[music] [David Blatner] I'm David Blatner. I am going to be talking about how to become an InDesign superhero. That was the cue for me to, like, rip off my shirt and have like a Superman outfit on. We're not doing that today. But we're going to be talking about InDesign tips and tricks basically, a whole bunch of different kinds of tips and tricks. Quick background on me for those of you who don't know me, I've been using InDesign for 24 years, since it came out, before it came out, I have been in this industry for a lot longer than that. And my goal here is to help you smile more while you're working.

Seriously, because this is my favorite tool. InDesign is an awesome, awesome tool and if you're not smiling when you're working, then you're doing something wrong because-- And I don't mean that in a judgmental way. I mean it and there is-- It's a clue. That should be a clue that there's something more you need to learn. There's something about automation that maybe you don't know or maybe there's something that you're not doing right with the styles, or there's something there when you're going, "Why is it?" Now, of course, it's buggy and so sometimes you get that face because it's not your fault. But sometimes, or a lot of the time, it's like, "There's something for me to learn here." And so that's part of what we're trying to do today is just give you a few little tidbits in the next hour that will help you go, "Wait a minute. I need to think about InDesign differently. I need to step back and think there's other ways to use this software which might actually be way more fun and get my work done even faster," which is part of the having more fun. So we're going to be looking at a bunch of weird bits and pieces of InDesign. It's going to jump around a lot. Tend to be a very tangential speaker. So we're, kind of, going to go all over the place and just give you a few little things to play with InDesign. It's all in the handouts. Now yesterday, I did this session, and we're going to do some of the same stuff, some different stuff today. But I found out afterward that not everybody got the handouts. I was like, "We were supposed to email the handouts to everyone." So if you didn't get the handouts, let's start there. You can get the handouts, and you don't need to follow along in the handouts. You can do this later. But you can either scan that or use that URL, download, it's a PDF. There's all kinds of stuff in there, and there's way more in the handouts than I can cover today in this hour, so lots of links, lots of resources, there's a whole article that Anne-Marie Concepción and I wrote some years ago for InDesign magazine that you should know. There's keyboard shortcut chart, there's a Grep-- Excuse me. Grep stuff. There's all kinds of cool stuff in there that you're going to want. There's also, in the beginning, some information about CreativePro. CreativePro is my company.

We've got a membership, we've got all kinds of in-depth information about InDesign, Photoshop Illustrator, PowerPoint, Acrobat, fonts, whatever. Some of you might know InDesign Secrets. Anne-Marie and I started InDesign Secrets many years ago, and InDesign Secrets rolled in to CreativePro, so all of that is at CreativePro right now. Anne-Marie and I also do an InDesign Secrets podcast, still called InDesign Secrets. If you don't-- You need to listen to a podcast sooner or later, right? So listen to InDesign Secrets. We've been doing it for, like, 17 years. And what's amazing-- Yes, we were one of the early ones. What's amazing is people tell us that they still go back to number one, and they're like, "Wow, those early ones are still relevant." Because InDesign, for better or worse, hasn't changed that much, so all those tricks, most of those tricks still work today. So we talk about InDesign and how you can become more efficient and what all those weird obscure features are. We try and get in-depth information about that. So InDesign Secrets, we also run InDesign Secrets forum on Facebook. If you're on Facebook, go to the InDesign Secrets, it's free, group. InDesign Secrets group on Facebook. We have another one on LinkedIn. If you don't like Facebook, go to LinkedIn called InDesign Secrets, really wonderful communities to help the whole community thrive. That's the goal here because nobody can know it all anymore. Nobody. You can't do it. There's just too much information, but as a community, we can. We can help each other thrive. That's our goal. There's always more to learn. No matter who you are. In fact, I am almost giddy with anticipation for this session because literally last night, I learned something new about InDesign. And I'm like, "I have to show this." It's a totally geeky trick. But I have to show it because it's exactly the, kind of, thing that I like about InDesign. Okay, wait, is there anything else I need to tell you first? We do other events. We do CreativePro Week, which is a five-day extravaganza. Next year, it's going to be in Washington, DC and livestreamed. There's information in there with a discount code. We do the Design and Accessibility Summit, which is coming up next month, four days of in-depth stuff. If you care about InDesign and accessibility, you've got to go to the Design and Accessibility Summit. It's awesome. Okay. I have a Museletter, what I call the Museletter on LinkedIn. You can check that out later. Anything else I need to tell you? No. I'm sure there is, but that's good enough. Let's just dive in. You all got this stuff. I can give it to you later if you need to.

I'm going to-- Where am I going? Look at all these things we're going to play with.

It's a crazy thing about-- Oh, I remember here. So we're going to play with this. Just for a second, I want to zoom in on here. This is this insane tip that Colin Flashman last night on the street corner out here came up to me and like, "David, you know there's-- You were talking about bar charts. And there's this interesting thing you can do, and you can use this Chartwell font, and there's all these other ways you can do charts in InDesign." But I just realized, and he told me, and I was like, "No. That's no. That wouldn't work. Would it?" And so he sends me this file, which I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because it's so geeky. But here's the thing. Here's a bunch of numbers, and we need to make some bar charts from this. Just a quick little bar chart from these numbers, from 32, 6, etcetera. So he says, "What if you used this Excel formula that I just remembered called REPT. R-E-P-T and R-E-P-T is this incredibly obscure formula that literally says take this number and repeat a character this many times. So this is like, a bar, a vertical bar repeated 32 times. And here it is 10 times. And it's literally, I don't know if you can see that well, but it's just-- That's the function. So if you do that, and then you grab the text out of there and you drop it in here...

