If you know InDesign and are a member of the Adobe Creative Cloud, then by ramping up your skills and learning DPS – the Digital Publishing Suite – you could be earning serious money very soon. As of early this morning, the Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition has been added to the Adobe Creative Cloud! CC Members will now be able to create, develop, and deliver unlimited iPad apps without writing code.

I offer a one-day intensive course for intermediate and advanced InDesign users – please contact me (info<at>tonyharmer.co.uk – replacing <at> with the appropriate symbol) for more details. IMHO this finally puts the new publishing revolution in the hands of individuals.

Get all the details here:http://bit.ly/DigPubSE

PDF2ID Standard and PDF2ID Professional v3.5 are newest versions of the most popular and accurate PDF-to-InDesign conversion tool in the market today. PDF2ID Standard and PDF2ID Professional v3.5 adds support for InDesign CS6 and also includes the capability to convert Windows XPS files to fully editable InDesign files. PDF2ID v3.5 now uses a modern hybrid 32/64-bit PDF and XPS conversion core resulting in an even more precise PDF-to-InDesign conversion.

“With it’s new compatibility with InDesign CS6, the latest version of PDF2ID will no doubt continue to be a must-have tool for any InDesign user who needs to convert PDFs into native InDesign files – says Chris Kitchener, Product Manager, Adobe® InDesign.”

PDF2ID converts PDF and Windows XPS files into editable InDesign files by recreating the intended construction and layout of the document; forming paragraphs; applying styles; regrouping independent graphic elements; extracting images; creating tables; all automatically without any manual intervention.

Key New Features:

• InDesign CS6 support
  PDF2ID v3.5 supports InDesign CS4-CS6 and includes variable page size PDF
  and XPS file conversion to InDesign.
• Windows XPS File support
  In addition to converting PDF to InDesign format, PDF2ID v3.5 now converts
  Windows XPS files to fully editable and formatted InDesign files.
• Hybrid 32/64-bit PDF/XPS v6.0 reconstruction engine
  PDF2ID v3.5 uses a hybrid 32/64-bit PDF/XPS v6.0 engine, which is 64-bit
  savvy.
• Enhanced Image conversion support
  PDF2ID v3.5 includes new image conversion options so that
  Lab/Grayscale/Indexed Color images without ICC profiles can be converted
  to a specific format independently of RGB/CMYK images.
• Layout Reconstruction v6 engine
  PDF2ID v3.5 uses the v6 layout reconstruction core improving Table
  formation, Complex Vector Graphics to image conversion, Paragraph
  structuring, Frames reduction and Graphics processing.

PDF2ID v3.5 is available immediately in the following configurations from the Recosoft web store in the following configurations (per license):

Prices quoted in $USD – Please check for your local currency
PDF2ID Standard v3.5 US$199.00
PDF2ID Professional v3.5 US$299.00
PDF2ID Standard v3.5 Upgrade  US$99.00
PDF2ID Professional v3.5 Upgrade US$149.00

Markzware have released PDF2DTP and at only $199 is $200 less than Recosoft’s PDF2ID. Although I haven’t had my hands on a copy yet I’ll be really interested to see how this product compares.

PDF2DTP for InDesign CS6 provides an easy and affordable method to migrate content from a PDF into an editable format within Adobe InDesign. PDF2DTP will provide a detailed conversion, bringing PDF elements into a familiar layout and graphic design environment for creative professionals, so that changes can be made as needed. This CS6 plugin will be particularly beneficial to users of InDesign in the Adobe Creative Suite. PDF2DTP will recover embedded images and save them in a job folder, as well as place the text, frames, images and colors back into the InDesign document. It will convert a PDF to InDesign, whether the original PDF was created in QuarkXPress, Microsoft Word or an Internet web page.

Dan Figlo, principal, Moblpress said, “In our design business, we are sometimes asked to work from PDFs when clients don’t have access to the original design files. Our current workflow involves reconstructing the pages from scratch and using the PDFs for little more than a reference. To speed up this clumsy process, we have tested numerous dedicated applications and InDesign plugins. Some of the apps we tested chugged along so slowly that we wondered if they had hung, and when they did finish, there were often inaccuracies in the content or layout to clean up. Two even crashed InDesign CS6. None came close to the processing speed or produced cleaner or more accurate InDesign files than Markzware’s PDF2DTP – even though it was still in Beta when we tested it. The choice was a no-brainer for us.”

While PDFs are nice for viewing, it is difficult to actually edit PDF in order to make changes for business productivity purposes. The new Markzware PDF2DTP for InDesign CS6 plugin makes it simple to edit PDF content within a new InDesign document.

Independent design professional, Glen Saville said, “PDF2DTP has saved me a day or two simply processing the images. I was able to start working on the text in a new design in InDesign, and copy and paste the images from the converted file. Brilliant! This not only saved me time, but saved the editor retyping the whole thing! What got me was somehow it preserved where the original designer had put little bits of text into separate text boxes on tricky test run-arounds, so I was able to keep the text making sense! Another brilliant, useful tool from Markzware!”

Timus Rees, professional in graphic and technical illustration, said of this InDesign CS6 plugin, “I was amazed and very pleased that each document opened and converted quickly. Wow! This is a very powerful program! It is the type of ‘save the day’ program that we (the spoiled customers of Markzware) have come to expect.”

Brad Squires, creative director, Bold Type Design said, “I have been using the PDF2DTP plugin and I love it! Previously, I had used another product, but it did very strange things with all the text boxes – breaking text blocks into seemingly arbitrary parts and adding dozens of paragraph and character styles. I noticed that Markzware’s PDF2DTP for Adobe InDesign product handles all this very elegantly, leaving no need for all the cleanup.”

System Requirements, Pricing and Availability:

The PDF2DTP for InDesign CS6 plugin to convert a PDF file to InDesign is available immediately at the PDF2DTP InDesign Store for $199. (PDF2DTP for InDesign CS5.5 is $149 and PDF2DTP for InDesign CS5 is $149). You can obtain the system requirements for Macintosh and Windows platforms, as well as purchase PDF2DTP for InDesign CS6, PDF2DTP for InDesign CS5.5, or PDF2DTP for InDesign CS5, through the PDF2DTP product page.

PDF2DTP

I really should spend more time in Fireworks. This great Zurb UI kit is available for $9.95 (that’s about £6.55 today) from fireworkstoolkits.com, which has very recently launched.

There are so many great UI Frameworks available to create high quality web applications and sites. jQuery UI, Sencha Touch, Bootstrap and Foundation are some of the more popular frameworks available. That is, if you can code html and css. Some designers can code and some can not code. I realized that there is a very obvious solition, to make vectors of these toolkits. Since Fireworks is my tool of choice, naturally I made these for use with Adobe Fireworks.

Check it out.

State of Create UK 2012 Poster

I’m on holiday this week but just wanted to pop on and mention that Adobe UK have published their State of Create UK Report (http://adobe.ly/MR6eww) – I love the poster used to illustrate the highlights – love it, love it, love it.

The report has some interesting points and of particular interest to me was this paragraph:

Workplace challenges When it comes to creativity in the workplace, people in the UK are faced with a dilemma: 51% say they are expected to think creatively at work, however many feel the workplace is not conducive to creativity. 32% want more time to be able to think creatively and 33% want training to learn how to use different creative tools.

I’d say that in 95% of the workplaces that I visit, it is the first or only training that the delegates have had, some of whom have been operating the software for years. Everyone benefits from the training, they are more confident, faster and the benefits they reap in being able to work more effectively should not only buy them time for more throughput, but if studio bosses are wise – more creative time.

I’ve seen bad habits aplenty and these are usually learned behaviours supported by the phrase “we’ve always done it that way”. “Always” may refer to processes dating back to the dawn of the DeskTop Publishing era – nearly thirty years ago. I’m also constantly surprised by people operating the beautiful software that InDesign is, in exactly the same way as they would do with Quark – and at the same speed – shameful, and it’s their own time they are wasting (although someone else is paying for it, I’m sure).

Think of anything that you do really well – it’s probably because you don’t have to think to much about actually doing it that means you can get creative with it – just saying…

I think it is nearly impossible to speak of Adobe’s Creative Cloud service and their Touch Apps too highly. I’ve been using them for a little while now and if to be honest I’m reaching productivity levels now that I could only have dreamed of before. I’m currently using Ideas, Photoshop Touch and Proto, although I do have and play with Collage, Easel, Lava and Nav (see the Adobe website for more on the last three). Here’s my quick take on these brilliant touch apps and the Creative Cloud (with links through to the product pages on the Adobe website).

Adobe Ideas is the one app that is getting almost daily use from me at the moment. Now if inspiration arrives when I’m on the train travelling to or from work, or between jobs out comes the iPad and with my Wacom Bamboo Stylus start sketching something up in Ideas straight away. Unlike working in my sketchbook though, the file uploads to the cloud as soon as I get into work (my iPad is Wi-Fi – I’m so buying a data plan next time around) and is available to use in Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign as soon as I log in on my desktop. I can also directly from Ideas mail the file on to a colleague or client and start the ball rolling on a project, too.

Ideas has layers (although you do buy these as an add-on) and the ability to import a photo onto a layer that you can use as a tracing image by lowering the layer opacity. The controls are really easy to use and you can vary colour, opacity and brush size. The file format when emailed is PDF, and you can download the original .idea file (opens in Illustrator) or as a PDF, or if you want raster (.ideas and .pdf are both vectors) JPEG or PNG.

Photoshop Touch has been the subject of many a movie by Russell Brown on Adobe TV and is surprisingly powerful – check them out here. It supports a wide range of adjustments with a really neat interface, as well as several effects and a gradient tool that Photoshop should have – in fact I’m amazed that it still has the same one it’s had for years (but that’s another story, I guess). I first used this when I had gone to Stonehenge very early one morning (actually a bit too early – I had to wait 45 minutes for it to open) to get some shots for friends in California. I shot them on the DSLR and then took a few with the iPad camera. Later in the cafeteria having a coffee before moving on I found I was able to process the iPad shots quickly and it was fun!

Collage is an app for creating digital mood boards and I’ve only played with this so far – maybe because I haven’t had a suitable project to use it on but do plan to get into it a bit more. The Collage page on the Adobe website lists the following as highlighted features:

• Create modern moodboards with mixed media.
• Import PDF, PSD, and AI files.
• Search and import Google and Flickr images.
• Draw with multiple pen types.
• Add text with a variety of fonts.

Kuler hasn’t made it to iOS yet although it is available for Android. I like using the Kuler website and the extensions in my apps – I’m sure  it’ll be a useful addition when I finally get it on my devices but I’m not in too much of a rush as colour themes are generated automatically from the files you upload to the Creative Cloud. Fantastic for getting quick themes from images you grab on the move just because you “like the colours you’re seeing.”

