Twin Cities InDesign User Group meeting

I've scheduled the next meeting of the Twin Cities InDesign User Group for Wednesday evening, November 28, 2012. Erica Gamet is going to be in town and has agreed to talk about how to "Multiply your layouts with CS6". Following that, I'll be doing a short presentation on advanced use of Find/Change, including a couple of useful plugins.

These meetings are a lot of fun, and free. We usually get 120-200 people attending. Don't miss it!

Please register in advance at the IDUG Web site so we know to expect you!

Free InDesign scripts

On of the things that I spend my time on is custom Adobe InDesign script development. Over the years, customers have come to me with some very interesting workflow and automation challenges that I've been able to solve by writing a script.

But I've also written a few scripts that I give away free in the hope that someone will find them useful. These scripts are all listed and described here. These include scripts for checking documents for flipped images, automating the Package process, playing each page of your InDesign file as a slideshow, transposing characters, and more. Check them out!

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)

How to avoid retyping filenames

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

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.

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.

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.