Of course, you have to know where you put it. That would be really helpful. If you grab your text file and place it in here, it looks like this, which is not that exciting and we don't need that header, but if you then-- Oh, jeez. Where's my Paragraph Styles panel? Paragraph Styles. Where's my Control panel? Okay. Before I show you this tip, I got to show you another tip. If you're still stuck in the Essentials workspace, the dumbest workspace-- Hi. We're from Adobe, and we've decided to dumb it down for you.

What the heck? Why would they even do this to you? You paid for all these features. Don't you think you should see them? So that's-- Yeah, get rid of that. First thing you need to do is go to Advanced. Second thing you need to do is add on the other panels that you want, that you use all the time, the things that you want to take advantage of, and then make your own workspace. So I'll just open the panels you like, close the panels you don't like, move them around, put them on the right-- Look at this. I have my Pages panel over my left side, something that Laurie Ruhlin taught me. I was like, "That's a brilliant idea. Use your screen real estate the way-- Use it, use their screen real estate. That's all I have to say. Then save it as a workspace. I've got my David Workspace here. I'm going to put it back to the way I like it here, most of the time. Anyway, so Paragraph Styles, let's go back to-- So workspaces. Use workspaces, people. Save your workspace and because you know after five minutes of working, you're going to be like, "Oh, yeah, I need this over here, and I need this over here." Did you know you can move the Control panel? You can just drag the Control panel out too. And a lot of people like putting this down at the bottom, that's, kind of, cool. So, you know, this is this is my workspace after five minutes of using InDesign, right? That's why make a workspace, build it, save your workspace, and then reset your workspace. This is one of my favorite features in the whole program. Reset Workspace. Clean. Okay. I can-- I can breathe. Everything's fine. So okay. Moving along. No more workspaces. I'm going to select all of this stuff, and I'm going to apply a Paragraph Style. Bing. All done.

What just happened? So we use the Excel, crazy Excel thing to make a bunch of lines. And then we-- The characters are still there. But in this case, the characters are set to disappear. This is actually a character style that's been applied, automatically. I'll show you-- Actually, let me just show you, that Paragraph Styles, this paragraph style that I created...

Primarily what it does is it make the-- It applies to Nested style. Nested Styles are some of the coolest things in InDesign because Nested Styles are all about automating your formatting. When you are working in InDesign, going back to the, "Oh, why is this so hard? Why do I have to apply the same formatting over and over and over again?" Okay. If you are applying formatting over and over again, you're doing it wrong. There's got to be a better way to do it. Nested Styles is a hero. Nested Styles say, from the beginning of the paragraph up to here, and you get to say what here is, apply such-and-such. In this case, it's applying none. Can you see what that's doing there? Apply none up to two tabs. There's a tab, there's a tab. Then apply my barLine character style through a word or whatever you want it to be. So Nested Styles is incredibly helpful for doing all kinds of stuff. Now what's that Character Style? The Character Style over here, and notice that I'm not clicking on that Character Style. Don't click on Character Styles. Don't double-click them. Don't click them. Just stay away because you will get yourself in trouble if you start clicking on Character Styles.

So how do you edit them? What do you do? I mean, okay, I should say you can click on a Character Style if you're trying to apply it. I got to be clear here. If you're just editing it, don't click it because if I click on that or double-click on that Character Style, it's going to apply it and if I don't have anything selected on my page right now, that's going to become my new default style for my entire document. Never had that problem where you're like drawing out a text frame, you start typing, you're like, "What the heck? Why is all my formatting on?" And then you apply the Paragraph Style. "Why will a Paragraph Style not remove all this formatting that's on this paragraph?" It's because you have Character Styles applied to the entire thing. You never, ever, ever apply a Character Style to an entire paragraph. It's a cardinal rule of InDesign and all software, in my opinion. Character Styles are for parts of a paragraph. Paragraph Styles are for the whole paragraph. So I still run into people all the time who they don't use Paragraph Styles, they apply Character Styles to everything. No. No, no, no. Slap yourself on the wrist. Paragraph Styles apply to a paragraph, Character Styles apply to a part of a paragraph, a word, a sentence of the character, whatever. Anyway, I'm not clicking on this. I'm not double-clicking to edit it because I don't want it to become a default, and I don't want to apply it. I want to right-click, get in the habit of right-clicking, right-click on styles to edit them, right click on swatches, color swatches, to edit them. Any time you want to edit something right-click, and then you can choose Edit. That way, it's nice and safe. You don't change any defaults. Okay. So what the heck is going on here? All this is really doing is its setting my Character Color to none, which is a wonderful little trick, by the way. In InDesign, using a none color makes it disappear. Poof. Well, it makes it disappear in most situations if you export EPUB or if you're dealing with accessibility issues, and then it doesn't work anymore, but it makes it visually disappear on screen and in printouts and in print and so on. So this is currently making this set to none. And then I'm doing an underline, a big, big underline. If I change my color of the underline, it changes the bar chart. So I could make different styles for different bars, which is, kind of, cool. Now do you need this every day? No, of course not. But is it cool that you can set colors to none? Maybe, that-- That's the, kind of, thing, a none color. That's the, kind of, thing that if you plant that seed in your head and you start thinking creatively, you start finding there's all these interesting things you can do with that information. A none color text. The idea that you can apply a underline to text that has none, but the underline still shows up, so that turns out to be really helpful because the more Excel, you have in there, the longer the bar chart and so this is Colin's weird gift to the world that he said, "Wait a minute. If I put this thing together with this thing and this thing, all of a sudden, I can make bar charts in InDesign without any special features at all." This seems weird, but it turns out to be, again, the way you want to think about InDesign, because you can get so creative when you start putting all the pieces together. Okay. I just wanted to show you that I just learned it, and I got all excited this morning when it actually worked, so I had to share it. Now another thing about charts, since we're on charts, I have to show you this one other thing. I left this at the very end yesterday, and they were like, "Way to leave the coolest thing to the end." But this is-- Do people know about the Chartwell font? This has nothing to do with InDesign, actually, or almost nothing to do with InDesign? It's just a font. There are not that many fonts that every designer needs.