Cloud membership also gets you the entire Master Collection, as well as Adobe Muse and Adobe Edge, which are not available as boxed or download product. Here in the UK (check for your region) you can get a special offer (up until September 2012) on your first year of Cloud membership if you have CS3, 4 or 5 products and if you buy three Touch apps you get an additional month free. My advice to you is grab this with both hands, now.

Using symbols appropriately in Illustrator converts through perfectly to the <symbol> markup in SVG and trimmed loads off the finished file. I’m still convinced that SVG’s day is just around the corner – with Illustrator right at the front of the field as a production tool.

Partly because I’m really looking forward to the release of the Avengers movie (probably the less said about it the better though) and (mostly) because I’m always trying to get people to realise just how powerful the appearance panel is inside of Illustrator, I thought I’d come up with a nice Captain America shield graphic from just one object. Here’s how that comes together.

Start out with a 5-pointed star using the Star Tool, with a white fill and no stroke. If you want to use the same numbers as I’m doing here, then make your star by clicking with the Star Tool and using the following dimensions: Radius 1 = 64px, radius 2 = 24px, Points = 5 (otherwise you’ll just need to experiment).

Go to the appearance panel and add a new fill. Choose a blue fill colour, and then drag this fill beneath the original one. Making sure that the new fill is selected in the Appearance panel, go to Effect > Convert to Shape > Ellipse… The settings I used were as follows: Relative; Extra Width -10px, Extra height -10px. You may notice that the star doesn’t sit directly in the centre of the circle, so select your original white fill (in the Appearance Panel) and go to Effect > Distort and Transform > Transform… and shift the star up a bit. I moved it vertically by a value of -6px.

Now click on your modified blue fill and click the Duplicate Selected Item button at the bottom of the Appearance Panel, giving you two fills – you’ll be repeating this step a couple more times in just a minute. Select the bottom-most of those two fills and change its colour to Red, and if it isn’t visible already, click the small triangle to the left of the word fill to expand its properties. Click on the Ellipse hyperlink to edit it., and modify the Relative values to 10px and 10px.

Repeat this step twice more by selecting the bottom fill, duplicating it and editing the properties (colour and Ellipse effect properties). Make the next fill white with the following Ellipse values: 30px, 30px, then the final red fill has the values 50px, 50px.

Make the stroke colour black and about 5 – 7px in weight. This will be applied to the star shape to begin with but you can alt-drag the ellipse effect from the bottom fill onto the stroke to copy it there. You should have something that looks like the picture below.

Next I added a couple of shading gradients – these are essentially black to black and white to white gradients that have different opacities such as 100% at one end and 0% at the other. I duplicated the largest fill and moved it up to the top of the stack and added a black-black gradient, with the blending mode set to Multiply. This is achieved by clicking on the Opacity hyperlink related to the fill. I duplicated that effect to strengthen it a bit and then duplicated that once more, moving the new fill to the very top of the stack just beneath the stroke and then applied a white-white gradient with the blend mode set to Screen. Here’s a shot of the final, fully expanded Appearance Panel.

Registered users of this blog and FaceBook followers can download the source file for this exercise from the link below (you won’t see the link if you’re not registered and signed in). Support files are available to registered users of the site only. Please Login or Register to access the link.

On my Facebook page (facebook.com/TonyHarmerTraining) today I’ve posted a really short – and silent – video that demonstrates in just a few easy steps how to use Photoshop’s Colour Range feature. The what? The Colour Range feature – it’s been there for absolutely ages and before you go reaching for the Magic Wand give this a go – you might be really surprised at the results!

I’ve heard Lynda.com’s Michael Ninness call the Magic Wand the Tragic Wand – I don’t think that’s because of the tool itself, but more around the efforts and coping strategies employed by those trying to make it work for them against the odds, when there are features like Colour Range that may be able to achieve what they’re after in a fraction of the time.

Shading gradients give us a way to add form to our otherwise flat images and drawings, by adding highlights, shadows or perhaps both. The trick to getting these “right” is to make sure that your gradient is the same colour at either end, which will make sure you get a nice smooth blend to transparency. If that sounds a bit confusing, here’s the explanation that will hopefully clear it up.

If your shading gradients end up with a flat, matte looking blend as illustrated above, then you’re probably doing what I see quite often in this sort of thing, simply using a default black to white gradient with one stop or the other set to an opacity of 0%.

So what’s happening? If you imagine the colour and the transparency as two separate things for a moment (which is actually pretty much as it is) and think about the colour that would be at 50% of a gradient from black to white. Neutral grey, right? Now think about the opacity/transparency (both sides of the same coin for me so you choose) and what you’d have at the 50% mark there- so the end result of the two combined would be neutral grey at 50% opacity.

So if you set both ends to the same colour, you’ll get exactly that colour, at whatever opacity you want. Easy!

This one comes up from time-to-time as people explore some of the path effects: Outline Object. You may well have tried this one yourself, and been baffled by the result – it doesn’t seem to do anything and surely you’d just add a stroke to a shape?

You may well just think that it’s a feature from an earlier version of Illustrator that the engineers have just forgotten to remove and leave it at that, but the persistent and curious will know that’s extremely unlikely and dig a little deeper.

The help system is usually the next port-of-call but that’s usually pretty fruitless – and again persistence may well lead you to discover that it works with images. So, you place an image in your document, apply the effect and… it suddenly disappears – eek! “Maybe I should add the stroke first,” you think, and one rapid undo later you find yourself trying to add a stroke by clicking firstly on the swatches (with the focus on the stroke attribute, of course) only to find that nothing happens there either – but you’ll be pleased to know that you are on the right track, at least.

What’s needed now is a trip to the appearance panel, and adding a new stroke either by:

• clicking the icon at the bottom of the panel (first one on the left)
• visiting the panel menu and choosing “add new stroke“
• or, if you’re a super-duper-power-user with the shortcut alt-cmd-/

Once you’ve done that, all you then need to do is apply the effect and (hey presto!) it works. You can add other strokes to it as well to build up effects – mystery solved.

Adobe have a really exciting announcement today for all of you print designers wanting to start making web sites but without learning any code. Muse is a brand new product that is now in public beta and will be available via subscription from early 2012.

With Muse (Adobe’s code name for this great new product) you can use familiar tools such as Photoshop, Fireworks and Illustrator to create your graphics and then use them in your site designs as easily as you’d lay out print designs inside of InDesign. You can have interactive elements and precise control over typography and so much more – get yourself over to the Muse site here: http://muse.adobe.com/index.html

As one of the few UK trainers involved in the prerelease I’ll be offering training in Muse immediately – please contact me for details.

James and my fellow IDUG rep from Serbia, Marijan Tompa have cooked up a script that enables you to create form fields (and more) directly in InDesign – although you do need Acrobat Pro installed as well. Although i haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, Iam looking forward to this job finishing so I can have a play with it.

It also seems only fair that seeing as this began with a rhyme, this milestone deserves at least a verse (or two three).

I’d cried out for forms,
Had my pleas gone unheard?
When I went to Adobe,
They’d not hear the word,
They were all very nice,
And they listened, and smiled,
But my ask wasn’t trendy,
Or Flash-y, or wild

But James Fritz had heard me,
I wasn’t a fool!
And others were saying
“now that would be cool”
James contacted Tomaxxi,
Who makes magic scripts,
And now it’s out there
With the InDesign tips

Go to InDesign Secrets,
The script’s there for all,
Use it and test it,
Then later – say Fall,
Contact Adobe,
Let them know how you feel,
Then for all InDesigners,
My wish becomes real

James also mailed me a short while ago and said that now I’ll have to find something else to complain about – I’ve told him that my next composition will be an oldskool rap entitled “yo! Where’d the Photoshop cursor go?” – how many of you have had that problem, I wonder.

p.s
Someone said to me that I’m going to get a name as ‘the forms guy’ – please take note that this isn’t part of my wish.

p.p.s
I’d rather be the Creative Suite Poet.

Used by millions of us every day, this ligature of the letters “et” (Latin for “and”) can now be shown off in all its glory thanks to the iPad’s superb display quality. We hope you’ll agree that the gallery we’ve created has resulted in each page effectively becoming a piece of art in its own right.

It’s a great publication and the best bit is that it’s free! Please be sure to help Chris along with a rating in the store.
Well done, Chris.

Dear Adobe…
I love InDesign, I really do
It has changed my life
And I’m grateful to you
Such a pleasure to use
Yet so powerful too
Getting things done so quickly
Unlike I used to…
…you know …in that other package

With laying out pages
No longer a chore
There were hours to fill
And more work through the door
I got so much more done
In less time
With less pain
Although I’ll admit
That my fees stayed …the same

And so things continued
Bit of this, bit of that
I branched out a bit
And I learned Acrobat
The software of course
PDF right enough
Not the circus performer
Balancing stuff

All of the standards
X, A, and E
Preflight and fixups
…Eventually
My PDFs rocked
Boxes media and trim
And they could be shared
With him, her and him

I made things interactive
And all “off the cuff”
Bookmarks and buttons
Yeah, this is the stuff
Layers, transitions,
I cooked up a storm
And I soon fell in love
With the sweet AcroForm

Adding form fields and drop-downs
No jumping through hoops
Checkboxes for ticking
And radio groups
So quickly filled in
Then mailed with a click
Enabled for Reader
Well, it’s just so darn slick

Customers loved it
So easy to sell
Not hard to convince them
I really did well
Just one thing made working
With forms rather tough
To-ing and fro-ing
Sometimes a bit rough

I continued regardless
And managed to cope
But sometimes I thought
And that thought became hope
InDesign surely
Will soon add this feature
They must see the value
Do I need a preacher?

Then I got distracted
I’d heard rumours around
In the next InDesign
Yet more cool features found
Too many to list
In this three-minute rhyme
They packed so much in
I just don’t have the time

Never far from my mind
Forms came back to the fore
They belonged in the software
Of that I was sure
Although ID was great
There was no form support
In my mind “maybe next time”
…well …that’s what I thought

So “next time” arrived
And I readied my cash
But InDesign branched out
And now we had Flash
The turn of a page
When we swipe at the borders
Though while page curls are great
They can’t handle orders

Eighteen months later
More features for screen
We could animate just about
Everything seen
Motion path presets
The odd MP3
Multi-state objects
And of course FLV

The gap tool is useful
Split columns and span
Live captions a bonus
I’m really a fan
Document fonts
- Inspired I say -
If you’d added form stuff
You’d have blown me away

A dot release followed
- It’s still pretty new -
And I’m very pleased
With the things it can do
Epub’s on my radar
Don’t misunderstand
But I’d hoped by now
To have form stuff in hand

I know where I’m going
To make myself heard
I’ll visit the website
And type in the word
I’ll wrap it with others
And make out my case
Why we should have forms
And why forms have a place

Please listen, Adobe
How hard can it be?
Some of us need it
Are you guys with me?
It might not be killer
To that I’ll admit
Cross your fingers and wish
Cos I just clicked submit

Named Anchors and ID Attributes

For this exercise we’ll use a nice big chunk of text. Open a new copy of blank.htm (see this post if you haven’t been following along) and save that as named.htm, then visit http://hello-world.org.uk/named.htm and copy everything that you see on that page; once back in your text document, select all (cmd-a/ctrl-a) and then paste to overwrite with the new text.

