Support for our Rocky Mountain Training students on the Adobe Creative Suite & Technical Communications Suite applications.

by Barb Binder, Adobe Certified Instructor on Photoshop

by Barb Binder, Adobe Certified Instructor on InDesign

InDesign CS6 new Adaptive Design Tools—Liquid Layout, Alternate Layouts, Linked Content and the Content Collector tools—all geared towards allowing you to easily adapt page layouts for print, tablets and screens. Another really powerful new feature is the ability to set up forms fields in InDesign that will work in Acrobat. All of those topics deserve their own posts. (They are coming.) And all of them represent terrific reasons to upgrade to InDesign CS6. But what if you don’t need to adapt your page layouts for a variety of devices and you don’t create forms distributed through Acrobat? Then this post is for you…here’s my list of the little changes that won’t grab headlines, but will help streamline your work. My top six are listed first.

New Favorite in Adobe InDesign CS6 :: Split window: View two side-by-side layouts within the same document to compare the look and feel of the layouts and help ensure consistency. This feature is geared towards alternative layouts, as it makes it easy to compare a horizontal layout to the same page in a vertical layout. However,  anyone can take advantage of this when they want to see two separate pages at the same time. In the example below, the same page is open in both windows, but the text is magnified in the second window. Click the button (outlined in red) at the right of the horizontal scroll bar to turn split window on and off.

New in Adobe InDesign CS6 :: Recently used fonts: Access fonts you use frequently. Recently used fonts appear at the top of the font list in the Type menu. Just like Microsoft Word! Go to InDesign > Preferences > Type (Windows: Edit > Preferences > Type) to display between 0 and 50 recently used fonts at the top of fonts list.

New Favorite in Adobe InDesign CS6 :: Persistent text frame fitting options: Set frames to grow with additional text, based on simple parameters. Grow and shrink frames automatically for headlines, call-outs, or other variable content. Again, this one is geared towards tablet publishing, but when you are working with small frames, what a great way to avoid overset text! Turn it on in Text Frame Options. Set Auto-Sizing to expand just the width, just the height, or both. You can control where the frame expands and set a minimum width and height.

New Favorite in Adobe InDesign CS6 :: Key object alignment: Align selected items to a key object you define. This one came right out of Adobe Illustrator. Just select multiple objects, then click the Key object one more time to get a darker outline. See the little key in the Control panel? Now when you set your alignment, all of the selected shapes will align themselves with the key object.

New Favorite in Adobe InDesign CS6 :: Enhanced split and span support: Keep lines together in paragraphs that split or span columns. This feature was supposed to be in CS5, but we learned not to count on it working. Now it does!

New in Favorite Adobe InDesign CS6 :: Interactive PDF export as pages: Export an interactive PDF file as pages instead of spreads. Pretty simple request, and easy enough to fix in Acrobat, but way better to handle via export while you are still thinking about it.

Here is the rest of the list:

Grayscale preview: Preview your layouts in grayscale to see how they will look on a black-and-white device or when printed in black and white.

Grayscale PDF export: Export PDF files in grayscale directly from the Print dialog box. Just set up your export options and leave the original in full color.

Export to PNG: Export your InDesign document to PNG, a lossless format, for use on the web. You can export the entire document, part of the document, or individual items.

Enhanced zoom for linked objects: Zoom in to a linked object from the Links panel to evaluate it more clearly.

Hunspell dictionary enhancements: Access more than 100 open source dictionaries.

IDML support: Save in IDML format from the Save As menu to use the layout in an earlier version of InDesign.

Complex calculations: Calculate values in panels and dialog boxes using complex calculations (for example, 12.5p/2×3).

Extension set management: Enable or disable groups of extensions based on your current workflow.

Indic language support: Use the World-Ready Composer, an alternate composition engine, to work with Hindi, Punjabi, and other Indian languages,† as well as complex script languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.

Interactive HTML: Include interactive HTML, such as Google Maps and animation developed with Adobe Edge™ software, in InDesign layouts. Interactivity is retained when exporting to HTML, EPUB3, or .folio for Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.*

Style mapping in linked text: Control how content in linked text is styled. Specify different text styles for parent text and children.

Enhanced packaging support: Package InDesign projects for handoff in Adobe Digital Publishing Suite workflows, including functionality such as overlays. You can also include an IDML file as part of the package.

As the years go by, we have lots of chances to improve ourselves. I know I’m working on my personal and professional growth, but I’m just not sure you are as focused on yours. Here is a list of just a few things I wish you would consider adding to your repertoire:

1. Nested formats. I really want to embed character formats within my paragraph formats.
2. GREP Find & Change. Pattern-based find and change would be life-changing for cleaning up documents.
3. GREP Styles. Pattern-based character formatting would be even better.
4. Save Find & Change Queries. Without GREP, clean-up is still very manual. If I’m going to have to run the same series of Find & Change sequences again and again, I’d like to be able to save them.
5. Footnotes. Please allow them to break across pages, and never ever put the footnote text on the page after its reference number.
6. Letterspacing: Can we make tracking/kerning a little easier to do on a manual basis?
7. Full Screen Mode: How about an intuitive way to get out of Full Screen mode when you inadvertently activate it from the Screen Mode button in the Application Bar? May I suggest the letter f, like in Photoshop? (Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think Esc S M t is intuitive.)
8. Fonts. How about a reliable way to remove undesirable fonts? I know you think you are doing it, but they still linger in the document. While they might be gone from the Fonts panel, they still bring up the Unavailable Fonts message.
9. Scaling. Can’t we please have Scale in the context menu when we have a frame selected?
10. Frame formats. I would love to see a Frame Designer and Frame Catalog.
11. Updated Templates. I do believe that the templates that ship with FrameMaker are valuable teaching tools. You can pick them apart to see how to accomplish an advanced task but really, they look like they were designed in 1988. (Oh, right. They were.)