I mean, besides Helvetica. No, I don't even like Helvetica.

Arial. Arial. Besides Papyrus, there's not that many fonts.

But Chartwell is one of those things that you should just write it down, this is actually not in your handouts, but write down look up Chartwell. Figure out what David is talking about. I think I have it here, on CreativePro. We have this-- Mike Rankin wrote an article called Creating Instant Charts with Chartwell. It's a font. Here's how it works. You write out some numbers, and then you color those numbers. And then you select those numbers, and then you say, make this font, Chartwell. Chartwell, let's say, pies. Bing. I'm done.

Like, "Wait. What? What just happened?" Now what's really weird is if this is still editable text, this is text. Remember when people told you, "You should be using OpenType fonts." And you're like, "Why?" And they say, "Well, because OpenType fonts have all this cool technology in them." This is what they're talking about.

OpenType fonts have a very wide range of possibilities. They're almost like their whole software packages by themselves. So this, if I go into Story Editor, people who use Story Editor, Command-Y, you have to use Story Editor. Here's one of my favorite features under the Edit menu, Edit in Story Editor, it's a little word process or a text editor built into InDesign. So incredibly helpful when you're dealing with little fine print text or really long text or long documents or overset text. Checkout Story Editor. It's an awesome feature. But you can see all the numbers are there, right? Can you see that with zoom in here? So I can say, oh, you know what, this is supposed to be, 38 and this is supposed to be that went up 8, right? So this is supposed to be 2 and, bing and zoom out. And now it's changed. So it has its magic. That's all. I just-- Bing, it's magic. Chartwell, this is a cool font. So there's cool things you can do in InDesign, and then there's cool things you can add to InDesign. By the way, this is not just Chartwell, not just pie charts. They also have line graphs, and they've got bar charts. This is not a good example of that, but you can do all kinds of stuff with Chartwell, it's mind-boggling. Okay. Let's get back to InDesign, onto InDesign.

Where are we going next? How about-- Okay.

No. Yes. Okay. I showed it. I'll do it.

This is one of those things. A year ago, Illustrator, whatever that was 23 came out and they got intertwined, intertwined. Everything's intertwined. It's the coolest feature ever. And I'm like, "InDesign's had that for years." And when they're like, "No, it doesn't. There's no intertwined feature." I'm like, "Yeah, there is." Now we don't have a tool to go beep, make it intertwined. What we have is a three-step process, but it's a really, really easy three-step process. Everyone can do this. How do you do it? Let me hit W to jump out of preview mode, and I'm going to say, step one, make a frame, empty frame. Can you do that? Anyone? Anyone? Make a frame. Where you want them to intersect? Step two, use a Selection tool to grab the object behind whatever's in the back that you're trying to put in front. Copy it to the clipboard. Step three, go to Edit, Paste Into. Bing. All done. Intertwined.

We have it in InDesign.

And you can do that. All right. Let's try that one more time. So there you're like, "Do I need that feature? Am I in the right room? This is not GenAI. What?" Okay. I want to make the blue go in front of the green so I make a frame. I select the blue frame, I select my frame, Edit, Paste Into. Paste Into takes whatever was there and paste it into the current-- That little tiny frame there, and pin registers it. How many people know what pin registering means? What? A few. Thank you. I feel so old. Pin registering is from the old days, which doesn't seem that long ago, where you'd actually have color strippers at printers and they would, like, have to register stuff, and there were little pins sticking up, and you'd pin register it. So pin register means line it up exactly in the right place. Okay. So I pin registered it by pressing, whatever. And you can see that it all works. Now I will say that you don't want to-- Oh. Yeah. Wow, wow, wow. Yeah. Wow, wow, wow. So here's the trick. Of course, it's the little thing called Command+G group, Command or Ctrl+G, group them. So now they all move together. So that's a good thing. And it's not just random squares, we could do it for text as well. So we could say, let's grab this.

I think I can do it. Here, yeah. I'll just take that. Make a little thing. Take the C, copy it, and Paste Into. And...

Did I-- Oh, I grabbed the wrong thing. Thank you.

Oh, now I'm really in trouble. Do you know what this-- I need to select-- I have a frame here, right? I've got this frame.

Wow. What's going on? I have this frame here, and I need to select the object that I accidentally pasted into that frame. So there's two things you need to know. One is double-clicking means go in. So with text frame-- Blah, blah, blah. With a text frame, you know, if you double-click on it, it puts the text cursor into the frame, right? Escape key means go out. Go up. So double-click to go in and Escape key to go out. And this works not just for type but also graphics. If you double-click on a graphic, you select the image inside the frame. Escape key selects the frame again. Same thing with cells in a table, right, double-click, and then Escape goes out just like the whole cell. And the same thing goes with objects that have been pasted into another object, so if I want to select the frame that's inside that frame, I double-click on it. And now that's for-- Except that I've got the Type tool because it's not working. So there we go. The second thing you can do is use this little weird looking thing, which means Go In, right? So that Go In means select the object inside that's nested inside that other object. It's either that or a squid. I don't know. It's one of those things. But if I click on that, I can select that, and I can delete it and try over again, select the C, not the P, and say Edit, Paste Into. Bing. There we go. So now we've got the intertwined which looks better in preview mode. So little things, little things. I like that. Thank you.