Named Anchors

First we’ll add a named anchor at the top of the page, just before the <h1> element there, like so:

<a name="top" id="top"></a><h1>Named Anchors and ID Attributes</h1>

It is the same tag as we used yesterday, only with two new attributes – name and id – instead of the href (so it doesn’t go anywhere) and the tags don’t wrap around anything, so there’s no ‘trigger’ to fire it. You could do without the name attribute probably, as it is only there for compatibility with older browsers – much older browsers. The ID attribute however is very useful, as it allows us to individually name elements of tha page, and once you start giving things names, it is easy for the browser to find them, and more importantly, you can tell them how to look and how to behave (although that’s for later).

Adding an ID attribute

Go down the page and locate the <h2> that contains the words Section 7. Add an ID attribute to the opening tag like so:

<h2 id="section7">Section 7</h2>

Notice how the name is section7 and not section 7 – it is important that you understand that names cannot contain spaces, and that applies to everything, including file and directory/folder names; try to keep that in mind.

Adding the Links to the List

All of the other links in the page have been added for you, so now we’ll create links between the list at the top of the page and the various sections. Add the following to the first item in the list:

<li><a href="#section1">Section One</a></li>

When you’re targeting an ID, the name is preceded by a [number sign | hash | square | octothorpe] (choose as applicable): #

Continue through the list so you end up with:

<li><a href="#section1">Section One</a></li>
<li><a href="#section2">Section Two</a></li>
<li><a href="#section3">Section Three</a></li>
<li><a href="#section4">Section Four</a></li>
<li><a href="#section5">Section Five</a></li>
<li><a href="#section6">Section Six</a></li>
<li><a href="#section7">Section Seven</a></li>

You should now be able to preview your saved file in a browser and all of the links should work, jumping you to the relevant section. Links back to the top of the page have been added for you at the end of each paragraph. If you’re on a monitor that’s quite large, you might want to make your browser window smaller so you can see the effect better.

Extra Credit – Linking to an Anchor on Another Page

You could always try linking to this page from one of the pages you made already, or a new one created from your blank.htm template file. The href part of the link would link to the document first, immediately followed by the ID, like this:

href="named.htm#section4"

Give it a try!

Links are the web. To be able to move from one resource to another with a simple click is the amazing thing that sets the documents of the web apart from their paper ancestors (or maybe cousins). Not too long ago, researching a topic usually involved at least one trip to the library (at the time of writing this, you may soon have to look up what one of those was), and usually several more, either to wait for a particular book to come in, or for the ‘gentleman of the road’ (asleep in front of the book you want) to move on.

If you’re thinking that there’s a <link> tag coming up today you’ll be disappointed, as although there is a tag by that name, it is used for a different purpose – in the fluid realm of hypertext, resources are anchored to one another, so the tag used is the anchor <a> tag.

Adding the Anchor Tags

Continuing on from the previous exercise, add anchor tags before and after the word "Wikipedia" in your second definition, like this:

<dd>Find out more about HTML on <a>Wikipedia</a></dd>

Whatever is wrapped by the anchor tags, becomes the ‘trigger’ that makes the link work. At the moment, the word ‘Wikipedia’ would be the clickable part of that line, but if your code looked like this:

<dd>Find out more <a>about HTML on Wikipedia</a></dd>

then ‘about HTML on Wikipedia‘ would all be clickable.

Href

The anchor tags on their own don’t actually do anything – they require an attribute to give them functionality. Attributes give the browser information about that element, and some – as in this case, with the href attribute – are required. The href attribute is a shortening of the term "hypertext reference" and points to the destination of the link. As with all attributes they are added to the start tag and as a name="value" pair, like this:

<dd>Find out more about HTML on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Html">Wikipedia</a></dd>

Save your work and test it in your browser.

Absolute and Relative

The link you just added uses an absolute path – path is the word used to describe the route to any resource – and contain all of the information necessary to get to there. Within your own site, you can use relative paths – add a new paragraph to your glossary document, after the closing <dl> tag.

</dl>

<p>Back to my Test Page</p>

Now we’ll make the words "Test Page" link back to your test.htm file:

<p>Back to my <a href="test.htm">Test Page</a></p>

This much shorter attribute is possible because the link and the link destination have a relationship to one another – they are on the same site and in the same folder – whereas the link to Wikipedia is not, so the whole thing has to be spelt out. Think of this like the telephone system; if you and one of your friends live in the same area code, you can dial just their number and reach them. If you have another friend that lives in another country, you’ve got to dial "00" to make an international call, and then the country code, and then the area code and so on.

Introduction

You could supposedly guess the main intention of the definition list by the name it carries, and you’d be right – it is perfect for use in glossaries (the example you’ll be making today) and dictionary-type listings – although with a bit of thought it can be turned to many uses, from screenplays to estate listings, there’s so much that can be achieved with this inbuilt structural element.

New Document

For this exercise we’ll start with a new document, as this will also set us up for the next exercises. Copy the code below (everything inside – but not including – the asterisks) then select all in your test.htm document and paste the code you have copied to replace it. Save this as blank.htm, so you have a blank ‘template’ with which to work in future, and then again as glossary.htm – the file we’ll work with today – you may also want to modify the title and heading of this document, but that isn’t important.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html>

<head>

<title>Title Goes Here</title>

</head>

<body>

<h1>Heading</h1>

</body>
</html>

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Creating a Definition List

The markup for a definition list uses <dl> tags, and has two child elements, a definition term <dt> and a definition description <dd>. As we did with the unordered and ordered lists before, we’ll add the <dl> tags immediately below the h1 element.

<body>

<h1>Glossary</h1>

<dl>

</dl>

Now we can add the <dt> tags for our definition term, and of course something to define – let’s use HTML as an example.

<dl>

<dt>HTML</dt>

</dl>

Now we can follow that up with the <dd> tags for a description.

<dt>HTML</dt>

<dd>HyperText Markup Language</dd>

Save your document and load it into your browser – you should see something like this:

HTML

HyperText Markup Language

You’re not limited to one term or description for each item either, let’s add another <dd> to what we have already.

<dt>HTML</dt>

<dd>HyperText Markup Language</dd>

<dd>Find out more about HTML on Wikipedia</dd>

You should now have this:

HTML

HyperText Markup Language

Find out more about HTML on Wikipedia

While you’re learning all of these new terms, it might be a nice exercise – if you have the time – to actually add more terms and definitions for the stuff you’re learning here, as then you’ll have a resource of your own to refer to, and it’s great practice. We’ll be building on this exercise tomorrow when we take our first look at links.

Introduction

Lists are great for structuring information, and HTML gives us three categories to use:

• Unordered – like the list you’re looking at now, a collection of items
• Ordered – where the order is important, like a recipe method perhaps
• Definitions – intended for defining terms

We’ll create a definition list in the next exercise and revisit them – perhaps the least used, but very flexible and suited to a wide range of applications – at a later point.

Lists

A concept you will be learning more about soon is the document tree, and the heirachies and relationships within HTML documents, in particular parent/child relationships. Lists are a really great way to introduce the topic, but don’t worry, this isn’t where we go and watch some nature films and have a ‘little chat’ – there will be no awkward diagrams or anything like that; HTML elements have children on their own.

Lists are parents that must have child elements – they cannot exist just on their own. The children of unordered and ordered lists are list items and are marked up using the <li> tag. Just as in nature though, we’ll start by creating the parent first.

Unordered Lists

Underneath your introductory paragraph, add the tags for an unordered list as shown below

<p>My name is Tony and I live in Somerset</p>

<ul>

</ul>

Once you’ve done that, add some list items between those tags. To make them easier to read later, you may want to indent them as I have here, use either a tab or a couple of spaces – it doesn’t matter which.

<ul>

<li>HTML</li>

<li>CSS</li>

<li>Glossary</li>

</ul>

Save your work and view your page in a browser, you should see something like this:

• HTML
• CSS
• Glossary

Ordered Lists

Copy the list you have there, and paste it below the unordered list as shown below – then edit the <ul> tags and change them to <ol> tags.

<ul>

<li>HTML</li>

<li>CSS</li>

<li>Glossary</li>

</ul>

<ol>

<li>HTML</li>

<li>CSS</li>

<li>Glossary</li>

</ol>

When you view your saved file in your browser, it should look like this:

• HTML
• CSS
• Glossary

1. HTML
2. CSS
3. Glossary

Nested Lists

It’s also possible to create nested lists – lists within lists – and in fact several navigation systems use this approach. For a bit of extra credit – why not save another version of this file, and try adding this code:

<ul>

<li>HTML

<ul>

<li>4.0</li>

<li>XHTML</li>

<li>HTML5</li>

</ul>

</li>

<li>CSS</li>

<li>Glossary</li>

</ul>

A video accompanying this post is available on my Facebook page.

Comments

Comments are very useful in markup (as they are in styles and scripts – but more on that later) they can help you make sense of where you are, what you’re doing, where you’ve been – when you revisit code you haven’t seen in a while – and are also a really useful debugging tool, one of the things you’ll see in this exercise.

HTML comments look like this:

<!–here is an html comment –>

Your comments can be as long or as short as you need, and can contain anything with just one exception, double hyphens aren’t allowed. In the first part of this exercise, we’ll just add a simple comment between two lines of our source code, then a couple of comments to help make sense of the markup we’ve produced already (as before, changes in bold type). Add a comment between your <h1> and <p> elements, as shown, then save your work and preview the file in your browser.

<h1>Hello World</h1>

<!– here is an HTML comment –>

<p>My name is Tony and I live in Somerset</p>

You shouldn’t see any change at all as comments aren’t rendered by the browser. Just to prove to you that it is there however, take a look at the source code in the browser by going to the View menu – you’ll find a command like “View Source”, “Page Source” or similar (if you’re using Google Chrome, it’ll be in View > Developer > Page Source).

Now you’ve seen it in action (or now that you haven’t) let’s take that one out and add a couple that may suggest how comments can be slightly more useful.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html>

<head>

<title>My First Web Page</title>

</head>

<!– head section complete, start body –>

<body>

<h1>Hello World</h1>

<p>My name is Tony and I live in Somerset</p>

</body>

<!– body complete –>

</html>

You might not be completely sold on the benefit of this at the moment, but trust me – once you get into divs, sections, asides and more then using comments in this way is almost essential. Let’s try using comments to selectively hide items on our page – there are several uses for this but it is primarily an excellent debugging technique – if something isn’t working the way it should, you just start commenting out your code from the point it is working, and then move the comment around until you find the naughty, misbehaving code.

