It’s the topic that just won’t go away, at least in my mind. InDesign’s Fit Selection In Window command. In his comment, David injected a dose of reality on my overhyped enthusiasm for this command. In my joy at finding such a hidden gem of a feature in my live-in application, I overlooked some limitations. So I spent a little time taking a closer look at when this command works really well, when it doesn’t, and what you can do about it. Here are a few tips for understanding and making the most of Fit Selection in Window.

• FSIW adjusts the view so that the bounding box of the current frame(s) is centered and occupies no more than 50% of the window in any direction. Because of this, it will zoom a lot closer on frames that are squarish, than ones that are much wider than they are tall, or vice versa.

Employ FSIW on a square frame and you’ll zoom roughly twice a much as you will on a frame 4x as wide as it is tall.

• The amount of zoom is also dependent on the amount of real estate available in the window. FSIW zooms the most with a fully expanded window. It doesn’t play well with tiled windows. For the same reason, your screen resolution matters. The higher the resolution, the greater the zoom.

• Selecting text does not affect the zoom (it would be a lot cooler if it did). A blinking cursor yields the same zoom as selecting any or all the text in the frame. But the good news is, selecting a table or a cell within a table does affect the zoom. Selected tables and cells are zoomed on just like frames.

• FSIW will zoom on inline frames and anchored items when they are selected with a selection tool, not with the type tool.

• With text frames, the zoom is always greater with the type tool than either selection tool but the difference gets smaller with bigger frames. This shot shows four frames and the zoom percentages I got when I used the Selection tool (top) and the Type tool (bottom).

• Since the nature of the command is to fit the entire frame in the window, the larger the frame, the less readable text will be. If you try it on a column that spans the height of a page, you will zoom out. Way out, to some village near Athens (where all your text is Greeked).

• In those situations where FSIW just won’t zoom close enough, let your fingers do the walking. Since the key command here is command-option-= it’s a piece of cake to just lift a finger (the one one on the option key) and then hit command-= again as needed to zoom closer. After you do this a few times it becomes second nature.

Alright, I think I’ve exceeded the recommended daily dose of InDesign SubMicroMinutae. So that, my friends is the last I will be writing about Fit Selection In Window.

Today.

; )

Won’t you please help me help you?

Do you have any problems using InDesign or Photoshop? Ongoing struggles? Unanswered questions? Do you lie awake at night thinking there must be a better way of doing a particular task? Do you wish you were better trained in some little aspect of either of those programs? Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your errors.

I am starting a new project where I will be collecting and answering as many burning InDesign and Photoshop questions as I can. Not here, but on another famouser website, to be named later.

I’m looking for specific, finite questions that can be answered in a couple minutes or so. Quick hits. Things like “When is it better to use a vector mask instead of a layer mask in Photoshop?” or “Is there a way to update all missing links at once in InDesign?” Stuff like that. As long as it’s specific, no question is too simple, too obscure, too weird, too whatever.

If you have a question, post it here as a comment or shoot me an email at jmvrankin [at] gmail.com. I’d like nothing better than to have an inbox full of your problems. Thanks!

Just going along, minding my business in a longish document, when all of a sudden I am surprised to see a little white hand wave to me from the Pages panel.

Now we know in InDesign the little hand means “drag to scroll,” and sure enough I can drag to move what’s visible in the panel. I pause and ask myself, “Self, did we know about this?” Self does not reply, which in some ways is probably a good thing. But I am left with the weird feeling that I have always known about this “handy” feature. Earth humor, ar, ar, ar. And yet it seems entirely new. Have I been doing InDesign in my sleep? Sad to say, I have dreamt about InDesign. If I ever apply for a job at Adobe, I’ll be sure to include that on my cover letter. Insanity is a good differentiator.

There may be another explanation for my déjà vu. I’ve always told people to go to the Pages Panel options and uncheck “show vertically” to fit a lot more pages into the space.

Otherwise you aren’t taking advantage of all your screen real estate.

That, plus the fact that I rarely used to work with documents longer than 10 pages, meant that I never faced a Pages panel with a scroll bar. I could always see the entire document. Either that, or I’m about to wake up and realize that the last nine years have all been a…

Cue the wavy lines and swirling harps.

Oh. Excuse me (yawn) I think I fell asleep waiting for Quark to find pieces of missing art…

Y’know, I just had the strangest dream…

A few extra thoughts on my obsession with InDesign’s Fit Selection in Window:

1. I think some of my joy stems from the fact that I am left handed and thus mouse with my left hand and do keyboard shortcuts with my right hand. So I feel very balanced using stuff on the right side of the keyboard. Righties, your mileage may vary. Still, it won’t be as awkward as the many times I visited a right handed co-worker’s desk and had to cross my arms to drive their Macs out of some digital ditch.

2. Daring Doers of Desktop Demos may also have a conflict, since they often employ command-option-= to trigger the Mac’s Universal Access System Pref screen zoom.

This is an awesome feature when you’re putting on a show and need be sure your audience can see exactly what your cursor is up to. I’ve also used it to magnify markup on scanned PDFs that was otherwise illegible (my eyes are old and bent). But if you’re not in front of an audience you’ll probably benefit by turning it off and using those keys for InDesign.

3. Laptop users, where’s the love? If you have a model with no option key on the right side, you have no choice but to go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts and assign something else. Maybe just change it to command-shift-= True, that’s assigned to Superscript by default, but I think Fit Selection easily trumps Superscript. And command-shift-0 is unassigned, so there’s your Fit Spread in Window.

Is it possible to get addicted to a keyboard shortcut? To obsess about it. To look for excuses to use it. To waste time because you go out of your way to use it. To make up off-key ditties of praise and hum them while nobody is listening. Uh, a friend told me they did that. Yeah. A friend.

The answer is true, and I am living proof. The keyboard shortcut I am about to share with you is dangerous. If you aren’t careful, it might take over your life. At least your life using InDesign. Still, it’s so sweet, you have to try it. C’mon, all the cool kids are doing it. Just don’t inhale.

Ready? It’s command-option-=. Go to InDesign, select something, and press command-option-=. I mean it. Do it now, and come back.