All right. Let's get out of here. I talked about that, I talked about that.

Let's deal with that later.

One of the great problems in InDesign is other people.

To be honest. Because my InDesign files are pretty terrific if I do say so myself, but I get word files from other people, and they love making my life difficult. I am pretty sure that they're doing it on purpose. They're out to get me. And so they send me word files that I place into InDesign, and generally, 98% of the documents I get, the word files, RTF, whatever, I place it and I have local formatting everywhere, right? The whole thing. And I know local formatting is any formatting on top of the paragraph style that's supposed to be there, right? So let's zoom into 200% here. So if I click over here and look at my Paragraph Styles, I have a little plus icon, little plus sign. The plus sign means there's stuff that's formatting on top of that. And everywhere I click, there's a plus sign. So I know there's local formatting. And if I hover over this, it'll tell me, oh, the size changed. Somebody applied the wrong size. So usually, it's a lot worse than that. But you get the idea. In this case, I need to get rid of that extra size everywhere. So what I'm going to do here is I need to clean it up, first thing I need to do is just clean up, get rid of all that extra formatting. And there's a multi-step process, which I think is in the handouts, that you should take a look at having to do with creating Character Styles and so on, I've already done that part where I've applied Character Styles to the texts that I don't want to lose, the formatting that I don't want to lose, like Italic text. Once you've applied your Character Styles, all you have to do is select Command+A or Ctrl+A on Windows, select the whole dang thing, and click on the Remove Override button. I love this button because it just removes all of it. All the pluses go away. It all goes back to what it's supposed to be. In this case, we're moving all the stuff. So that-- Some of you know about that button already, but if you don't, it's a lifesaver. It's just so incredibly cool. Now if I had to do this for a long document with a lot of stories and there's tables, I don't know if you work with tables, you know you're forever having to clear overrides out of tables. It's a disaster. Turns out there's a script that lets you clear all that stuff out automatically, and I'm going to be talking about scripts in just a little bit.

So don't let me forget to tell you about that script, but in this case, I wanted to show you one of the thing that I need to do. If I zoom in here, I have Type, Show Hidden Characters turned on, down here from the Type menu. So I can see-- What the-- Why is there a tab? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. This one, the space dash space, that's supposed to be an n-dash. That's easy. Oh, yeah. Double spaces after punctuation. Really? Okay. Oh, yeah. There we go.

All these extra paragraph returns and then tab indents.

So I'm just going to have to clean this up. I hope you don't mind. This is going to take a little time. Just sit tight. It'll only take about 20 minutes to clean up. No. What the heck? So why are they doing this to me? And how do I clean this up quickly? Now I could run a series of fine change. Command+F, and then look for my double spaces and replace those single spaces, you got the idea. There's a lot of fine changes that you could do, or you could use a script. Now here's the thing about scripts. I guess I'm segueing into scripts now. How about that? Here's the thing about scripts. Most InDesign users will say, "I've never used a script. Is it scary? My IT department won't let me use a script." Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Let me just tell you, A, you can get around your IT department.

So we got that. B, I'll show you how. B, if you're not-- I hate to say it, but if you're not using scripts, you're not doing it right. InDesign has a lot of cool features in it, but you can make it even cooler if you're using script. And scripts are just a way to automate stuff in InDesign, right? You're just pulling levers behind the scenes. Super amazing things that you can do in with scripts. Now here's the first thing. First, you already have a bunch of scripts. You don't have to download scripts and install them. You already have a bunch of scripts. And you can find them by going to the Window menu, go into Utilities and choosing Scripts, and up comes the Scripts panel.

And let me just open that up a little bit so you can see what's going on. And it will look like this. You've got Application, Community, and User. And inside the Application, there's a Samples folder. And inside Samples, there's a bunch of other folders. And if you're inside JavaScript, there's your scripts. There's the scripts you want to be using. Not all of them. Some of them are pretty dorky, but there are some really interesting ones in here that you could use. For example, here let me just open a quick document here and place an image.

Okay. That's not the right image. That's not an image at all.

Here we go. I'll just grab this image.

I really wish this image were broken down into a grid. I don't know why. But let's say we want this broken down into a grid. It turns out you have a script on your computer right now called MakeGrid.jsx And if you run the script, you can turn this into a grid, make a grid. Now running a script is complicated, I will say you have to double-click.

And when you double-click, not just once but double-click, you say, how many rows you want? I want this to be four rows and five columns, and I want there to be six points between, and you click OK. And, bing, it's a grid. And so it just automates stuff. It makes things work. And by the way, these are actually individual frames. - Oh, wow. - Right? So we had literally turned this in-- And I can say, I don't want that one. I want to put some text there or whatever. So if you're doing a real estate thing or if you're doing cards-- Do people still do card things with all those cards all over them? Any time you need a grid of objects, you just say make a frame and make a grid out of it. Bing. It's a grid. So that's, kind of, cool. Now let's get out of here. It turns out there's a bunch of other, scripts in here. By the way, in your handouts, there's a link. I think there's a link to an article I wrote on CreativePro. If not, you can find on CreativePro easily. Like, what the heck? Just type in, "What the heck are all those scripts that come with InDesign?" And I wrote an article about what each of these things do and why you'd want to use them. So that's all there. It's free. But here's my favorite script that's in here. Make grid is pretty cool, but my favorite is called FindChangeByList. And FindChangeByList is a automated find change. You make a list of stuff that you wanted to find and what you wanted to replace it with. And if you have 50 find changes that you need to do in a row, you just set it up that way. It's a little geeky to do it. But once you set it up, all you have to do is run the script, and boom, it works. Now it comes with a sample. Remember this folder was called samples? The sample that's in there does something, kind of, cool. It cleans up all of this garbage. So people who send you stuff with double spaces and double line, double paragraphs and tabs and double hyphens for em-dash and so on. All you do is you say, "I think I'd like to-- Let's clean up this selected story." Bing. All done.