Try this:

<!–

<h1>Hello World</h1>

<p>My name is Tony and I live in Somerset</p>

–>

Save and refresh your view in the browser – you should be looking at an empty window! Now return to your text editor and move the closing part of the comment up between the <h1> and <p> elements.

<!–

<h1>Hello World</h1>

–>

<p>My name is Tony and I live in Somerset</p>

Now if you save your file and refresh in your browser, the paragraph text is back. And that’s how it works. Remove the comment around the <h1> and save your file.

A video accompanying this exercise is available on my Facebook page.

Introduction

Yesterday you made the simplest of pages with just a couple of lines of text and then marked those up with HTML to give them some structure. Today we’re going to build on that – you’re going to learn a bit more about markup, and also the skeleton of a page.

HTML Pages

HTML pages are composed of two distinct areas, the <head> and the <body>. It is the markup in the body section that we see rendered by the browser in its window (Glossary term: Viewport), whereas the tags in the head section carry information about the page, and details of how the browser should render it.

The <head> section

We don’t usually see anything that we put into the head section, although the <title> tag – you’ll be adding one today – is an exception. There are only a handful of tags to learn for the head and these are:

• <title> – this is the only one that is required, and its name should speak for itself
• <meta> – metadata gives information about the content of the page
• <link> – defines the location of an external resource used by the page, such as an external stylesheet or script
• <base> – defines the base location for links on a page (a sort of “start from here” if you like); not used too often
• <script> – contains scripting for interactive elements on the page
• <style> – contains styling information directly related to this page only

So, let’s take the document we were working on yesterday and add those sections (changes marked in bold). You’ll notice that I have left a line or two extra space in there – I suggest you do the same as we’ll be adding more to this in just a minute.

<html>

<head>

</head>

<body>

<h1>Hello World</h1>

<p>My name is Tony and I live in Somerset</p>

</body>

</html>

Done – now add in the title element between the <head> tags:

<head>

<title>My First Web Page</title>

</head>

You can now load this into your browser and you’ll see that your title appears in the browser’s title bar (if it has one) and/or in the page tab (both outcomes are shown below).

We’ll come back to more head content soon enough, but for now there is one more thing we should put outside of the body area of our page: a doctype.

<!Doctype>

You may or not be aware that there are a few different flavours of HTML out there – you can find HTML 3, HTML 4.01, XHTML and HTML5 and perhaps others. They all have slightly different rules – a bit like the differences between British English and American English – an English reader would understand the differences providing they knew which version was being used at the time. The doctype declaration does that for browsers, so it understands toh-ma-toe / to-may-toe kind of thing. Although HTML5 is fast coming into play and understood by many browsers already, the most common doctype you’re likely to find ‘out there’ is XHTML 1.0 so we’ll use that in our page. Here’s how it looks:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>

Most people break it across two lines like that as it looks neater. The doctype declaration has to go in before any of the HTML tags – add one to your page like so:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>

<html>

<head>

Make sure your document is saved.

A bit of good news

It’s a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it? I’ve always been glad of Dreamweaver inserting that for me automatically – and always had to copy and paste it in when I’ve been running courses. The good news is that in HTML5, the doctype declaration couldn’t be easier – even I can commit this one to memory: <!DOCTYPE html> – and that’s it. Much easier.

A video accompanying this post is available on my Facebook page.

Introduction

Having taught hundreds of people how to get started with HTML and CSS, for quite some time my intention has been to produce some sort of guide which I can eventually turn into a book – so by producing these articles I am essentially organising the structure to make that happen. You’re now involved in that process – hopefully I’ll get some valuable feedback that I can use, then flesh that out with lots of little asides and pictures, and my book will be ready to go; then I can get fabulously rich on the proceeds, marry Kate Winslet and go and live on an island somewhere sunny. Ok, that last bit is a bit of a stretch of the imagination – fortunately I already live on an island and it is sunny here at least some of the time.

This is really aimed at the non-technical amongst us, although you never know… so everyone is welcome and I’d be happy to hear back from you whatever your experience level, although the more teh-savvy might find them a bit slow at first as these guides are going to be for the most part brief, tiny steps that you should be able to easily accomplish in your lunch break and still feel like you’ve had a… well, break.

Initially, I’ll be using nothing more than a simple text editor, and after that I’ll be using Adobe Dreamweaver although you should be able to continue along with most of the exercises with your text editor if you don’t have Dreamweaver – you’ll just have quite a bit more typing to do.

Before you begin your first exercise, let’s start out by just having a look at some HTML, just so you can be a bit more familiar with how it works.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language. The important words in the HTML abbreviation are in my opinion the last two: markup language. What HTML does is give is a way of providing structure to a body of text (and quite often make its meaning clear) by marking it up – look at this example of some text.

HTML and CSS for Beginners

Introduction

You’re learning HTML and CSS

I’m now going to mark up this text. The markup is applied using ‘tags’ that (mostly) wrap around the elements within your text, like this:

<h1>HTML and CSS for Beginners</h1>

<h2>Introduction</h2>

<p>You’re learning HTML and CSS.</p>

All that has happened here is I’ve made it clear that the first line is a heading – level 1, the next line is another heading inferior to the first (think subheading) – level 2, and that what follows is some paragraph text. Notice how the tag at the beginning of the markup is repeated at the end only with a slash preceding it. This is called closing a tag and most tags require this – but not all, as you’ll see over the next few days.

Hello World

It’s time to start your first exercise. Begin by creating yourself a folder somewhere on your system – it doesn’t matter where as long as you can find it easily – and name it myFirstWebPage or similar. Now open a text editor – TextEdit on the Mac, or Notepad (not WordPad) on Windows. If you’re using TextEdit, make sure that it is in plain text mode – if you can see a formatting bar at the top of the document you’re in rich text mode – and you can change that in the Format menu (Make Plain Text is what you’re looking for). Now type a couple of lines a shown, although you’ll most likely want to use your own name/residence.

Hello World

My name is Tony and I live in Somerset.

That’s it. Now save the file into the folder you created as test.htm (see the note below) and leave your text editor open.

Saving from your Text Editor

On the Mac, you may get a warning dialog about the extension – click the button ‘Use .htm‘ if it appears. On Notepad, you’ll have to do a couple of things – firstly, enable All Files from the files of type drop-down, and secondly (although not essential, just perhaps wise) choose UTF-8 from the encoding drop-down.

Open a browser, and in the File menu you’ll find an Open or Open File command – choose that and then navigate to your test.htm file. The browser window should now be showing you the text you’ve typed. Leave your browser open and switch back to your text editor, where we’ll mark up the text. First though, we need to tell the browser to read the text as html – add the tags to your text as shown:

<html>

Hello World

My name is Tony and I live in Somerset

</html>

Then add <h1> tags to your first line of text, and <p> tags to the second, like this:

<html>

<h1>Hello World</h1>

<p>My name is Tony and I live in Somerset</p>

</html>

Save your document (don’t do a Save As… here, just a quick File > Save or cmd-s/ctrl-s will do) then return to your browser and reload the page using cmd-r/ctrl-r if you’re on Safari, Firefox or similar, and F5 if you’re using IE. You should now be seeing something like the picture at the top of the page.

Congratulations! You’ve made your first web page, all by hand and in just a few minutes. Hopefully, you’ll have seen that learning HTML isn’t too difficult at all – and you’ll be ready for the next post when you can build on what you’ve done today.

A video accompanies this post over on my Facebook page.

Here’s hoping that 2011 is a good year for all of you.

If you want to change Photoshop CS5′s HUD (Heads Up Display) colour picker (with a painting tool active, ctrl+alt+cmd+click on the Mac, alt+shift+right-click on Windows) from the default Hue strip to a colour wheel, change the option in the Preferences>General category.

It even removes the colour if you backspace – try typing “Go” and then backspacing the “o”.

Continuing with my series of InDesign tips every two weeks, here’s a quick tip to help those of you working with threaded text. As always, Windows users need to substitute the CMD key with CTRL and if you’re on a U.S. Mac keyboard, substitute Alt with Option.

Navigating Threaded Text Frames

If you work on publications, then you probably have stories that begin on one page, and then continue on other pages elsewhere – sometimes separated by several pages. With the Selection Tool, if you click on one of the text frames, you can navigate through threaded text frames by using CMD-ALT-PAGEDOWN and CMD-ALT-PAGEUP. Using the same shortcut when you’re working with the Type Tool will select the contents of the next frame in the thread. You can jump to the first or last frame in a threaded story by adding the SHIFT key into the mix.

Don’t have a pagedown key (I’m typing this from my Macbook Pro which doesn’t have such a key) then you’ll need to use the Fn key and the DOWN/UP arrows (so Fn-CMD-ALT-DOWN for example).

Here’s a really quick tip, but as you know I think it’s worth it even saving you a few seconds…

Using layers makes sense in organising your content – but isn’t it a drag (pun intended) if you want to add a layer beneath your current layer? It doesn’t have to be – simply hold down the command key (ctrl on windows) when you click the new layer icon and the layer will be added beneath the current one.

As usual, Windows users should substitute CMD with CTRL and if you’re on a US Mac keyboard substitute the ALT with OPTION.

Making the components

Use the pencil tool to draw a simple bumpy line, as I have done above.

Use the shortcut CMD-ALT-J to invoke the average command – it is under the Object > Path submenu. Select the horizontal radio button and click ok.

You should end up with something that looks like the above. Leave that selected and double-click on the reflect tool in the toolbox.

Once again, select the horizontal option; click copy.

Switch to the Direct Selection Tool (A) and drag a selection marquee over the last endpoint of the top and bottom lines to select them both.

Once again, use the average command – this time choosing the both option – and then join the two points together by using the Join command – CMD-J (this is also available from the Object > Path menu). Repeat this at the other end of the lines to create a closed shape.

Go to the brushes panel and click on the new brush icon at the bottom. Choose art brush from the dialog and just click ok in the options dialog. If you want, you can repeat these steps a couple more times to create a couple of other brushes to use as well – this technique works best when there’s more than one and the image below shows my brushes panel for this exercise with three new brushes created.

Creating the Appearance

Now you can draw a rectangle with no fill and apply the brush stroke to it by clicking on the stroke in the brushes panel.

If you created more than one new brush, go to the Appearance panel, choose Add New Stroke from the panel menu and apply another (different) brush stroke to your shape.

Repeat as necessary – my shape ended up with the three brushes I’d created added to it, as pictured above. Keep it selected.

Defining and applying the Style

Switch to the Graphic Styles panel and either click the new icon at the bottom of the panel or choose New Graphic Style from the panel menu. All of the attributes of your rectangle now become a style.