Now FrameMaker, it’s not lost on me that many of these features are already part of Adobe InDesign. However, you two don’t appeal to the same market and very few people own both products. InDesign is used primarily by the creative folks, and the FrameMaker users are almost exclusively technical writers. These writers deserve some new features on the unstructured side to make their lives easier. Please just think about it.

by Barb Binder

This question came in yesterday from a former Advanced FrameMaker student:

I’d like to insert a graphic each time my document is going to reference a “Note.”  How do you suggest I do this? Just insert the graphic each time?

That would work, but here’s what I’d do:

1. Add the graphic to the Reference Page.
• View > Reference Pages.
• Graphics > Tools > Place a Graphic Frame tool.
• Draw a graphic frame and give the frame the name “Note”. Click on Set.
  
• File > Import > File to add the graphic to the frame, then size the frame to fit the graphic.
  
• View > Body Pages.
2. Create and format a one-row, two-column table.
• Table > Insert Table and define two columns and one body row.
  
• Use Table Designer to create a Table format (I called mine “Alert Table”) and set your table up to look the way you want. In my example, I’ve hiding the table title and all of the table rules, and adjusted the column widths.
  
3. Set up the first cell to call in the image.
• Click an insertion point in the first cell.
• Create a new paragraph format. (I called mine “Note Graphic”.)
• In the Advanced properties sheet of the Paragraph Designer, set Frame Below Pfg to “Note” and Update All.
  
• You many need to adjust the table and paragraph spacing values to put the image exactly where you want it.
  
4. Set up the second cell to hold the note text.
• Add the text to the second cell.
• Create a Paragraph format in Paragraph Designer and format as desired.
  
• When you hide your borders and text symbols, no one will even know it’s a table.
  

Once you have the first table set up, this gets a lot quicker. And you can also create a series of graphic images on the reference pages so that you can use the same table for any kind of alert: Static, Caution, Danger, etc…

by Barb Binder

This should be so easy, right? And usually it is, but I just received this inquiry from a former Adobe FrameMaker 9/10 student:

I am sorry to bother you, but I have a quick question. I have FrameMaker 10, so does my co-worker.  I cannot print to a PDF, yet I can do it from my co-worker’s computer.  The only difference is that I have Adobe Acrobat X version 10.1.2 and she has 9… is there a magic setting I am overlooking?

There are times when I’m really glad I’m an Adobe Acrobat X Certified Instructor, and this is one of them. Creating a PDF from FrameMaker should be so simple. After all, Adobe owns both products. However, my 20 years of FrameMaker production experience have shown this to not always the case. There have been many times over the years when I’ve had to try multiple techniques to produce a PDF from FrameMaker.

Here’s what I do, in this order:

1. File > Save as PDF. This is the recommended method of creating a PDF from FrameMaker. You can initiate this command from a book file or a document file. After choosing where to save your file, you will be presented with a dialog box to set up your conversion options, including Settings, Bookmarks, Tags & Links. Click Set to create the PDF.
   
2. File > Print > Adobe PDF Printer. Start by unchecking Print to File, and then click on the Setup button to choose the Adobe PDF printer.
   
   
   You have the option of clicking on the Properties button to make additional adjustments, including setting security options, viewing the results automatically, adding document information (which FrameMaker reads from File > File Info) and whether to rely on system fonts or document fonts. (If you need more information on system fonts vs document fonts see “Adobe FrameMaker: Rely on System Fonts Only, Do Not Use Document Fonts“.)
   
   Pick OK twice to return to the Print Document Dialog box. The print option also gives you easy access to the PDF Settings dialog box. Click on Generate Acrobat Data and click the PDF Setup button to set up your conversion options, including Settings, Bookmarks, Tags & Links (shown below step #1). Double check that Print to File is still unchecked, and then chose Print when you are ready to go.
3. File > Print > Print to File. When all else fails, you can create a PostScript file and then convert it to a PDF in a two-step process.
   
   Start by checking Print to File and use the Browse button to indicate where you want to save the file. You can set the file name and extension by typing in the text box to the right of the Browse button. (You can use the default .prn extension, or change it to .ps, it doesn’t make a difference.) If you’d like to Generate Acrobat Data you can use the same settings described in step number 2. Because the Print to File checkbox is activated, when you click the Print button, a PostScript file is created, but not the PDF. There are multiple ways to convert a PostScript file to a PDF. Perhaps the easiest one is to right click the file, and chose Convert to Adobe PDF.
   

I would be very happy to never see this combination of dialog boxes again. But in the meantime, I’m glad to have options!