How cool was that? InDesign zooms in or out to frame your selection nicely in the window. Not surprising then that the name of this feature you invoked is Fit Selection In Window. Just think of it as intelligent zooming. You may remember a while back when I wrote about double-clicks, and snarkily suggested there should be a feature that reads my mind and selects the thing I need. Well, this is as close as I’m going to get till I get the GoogleBrain implant. There is no reason to ever touch the Zoom tool again. Even pressing command-= more than once makes me feel hackish now.

I just don’t understand why the good folks at Adobe didn’t give this puppy a line in the View Menu. It deserves to be there. And there was room. The Type, Edit, and Window menus are all longer than View. It does appear in the contextual menu when you right-click on a selected object. But I never noticed it before. And I’m betting that 95% of InDesign users don’t know about it because it’s been so unheralded. The only documentation I could find is lost in a bland table on page 636 of the User Guide.

If you have a large frame selected, you’ll zoom out to something near Fit Page in Window. If you can’t see all of the object you have selected, it zooms out (or just re-centers) to show you the whole thing. But in most cases it will zoom in so that the object(s) you selected are centered with a nice amount of space around on all sides. Curiously, the zooming has a limit of 2000%, even though InDesign will go to 4000% with other methods. I can’t think of a time I ever zoomed to more than 2000% to actually do anything other than giggle, so I’ll let this slide.

plus command-option-= becomes

What makes this shortcut even cooler is:

• It works when you have text selected, or just a blinking cursor. Even in linked frames!

• It works as document navigation: when you’re zoomed way out, you can instantly zoom to anywhere in the document.

• It’s easy to remember, since we’re used to command-= (usually thought of as command-+) to zoom in. Or you could think of the = as squinty eyelids, focusing on something far away.

• It’s even better paired with command-option-0 (Fit Spread in Window). Use them to zoom in to work, and zoom out to admire your work and pick your next target.

If using command-option-= does become an addiction for you, know that you always have a kindred spirit here. We can all form a support group. Zoomaholics Anonymous.

Oh where oh where can it be?

Top Five Reasons Mike Has Not Been Blogging Lately

5. Been Photoshopping myself into the Celtics victory parade, high-fiving Kevin Garnett.

4. Been writing “I will not forget our anniversary again” on a chalkboard 5000 times.

3. Been driving hundreds of miles in search of gas under $4.

2. Been sulking since the 8-year-old’s blog scored 200 hits in one day.

1. Been designing a steampunk litterbox for the cats.

The merciless calendar mocks me. Two weeks and counting, dude. That’s like two months in internet time. Or three months in dog years. So if a dog wrote this blog, that would be like six months without any new content. WOOF! Saddest thing is, I STILL don’t have time to write anything more than this extended ping. But to assuage my guilt and give you hope that someday soon there will be new content here, I proudly give you…other people’s content!

First, we have Photoshop Disasters, a cautionary site for careless cloners. Six-fingered hands, missing belly buttons, severed hands, impossibly thin limbs, you name it. Monsters everywhere! And you only need to look a little closer at all the media around you to see them. Be warned, it is sometimes NSFW, but APDF (Always Pretty Damn Funny. I just made that up).

Oh and by the way, there might be a solution for THE WORST PROBLEM OF ALL TIME. No, not global warming. I mean the real problem that threatens to pitch civilization into violent chaos. Namely, adding a page to the beginning of a book, switching all the versos and rectos. A set of plug-ins from InTools allows you to set up any object with position relative to the spine. Genius! Stumbled on that one on an InDesign Secrets comment. I haven’t had a chance to play with the plug-ins yet, but when I do, I’ll report back here. If they work as advertised, you will hear the angels singing directly from your RSS reader.

.
As an unashamed Buffy fan, I have to admit that every time I hear the word “master” I get visions of Buffy’s original Big Bad. The aged vampire who she eventually ends up beating after making a witty remark about him dying (poofing actually, since he was already dead). While he was a A Big Bad, he wasn’t nearly as Bad as he thought he was. Not if he could get beat by a snappily-dressed high-school cheerleader. And all of this is a non-subtle intro to master pages for people who think they’re Bigger and Badder than they actually are.

Over the years, I’ve talked with a lot of designers who are just as afraid of master pages as Buffy was of the Master. Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. But once Buffy was given knowledge of the Master , she became less afraid. And I think the same would happen with a designer or production person who is making or needs to use a template.

Like so many things I’ll probably end up talking about, master pages are great because they save time. Time that I’d rather spend watching Buffy, time that Michael would rather spend Photoshopping space suits on his cats, time that you may rather spend reading Tolstoy. Or, time that you may be able to spend working for another client or working for that promotion. Master pages lead to measured efficiencies. Impress your boss with that line.

This is our sample file. This is the first spread, there are other pages that follow this that contain the last bit of our story but this is the perfect example of how to begin creating a template from this document. I wouldn’t consider this a template, but some people would. It’s a point of preference and comfort. Since I often think my way is right and therefore the only way something could/should be done, I’ve become shocked lately to see how some people’s thinking differs from mine. Mine is still right, of course, but I’m willing to be understanding that they’re different from me.

I like a template to contain empty boxes/frames that are linked as needed but minimally styled. For example, my version of the perfect template for this layout to be used across all file types would like this:

How I got this was by selecting ALL, cutting, going to Master Page A and Pasting in Place. I then deleted all of the content from the text boxes and applied the “none” object style to each frame, except for the footer. Now I have the frames I need to begin creating any of the four types of files without having to remove any text. All I have to do is select a box and style it with the desired object style before I begin pouring. There are a few other things I need to do to make this template work better. By taking a few extra steps now, I’ll save myself a lot of time later.

There are just a few things I’d like to explain more. Let’s start with the red line around the outside of my spread. This designates how much bleed the printer requires of me. This number will vary from printer to printer so be sure to ask yours how much to prepare for. This particular printer asks for a p9 bleed. (That’s 9 points, for all of you who work with other measures. I hated points when I first started, but after trying to do the math with fractions, I realized points were easier.) To set your bleed line, go to your File menu and choose Document Setup. Click on the “More Options” button on the right. At the bottom of the window are selections for bleed and slug.

By adding a measurement to the bleed boxes, you’ll get the nice red line outside your spread so you can visually check that all of your images bleed off the page as required. If “Snap to Guides” is selected, it’ll be even easier to make sure that you have the right amount of bleed on frames that run off the page. It also means that you can easily set up your print styles to include this area when you print a paper copy, or print a postscript file. If you want to have the exact same amount of bleed on each side of your layout, all you have to do is input the number into the Top box and select the little chain icon to the right of the entry boxes. This will apply the same amount to each box without you having to type the information four times. “Measured efficiencies” remember?