All that’s left to do now is to click on a bit of text (or indeed any other object) then select your graphic style from the panel, and you’re done!

Thanks for all the positive feedback about Illustrator Week – I’m really glad that so many of you are getting something from it and enjoying it.

Next week will be another InDesign tip and coming up soon: Dreamweaver Day!

Stay Tuned.

http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/customers/

1. Draw multiple instances of a shape by holding down the tilde (~) key as you draw. Can be really cool for creating interesting patterns and spirograph style shapes.
2. Find yourself reselecting the same things? Save a selection! If you’ve got something selected and it’s taken you more than a minute or so to get it, then you won’t want to be doing it again, will you? Go to Select > Save Selection.
3. In a related topic, did you know you can also save views of your document? Once you’ve got your view set up, go to View > New View – done!
4. Don’t forget that most of your dialog boxes can handle simple math – if you want to draw a rectangle that’s a third of 196 mm (random sample from my head) for example, just enter 196/3 in the width field of the rectangle dialog and you won’t have to go reaching into your desk drawer to rescue the blu-tack covered calculator from the back.
5. To copy an artboard complete with it’s contents, select the artboard tool (SHIFT-O) make sure that move/copy artwork with artboard is enabled (pictured below) and alt-drag the artboard you want to copy.

Here’s a simple technique to create a Celtic knotwork style strip, using a line, the zig-zag effect, the Live Paint tools and finishing up creating a pattern brush.

Creating the Knotwork

Begin by creating a short horizontal line with the line tool and then leaving that selected, choose Effects > Distort & Transform > Zig Zag.

In the dialog, choose a fairly large size (I’ve gone for 38, but this will depend on the length of your line), with 2 ridges per segment and smooth points, as shown.

increase the stroke weight so the line gets nice and chunky, then choose Object > Expand Appearance followed by Object > Expand.

You should be left with a filled shape as shown above.

Next, select the Reflect Tool and double-click on it in the toolbox – set the options to vertical, 90º and click copy. Select both shapes and then choose Object > Live Paint > Make.

Now you’ll need the live paint bucket – the quick key for it is K – and to make sure that it’s set up for what we’ll need to do next, double-click it in the toolbox. Make sure that both paint fills and paint strokes are checked.

Select a white fill colour, and drag across the areas that are currently black – be careful to avoid the ‘holes’ as they will fill as well.

Set up your stroke in the control strip – choose black for the colour, set a heavier line weight and make sure that the end-cap is set to butt-cap as shown.

When you approach the line segments on your shape with the paint bucket tool, you should see the cursor change from a bucket to a brush. Click on the line segments as shown, so that you get the characteristic  cross-over from Celtic knotwork patterns.

Create a Pattern Brush

There’s still a bit of work to be done to turn this into a pattern we can use on straight lines – we need to firstly get rid of the lines at the ends – select the scissors tool (C) and click on the end vectors, as illustrated above.

After that, clean up by using the LIve Paint Selection Tool (SHIFT-L) to select the end pieces then delete them. The result can now be expanded (Object > Expand).

Keeping the artwork selected, go to the Brushes panel, click on its panel menu and selecy New Brush. In the dialog, choose Pattern Brush. You should see that the first option contains a copy of your graphic (shown above). All you need to do now is draw some straight lines, then apply your new brush stroke to them.

Begin by selecting the line tool – the quick key for this is the backslash \ and then click at the top left-hand corner of your document. In the Line Tool dialog enter a length that is about 120% of your document width – in the example I’ve shown here my document is 800 pixels wide so my line length is 960px – and set the angle to 30º.

Switch to the Selection Tool by tapping V on your keyboard and alt-drag a copy of your line down as far as you want the grid size to be, then use CMD-D to repeat the last operation; continue using the shortcut until your page is covered.

Select all (CMD-A) then select the reflect tool by pressing O on the keyboard, and alt-click the light-blue registration mark on the centre of the page, or double-click on the tool in the toolbox. Set the options to Vertical and the angle field should say 90º then click Copy.

You can now convert the lines to guides straight away with CMD-5, or clean it up a little first and there are various ways you can do so – I prefer to draw a line along the top of the document, then choose object > path > divide objects below and delete the bits I don’t want; rinse and repeat with the side and the bottom.

1. Use cmd-6 (ctrl-6 on Windows) to shift ‘focus’ to the first available input field on the control strip – want that in English? Thought so – try this: select an object on your layout, hit cmd-6 and you’ll notice that the x field becomes highlighted so you can simply type a new value there. Select some text with the type tool – hit cmd-6 and the font field becomes highlighted (if you’ve got the character options available, otherwise you’ll get the left indent field). Tab to move between boxes or shift-tab to move backwards – give it a go, you’ll see that even some of the icons respond to the keyboard!
2. To exit the type tool and go immediately to the selection tool, just hit escape (esc) on your keyboard – short and sweet, that’s it – but a real time saver.
3. Use the eyedropper to quickly apply paragraph styles: click on a styled paragraph to ‘load’ the cursor, and then click to apply on other paragraphs. To resample if you need to, hold down the ‘alt’ key. To modify what the tool samples double-click the tool in the toolbox.
4. To add a vertical and horizontal ruler guide at the same time – hold down the cmd key (ctrl 0n Windows) and drag from the ruler intersection (see picture below) – bam! – Two for One!
5. Use the ‘Jump to Page’ shortcut – cmd-J (ctrl-J on Windows) to navigate your document quickly. If you’re on page 1, and you want to go to page 7, do cmd-J, hit 7, hit return – you’re there. Want to go to a master page? Simply type the master page prefix – so, if I’m on page 7 and I want to go to my A-Master, cmd-J, type A, hit return and I’m there – when I’m ready to go back to page 7, cmd-J, hit 7, hit return.

Ruler Intersection Point

[SS55]

Well, here we are at the end of this InDesign Fortnight feature – I hope you’ve gained some useful stuff over the last two weeks and if you’d like to see something like this again, let me know!

We’re going to finish up with libraries, and this video should give you a good start – I hope you enjoy it.

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You can find out much more about InDesign, meet other users and win great prizes – join an official Adobe InDesign user group near you: http://www.indesignusergroup.com/chapters/index.php?ref=menu

Here’s one that can be used if you’ve got any strictly repeating structure and one of the tricks that I love presenting – it’s so much formatting applied with just one click.

I’m using a document containing some soccer fixtures – it has everything we need in the way of structure (which is essential here – any variation will cause this to break) and if you want to download a copy (in IDML format) via this link.

Mis en Place

Although mis en place is a culinary term I’m going to borrow it here – it means ‘everything in place’ (chefs don’t want to go scrabbling around for utensils while they’re preparing food) – and the InDesign equivalent is the workspace. As we’re going to be dealing mainly with typography let’s use a suitable workspace – go to the workspace switcher and choose Typography from the list – it’s probably a good idea to expand the panels by clicking the double-arrows at the top of the panel set, too. Workspace switching isn’t used enough in my opinion – it’s a lightning fast way to access the tools you need without having panels littered all over the place – if you don’t use it already, you really should give it a try.

Creating the Type Styles

We’ll begin by creating paragraph styles for each line, and a character style for the match date – we’ll do that first so that we can use it in one of the paragraph styles. Create a new character style which we will call “Red” and set it up as follows: Font Style: Bold, Character Colour – choose red from the default swatches. Don’t add anything to any of the other fields to make this style as flexible as possible – we’ll let the paragraph styles do the rest of the work.

There are going to be three paragraph styles here (as shown above) and we’re going to create them in the reverse order that they’ll be used, so that we can use Next Style.

Begin by making the style for the match detail – we’ll name it “Detail” and the options I’ve used (you may want to vary these – I’ve kept them very basic and specific to my region) are as follows:

Font: Arial, Regular, 10pt

Language: English UK

Space After: 3mm

I’ve also created a nested style to apply the character style “Red” to the first ‘word’ in that style which takes care of the date. Just in case you’ve never done this before, here’s how:

In the Drop Caps and Nested Styles category, click the New Nested Style button. From the drop-down choose your “Red” character style and if necessary modify the other options in that line to “through” “1″ and “words” as in the image above (click on it to see a larger view if you need to); this will work as there are no spaces in the date so it’s considered as a ‘word’ here. We’ll have to revisit this style at the end of this process but for now you can click OK and then we’ll create the next style for the ‘group’ line – I’ve called mine “Group” and it has the following attributes:

Next Style: Detail

Font: Arial, Italic, 12pt

Space After: 2mm

with that style completed we just need to create one more, called “Match”:

Next Style: Group

Font: Arial Black, Regular, 17pt

Space After: 2mm

Finally, we need to go back into the “Detail” style options and set the Next Style there to “Match” – now we’ve created a formatting loop and – again – that’s why a consistent structure is vital, any change to the pattern will cause this to break.

How Next Style Works

Next Style is a really powerful little feature – what it does is when you reach the end of a paragraph as you type, it automatically switches to the next style. Combining that with Quick Apply to get to the top of the ‘style tree’ means that you can format type incredibly quickly – one of my two minute tip podcasts covers it and you can watch that here. So how is it going to help us with that list if it’s meant to work when you’re typing? The answer is by putting it into an Object Style.

Creating the Object Style

In the Control Strip locate the Object Style button and drop-down. Click on the button and select New Object Style – we’ll call it “worldCup”.

Although it won’t hurt to leave them on, I’m going to set most of the Basic Attributes categories here to Ignore (shown by a small line in the checkboxes) with the exception of the Paragraph Styles – you can do this by alt-clicking on the Paragraph Styles check box twice (once turns all the attributes on, the second turns the others off). Now click on the category to access its detail area and then set the Paragraph Style to “Match” – enable the Apply Next Style checkbox and you’re done – it’s ready to use!

Click on the text frame containing the unstyled list and then either by using Quick Apply or the Object Styles drop-down, choose worldCup and – as if by magic – your list is completely styled. There are so many ways to use this feature – I use it on call-out boxes all the time and the only thing is that they must adhere to a rigid repeating structure (think of what we’ve done here: Match – Group – Detail – Match – Group – Detail… ).

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Although probably not one of the show-stopping features of InDesign CS5, the new options for captions are a great productivity bonus for so many document types – and every little helps.

Static Captions

Of the two kinds of captions available you’re likely to come across static captions first – you’ll notice that when you import an image there’s an additional option available in the bottom of the import dialog: Create Static Caption.

Placing an image

Placing the image caption

This will generate you a text box at the same time and by default will contain the file name of the file being placed – although this can be modified in the preferences. Any changes to the content of the box will need to be modified manually, but at least you get a frame populated with some text ready to work on.