What!

Yay, yay, yay. Isn't that incredible? No. I did not-- I didn't write the script.

I just like pointing out that this stuff exists and that you already have this. You have this feature. How long scripts have been there? The scripts have been there-- Not that long. It's about 23 years, I think.

Yeah. These were all there I think in InDesign 1.5. - Wow. - Yeah.

Why didn't anybody tell me? Why didn't anybody tell me? Right. Exactly. What the heck? So yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff in there that you can do with scripts. So let me see if there are any other scripts I want. Oh, so there are scripts that you have now. Oh, and I told you to remind me, look inside the Community script after... These are new. These are, like, three or four years old. Adobe said, "Let's go find some cool scripts that scripters in the community have written." And let's whet them and make sure they really work properly. And let's put them inside the Community folder. And so there's a bunch of stuff in here, and there's even more on GitHub that you can download. It's all in the article.

And there's cool stuff in here, like BreakTextThread. So do I have a example? I have no example. Okay. Let's just quickly make an example here.

Here's a random little tip. If I need to make a bunch of frames that are threaded, I click with the selection tool on the outport, and then do I have to click? Click, click, click, click, no, you hold on the Option or Alt key, and when you hold on the Option or Alt key, it makes a frame and threads it automatically. So beep, boop, beep. You get the idea. Anyway, so I have a bunch of frames that are threaded together, and I can tell they're threaded together because I do a Command+Option+Y or Ctrl+Alt+Y. So I can see the threads. I really wish this was turned on by default. Wouldn't that be helpful if... I mean, you can get to it from the View menu, View, Extras, Show Text Threads, but it just should be on. I want to know what's threading to what. Anyway, so I want to break between these two frames. Just break that thread, but keep the text that's in there. Is that possible in InDesign? No. Sorry. Anyway, move on to that. No. It is possible with a script because the answer to virtually every no answer is it possible answer is, yeah, with a script. And so there is a script here called BreakTextThreads. So all I do is I select that frame and I double-click BreakTextThread, and it says, "Where do you want to break it? Before or after this frame, or do you want to break all the frames?" I mean, just you have this already. This is there. So incredibly helpful. Or have you ever imported, like, 200-page document broken down all the chapters are in there and you want to break it 1 chapter a time into different frames, into different stories? So apply the, like, chapter title Paragraph Style, make a Paragraph Style, called chapter title, apply it to each of the chapter titles, and then use this, and you can break it at... I don't have that right now, just say, break it at every chapter. Boom. Done. Anyway, in this case, I'm just going to say Before the selected text frame, and you can see that it worked. And here, we've got this threaded and this threaded, this text is maintained, and that's pretty cool. I like that. There's another one in here called clear style overrides. This is the one I was talking about earlier. You could have 1,000-page document with tables and texts and all kinds of disasters and you can just clear them all out super, super fast. So I love these features. There's a bunch of other stuff in there. Okay. So as I said, there are people out there who like scripting. They're not me, but they like scripting, and they're really into it, and they love helping people out, all of us, become more efficient with InDesign. And so there's all these scripts out there. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of scripts available out there. And you can download them. You can find them on forums. You can find them on creativepro.com, you can visit a bunch of sites out there with some cool scripts. And if you want to really be a power user, a superhero in InDesign, you want to go start looking for scripts. And I have several written in here in the handouts that you should totally get. I don't have enough time to get all of them, but here's one of my... Here's a couple of my favorites.

Oh, yeah.

If you're working with tables, you often will need to sort tables. And I don't know if you know, did you know that you can move rows in tables? A lot of people don't realize, they snuck this in some years ago, but they didn't really tell anyone. If you select a row in a table... Excuse me.

I don't know if you'll be able to see this. And you move your cursor in just the right place...

Well, actually, no, I guess they move it all over. Do you see the cursor changes to a little Lego brick thing? That means you can drag the whole row, which is, kind of, neat. I know. Yeah. Same thing with columns. Just look for that. Okay. So in this case, though I want to alphabetize this table. There is inside one of the samples in here is sort paragraphs. So if you've ever had a long bunch of paragraphs that you want to sort alphabetically, you have the script to do that. Except it doesn't work on tables, so you need a different script for working with tables, so... Oh, that's okay. It's a free script from Peter Kahrel who wrote this script, you can download it and install it.

Little tip before efficiency, hydrate.

Oh, my gosh. Okay.

Keep going, keep going, so much to cover.