We won’t be using the Slug yet, but if you wanted to include a frame that would appear outside the layout when the InDesign file was viewed and easily be printed or not printed you would set your slug area as desired. One possible use for slugs might be to create a box in the slug area where you can leave notes for the Designer to view.

Another time saver is to set up our file so it automatically applies the page numbers in the footer. And this is much, much easier than you may fear. Simply place your cursor where you want the auto-number to appear. Now go to your Type Menu and select Insert Special Character and then Auto Page Number. Click and you’re done. If the pagination changes, your page numbers automatically update and you never have to manually change a page number. In fact, I would highly suggest never manually changing a page number.

Now I briefly talked about layers in my first entry here on Mike’s wonderful site, but I want to revisit it. I propose a simplification and standardization of layers. Your organization mileage may vary, but there’s no reason to have dozens of layers in a file. For this layout I propose 4 layers:
Footer
Text
Art (which isn’t being used for this spread, but will be used for the spreads that come after this one)
Background

Very simple, right. You can look at the name of the layer and look at the item on your page, and probably guess on which layer that item will reside. The only thing which should live on the Footer layer are the footer boxes that contain the page numbers, and any book title, chapter title, etc. info. That’s it! This layer will begin in the unlocked position, but once you add the needed info to your master page, you will lock this layer. This will help you feel confident that you won’t accidentally edit this item.

The second layer in your palette is the text layer and it should contain any boxes that will have text poured into them. I would also suggest linking all of your text boxes together in the order you’re most likely to come across the text. This will help your pouring job easier in CS2 and even easier in CS3. I also suggest selecting all of your text boxes and grouping them together. Since the text boxes will remain on your master page, but you’ll actually begin to pour the text on the working page which means you’ll have to break the link for these items from your master page. And only these items, actually.

There are still a number of “efficiencies” we can express in this template, especially for the pages that we’re going to add to it next time. But we’ve got a really good start, I think. I may not be as witty as a cadre of Hollywood screenwriters made a high-school cheerleader sound, but hopefully I’ve at least given you a little more confidence so you can start to tackle the über-master pages in your own documents.

Just a quick note in case any of you out there were confused by the fact that my name was appearing on another WordPress blog, called Mr. Sports. I am the administrator, but the posts are actually authored by my son, who has caught the blogging bug in a big way from his old man. What he sometimes lacks in terms of content, he more than makes up for with enthusiasm and exclamation points. Funny thing is, he gets more hits than me. This is the source of great, animated debate at the dinner table. Note to self: use more exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dude, not THAT McCain. God, I am shameless. And for my link-baiting sins this site is probably being monitored by the FBI right now right now.

The McCain in the title refers to a binding style known as McCain. It is a case-bound and side-sewn style. Jargon free version: folded piles of paper stitched together through the top and glued to a hard cover. Variations on this theme are called Smyth sewn and Moffet sewn. McCain is industry standard for thick, heavy textbooks (are there any other kind?) because of its strength. Schools need something strong enough that eccentric French teachers (are there any other kind?) can throw at a kid mis-conjugating the verb “savoir.” Sacre bleu! Le subjonctif! Yes, this actually happened. No I was not the kid; my pronunciations were “for-me-DA-bleh.”

McCain stitches pinch the paper with great strength, like the way the playground bully used to pinch that spot where your neck meets your collarbone. And just as hard. While the book can lie flat, some of the paper is lost in the pinch and will never be visible unless you rip the book apart. Industry standard for the kind of book I used to work on was to leave a quarter inch or 1p6 on the inside margin of each page empty as a “no print” or “no ink” zone. You can see it if you look at the top or bottom of a side sewn book.

Oh, how tempting it was to put secret messages to the kids in the no print zone.

If you can read this, you’re too close!
I am the Walrus.
Neo, this is Morpheus, get out of that classroom NOW!
Frodo lives.
And so on.

So when you have a photo that spans the gutter, you have to account for the no print zone. Otherwise half an inch of the picture will be lost. This is great if you’re doing a Mad Magazine Fold-In, or have a thing for cyclopses,

+ McCain =

but it’s not usually recommended. My $60 ginormous Beatles Anthology book doesn’t have a NPZ, and thus there’s a cyclops George Harrison on p.450.

The fix is to split the image and move the two halves away from each other a half inch (or whatever your industry standard is), with the gap centered on the gutter.

Say you had to make this ice cream sandwich to look right across the gutter.

Select the frame and copy and paste it in place (cmd-shift-opt-v, or even easier, option-nudge/nudge back).

Throw a guide where you want the image to match up till you get the hang of it, or to check your work. Then move the copy 3p to the right.

Or move the other one 3p to the left, or split the difference and move them in opposite directions 1p6. Which way you go depends on the flexiblity of your layout. If you have no flexibility, you have to scale or crop your image to make it 3p narrower.

Close up the frames to empty the gutter and you’re done. Or leave a little extra something for someone to stumble upon when the book is old and falling apart.

The guides show that the two sides will match up when the book is laid open.

Tasty!

Just as the kids are getting close to their summer vacation, I’m going back to school. InDesign school, that is.

I’m spending a chunk of my summer digging through every last shred of the official Adobe documentation to study for the certification exam to regain my ACE (Adobe Certified Expert) status.

I foolishly let my certification expire, so instead of gliding through the open book re-certification exam, I’m going in like a first-timer. Fork over $150 and show up at the testing center with a full brain and empty pockets. Security will give me the hairy eyeball. They’ll make me toss my water bottle in case I had keyboard shortcuts etched behind the Poland Spring label. The mouse will be sticky and my chair will squeak. My one allowance–the little dry erase doodle board will be no help. I’ll hold it up to the light and see if I can make out any clues left from the last person. Hmmm, the answer to question 31 looks like command-shift…Snoopy. OK, seems unlikely, but I’ll go with it.