Live Captions

The power of this feature comes from InDesign CS5′s increased support for metadata – data stored in a file about the file – and it is becoming more and more an essential part of everyday workflows (especially cross-media and variable data publishing), so if you’re not familiar with this already then now might be a good time to start learning! Just an aside for a moment – if you want to have a look at a ‘metadata panel’ go to File > File Info… (in InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, etc.) and you’ll see just how much data can be added to the file – you can also use Bridge to add/edit metadata for several files at once. To find out more about metadata in general – and how it enhances the file (searchability…) – try reading more on Wikipedia for starters and follow that up with a link (on the same page) to the Adobe eXtensible Metadata Platform: XMP.

Now that’s out of the way, back to Live Captions – the best place to start is with caption setup, that can be accessed from Object > Captions > Caption Setup. From here you can set up exactly what you want your caption to include – you can type directly into the two available fields, or add special characters from the small menus to the right of each field.

The drop-down in the middle gives you access to the different metadata you can add – there’s a lot – and if you need still more then  there are two icons at the end of the row that allow you to add and remove more. After that, you can determine the position and style of the caption – these attributes can be set and applied to static captions also – such as where the caption appears, the caption’s offset, paragraph style and even the layer on which the caption is placed.

The important thing to know once you’re out of the dialog is that the frame containing the caption must be either touching an imported file’s frame or grouped with it (the option to do that does also exist in the Caption Setup dialog) – if not you’ll get text inside the frame with the words <No Intersecting Link>.

Adding captions to links that are already placed is simple, too – right-click the link and choose Captions > Generate Live Caption or simply create a copy from an existing caption by alt-dragging it to the other links and it should update with the new data.

You can also convert your live captions to static captions (right-click and choose Captions > Convert to Static Caption) and indeed it may be necessary at certain times to do so – the captions are essentially a text variable and text variables don’t wrap; if you have a particularly long text string in a description for example, it may have to be converted so that you can wrap the text.

BTW – this works with other placed files, not just images – even placed ID files!

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Yesterday we took a look at bulleted lists, today we’re going to take a look at numbered lists and nested lists – lists inside a list item.

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Creating Your List

Creating a numbered list is remarkably similar at the outset to creating a bulleted list (see yesterday’s post: http://bit.ly/9t7EFP) but there are more options to be explored and some powerful features that make working with more complex multilevel lists much easier.

For that reason,  although the same ‘one-click’ functionality is available in the options bar, it is best to work with numbered lists inside a style for all but the simplest single-instance lists. Not only that, but to allow InDesign to manage the list numbers across stories and even documents (in the case of a book file) it is best to begin by defining a list.

Defining Your List

To do so, go to Type > Bulleted & Numbered Lists > Define Lists.

All you need to do here is to click the New button and name your new list (my example is called adobeProductList). Completing this step enables InDesign to do three things, two of which can be determined in this dialog – enabling the continuation of list numbers across stories and/or books, and additionally list levels – the key to multilevel lists.

Creating a Style for the Top Level of the List

With a text cursor placed inside one of the paragraphs to be at the top (first) level of my list, We’re going to create a new paragraph style. Making sure to check the Apply Style to Selection and Preview boxes, we can begin by naming the style – my example here is called productListMain – then set some simple text attributes (font, size, style, space before/after and so on); after that I’m going straight to the Bullets and Numbering category. As soon as you choose numbers from the List Type drop-down, you’ll see your text change and a number is inserted before the list item.

Next, associate your paragraph style with your list from the earlier step, although if you’d missed that out you can see that – just as with character and paragraph styles – you’ve got the option to create a new list from inside this dialog; choose your list from the drop-down and leave the Level field set at 1.

Now to choose the numbering format – I’m going to keep the top level of my list with the default numbering (1,2,3…). The number field is next and you’ll see that this is already populated with some metacharacters – ^#.^t . All they add up to is a number (^#) – to be precise, this actually means the current number from this level) – followed by a period (.) and then a tab (^t). Let’s decide not to have the tab character at this level and replace it with something else; highlight the ^t and then from the menu over to the right of the field, choose Insert Special Character > EnSpace – you’ll get a new metacharacter that looks something like this: ^>.

Now to add a character style for the number – there’s a good reason for doing this – the number will take on the style of the list item, which means that if you have a list item that has an italic style on it for example, then the number will take on that style. I created a style from inside the dialog that set the character format to regular with a red colour. Leave the Mode drop-down set to Continue from Previous Number. As there may be more than nine items at this level, we’ll set the alignment options to Right so that single and multiple digit numbers will align correctly. We’ll finish off this style by creating some indent for the numbers (I’ve gone for 10mm in my example); in this list there will only be single words so there’s no need for us to set a negative first-line indent. We can now click OK and a few moments later (using Quick Apply – if you’ve never come across it before read the section ‘applying the style quickly’ from day one of InDesign Fortnight) the top-level items are styled.

Creating the Next Level of the List

This is where the nested part comes in, and you’ve probably already guessed how it’s done – all we need to do is create a new paragraph style for the next level of the list, associating it with our existing list (that’s the magic step). With a text cursor inside one of the nested items, we can create a new paragraph style (mine is called productListDetail) and continue as before by setting the basic text attributes. When we get to the Bullets and Numbering category, again choose numbers from the List Type drop-down and then choose your list from the List menu – this time set the Level field to 2.

We can now set the format – I’m choosing letters (a, b, c…) for this level – and then turn our attention to the format field. This time, we’ll click before the current number metacharacter (^#) and from the menu on the right choose Insert Number Placeholder > Level 1 – if you’ve got preview turned on you should be seeing 1a now at the front of the list item. If you want, you could copy my example – I’ve manually added some parenthesis around the current number metacharacter, removed the period and replaced the tab with another En space: ^1(^#)^> is how it looks. After that it’s just a matter of playing with the indents to get them looking good and you’re done!

Converting the Numbers for the Clipboard

Something you need to keep in mind is that the numbers are added almost like an effect to your paragraphs – they don’t actually ‘exist’ as such (try selecting them – you’ll be there awhile) and this can cause you a problem should you need to paste the text into another application (like Keynote, Word or Powerpoint for example). The workaround is to copy the text into a new text frame (so you don’t ruin the flexibility of your original), then select it, and go to Type > Bulleted & Numbered Lists > Convert Numbering to Text – you’ll then be able to copy that text and paste it into your other application.

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Welcome to the second week of InDesign Fortnight – we’re going to begin this week by taking a look at lists, starting today with bulleted lists and continuing tomorrow with numbered lists and nested or multilevel lists. Although this particular tip is aimed at fairly new users, there’s a nugget or two in here for those of you with a bit more experience, too.

Creating a Bulleted List

To create a bulleted list on the fly, all you need to do is to be in a text frame and click the Bulleted List button – which you can usually find with the paragraph options in the control strip…

…any text you had selected will be formatted, or anything you type afterwards will be formatted.

Accessing the Options.

Alt-clciking on the Bulleted List button will bring up the Bullets and Numbering dialog, from which you can set up your list in more detail.

Firstly, you can choose a character to use as your bullet. A small selection is there by default, but you can add (and remove) a character from any font on your system to that list by clicking the buttons to the right of the available choices.

Advanced tip: if you’ve ever wondered what the little red u is for in the corner of some of the presets, it means that the character is specified by its Unicode value, and is not font-specific. You can specify this by deselecting the Remember Font with Bullet option in the Add dialog, although you’ll need to make sure that it is a character that is present in the font you’re using.

Next, you can specify what follows your bullet (and precedes your item). This is usually populated with a metacharacter such as ˆt but you can type anything in here – including the metacharacters if you know them – or there is a list available just to the right of the field, as shown above.

The next option is to specify a character style for your bullet. InDesign CS4 and CS5 allow you to create a style from inside this menu if you don’t already have one – in the example shown I’m creating a style named ‘red’ that changes the character colour, so I’ll end up with a red bullet.

Finally in this dialog, and this is where the waters can become somewhat muddy, are the options for positioning. Whereas ordinarily – with text – alignment relates to the frame edge and your paragraph, here it is concerning the bullet and which part of the bullet – left-edge, centre or right-edge as the reference point for the first-line indent.

The diagram above tries to illustrate this; choosing left alignment, the reference point would be the left edge (A), centre alignment (B) and right alignment (C).

If you’re likely to have more than single lines for your list items, then you’re going to need to set indents. Begin with the Left Indent, this specifies how far the lines after the first line are indented. After that, set the First Line Indent, this specifies where the bullet or number is positioned and is normally a negative value of the Left Indent – for example, if you have a left indent of 5mm, your first line indent would be -5mm.

The Tab Position field allows you to specify where InDesign will move the list item to if the distance between the number and the list item reaches zero (obviously this doesn’t really apply to bullets here, as they retain a constant width).

Styling Your List.

The intelligent way to work is almost always to create your list styles as a paragraph style, and all of the options here are present under the Bullets and Numbering category in the Paragraph Style dialog. If you’ve got more than one single instance of your list in your document, or if you want to be able to use the same formatting in other documents with the minimum of effort – turn it into a style!

Sorting Your Items.

If you’ve got a list and you’d like to sort it into ascending or descending alphabetical order, then there is help at hand! In InDesign CS4, go to Window > Automation > Scripts, CS5 users: Window > Utilities > Scripts to bring up the Scripts panel. Once you’ve got that open (and making sure that your list is selected) then inside the Scripts panel, open the Samples folder, then the JavaScript folder and double-click the sortParagraps.jsx script; a dialog will appear – choose the options you want (really straightforward) and click OK – job done!

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It’s the end of the first week of InDesign Fortnight and in this special edition of the Suite Spot podcast I’ll be getting you started with special finishes in InDesign.

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Welcome to day four of InDesign Fortnight – Today we’re going to look at one of my favourite topics – creative suite integration between InDesign and placed Photoshop and Illustrator files. Even though I’ve done this many times at different events, and hundreds of times with classes, I’m still really surprised to find how many users (even those who’ve been using ID for quite a while) don’t really explore the options available to them with linked graphics files, or really use the advantages offered by integrating with Photoshop and Illustrator. We’re going to take a look at using layer options when we import a file and when the file is placed. If you’re in a situation where you are creating multiple versions of a file, this is probably going to save you lots of work, more than likely going to save you disk space and definitely going to make you faster.

A PSD File, in its Natural Environment.

As you can see from the layers panel, there are three different background colours here – I’m not sure which of these my client is going to want to use, and there’s also the chance that I’ll just have to use the picture of the woman on her own too – to save time later I’ve created four layer comps in Photoshop, one of each background colour and one with just the woman on transparency.

Placing the PSD file in InDesign

In the InDesign layout we can place the file by using the shortcut cmd-D (ctrl-D on Windows) or go to File > Place – make sure that Show Import Options is selected at the bottom of the dialog asking you to locate the file.

Next you’ll get the options dialog, and one of the tabbed options you will have there is layers – you’ll be able to see all of the layers in the Photoshop file and choose which you want to use when you place the file; if you’ve used layer comps then there’s a drop-down for that, too.