You can download it and install it in InDesign. So how do you do that? Well, you want to put it inside your User folder. And I would tell you where the User folder is on my hard drive, but I actually have no idea because it's somewhere, and I don't know... The way to get to it is you right-click, our friend right-click, and it says Reveal in Finder or Reveal in Explorer on Windows. And up comes the Scripts folder. So it's somewhere on my machine. I don't know. The good news is that usually, even without IT support, you can put stuff in here because it's not inside the applications, this is inside your User folder. So don't tell them I said that. Just quietly sneak in some scripts. Now you don't want to put them, and this is important. Don't put your scripts inside your Scripts folder. That would be too easy. Instead, you want to put it inside the Scripts Panel folder, which is inside the Scripts folder. Technical reasons why you need to do that, but you can see I have a few scripts that I've downloaded and run over the years. And there's all kinds of stuff you can do with these scripts. So download a script, drop it in there, and then you'll have access to it inside your User folder. Now what's cool is you don't have to restart InDesign or anything. And you can make folders 'cause once you start getting into scripts, you'll see when you get too many scripts, you start like, "I have to organize this somehow." So I have all my DataMergeScripts inside my DataMerge folder and so on. And any, folders you make here, any folder organization you make is reflected immediately inside the Scripts panel, which is, kind of, cool. So that's great. Okay. Back to what I was talking about, I placed my cursor inside my table, and I say, "I need to sort that table." Now in this case, I could find it relatively easily, SortTable.jsx is hiding in there, but I want to show you a trick. And it's an incredibly important trick for InDesign, and that's to use quick apply. Quick apply. Because even if the Scripts panel is closed, I still want to be able to get to those scripts quickly without scrolling, scrolling up and down. Similarly, if I have 40 Paragraph Styles in my document, I don't want to have to sit there and scroll up and down. I just want to get to the Paragraph Styles quickly. If I have menu, I've got all these menu. I don't even know where all these features are. What menu is that feature in? I want to get to it quickly. And the quickest way to get to anything is keep your hands on the keyboard. Don't go to that mouse and start moving your stuff up and down. Keep your hands on the keyboard. And so you want to use quick apply. Quick apply is one of those things that every InDesign user needs to start using right now. No. Not right now. Soon as you get back to your computer, start using quick apply. And here's what you do, it's Command+Enter, on the Mac, it's Command+return, on Windows, it's Ctrl+Enter. Same thing, right? Command+return, Ctrl+Enter. Up comes the Quick Apply panel, window, whatever. And now I can get to my Paragraph Styles. I can get to my menu items. I can get to my scripts. Actually I can't get it to my scripts quite yet. Oh, I can right now. But normally, you can see... This is all the stuff that quick apply will show you. Paragraph Styles, Character Styles, etcetera, etcetera, but it doesn't show you scripts by default. So your job is you launch this once, Command+return, Ctrl+Enter. Go to this little pop-down menu and say Include Scripts. And now my scripts are going to be in there too, which is, kind of, cool. So I can say I need to sort this. I don't know where that script is. All I need to do is say Command+Enter, Sort Table.

And, of course, it doesn't show up because I'm on stage. So there we go. There we go. Sort table without a space, and it says, "Oh, there it is." SortTable.jsx and I can move up and down this with my arrow keys if I want to choose a different one, but in this case, it's right at the top, and I hit return, enter and it says, "What do you want to sort on?" And I hit return or click OK, and, boom, it's alphabetized. So this feature, you don't have this feature yet, but you could download sort tables and install it in your User folder, right? You open the Scripts panel, right-click on, Reveal in Finder, put your script inside the Scripts Panel folder, and then you can run it either from the panel double-clicking on it, or using quick apply. But I really encourage everyone to start doing that quick apply. Command+return, Ctrl+Enter. It's just so much easier to apply stuff. - Can we download this? - You can download this. There's a link in the handouts, and you can download it from CreativePro. Yep. Peter Kahrel has put all of his scripts up on CreativePro a few years ago as a repository. So there's some amazing things. Oh, here's another one, another Peter Kahrel special.

This is our price list. Except it'd be, kind of, cool if that price list had dollars in front of them. I want to put the currencies, and I don't want to have to type dollar, dollar, dollar, dollar, dollar, right? So I'm going to select all of these things, and I'm going to... Probably easiest thing to do is to make a Paragraph Style for it. So let's option-click on down here, which forces the dialog box to appear and I'm going to say this is currency. I don't know. You can call it anything you want.

I'm not going to do anything special here, except for one thing. I'm going to make it a bullet.

I'm going to add a bullet. And let's say this weren't there. I'm going to make it a bullet. And I want a currency bullet. So my bullet, I'm going to say Add, and I'll grab my currency, in this case, a dollar sign, click OK. Select that. Now this is going to be... Typically, when you do a bullet, you get a character and then a tab and then the thing, right? Well, the reason you get a tab is this field right here, Text After. That code means tab. So if I delete that, I won't get a tab. I won't get anything. All I'll get is the bullet. This is a great example of how you can use a feature that was built for one thing to do something completely different because here, all I need to do is say, apply currency, and I get bullets that just happen to look like dollar signs, right? But these are all actually still just numbers. There's no actual text dollar sign text in there. So that's, kind of, cool. Now I grab this, and that's just built in InDesign. So bullets, you can do bullets, bullets in numbering, you can do all kinds of amazing weird things if you, kind of, think outside the box. Like, what if my bullets looked like, anyway, special characters. Any, you know, 'cause any character...

When you're doing bullets in numbering and you click Add here, any character from any font can be a bullet. So I can say let's make this Wingdings, and let's choose a character out of Wingdings. And then you can say remember the font with the bullet or not. But in this case, obviously, I want the font to go with that. Was that Pisces or something? I could then add that to my bullet. And now I have that character as a bullet. Any character from any font can be a bullet that you can use at the beginning of any line. - Yeah. - Does it mess with accessibility? Does it mess with accessibility? Yes, that would because we can see that visually, but that dollar sign or the pricing sign is not technically there. It's just formatting. So if it was important to say dollar sign, $23, whatever, then that would be an issue. By the way, can you see this, right, what the... That comes with InDesign. And some of you, when you go to your Bullets dialog box see that and some of you don't.