Aside from these complaints, having to re-take the exam is a blessing in disguise. It’s forcing me to look at tools and features of InDesign CS3, that I have ignored, forgotten, glossed over, or flat out avoided. And there’s plenty to have igforglossvoided. 32 tools, 11 menus, 41 panels, and probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 unique commands (I counted 500 in the menus plus 8 panels before I realized, I’m not THAT crazy, and quit. Hey, I count them so you don’t have to. Enjoy the madness.

It is humbling to go back to page 1 of the manual, and read every word like a newbie. I am no longer Jedi master of the page. Take the batteries out of the lightsaber, Adobe-Wan Kenobi. You’re going back to school. Every menu, every palette (er, panel) now stares back at me from my screen, posing the question, “Do you REALLY know me?” Everything becomes a potential question. Given the test makers’ fondness for trivia, no detail is too small. Quick, without peeking: is Index in the Window menu or the Type & Tables submenu? Could be on the test.

The more I study, the more I start to nitpick. Do Notes really deserve their own menu? Couldn’t Show Hidden Characters be in the View menu instead of Type? Why is the Edit menu an unholy brew of text and frame commands, InCopy functions, and application- and document-level preferences? If Einstein was right and time travel is possible, why do we STILL not have a History panel? Why the hell is it even called InDesign? What am I doing with my life? What is the cat eating now? Some things are better left mysteries.

When it comes to InDesign I’m pretty much home schooled. I’ve taken plenty of classes, read books, and haunted websites, forums, and blogs. But IMHO there is no way to truly learn the program unless you use it regularly. As in, more days than not. Case in point: hyperlinks. The only time I’ve ever used hyperlinks in InDesign was studying for the ACE, and about 10 seconds after I passed the test, all knowledge of hyperlinks passed straight out of my brain.

What I really want is to know the InDesign commands more in my hands than in my brain. That is, when you use a command every day, your hands are usually one step ahead of your head, instinctually going to the right spot in the right menu or panel, even as your brain is wondering stuff like what Peter Tork is doing at this very moment.

For study aids, I’ll refer to the ACE guide, the Classroom in a Book, and the Help menu. But I also like to make my own. Here’s one that I cooked up to serve like a set of flash cards for learning a set of keyboard shortcuts. I specifically wanted to learn all the command-option shortcuts (for a future post here). I took the text file from Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts > Show Set… and placed it into a layout.

I created a Character Style with strikethrough to simulate a highlighter.

Did a Find/Change to Find a text string that would grab all the command-option shortcuts, and no other ones. So I included the colon and space, Opt, +, Cmd, wildcard, and end of paragraph.

And wherever this string was found, I told InDesign to apply the highlighter character style. Later, for good measure, I did a similar FInd/Change with a paragraph style to number the shortcuts I found. This made it easy to select and delete the other shortcuts I wasn’t interested in. Which left me with a nice numbered list of just the command-option family.

By default, the answers are hidden. To show them, just toggle Overprint Preview on (cmd-shift-option-y).

Not a bad first day of class. We’ve made an InDesign annoyance (onscreen strikethrough knockout) serve our study needs. Our hands and our brains are learning. And somewhere, Peter Tork is smiling.

Lately I’ve been wrestling with issue of whether to publish full or partial text feeds for RSS readers. On the one hand, there’s the partial feed virtues:

• I like the idea of people coming to the site
• As far as I can tell, the version of WordPress I’m using doesn’t track RSS readers, so I have no idea how many people are reading until they click through to the site.
• I open myself up to splogs ripping off full content from the feed.
• Cinnamon and I usually write really long posts, which might be more than someone wants to deal with in a reader.

On the other hand, I’ve read that full feeds don’t decrease readership, and they might actually increase it. I’ve also read that most people hate partial feeds, and some lose interest in blogs that don’t give them everything in their RSS reader. Truth be told, I am one of these people. So today I switched over to a full feed. Enjoy.

Oh and just to make me look like a doofus, Firefox crashed while I was updating my WordPress prefs, so the first time this post was published, it went out as a partial feed. Hee hee, I Iike kampooters.

Hope everyone had a nice Memorial Day Weekend. Here in New England the weather was glorious, and we celebrated by partaking of pure All-American fare: amusement park, little league baseball, ice cream, cookout, and Indiana Jones. The kids marched in the parade down Main St (actually they marched down Route 14, but Main St. sounds better).

We also flew our American flag. It is a gorgeous, top notch flag that feels as good as it looks. It even makes an awesome snapping sound in the wind. I fly the flag only a few days each year, Memorial Day, Flag Day, and July 4th. I’m not patriotic in a traditional sense. In my world, the only version of the “Star Spangled Banner” you’d hear before a baseball game is the one by Jimi Hendrix. And when it’s time to have my All-Time American Icons Barbecue, I’m inviting both Dwight Eisenhower and Howard Zinn. But I might seat them at different tables.

I am fascinated by American history. Growing up only a short distance from where the Mayflower arrived in 1620 might have something to do with it. So did being a Gen X child of the 70s, consuming vast quantities of Schoolhouse Rock along with my Froot Loops.

But mostly it was due to having some absolute rock star history teachers in high school and college. My 10th grade teacher gave everyone in the class bullets he’d collected from the ground at Gettysburg. Talk about keeping it real. Holding that amazingly heavy lead slug, helps me understand in a visceral way the price paid for that “new birth of freedom.”

By the way, if you ever find yourself at a friendly neighborhood flag burning, here’s a word of advice: bring a gas mask. Having attended a flag “retirement” ceremony last Memorial Day, I can tell you that a pile of burning freedom smells like a blazing truck tire stuffed with anchovies. Old Glory won’t go down without a fight.

And speaking of Old Glory, let’s finally get to the reason for this post. Namely, what the Stars and Stripes can teach us about reproducing color. Yes, it’s patriotic prepress.

One of my Three Cardinal Rules of color correcting is to make sure you get “known” colors right. The other two are neutralizing grays, and minding the shadows and highlights. (A lesser-known fourth rule is “never get involved in a land war in Asia.”)

We all have a set of memorized colors that comes from seeing certain things over and over. We don’t know the ink numbers, but we know what some things are supposed to look like. It could be something from nature, like a blue sky, or something from the supermarket, like a Coke can. If you’re trying to reproduce them for print work, they can look very wrong if you don’t go by the numbers and apply some accepted formulas, and account for dot gain (we’ll get to the evils of dot gain in a minute).

