[Music] [Bart Van de Wiele] So this is diving deeper into Adobe InDesign. My name is Bart Van de Wiele. I work for Adobe. I'm a head of solution consulting, which means I run a team of product specialists. We talk to customers. We meet up with them.
They tell us their complaints and their dreams and wishes. And then we try and map that to a solution that has an Adobe logo on it. That's what it comes down to. So anyway, that's fun. Europe is home. I come from Ghent. That's Ghent in the background, which is in Belgium. That's my home city. And yeah, and it's fun. I love doing these conferences. This is my 10th MAX, by the way. I'm having my MAX anniversary this year, so yay me. And I have learned a ton of things in the past speaking at conferences and attending conferences as well. I am self-taught. I am a graduate of Wingate University, and I used to be a graphic designer. I used to be a trainer for a long time for about eight years. And I used to go to customers and I would sit there and I would work with their files for a couple of days, a couple of weeks, a couple of months. I would say work for hire. And so I've seen InDesign files beyond your wildest imaginations. But that was a learning thing for me as well because I got to see, this is how you should not do things or here's how you should definitely do things. And that has trained me up a little bit. And I'm here to share these tips and techniques with you guys. So everything you see here today is based on situations I've encountered in the past and situations that have saved my butt. Okay, because I got to go home early or I got to do more work or I got a pat in the back from my boss or whatever. So I have hobbies. So my hobbies are I record courses for LinkedIn Learning, over the weekend, much to the joy of my wife. And, so I have a couple courses that might be interesting for you guys as well. So I have one specifically on InDesign productivity techniques. So it's advanced InDesign. So I made 96 videos for that one. That was a fun weekend. But it's all fun. It's all interesting, I think. There's a lot of Firefly stuff, like how to start with Firefly, how to be an advanced Firefly user, all that stuff. So that's where I have fun. And I wrote a book. Wrote a book two years ago. Yay. And this is on multi app workflows. So if you love using InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, and you want to learn more about what fits and what, it's like this little babushka dots, like this fits in this and this fits in this. And it's a bit like that. And we're going to place and link and embed and update and all that stuff. So that's what the book is about. It looks like this. By the way, they have it here in the Mac store. I took this picture yesterday, actually. And if you buy books here, apparently, you get 20% off. So that's amazing. So that's cool. So I actually have a session on this exact subject tomorrow. It's my last instance of that session. I have over 800 people signed up already. So if you want to join the crowd, so be there tomorrow, and I'll definitely see you there. The publisher also is doing a giveaway. So either you scan a QR code here or you simply go to their booth, they're next to the Mac store, the shop, and you can scan it there as well. So they're just giving away free books. So eBooks and everything, just scan it. You enter to raffle. That's it. I'm going to start with this here. So I've got a couple of projects here lined up for you guys today, and I'm going to be using a lot of functionalities there. To be honest, very old, but I don't see a lot of people actually using them at all, which is a bit weird because they've been around for a very long time. But the thing is that, we're all busy, right? We're busy. We're working. We don't have time to look at all this stuff. Even though sometimes we've got options that just stare you in the face for 10 years, 15 years, and what do they do? No idea. They don't seem to harm my files, so I'm just going to leave them alone. And that's just stuff that, that's been around for a very long time. And I'm going to start with one I've got here. And this is a project that I recreated a similar project, which is this year. And this was a project where I had to create multiple versions of a letter that needed to be sent like commercial offering that needed to be sent to customers. And it looks like this. So basically, assume this is a promotion letter and it needs to be personalized a little bit, right? So I've got one letter where I say, dear sir. I've got one where I say, dear madam. And then I'm not quite sure if I want to give that customer a 30%, 40%, or 50% discount. I am a very generous man. And then for customers who have been with us for longer than five years, they get this extra line of text. Okay? Now, the thing is that I have six, seven, whatever, different types of combinations that I'm looking for right now. And, what a lot of people would do is they would just go into the pages. They would go like duplicate and duplicate and they would just keep going and they would just make one version here, one version there, right? I'm going to undo that, by the way. Or they would take the text frame and they would take the layers and they would just make it a layer and they would go like, let's move this frame and copy it to this layer, which, by the