Have you seen this before? Does it... No? It took years to figure out why this character was in here for some people and not for others. And the answer weirdly is font versioning. Going off on a tangent here. This is famous, David tangent. I mentioned earlier that fonts are like software, right? They're literally like software, there's different versions of the same font. And so there is a version of Minion Pro in which a certain character, a certain bullet is in that space. And in other versions, it's this. So some of you have... Depending on what version of the font you have installed on your computer, you're going to see that or some other character, I don't even remember what it is, but some other character that you'd never use anyway. But it's, kind of, weird. You can find your versions, by the way, under the Type menu, you can say Find/Replace Font and choose your font, and then click on More Info. More Info, this is a pet peeve of mine.

Like I said earlier, you bought the software. You should have all the features. Why is InDesign hiding this from you? Right? Show me all the info all the time. I want to see it. Give it to me now. So in here, I can see all of this information. Adobe is constantly afraid of freaking you out. "I don't want to show them. This is going to make... This is too geeky. It's too scary. It's too technical." No. Just look. Trust the user. Show them the information. This is really helpful. I can see that this font shows up... There's 178 characters in these styles, etcetera, where it is, and so on. And there's the version of the font and here's where it is, here's where it's living on my machine. So really InDesign gives you a lot of information about what's going on inside your document. In fact, wow, tangent on tangent, did you know if...

Mac and Windows are almost identical except for a couple things. The Preferences dialog box on Windows is under the Edit menu. And the About InDesign dialog box is under the Help menu, right? But either way, wherever you find it, if you select it, it's all very exciting. No, but if you select it with a Command key held down or Ctrl on Windows, you get a super secret InDesign component information dialog box, most of which you don't need because it's too geeky. This seriously is too geeky, but there is some stuff in here which you could use, like I don't know if... Can you see this down here? The document history, the whole document history. So if someone sends you a document and it's acting up as doing weird things, and you're like, "Where did this come from? Who made this? When was this made?" You can open up this component information dialog box and start looking through here and says, "When was it created?" Yeah, let's see if I can get a better example.

When was this created? This one was created...

Created here and went through this, and it was saved as, most recently saved and so on and so on. So it gives you all this information. Was it recovered? Did you go through a crash and then the file got recovered? All that stuff gets saved in your document. So anyway, it's a weird little thing, but you should know about it. Okay, back to this.

I've got my table here. And the problem is that we need to... Inflation. Inflation's a problem, right? That's always a problem. All these numbers have to go up 30% right now. All right. I can do that in my head.

Or I could use a script. I could use a script called price. Now I'm not sure if it's going to show up right there. So there's a little thing. See all these little characters where it says C colon, O colon, that's a way to filter. So if I say S colon here, S colon means filter just show me scripts. So this way, I can say show me just the scripts that have the word price in them or similar to price. There is price adjuster. I can say... Great. I need to multiply this by 1.3, which is 30%, and I'm not going to care about that right now. And good enough. Click OK. Bing. All done.

It just actually... I told it to change the color too, so that was a mistake. But you get the idea. The script can do that. It'll change the colors automatically. But...

It just multiplied all the numbers. And you could say only use this character style or only do numbers that have a currency in front of them, etcetera, etcetera. But is that not helpful? I mean you could take a 200-page catalog and update all the prices in 2 seconds. That's pretty amazing. So scripting really gives you a lot of control over your documents and a lot of efficiency. Let me just look at a couple of more quickly that you should know about.

Well, no, no, no. Okay. That's not going to work, but this will work.

So scripts, there are some very simple scripts. There's commercial scripts that you can buy, there's a bunch of that are free or donationware. So if you've used them...

If you've used them, they save you a lot of money, then they just ask that you donate some money to this scripter, which is a great help because that encourages them to keep writing more cool scripts, right? So definitely look into doing that. And then there's scripts that are like wow. Wow. What the heck? So I want to show you two scripts quickly that are really quite astonishing, and then we'll move on. Let's get back to my Scripts panel. There's a script right now called... There's a script that's relevant right now because we're all thinking about calendars. Like, because it's almost 2024, right? So we're... Someone's going to say, "Could you make the company calendar and put it on the wall?" So making calendars is really a pain in the butt, right? So this guy said, "I'm going to make a script that'll make a calendar." And he sent it to me, and I said, "That's pretty cool. But could you add phases of the moon?" And he said, "Sure." And I said, "Well, could you make it all based on styles?" He said, "Sure." And then people kept asking for more features, and this is what it turned into. There's a little thing called Calendar Wizard, and it does anything you want.

We can do a whole MAX session on Calendar Wizard. So Calendar Wizard is free if you're using it just for personal use or for your own company or whatever. If you make calendars that you're going to sell, he asks that you buy it, right? That's fair. But right now, we just say, okay, we're going to make October 2023. You can say what font. I mean what month and year? You can do multiple years. In fact, let's do the rest here. Let's add the phases of the moon. Let's do mini calendars. Let's do this and that. And I don't want to get into all these details, but he really got into making this script. And all you do is you say make me a script. I mean, make me a calendar and, boom, there it is.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Isn't that crazy? And, again, all of this is based on styles. So you'll see it here in the Paragraph Styles, see all these different Paragraph Styles it made in here? So I can actually go in here and say, change my calendar base. I right-clicked, didn't double-click on it. Right-clicked, calendar base, and say, I don't want this font. I'm going to... Let's change it to Party!

Boom. Now it's all. And it changes it through the entire document, right? So it's all styles. You can really customize it to the way you want. Again, there's all kinds of stuff you can do with this, but that's a script. It automated that for you, which is pretty cool. Okay, there's one more script I want to point out. And that is something called a Layout Zone. It's in your handouts.