In the case of the Coke can, we can go to the Coke branding website and learn that Coke Red is L50 A71 B48. You won’t find a much redder red in the SWOP gamut (4c99m94y1k). In the case of the blue sky, there’s no exact formula, but you know it’s not supposed to be cyan or purple or blue-green. For a bright blue sky, my rule of thumb is twice as much cyan as magenta. So your daytime sky gradient goes like this:

Add M and then K with increasing velocity to bring on the night.

In terms of color, the American flag is made of blue sky and Coke cans. There’s something poetic about that, but I can’t quite grasp it. Where’s Walt Whitman when you heed him? More accurately, the flag’s red and blue are recognized standards: Pantone Old Glory Red (193) and Old Glory Blue (281). The current standards body in charge of these colors is known simply as The Color Association.

The flag’s white stripes are supposed to be neutral, not any kind of creamy color.
Last night, I made a set of swatches on kuler.adobe.com with these values and some darker shades to share with color-managed patriots everywhere. The base red and blue look very washed out on the kuler site, but once you load the swatches into InDesign or Illustrator, they look right.

Those values are your weapons in the fight for All-American color, but will they be enough? Think back to our house painting adventure. You can use the same LAB curves techniques to nail the exact values for the flag. Unfortunately, that alone won’t get you the right color for print because both the red and the blue are susceptible to an un-American amount of dot gain. And to make matters worse, Old Glory Blue is out of SWOP gamut. So is our dream of righteous color over?

“Over? Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”

-John Blutarsky

Hell no! So what do you do? You learn about dot gain.

Dot gain is the darkening of colors in print caused by the spreading of ink droplets as they are absorbed into paper. In halftone screens, the larger the dot, the darker the apparent color. So when dots spread, it looks like more ink was applied. Dot gain doesn’t mess with your highlights or shadows much since those dots are too small or too big (i.e. nearly touching) already. Instead, dot gain affects the midtones most. In our flag colors, the midtone colors are the Y in Old Glory Red and M in Old Glory Blue. Dot gain in yellow isn’t that scary since it’s such a weak ink. But we have a big problem with that magenta. And I’ve seen plenty of purplish flags and skies in print to know that most people don’t deal with that problem.

We start by taking either a picture of a flag that is correct or has been corrected with the LAB technique, or a couple swatches of Old Glory Red and Blue in RGB. The next step is to adjust our Photoshop Color Settings. First, change the CMYK working space from SWOP v2 to Custom CMYK. The Separation Options let us replace cyan, magenta, and yellow, with black ink. By doing so, we can reduce the purplish hue while keeping the blue as dark as it should be. The default of Medium GCR gives us an out of gamut blue with 81m and 22y. No thanks. Light GCR, often recommended for offset printing gives us 84m and 25y, even worse. But UCR gives us 74% magenta and 10% yellow.

I think we have a winner. Here’s the magenta and yellow from UCR (top) and light CGR (bottom). If you were trying to avoid purple, which would you add to your cyan?

We’re halfway done. The other thing we need to do in this dialog box is to address the dot gain directly. Switch the Dot Gain setting from Standard to Curves. Now we need to drag the middle of the magenta curve up a bit.

This tells Photoshop how much dot gain we’re expecting on press, so when we convert to CMYK, Photoshop will remove magenta from the image to compensate. I moved cyan down a bit to 70, magenta up to 74, yellow to 68 and black to 74. Why? To leave more cyan, remove more magenta, leave more yellow, and remove more black.

Finally, let’s go ahead and convert to CMYK. And…we did it! The blue is 96c 69m 10y 30k (top). Even with some dot gain, that is going to be blue and not purple. The SWOP v2 default separation settings were going to give us and out of gamut 100c 88m 28y 28k (bottom). Keep in mind what you see here is going to purple up on press when those magenta dots hit the paper, making our UCR, dot gain curved blue, true blue.

When you’re done celebrating, put down the hot dogs and sparklers and go back to your Color Settings. For everyday purposes, restore them to light or medium CGR. You can keep the dot gain settings, but maybe move the magenta down to 70. Only one thing left to say, and the founding fathers said it best:

One of the best aspects of using a program like InDesign is the ability to use styles. With styles, you’re able to create definitions in appearance and apply them to an item. This is great for two reasons. When you’re first creating a document, if you have styles created, you set up the attributes one time and then you just select the items that you want to have those attributes and apply them. The other reason why this is great, and honestly the main reason I love them, because when those attributes change you’re able to change every item that has been styled in one central location.

With paragraph and character styles, you can set up the font, type size, type spacing, hyphenation, ligatures, color, underline, and so much more in one central window. But starting with CS2, InDesign has something wonderful called Object Styles. This lets you pick those attributes that get applied to an object (a frame) so you can apply and edit them the same way you can with text. These will come in handy if you remember the file I used last time you’ll know how basic it is.

In this project, there are going to be four different feature types: “nonfiction”, “fiction”, “biography” and “reference”. The fonts used for each of these types will be different and the color schemes will be different. But the rest of the layout will stay the same.

One of the hardest aspects of making really dynamic templates, is to put on your ESP cap on and try to figure out worse-case scenarios so you can make your job easier later on. In this instance, you may be thinking that you should set it up so each type of feature will have its own layout. And there’s nothing wrong with that. However, it’s possible to use this one template for all 4 feature types, by just changing object and paragraph styles. One thing I’ve learned (often the hard way) is that editors change their mind and nothing is ever set in stone. Colors change after printer test proofs are received. Fonts change, spacing changes, drop-shadows change, so many things change. And you can either be prepared for it, or you can suffer through hundreds, if not thousands, of manual changes.

Another plus with this setup is eliminating places that you can either accidentally change things, or where you have to change things. Say, for example, that the running body text (which will be the same across all four features) changes by .5 pt. You only have to update that style in one template instead of in four. And that one template can be used to update your entire set of files, or your book of files. Or, say, you’re tweaking a Nonfiction style and accidentally change the type size in one template. Of course, because you know its true, you won’t realize the font changed until the end of the project when you’ll have to change them all. With this one-template method, if you realize the error at the end of the project, you can make a case for consistency.

My goal is to show you how you can use this one file, this one template, and simply create three paragraph styles and three object styles for each feature type. It also makes your designers job easier because they don’t have to approve as much. In this workflow, all you’ll need from your designer is:
• The background color for each feature type
• The lozenge color for each feature type
• The lozenge text color for each feature type
• The title color for each feature type.
• The title font for each feature type.

