check out their post as it also gives you the keyboard shortcut to unlock the guides if they’re locked.
Well this week seems to be my week for follow-up posts. Recently I commented on working with a graphic designer and who owns what. Well today I came across a post that dealt with the same issue but from a web site perspective. It apply to print too and the author makes some fantastic points.
You can check it out at http://blog.pixelita.com/23/who-owns-your-web-site/
A while back I posted a link to Adobe’s website that listed hidden characters that InDesign can show you for spaces, tabs, etc. Well the folks over at InDesign Secrets went one step further (and better). They created a great PDF of these characters. What makes it better is it’s LARGE, so you can actually see the characters easily. And it shows them in context.
Check it out!
InDesign Secrets has an interesting post on their website where they answer a graphic designers question about stripping out styles & master pages from a document that one of their clients requested. For me this isn’t of any value at all. I don’t think most people really need to know how to do this in the first place.
However, it does bring up a good point to keep in mind if your nonprofit is working with a graphic designer. For some reason, there are designers out their that feel that they “own” the pieces they created. Even though your organization may have paid them to create it for you, they feel it’s their work and you shouldn’t have it.
Do I agree with this? Absolutely not! If you’re paying them to create it, you own it. The point here is not who’s right or wrong, it’s that you need to be clear who owns what. That means get it in writing. I have no problem with a designer “owning” the work they create. I’m just not going to pay them the same amount that I would if I owned it. That’s the cost of their ownership.
Plus in my experience, the only reason a designer would want to “own” a piece is to prevent you from taking your business elsewhere. And if they need to resort to those methods to prevent that, that in itself tells me they’re not a designer that I want to work with.
Now this is nothing new really, you’ve been able to do this for years. But this doesn’t always give us the kind of PDF that most of us might want. Huh? you might ask, what do you mean by that?
When you “scan” a document to PDF the default is to turn it into an image. So if I were scanning a printed document (mostly words), each page is turned into a graphic image. This means if I’m looking for a certain word or term, I’m out of luck. As far as Acrobat is concerned there are no words in my new PDF.
The way around this is to use Acrobats Optical Character Recognition feature, or OCR. It will try to convert the text to editable text and the graphics to graphics. So each page doesn’t get turned into 1 big image. Now if you need to do this often you might want to set up a batch process for this. The folks over at the Adobe Blog’s have a great post on just how to do that.
If you’ve taken our InDesign classes then you should know that one of my favorite parts of the training is when we get to the drawing tools & adding color. I personally love using the Polygon Shape tool. It’s the most versatile of the drawing tools. You can create triangles, octagon, even squares is you wanted too (but of course you’d just use the rectangle tool for that).
The folks over at InDesign Secrets pointed out a cool trick that I hadn’t been aware of. If you hit the arrow keys while drawing your “polygon” then you can change the number of sides & the star inset field. Cool huh?