Changing you mind

If you need to change the view later on, there’s no relinking to another file necessary – simply right-click on the image and select Object Layer Options and you can make the modifications you need.

I sometimes use this when I want to show a client different versions of a file; place the first version and the alt-drag copies from it – then choose the object layer options on the copies to show the different versions – you can then send them a PDF or share your screen and get them to choose.

Illustrator Files

AI files have the same options, but there is a twist – and this one can save you loads of time, if you ever have to present different versions of the same art in the kind of scenario I’m going to use here. In the file I’m using, I have three versions of a graphic: one in full colour, one in greyscale and one in mono; each version is on its own layer.

Placing the AI File in InDesign

Again, when placing the file, make sure that Show Import Options is selected at the bottom of the place dialog and then you’ll get the Place PDF options (Illustrator files are PDF compatible); from the Options section, choose Bounding Box (in IDCS5, you’ll have two bounding box options – for this choose the one for Visible Layers Only). Next, click the layers tab in the dialog and turn on the visibility for just the layer you want to use now – on the version here I’ve selected the colour layer by alt-clicking on the visibility icon (which turns off the other two layers straight away).

Quick Change

If you find you suddenly need a greyscale or mono version of the graphic instead, again there’s no running off to place another file or relinking – simply right-click and again choose Object Layer Options; alt-clcik the visibility icon for the version you require and click OK – you’re done. Because all three graphics are exctly the same size in Illustrator, they won’t shift in InDesign – it simply swaps them over – perfect; it often isn’t necessary at all to have loads of different file versions all over the place – work smarter!

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Relinking Files

Relinking individual files is pretty simple – in the links panel, select the file you want to relink and click the relink button – you can also do this with multiple files selected in the links panel.

Relinking to a Folder

Sometimes though, you want to relink a whole bunch of files to a completely different set of files. Here’s a scenario that you may come across from time-to-time – a client emails you a bunch of low-resolution JPEG files to use in a document, and mails a disc over with the full-resolution files on (PSD’s, TIFF’s or whatever).

While you wait for the disc to arrive, you work on your layout using the low-res files. All you need to do when the disc arrives is (probably copy the files to a hard drive then…) select the files to be relinked in the links panel and choose Relink to Folder from the links panel’s panel menu.

You’ll get a dialog box asking you to locate the folder and you have a couple of options there – to match the filename and extension, or to match the filename and specify a new extension – simply type the file extension in the input box and ID will play an enhanced game of ‘Snap” while you sit back and relax – for a few seconds – it’s really fast.

Relink File Extension

This is a new feature in InDesign CS5 and I find this really useful. Quite often files sent from clients – usually JPEG’s these days – need a little work afterwards; I always save JPEG files as PSD’s (in the same folder – you can create this as an action in Photoshop, too) when working on them so I can work non-destructively and all that’s needed when back in InDesign is to select the files I’ve worked on in the links panel then choose Relink File Extension from the panel menu. The dialog that appears asks for the file extension and that’s it – done!

Advanced Tip: This is also really useful if you use Quicktime Movies in your interactive ID files and want to update them to FLV, F4V or MP4 – you can convert the files using the Adobe Media Encoder and then use Relink File Extension to replace them.

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Welcome to Day 2 of InDesign Fortnight – although most of the tips in this feature will apply to several versions, there is one feature of InDesign CS5 I think has to be among the most requested that I come across regularly; ‘straddle heads’ (as I’ve always known them, anyway) are headlines and perhaps bylines that span columns. InDesign CS5 allows you to span columns and also split them simply by selecting text and choosing the option you want from a drop-down. here are a couple of examples that will show you how to use it.

Splitting text

Here we have a single story in a single-column text box.

Select the text, then locate the Span Columns button in the control strip…

or if you have got the Paragraph panel open choose ‘Span Columns‘ from the panel menu…

Choose the number of columns you’d like your text split into…

and the text splits into two sub-columns. Below shows the same technique applied to a list inside a block of text.

Spanning Columns

Here we have a text box which is split into two columns (cmd-B on the Mac, ctrl-B on the pc to access the text frame options)…

select the headline text, then choose Span 2 from the Span Columns drop-down…

and the text now spans two columns.

Fine Tuning

If you want to modify the gutter (space between columns) or add some space-before and space-after values, then you’ll need to select span columns from the paragraph panel menu or the control strip panel menu (as far on the right at the top as you can go, usually) then choose Span Columns… from the context menu (shown below).

From there you’ll have the options as shown.

Advanced Tip: Span columns can also be set as part of a paragraph style!

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Safari 5 is out and it’s really fast, but the thing that really grabs me is the new Reader function – the browser detects when an article is available and the reader button appears in the address bar – or you can use the shortcut Shift-Cmd-R – and the article dispalys in a clutter-free modal view. I love it!

The text size can be changed by using cmd = | cmd - and you can reset the text zise by using Cmd-0. You can exit the reader by tapping esc (or by using the Shift-Cmd-R shortcut  or by clicking the reader button again).

There’s also a new Nitro rendering engine, even greater HTML5 support (yay!) an improved web inspector and hardware acceleration for pc users.

Welcome to InDesign Fortnight!

The idea is to give you ten tips over the next ten working days that work for you – for users of all levels. There will be at least one video tip each week and please feel free to comment on the posts and/or make suggestions for future features – if there’s something you want to learn in any of the Design Premium applications, let me know!

Today, we’re going to look at how a character style can help us with dynamic spelling – there are three parts to this particular tip, getting Dynamic Spelling set up, creating the Character Style and applying the Character Style quickly. This tip will work in InDesign CS5, CS4 and CS3.

Dynamic Spelling

Dynamic Spelling can be enabled by going to the preferences (on a Mac, InDesign > Preferences > Spelling | on a PC, Edit > Preferences > Spelling) and checking the box as shown in the above image, or by choosing Edit > Spelling > Dynamic Spelling from the menu system. Whenever InDesign comes across a word it doesn’t recognise (ID checks against the current language dictionary) it will ‘flag’ it – if you’ve ever used a product like Microsoft Word, you’ll be familiar with it straight away.

Setting up the Character Style

Select the Type Tool (Fastest Route: Tap T on your keyboard) and make sure that the control strip is in character mode (look at the buttons on the extreme left on the strip – you’ll see an A button – that’s the one you want selected).

Power User Tip: you can switch between the Character and paragraph options by using cmd-alt-7 (ctrl-alt-7 on a PC)

There are several ways that we can create character styles, but for now we’ll click the character style button in the control strip and choose New Character Style from the context menu that appears.

The first thing we’re going to need to do here is to give the style a name – I’ve named mine 01noLanguage – you’ll perhaps see why I chose to start this with a number later on. We’re going to make this style as flexible as possible, so we only need to change one thing here – from the categories on the left-hand side of the dialog box, choose Advanced Character Formats; you’ll see the last item on the right now is a drop-down for language and you can choose [No Language] from there. That’s it – done – you can click OK and close the dialog. By not specifying anything else the only attribute that will be modified by this style is the spelling language, which means we can use it on headings as well as body text and so on.

Applying the Style Quickly

Here’s the really powerful bit of this tutorial – and I’m still surprised to find how many users don’t know of its existence despite it being around for absolutely ages now: Quick Apply. To invoke Quick Apply all you need to do is hold down cmd on a mac, ctrl on a pc and hit return – the quick apply dialog will appear. The example shown is using my default spelling of English, and the word Repoussé appears quite often – it’s spelt correctly, just in French and so InDesign (which is currently using an English dictionary) flags it. We could have set the language to French earlier on, but I chose the no language option here so I can apply it in several different instances in my document – think about using it on a URL fro example (which of course is ok provided you know that the word is spelt correctly in the first place… ).

If you are working along with this and want the same text as I’m using here simply copy the quote below and paste it into an InDesign document.
Note: Just in case you’re wondering – Repoussé is a new feature in Photoshop CS5.

Using Repoussé
The term repoussé describes a metalworking technique in which object faces are shaped and patterned by hammering on the opposite side. In Photoshop, the Repoussé command converts 2D objects into 3D meshes, which you can precisely extrude, inflate, and reposition in 3D space.

So, let’s select the word (I’m going to assume you’re using the same text as me now) we want to apply our style to – with the Type Tool selected double click on the word Repoussé – then invoke Quick Apply as described above. All you need to do now is hit zero on your keyboard (remember that we named the style beginning with a zero) which will highlight your no language character style and hit return again to apply it – you’re done. This is a technique that’s fairly easy to pick up, and with practice you can perform a range of actions quicker this way than almost any other method – investigate and find out more about Quick Apply on the Adobe InDesign Help pages.

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Photoshop Week went down quite well, so from this Monday (14th June) for the next two working weeks we’ll be having InDesign Fortnight – Ten Working Days, Ten Tips That Work! The tips are going to be for users at all levels, and there will be at least one video tip each week, too.

Here’s a nice one for the weekend – with a few juicy shortcuts thrown in – to turn a photo into a pencil-like sketch (PC users substitute Ctrl for Cmd):

1. Open a suitable image
2. Add a black and white adjustment layer, tune as required
3. Create a new merged copy layer – Cmd-alt-shift-E
4. Duplicate the layer – cmd-J
5. Invert that layer – Cmd-I
6. Change the blending mode to Colour Dodge – Shift-alt-D
7. Run the Gaussian Blur filter and tune as required

Enjoy!

Need to open a flattened version of a layered Photoshop file? In the open dialog, hold down shift and alt as you click open – Photoshop will ask you if you want to read the composite data; click OK and you’ll get a flattened version – really useful if you want a quick look at a file that has tons of layers.

Hey, Tony; I have a load of images that I need to convert to [JPEG | TIFF | PSD], and I’d also like to set their size to fit a scheme and maybe a couple of other things – like add copyright info and perhaps run some actions… could I write one big action that does all that?

The answer of course is yes, but herein lies another great undiscovered Photoshop nugget – the Image Processor, which you’ll find in the scripts menu (File > Scripts > Image Processor) – it’s really easy to figure out and if you want to run more than one action, just create a ‘parent’ action that runs the other actions you require.

This will save you ages!

To fill a selection or the background/current layer with the foreground colour, most users know the shortcut alt-backspace – in my experience slightly lesser known is that you can also use cmd-backspace to fill with the background colour, cmd-alt-backspace to fill from the currently selected history state, cmd-shift-backspace to fill with the background and preserve the transparency (of a layer) and cmd-alt-shift-backspace to fill from the history and preserve the transparency. If you’re on Windows, substitute cmd with ctrl

Also it is well worth learning the shortcut to launch the fill dialog box which gives you a lot more options, and if you’re using CS5 then you also get quick access to the content aware fill option.

Another tip tomorrow!

