Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Scary Typographic Education

Just in time for Halloween, the FontShop Blog contains a series of 6 blog posts about "Typographic Horrors" such as faux bold, rivers of white, fake small caps, etc. Recommended reading if you want to sharpen your typographic skills!

(via Peter Gold)

Friday, October 26, 2012

How to avoid retyping filenames

When you do an initial "Save" of a new file, you are prompted to type a filename.

Shot 1

But if you already have a file with the name that you want on your hard drive or server, you can just click on that file name in the File > Save dialog box, and the name of the file you click on will be entered as the filename. Then you can edit the filename if you don't want to overwrite the original file.

Shot 2

This is a pretty basic operating system maneuver that works on both Mac and Windows computers. I showed this to a client last week, and they were so amazed and grateful, I thought I would post it here in case others don't know about it.

Monday, October 15, 2012

2 clipboards in InDesign?

Did you know that when you are copy and pasting text in InDesign, you have 2 clipboards at your disposal? 

If you turn on Drag and Drop Text Editing in Preferences > Text, you can copy and paste or cut and paste via drag and drop, independent of the clipboard used with Edit > Cut, Edit > Copy, and Edit > Paste.

In other words, you can copy some text to the clipboard with Edit > Copy, and then cut and paste some other text via drag and drop, and then still paste the first text you copied by choosing Edit > Paste.

Some handy shortcuts to use with drag and drop text editing:

* Add the option/alt key after you begin dragging to copy the text instead of cutting it.

* Add the shift key after you begin dragging to cut or copy the text without formatting (which will cause the text to adopt the formatting of the surrounding text)

* Add the Command (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) key after you begin dragging to create a new text frame for the text.