Since all of these styles are the same except for a few items (color, font type, etc.) it’s best to use the “based on” option in your Paragraph Style palette to create these styles. Let’s start with the Paragraph Styles palette and let’s start with the title treatment.

Place your cursor in the text box that contains the word “Away”. Bring up your Paragraph Styles Palette and choose “New Paragraph Style” from the drop-down carat. In the “Style Name” slot type in “Nonfiction Title*” and click through all of the menus to make sure the style is selected as you would see best. Click on OK. You know have your base paragraph style for every feature type. All you’ll have to do is duplicate the Paragraph Style, rename it, and change the options that need to be changed. Sounds pretty easy, eh?

It is. But, here is a little tip that I’ve discovered that has made my templating easier. I try to base as many styles on other other styles as I can. I can always disconnect them, unlink them, later. But if all of my title treatments suddenly need to be underlined, by changing this Nonfiction style, all of the other styles will change as well. However, because the projects I work on go on for years, because there are so many styles across so many file types, I can’t always remember what was the original style that I based all my other styles on. To get around this, I simply add the * at the end of the base style name. This way, every time I go to update that style, I know that other styles will change as well. I try to name my styles in such a way that I can tell which styles are based on this original style as well.

So now that we have our master style, we’ll want to create the style for our three other feature types. With your list of information from your designer you’ll be able to create the four different versions of the following items:
• The non-shadowed title paragraph style
• The shadowed paragraph style
• The object style for the dropshadow
• The lozenge paragraph style
• The lozenge object style
• The background object style

And that’s it. You’ll end up with three object styles and three paragraph styles for each feature type. Not too bad, eh? I didn’t think so. Let’s take a look at what the paragraph styles palette looks like.

At the top of the paragraph styles palette are a few styles with a “1-” in front of the name. If you don’t have InDesign CS3, with its Style Groups, this helps to keep all the paragraph styles that are good for every feature together in one area. Even if you do have CS3, it still might be a good idea to name your styles like this, since it makes them backwards-compatible. If you ever have to save down a version, you won’t lose the style groupings. (With CS2 and earlier, you can’t reorder paragraph styles by dragging and dropping them, so adding numbers, or letters, at the front of the name will help keep them in order of how they’re used. The other paragraph styles at least fall into alphabetical order which means that they stay grouped together by feature type pretty well.)

Now that our paragraph styles are organized, let’s make our base object style and then duplicate it and change it for each feature type. Begin by selecting the background box and choosing “New Object Style” from the menu in the Object Styles palette. Call it “NonfictionBackground*” (remember this will be the style that all other background styles are based on, so it gets the * at the end of the filename).

Object Styles are a little bit different, you want to keep them as simple as possible. So in this case, we’re going to deselect everything except for Fill and you’ll use the color that applies to the Nonfiction background. For the yellow Lozenge, you’ll deselect everything except for Fill, Stroke & Corner Effects, Paragraph Styles, Text Frame General Options, Text Frame Baseline Options. You’ll then select the functions within each of these menus to match the original design provided to you by the designer.

For the text frame that includes the portion of the title with a dropshadow, you can deselect everything except for Fill (which in this case is None), Paragraph Style where you select the style for the Nonfiction type treatment in this case and Drop Shadow & Feather. You’ll set this box as you need to and for all future title treatments you’ll simply have to change the name of the duplicated object style and change the color of the Drop Shadow.

This is what your Object Styles Palette will look like when you’re finished:

You’ve not got the basis that you need for a great template that will be easy for you or anyone else to use with very little information sharing needed on your part. Your styles will make it easy to change anything in the future and your organization system will help to create a clean working file as well as a clean template.

In the next installment of “Create a Template” with Cinnamon Cooper, I’ll discuss master pages and how to decide what goes on them and what doesn’t.

We left off our home improvement project with cobalt blue dahlias and a ruby red driveway. What else can we do but paint the house green?

Here’s the house of someone who is planning to re-paint.

It’s not a great photo, just above camera phone quality, but that’s OK. I can relax and not feel like I have to treat each pixel as though it were my last. The folks who own this house picked some swatches at the paint store and gave them to me, along with the photo.

With the swatches, I could either scan them or try to swipe them from the paint manufacturer’s website. I originally tried the scanning method, figuring that, properly tagged with a profile, the scan should be fairly accurate. It wasn’t. I think my scanner needs to be calibrated, but since I don’t feel like going through that procedure right now, I went to the website and swiped the swatches. The site uses Flash, so I had to do a screen grab to capture the swatches. I opened them up in Photoshop and checked the LAB values.

Ah, LAB color. Telling someone you prefer to work in LAB is like saying you do your taxes with an abacus. Usually they’ll say, “Oh…” and then start talking about something else. LAB can be a real conversation ender. If you were dating another publishing geek, it might be grounds for a break-up.

“I’m sorry, it’s not you, it’s your colorspace.”

Actually, LAB is easy to use once you get the hang of it. The numbers are more intuitive to me than RGB ones. Coming from a prepress world, I still can’t look at RGB numbers and tell you what basic color they represent, like I can for CMYK and LAB. The thing I like most about LAB is that it breaks the lightness value completely away from the color value. Unlike CMYK, where the fickle nature of the black channel means several different sets of numbers can equal the same color, each LAB value is a unique and unambiguous (and some times imaginary) color. Note to self: do some posts on the fundamentals of LAB in the future.

I became a fan of colorizing with LAB after reading Dan Margulis’ book Photoshop LAB Color. Well, “read” is too strong of a word. I attempted to read it, like my son attempts to read the newspaper. He’s 8, so some of the news sails right over his head (thank goodness). I’m the same way when it comes to reading Dan Margulis books. I know there’s really deep stuff there, but it’s often so dense (or maybe I am) that I have a hard time reaching it. I sometimes have to read the same sentence two or three times to really get it. It’s Photoshop as a foreign language and my accent isn’t totally there yet. I’ve taken a few classes by Dan at conferences, and he seems like a decent guy. But he scares the hell out of me in print.

