- Specimen book for Buddy August 24, 2010
- New release! Buddy: the sans companion to Contenu August 24, 2010
- Classes mess up Opentype Glyph generation August 9, 2010
- A history of the alphabet August 9, 2010
- Going after the look of old fonts? Not likely August 7, 2010
Adding anchored objects can be a little tedious. One of the most painful aspects of making anchored frames to hold illustrations, sidebar notes, or headlines is the tediousness of the repetitive filling out of the anchored object dialog box.
The simple solution is to make those settings in an object style.
Then all you do is place the object as an inline graphic and hit the shortcut to convert it to an anchored object and to offset it where you need it. Or place it, hit the shortcut and then insert it into the text where you need it. It will automatically be anchored and offset as you designed it.
Let’s make a style to automatically offset a frame into the sidebar area next to the column on a single column page
Make a new Object style with all the options turned off . Turn on Anchored Object and set it up like you see below. We’re assuming a four-inch column on a 7.5″ wide page. You can adjust to fit your page size.
Basic settings for an anchored object
TIP: Once you have your anchored style set up the way you like, save the document you are working on.
Then close all documents and go to the Object Styles palette (with no document open). Choose Load Object Styles… from the Option Menu and add the new object style from the document you just saved and closed. Close InDesign and reopen it to save your new application default.
From then on, all new documents will have this style available. In most cases, all you will have to do it modify the offsets to make it work for any new project.
Believe me, you’ll use this (or your version of it) a lot!
The other day I went through a common scenario> I had a 408 page book set up at 6×9. I found out that I needed it formatted to 4.25″ x 6.88″ for a different printer. How long do you think it took me? It became a 540 page book.
It took less than an hour.
How did it go so quickly?
Everything was formatted with styles including all the graphics. The graphics were all formatted as anchored graphics and object styles.
That hour included checking every page for orphans and widows and fixing all of them. That meant eliminating all paragraph fragments of two lines or less and all paragraph ending sentence fragments of two and a partial word or less.
The procedure
- Turn on Layout Adjustment… under the Layout menu in InDesign
- Change the page size in Document setup… under the file menu
- Change the margins in Margins and Columns… under the Layout menu
- Adjust the paragraph styles, character styles, and object styles
- Proof new layout from page 1 to the end eliminating orphans and widows
Like I said, it took less than a hour to convert a 540 page book. It was really fun. Yes, it was a novel we’re publishing for a new author in Peralta, New Mexico. But it doesn’t take much longer for a graphically intensive book like Practical Font Design.
This is the new Lulu version of the 2nd edition of the original Publishing with InDesign released in 2000 for version 1.5.
There will be a createspace version with an ISBN# that should be out in a couple weeks.
The Lulu version has a $7 download. Both of the perfect bound 108-page printed versions are $13.95.
These are training materials for the apprenticeship program here at Radiqx Press. This particular book covers setting up IndEsign for production speed, covering: defaults, styles (all five types), anchored objects, form design, and so on.
Here is an article from Creative Pro by Michael Murphy on the use of nested styles. He is a marvelous teacher, so I assume that the article is exceptional. I haven’t read it, because I have written similar things. But you should check it out.
Every book I seem to use nested styles more. The ability to add custom formatting to the beginnings of my paragraphs is too titillating to me. I tend to use this option too much. But it is an amazingly powerful option
One of the real surprises when we moved back here to Minnesota after 25 years in New Mexico was Summer. I had grown accustomed to the eight month summers of mid-New Mexico on the high plains south of Albuquerque. March to October I could expect heat and sun. I came to hate the sun. It made it impossible to work outside, and on & on.
I was really looking forward to summers in Minnesota. I knew about the mosquitoes, but they were pretty much under control in the cities. What i had forgotten about was the panic to get outside while the sun shines. The days are immensely long 5:30 am to after 9pm and Minnesotans seem to think it’s a sin to not be out in it. I’m not into that. For me, it’s a relief to only have to hide inside from the heat for a month and a half (mid-July to Labor Day) instead of staying inside from April through the end of September.
But Summer is a real problem up here. It is considered a legitimate excuse to be irresponsible. The Protestant work ethic still reigns supreme up here, but everyone get three months off for good behavior from Memorial day to Labor day. Sad to say, this means the relationship with God is put on the shelf for those 3 months. Phone calls and emails are not returned. It’s almost as bad as being back in mañana-land (remembering that mañana does not mean tomorrow — it means not today).
But the most dangerous, of course, is that children are taught that churches close for the summer, that God is not important for the summer, that we don’t have to be serious for the summer.
Pray for us all…
I’ve been on this bandwagon for years now, but when are we going to get an InDesign-level program for Web design?Dreamweaver certainly is not it. GoLive worked better before they killed it. I hear that Dreamweaver works reasonably well for coders. It’s certainly a pain for page layout specialists like myself.
We really need something that enables us to put together pages and a site without having to constantly mess with the code.
I certainly do not have to mess with PostScript to get a document done in InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop. Why do I have to constantly mess with the HTML and CSS to get a page put together for the Web? Certainly there’s a great programmer out there who can solve this. He or she will be an instant millionaire or better when they do.
I realize that a lot of this outburst was triggered by spending several days now trying to beat the CSS into shape for this blog, but really people, where’s that app? Of course, a lot of the frustration is because all the blog is PHP and there’s no wysiwyg editing of that.
One of the font design apprenticeships is taken so far.