It’s  all things Photoshop for me at the moment and so I thought I’d share a different tip (for users at all levels) with you every day this week.

Although this is a newbie tip really I am quite often surprised to find out how many seasoned users have let this one escape their attention. You can reset quite a few Adobe dialogs by holding down the alt/option key – the Cancel button will change to Reset saving you from exiting the dialog and invoking it again.

Like I said, a tip for new users essentially, but you really would be surprised how often I see that though!

• Introduces the Multiscreen Preview panel , allowing for Live View display on 3 different screen sizes, with Media Query support. (Window > Multiscreen Preview)
• Adds code hinting for the HTML5 Tag Library with new tags, attributes, and properties.
• Updates code hinting for new attributes and values in existing HTML tags.
• Adds code hinting for the following CSS3 specifications: 2D/3D Transformations; Animations; Background and Border; Basic User Interface; Line Layout; Marquee; Media
• Queries; MultiColumn; Ruby; Text; and Transitions.
• Updates Live View to support <video> and <audio>. (Requires Quicktime installation.)
• Improved rendering for CSS3 in Live View.
• Adds HTML5 starter layouts to the New Document Dialog box.
• Offers better rendering for new tags in Design View.

The pack is available from the Adobe Labs site – http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/html5pack/

Support files are available to registered users of the site only. Please Login or Register to access the link.

If you’re one of my small-but-steadily-growing Facebook fans then you’ll also get 20% off the cost of the course – that’ll save you about seventy quid by my reckoning!! I must point out that the offer can’t be used in conjunction with any other run by Certitec, is only available by booking directly with them and is also subject to verification (they’ll email me to make sure that you are ‘on the list’).

My nickname for the PS ACE Prep course that I deliver at Certitec in Cardiff is “Photoshop Top Gun” and now – just for fun – every delegate that completes the course is given their own ‘handle’, just like the aviators. Out of the four taking the course at the beginning of this week only two made it to the end – one delegate baled at the last minute and another had to eject halfway through. It is a gruelling two days designed to really shake you down and identify the areas where your knowledge is weak so that you might work on them and become hopefully exam-ready at a future point in time. You also pick up some excellent tips and tricks, and see areas of Photoshop that you probably didn’t even know existed – so it is worthwhile if you want to see how good you really are and see where you can develop your skills.

My congratulations then to Sharon Cohen who will be known from now as “Smoky” and Grace Elliott who has become “Kestrel”. They at least now know where to direct their efforts before attempting to take the exam if they choose to do so and even if they don’t they now have an idea of just how big a beastie Photoshop is…

Dreamweaver can give you information about the specificity of a CSS rule when you turn on rules view in the CSS panel, then if you hover over a selector you’ll get specificity information in a comma-delimited format like this 0,2,0,2.

To calculate specificity you count within each selector the number of inline styles, id’s, classes and element names – so in the pictured example the selector is #wrap #sidebar ul li which contains no inline styles (0,2,0,2) two id’s (0,2,0,2) no classes (0,2,0,2) and two element names (0,2,0,2).

Find out more about the cascade, inheritance and specificity with Zoe Gillenwater’s CSS Cheat Sheet, peruse the specification or book some training on my 2010 Web Masterclass or Dreamweaver ACA at Certitec in Cardiff.

It is the time of year when a lot of us start tackling the bit of ‘extra’ we might have picked up over the previous year and especially over the holiday period, if your InDesign files are starting to get a bit bloated, the answer is as simple as doing a Save As and overwriting the original with a new slimmer copy! InDesign saves lots of information as you work and this clears out that extra bit and gives you a leaner, meaner file – if only it was that easy for the rest of us!

If you’d like a ‘WYSIWYG’ preview of how a particular typeface will look on your text in InDesign then highlight the text with the Type Tool, use the shortcut Cmd-6 (ctrl-6 on Windows) which will shift the focus to the first available input field on the control strip and then use your up and down arrows on the keyboard.

Happy Holidays to you all – the Random Tip will return on the 4th January!

If your code gets a bit messy in Dreamweaver don’t forget that you’ve got the Format Source Code command which can be found in the Commands menu or in the coding toolbar (it’s the last icon at the very bottom) – one click and you’re done. You can edit the formatting settings in the Dreamweaver preferences dialog if they don’t meet your requirements by default (which can also be accessed via the button in the coding toolbar); really useful!

Extra advance content will become available in January for subscribers and even more for Twitter followers and Facebook fans – use the link on the right to become a fan today.

I’m willing to bet that most Dreamweaver users have overlooked the History panel and you should become familiar with it for a couple of good reasons:
Firstly and perhaps most obviously it allows you to quickly move to an earlier state without hitting Undo several times  – well, d’uh – but I think that the feature you might find most useful is the ability to repeat certain sequences and operations from within the panel, and also save them as commands – they’ll be added to the Commands menu (you’ll know if something can’t be used or replayed as it will be clearly marked with a red X in the panel).

Normally the History panel is document-specific but if you add a sequence as a command then it’s available to all documents and if you’re using menu items normally buried in a sub-menu (as a lot of the dynamic features are) it can be well worth the ‘effort’.

All we need now Adobe, is an easy way to add a shortcut to those commands…

One of the obscure modes of the Crop Tool is the ability to fix perspective at the same time as making a crop. To use the mode, all you need to do is check the perspective check-box in the option bar which allows you to drag the corner handles independently so you can position the box edges along the lines you want to crop to which will result in a rectangular image that has been distorted to that box.

In Photoshop, if you’d rather resize text a little more dynamically simply use the following shortcut: Cmd-Shift-> to increase the size and cmd-Shift-< to decrease (of course, substitute the CTRL key on Windows) and if you want to move in larger increments, add the alt/option key in to the mix for increments of ten.

Type ‘Styles’ for Photoshop

Creating simple ‘styles’ for type in Photoshop is really easy – set up the type the way you want it to be, and save that as a tool preset – just click the big, often overlooked icon at the left of the Control Strip and from the panel menu of the panel that appears – choose New Tool Preset and it’ll be there for you to use. Don’t forget to save the tool presets (from the same panel menu) if you want to keep them.

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In Illustrator, ever tried erasing parts of objects with brushes applied or vector effects and been surprised by the results (as in the above example)? The answer is that Illustrator now sees new objects to apply the effects to – so you’ve got to expand the object(s) beforehand by choosing Object > Expand Appearance.

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If you need to keep revisiting parts of an illustration, or artboards – save them as a view; simply go to View > New View… and give it a meaningful name – it’ll be added to the View Menu.

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Dreamweaver’s Code Navigator allows you to quickly jump to the CSS rules connected with an item – all you need to do is Cmd-Alt-Click (Ctrl-Alt-Click on the PC) and you’ll see all the rules applied to your selection; click on one of those and you’ll be taken straight to that code!

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Colour Blindness

Preparing graphics for the web? Do you ever consider how they might look to some of your target audience who have some form of colour blindness?

There are plug-ins available for Photoshop (try this one: http://www.vischeck.com/downloads/) but in CS4 you can also do a quick check for red and green types by going to View > Proof Setup > Color Blindness – Protanopia-type | Deuteranopia-type.

If you want to do a check for other types you could use this resource at Colblindor: http://www.colblindor.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/

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Want to create a quick contact sheet in InDesign? Using Multi-place you can select all the files you want included, then hold down Command-Shift (Ctrl-Shift on the PC) and start dragging – you’ll see a grid appear. After you start dragging let go of the keys, but don’t release the mouse button – you can then use the Left, Right, Up and Down Arrow keys to change the number of rows and columns for your layout; release the mouse button and you’ll end up with a nicely spaced arrangement of images.

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If you want to watch the previous one – here it is.

Discovering the keys on your keyboard that activate a particular tool is pretty straightforward – simply hover over the tool in the toolbox and you’ll see it in the tooltip that appears or when you click and hold on a nested toolset (like the marquee tools, for example) you’ll actually see the letter there.

Some tools have the same shortcut, and you can cycle between them by adding the shift key (you can turn that behaviour – the need for the shift key – on and off in the preferences).

Here are some of the shortcuts along with some suggestions for how you might remember those that aren’t so obvious; those that are followed by a letter I or Id mean that the shortcut is exactly the same in Illustrator or InDesign (some will also work in other products – see for yourself!)

• V – the Move Tool; perhaps you could think of this as being a pointer, like the system’s own arrow. I Id
• A – the Direct Selection Tool or Path Selection Tool; you could think “Actually I want to select the path or this point on the path.” I Id
• W – the Quick Selection Tool or Magic Wand Tool.
• M – the Rectangular and Elliptical Marquee Tools.
• I – the Eyedropper Tool. I Id
• B – the Brush Tool, Pencil Tool and Colour Replacement Tool (all brushes of sorts). I
• P – the Pen Tool. I Id
• R – the Rotate Tool
• E – the Eraser Tools (including the Background and Magic variants).
• G – the Gradient Tool and Paint Bucket Tool; you could perhaps think “Get this filled with a gradient, colour or pattern.” (I Id – Gradient tool only).
• T – the Type Tool. I Id
• O – the Dodge, Burn and Sponge Tools; if you’re used to a traditional darkroom you could perhaps think of the O as the end of the “lollipop” for dodging, the shape made by your hand for burning, and a sponge looks a bit like an O I suppose… otherwise perhaps you could think Overexpose as a starting point?
• U – the vector tools including the Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, Line and Custom Shape; how about “You want to use a vector in Photoshop?”…
• Y – the History Brush and Art History Brush; I must confess that my own way of remembering this is “Why would anyone use the Art History Brush ordinarily” (but that’s just me).
• J – the healing tools (Spot, Healing, Patch, Red-eye); perhaps “Just clear that up, and it’ll look great.”

Of course, I welcome your own suggestions!

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Photoshop CS4 has a neat little function called Spring-Loaded Tools which can save you lots of time if you need to frequently switch between tools whilst working, provided you know the ‘quick keys’ or ‘Tool Shortcuts’  (they’re actually called single key accelerators) for the tools.

Imagine for example, you’re drawing (with the Pencil tool) and you need to keep switching between that and the Eraser; you could hit E on your keyboard (to switch to the Eraser) do whatever it is you want to do and then hit B to return to the Pencil tool. Now in CS4, all you’d need to do is simply hold down the E key for the time you were using the Eraser and as soon as you release that key you’d be back in the Pencil tool.

Although a tiny change, you’ll be surprised how much quicker this makes you – give it a try!

Don’t know any tool shortcuts? Next Monday’s tip will have a few to get you started…

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• My time – I’m working on my book and a new podcast series (the sponsor-driven evolution of 4T, which is why it’s all been a bit quiet there recently) and of course trying to lead a normal family life
• My job and the travel demands shorten my available free-time (see above)
• The feedback statistics for the dependant pages dropped dramatically

Sorry – but at least it gives you a whole week to work on perfecting each tip!