I can still cut myself some slack, though. I first started using Photoshop in 1995, so that makes me a Photoshop teenager. Not old enough to drive or vote in Photoshopland, but I’ve learned a thing or two. I started using LAB only three years ago, so I’m just a LAB toddler. I can walk and talk but occasionally fall down and drool all over myself. Mostly I just have fun playing.

Here’s the first swatch I was asked to try out on the house. It’s called Moss.

More like Dead Moss. The moss that grows on my lawn is a tauntingly vibrant green. Ten times greener than the grass. I couldn’t make it look this dead with a 50 gallon drum of Round-Up and blow torch. Maybe this is fossilized moss. Mossil?

Anyhow, it might be a nice color for this house, so let’s put it on.

The game plan is to drag the Moss swatch into the Photoshop file containing the image of the house, then add an adjustment layer over the house to mimic the color of the swatch. Margulis’s tool of choice is Curves, but if you’re playing along at home, I think you can get useful results from any one of several tools, even our pal Hue/Saturation that we used on the dahlias. So choose your weapon.

But here comes the hard part. You knew there was a hard part coming, didn’t you? The hard part is picking the right spot on the house to match to the swatch. You don’t want anything in the shadows. Nor do you want anything totally washed in sunlight. Ideally the photo would be taken around noon on a day with uniformly neutral gray, but not too-thick cloud cover. The kind of light you find in a MacBeth booth. Since the odds of this are zilch, and there isn’t a MacBeth booth big enough to jam a house into, we may have to hunt and peck around till we get the sweet spot of most “average” lighting.

Our photo was taken on the exact wrong kind of day for our purposes, perfectly clear with the sun casting strong shadows over most of the house. You’ve heard of “Luck of the Irish?” Well I have “Luck of the Scottish.” Let’s leave it at that. That cats with lightsabers job might have been easier. But, no guts, no glory. Take your best guess and drop a color sampler on it. That’s why we’re working on an adjustment layer. Just make sure you have something in the range of a 5 x 5 sample size selected.

Anyway, if I do a crummy job, I can always offer the home owners some free graph paper as a consolation prize.

To proceed, either stick a color sampler on the paint swatch or write down the numbers on a scrap paper or whatever you have handy.

Next, stick a sampler in your best guess of neutral lighting. Then play with your adjustment layer controls till that spot matches the swatch.

That’s it. You’ve perfectly simulated painting the house with Moss. Nothing to do zoom out and admire your craft.

Send it on to the homeowners, who will no doubt reward you with praise and/or beer and salty snacks.

Yup, that’s it……..

OK, there is the slight matter of the entire picture looking like hell. Don’t worry, we can fix it.

To select or extract just the walls of the house away from the tree branches, shrubs, car, trim, and roof is going to he one nasty job. I am far too lazy for that. Especially when I can flip one switch and have Photoshop pretty much do it for me. You’ll find that switch by double-clicking (remember the joys of double-clicking???) on the layer thumbnail to reveal the Layer Style dialog.

This is where our choice to work in LAB is really going to pay off and the person who dumped you for that RGB hotshot is going to come crawling back. The Blend If controls are going to act like Moss-B-Gone. Switch from Lightness to the B channel, and start dragging the slider on the blue end to the middle.

This hides everything that is more blue than yellow from Mossification.

Remember that extra copy of the background layer we created at the start of this job? Turn it on and let the original sky, car, roof, pine trees, and grass show through.

The taillight and some of the grass and mulch is still bad, so a quick and sloppy job with the brush tool to paint some black over those areas on the adjustment layer’s mask will finish the job.

From here, you can paint the house any other color by duplicating the adjustment layer and tweaking the values therein. And while you’re at it, water the grass (or moss), will ya?

One of the fringe benefits of a career in publishing tech is that once in a while you get to use your DTP skills to amaze your friends and family. The other main benefit is the catered meeting leftovers at work (mmmm, corporate brownies).

Granted, it’s not as practical as a plumber who can fix anything that leaks, or a mechanic who can get your car started. But when the iPhoto red eye tool just won’t cut it, I’m your guy. The 8 year old is out of graph paper? No problem, young man. What size, color and weight would you like your grid lines to be? While we’re at it, want to make a picture of the cats fighting with lightsabers? Of course you do.

A more practical application of these skills is to use Photoshop as a home improvement visualization tool. With a photo and a wish list, I can show the results of a home improvement project before anyone ever gets in the car to go to Lowes. Given the money and physical labor of actually doing home improvement, I’m tempted to just Photoshop my dream house and print it out, life size, on a billboard in my front yard. Keeping up with the Joneses just took on a whole new dimension.

Oh look honey, the Rankins printed a new circular driveway, and it’s paved with rubies. How come we never thought of that?

In reality, I’ve used Photoshop to show what it would be like if we took out trees, put in new shrubs, moved the swingset, actually watered the grass… etc. You can do similar stuff with pictures of furniture or appliances from ads and place them into your house. But one of the easiest and most fun things to do is paint a room (or the whole house) with Photoshop.

There are tools on some paint manufacturers’ websites for doing this kind of thing. Benjamin Moore has a thing called Personal Color Viewer 2.0. You start with a photo, either theirs or yours, then define areas by making selections with a tool like the polygon lasso tool, then click on color chips to apply them to that area. For me, there’s just two problems with PCV 2.0: It doesn’t work with Leopard, and it costs $10. Two strikes, and I’m out. If I’m the CEO of Benjamin Moore, this is where some manager gets fired. We are a paint company, n’est ce pas? We make money selling paint. Not software. The software exists to encourage the customer buy more paint. So why are you not pushing this software into the hands of anyone who asks?

Valspar, by Lowes has a nice, free Digital Painter tool, but it doesn’t let you upload your own photos, which in my mind, defeats the purpose. Benjamin Moore struck out on a bad call. Valspar didn’t even get in the batter’s box. Time to roll up our sleves, and do-it-ourselves.

First step in any Photoshop paint project is to put down the drop cloth, i.e. make a back-up of the file, and a copy of the layer you’re working on. It’s the Photoshopper’s version of the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm (to your pixels).

We’ll start our beautification project in the garden, where our dahlias are nice but we want insane ones that will stop traffic.