This script is special, special in all kinds of ways. This is one of those scripts that I honestly think, like, every InDesign user should have, Adobe should have just shipped this one. Layout Zone, you can find... It's in the handouts, but it's from automatication.com and it is just astonishing what it does. It takes a page or spread or a portion of the page and it saves it out as an InDesign file. And that doesn't sound so exciting at first, but here's an example. Let's go grab these things. Let's say I don't know...

I'm playing with fire here because I haven't demoed with this document here, but let's say I'm going to take this stuff on the left, and I want somebody else to mess with it. I want some designer in a different office to edit this. Well, I don't want to send the whole InDesign file 'cause I'm still working on this InDesign file. So what I really want to do is I want to create a zone. So I want to... This little area is going to be a little zone that they can work on and then send it back to me.

What!

So I go to the Edit menu and I say Layout Zone, Assign Zone, and I'm going to put this in my Temp thing there. I'm just going to call it untitled zone. Very exciting. And I'm going to just grab the selection. Click OK. Obviously, this does all kinds of other stuff, but I'm just doing the basics. And it looks the same, right? But it's not. It's actually an InDesign file.

In the background, very quickly, took that, made a separate InDesign file and saved it, and then took that InDesign file and placed it back into this one. If you look in the Links panel, it says... Did you know you can do that? You can place InDesign files into other InDesign files. This is built in InDesign. This is a really, really cool thing. So let's say you had a 16-page document and you have 16 designers, and they all have to work on it at the same time, each one of them can make a one page InDesign document and send it to you, and you could make the master document and just place page one onto page one of your document, page two onto page two, right? So you're making an InDesign document master of other InDesign documents, just by placing InDesign documents into other InDesign... You can place that one into another InDesign document, and that one into another InDesign document. And then at that point, you get Inception.

Does it stay separate? Does it stay separate? I don't know the answer to that. Let me keep doing this. And then I will... This might answer it. You can send that InDesign file that's Untitled Zone, whatever you called it, and then they bring it back to you. Now you could also edit it here. How do you edit a placed linked graphic, you click on the linked graphic button Edit Original, right? And now it opens up here, and here's... I'm having some issues with fonts here, but you get the idea. I could take this and say, "Oh, yeah, this one actually should be flipped around the center." I want this one to be flipped. Bing. Good. You got the idea. And tulips. "Tuulips." And I'm going to save it. All I do is save it and close it, and bing. Nothing happens at all, but it should automatically update. But you can see that it's modified here, right? So I double-click on modified, just like a regular graphic.

And it updates. So now that's keen, but now I need to edit it again here. My designer in Phoenix just did this and sent it back to me. I updated it. I'm like, "Okay, that's great. Wouldn't it be cool if I could go to the Edit menu, go to Layout Zone, and then say Convert Zone back into editable objects?" And I... There goes that demo. But usually... This actually... It's a funny reason why that didn't work. But didn't work because of a flaw in this particular file because I don't know if you can see this, the name of this file is problems...

I used this demo file to show problems. So anyway, that was not intentional. But in this case, you can see that you can edit, you can convert those InDesign files back in. So you could have that 16-page document with 16 designers and bring it all back to you and then you can place those InDesign documents back into your master InDesign document, and you can convert each of those back into editable objects, so now you have a 16-page document with editable objects in it.

What the heck! Yeah.

You cannot convert multiple pages. You can't make multiple pages into a zone. You can only do a single page or a single spread or parts of a page. Yeah. That's a good question. Yeah.

It's a good question. So if I took this document before I had converted it, if I have InDesign files placed inside... It doesn't matter if it's a Layout Zone or not. If I just place one InDesign document into another, what happens when I print it or make a PDF or package it? And the answer is it acts just like a graphic. So it takes that InDesign file. In fact, if you have graphics in an InDesign file, like this one, and turn into InDesign file and you place that InDesign file, InDesign knows to package both the InDesign file and the linked graphics. It looks into it deeply enough. So, yeah, totally works. It's the workflow which I think Adobe meant to be to roll out to even cooler things and then they just forgot to tell anyone that it's there. So it's pretty dang amazing. Okay.

Before we get into more questions, let me just make sure 'cause a bunch of other stuff I want to talk about. I do need to say I have a... Again, there's a lot more stuff in the handouts than I can cover today in an hour. So there's just not enough time. I did eight hours of this on Monday.

There's so much, so much I could go on and on. But I do want to say one thing, which is a soapbox issue everywhere I go, I want to say, "Stop converting to CMYK." Please, just stop. When you have images and you're in Photoshop, I know they told you in 1993 to convert it.

But just stop. It's the 21st century people. In the 21st century, we place RGB images into InDesign.

That's the way it works. And then if your printer says, "No, I'm sorry. I need a CMYK." You get a different printer. No.

That's the best-case scenario you get a different printer. If you can't get a different printer and they really need CMYK, then you convert to CMYK when you export a PDF. And we don't have to... That's a whole hour session just by itself about how to make great PDFs, but I have a whole thing in here that you should read. If you're still doing CMYK, read this or you can just go to rgborcmyk.com 'cause people ask me about this so often that I just got the domain.

RGB or CMYK. The answer is RGB. rgborcmyk.com has my article. It's when I wrote with Claudia McCue.

Really, really important, get with the 21st century, use RGB. Okay, there's so much more to say about that. But okay, other scripts, other scripts. Oh, there's more scripts in here. Oh, so much to talk about. So little time. Okay. I'll answer a couple of quick questions. And then I will stick around afterward. I just want to say a couple things. I'll stick around afterward if you want to come up and ask questions until they kick me out, which they will. I will answer some questions. Also, I said earlier, you can get lots of answers on the forums, on InDesign Secrets on Facebook. My LinkedIn information is on here. My email is on here. If you have a question, you didn't get something, email me. Okay? [music]