There are tons of ways to change the color of an item in Photoshop. The simplest might be plain old Hue/Saturation. You may not even need to make a selection beforehand. Just add an adjustment layer to that new layer you made a minute ago. In the dialog, swtich the color range from Master to anything else. Then either click and shift-drag with the eyedropper to define the range you want to replace, or drag the little handles in the color sliders. The goal is to find the range that fits just the thing you’re coloring, and nothing else. In making my mutant dahlia, I squeezed the right side of the color range to avoid yellows, which are in the grass, and opened up the reds, purples, and blues all the way to the left.

You can drag the Hue and Saturation sliders (or use the up/down arrows), but avoid the lightness slider. It kills contrast, and contrast is king.

Now there’s no need to scour the plant catalogs for Martian Blues, you got ‘em. And it took all of 15 seconds.

Next time we’ll actually get around to painting the house.

Tonight was the 10th anniversary of the last episode of Seinfeld (and coincidentally, the last call for Mr. Francis Albert Sinatra). I always got a kick out seeing the Mac in the background of Seinfeld’s apartment, and how he silently “upgraded” each year to Apple’s latest and greatest. In the final season, Jerry even had one of those crazy 20th Anniversary Macs.

Seinfeld is my favorite show of all time, and tonight’s anniversary got me to thinking what my computing life was like ten years ago. The dot come bubble hadn’t yet popped in everyone’s face. Some grave nerds were warning us that Y2K would would be the end of all things. And in my apartment, I connected to the internet via my 28.8k modem, and a Performa 630 running Mac OS 8.1, and believe me, it was uphill. Both ways.

So tonight I set the Wayback machine (literally, the awesome Internet Wayback Machine) for the spring of ’98 to see what was happening in publishing tech. Here are my Top 7 Finds.

7. The May issue of MacAddict reviewed a new product from Macromedia called Dreamweaver 1.0 and gave it a rating of “spiffy.” They were glad that it allowed folks to use that cutting edge CSS stuff. But it was a tad slow, even on a smokin’ PowerMac 8500.

6. A shareware company called Casady & Greene released an application for playing MP3s. They called it SoundJam. I gladly paid for it, and here’s my serial number to prove it: sj1-024-917-43422. SoundJam ruled. Apple realized this, bought it, and harvested the code and re-named it iTunes. OK, you may not think this is publishing tech, but it was to me. I got through innumerable Quark pages only with the sanity-saving help of SoundJam and a good pair of headphones.

5. The W3C made XML an official spec. It’s taken 10 years, but we’re finally figuring out how to make good on the incredible promise of self-describing data. Now if only my data would shut up!

4. The search engine of choice was AltaVista. Most of us hadn’t yet heard of a project at google.stanford.edu which was still in beta, and would go live that September. Keep an eye on these guys, they might be onto something.

3. After sleepwalking through the decade, Apple released the iMac and changed everything. First it came just in Bondi blue, then in a rainbow of colors. By the turn of the millennium, everything from coffee mugs to Volkswagens came in 5 delicious, translucent colors. The iMac has a place in the top 20 consumer products of all-time, but why did it have to come with the dumbest mouse ever invented? Round? Really?…Really?

2. Engineers at Adobe were hard at work on a brand new application called K2, some called it “Quark Killer.” You know it as InDesign. It was still under wraps in the spring of 1998, but on September 2nd at Seybold, it “drew gasps from the assembled publishing professionals.” And soon they weren’t the only ones gasping…

1. In Quark’s Denver headquarters, Fred Ebrahimi, Tim Gill, et al hatch a plan to acquire Adobe in a hostile takeover. This is not a joke. Adobe was in the midst of some bad times, caught in the tractor beam of Apple’s blunders, and needing to lay off about 300 employees to stay afloat. Check out Adobe’s site in April 1998. They were touting Photoshop 4’s hot new features, lifted from Gallery Effects. Things like Chalk & Charcoal, Graphic Pen, Craquelure, Dry Brush, Plastic Wrap, and so on. I have never, ever applied any of these without immediately hitting command-z. Have you? They should be be in a menu called Pre-Undos. In fact, I think the Filter Gallery was invented just to remove the command-zness of undoing these silly effects. Something akin to speed dating to ease the pain of so much rejection.
It was nice meeting you, Smudge Stick. Have a nice life.

Anyway, back to the story.

Quark’s plan was basically that time-honored business strategy of, “if you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em and smother ‘em.” They intended to buy Adobe and kill PageMaker, FrameMaker, and K2/InDesign. Why do I think they came up with this idea after watching The Godfather? On August 18th they sent Adobe an offer they couldn’t refuse.

I think they also traveled to San Jose to make a personal appeal:

Fortunately for every person on Earth who has made a book, magazine, or web page in the last 10 years, Adobe’s response was, “drop dead.” After about a month of getting only John Warnock’s answering machine, Quark got the hint and returned to its core communications model of huge stretches of arrogant silence punctuated by perfunctory vaporware presentations. Man, I should write for Wikipedia.

Seriously, though, take a minute and imagine the publishing world we’d live in if that takeover had happened. The what-ifs boggle my mind. And not in a good way. Bad, bad boggling. I have a creepy feeling we’d still be on Quark 5–and it STILL wouldn’t run on OS X or do tables. Quark XposureShop, anyone???

I think this is all amazing when you look at it as a whole. One year, 1998, saw the end of Frank and floppy discs, Seinfeld and SCSI ports, and the dawn of the iMac, XML, InDesign, Google, and iTunes. Yadda Yadda Yadda indeed.

Sorry for the long dry spell. Real life and real work have taken all my time this past week. I promise it’s gonna start raining fresh content here, within the next 24 hours. Get your umbrella ready. I have 8 posts in draft right now, plus another storm of InDesign templating wisdom from Cinnamon is coming in from Chicago. Hang in there.

During the last year I’ve moved three times at work, and each time I’ve tried to shed some of the sticky detritus of my career in publishing. It’s cube crap, unused in years, but somehow always avoiding the trash bin. Outdated manuals, mystery dongles, piles of spec guide binders, a small moose made of binder clips. Rule of thumb: if you have more loupes than eyes, it’s time to pare down.

I’m also trying to go paperless as much as I can. Ideally I should be able to carry every bit of career knowledge either in my laptop bag or between my ears. Part of this documentation diet involves replacing paper books with ebooks. One of the old books that needed replacing was the classic, Pocket Pal by International Paper.

For those unfamiliar with the Pocket Pal