way, you can do by holding down the Option key and dragging this here. So little plus icon there, you just let go, and bing. Now I have a copy on that layer, which is cool. But that's not what I want to do. I'm going to delete that. Because the problem is that, the reason why you're putting this on different layers is because you've got some text that you want to change, but the rest of the body has to stay, right? And the problem then is if your customer says, that's amazing, but can you make a change? Like it says, thanking you. That's a bit weird. Can you just change the language a little bit? Oh, crap. I got to do this six, seven times now. And that's not what you want to do, right? So let me show you a different way to do this. So I'm going to go up here to the window menu. I am going to go down to type in tables. I'm going to choose conditional text. Who has never used conditional text in their lives before? There we go. So what does it do? Let me show you. So imagine there for a second that I would have to make a version where it says, dear sir, and I have a version where it says, dear madam. Okay, so if I focus on the sir, what would I need to remove to make that work? I would need to remove the space and then the word madam, but not the comma because that has to snap to the word sir. This is what I would need to remove, right? Cool. Let's make a condition for that. I'm going to zoom in. I'm going to make a brand new condition. I'm going to call this one madam. And this will be indicated by a wavy blue underline. Now you can just make all sorts of different combinations. It depends what you want to do. But this is simply how you mark it up. This is madam. Cool. There it is. And now I'm just going to select that, and I'm just going to tag that. Same thing here. So I'm going to make one for sir. I'm going to say, sir, which could be a red wavy underline. And if I were to remove sir, I would have to select this. And I'm going to apply that here. Now let's quickly give this a go. Now this is my file. So this bit is now already done in just a matter of seconds. The only thing I have to do now is say, actually, I need to make a mailing that says, dear madam. So I have to get rid of sir. So you get to hide and show pieces of text within the story, and that is something you cannot do with your layers. Layers only allow you to put copies of objects on top of layers, not bits and pieces of text. So if you do this in line. Okay. Let's maybe not go too crazy here with all the percentages. But in line, I can do it like this. I can just get rid of this here. I can now say, you know what? We'll make a new condition. Let's make this one 30%. And let's make one. And let's do 40%.
And I'm going to come in here and say this is what I need for 30%, and this one I would need for 40%. By the way, you can even do a find and change. You can find things and you can-- As a change option, you can say apply a condition to that, which is cool, especially if you're looking at price lists and stuff. I'll talk about that in just a few minutes. And then, obviously, I've got the extra promotion for all my best customers. I'm going to select that, including the full stop. And I'm going to say this is-- I'm going to call this one promo.
And I'm going to apply the promo as well. There we go. Now the cool thing is, again, now I have a switchboard. Now I can say, actually, I'm looking for one that says, dear madam. I'm going to give them 30%, and they do not get the extra promo. And this is something where you can just come in and you can just make all sorts of crazy combinations. And the moment you found the combination that you were looking for, well, let's show some more options. You can create a set for that where you have multiple ones. Right here, for example, I'm just going to say, let's do at female 40%, no, 30%, I'm sorry. And that's it. And choose Okay. And now you get to choose between different sets. So if I now start to mess around with this and blah, blah, blah, I get to now basically go back to this one. It's going to go back to that set. And the cool thing about this is that I use this for other customers. So I had a customer, and they were a really big insurance firm, right? And so they had these really long documents with insurance all kinds of legal mumbo jumbo. And then they had customers, depending on the type of insurance they were getting, that need to have a specific paragraph included or maybe specific paragraphs excluded, right? And what they were doing is just taking this very long document and they were just selecting the paragraph manually for every customer and saying delete. And then if they have a customer that does need to have that paragraph, they would open up somebody else's contract where they know they have that one paragraph and they would just copy it and put it in. That's the stuff that happens. That's the stuff that happens, right? Which is the same thing for example, maybe your marketing coworker who is not using Creative Cloud Libraries in Microsoft Office, which you can do, by the way, instead, they will go up to their own websites and copy their own company logo from their own website and paste it back in PowerPoint. Because where else am I going to get the logo so quickly, right? Now, so this is the stuff you can do. You can make all sorts of crazy combinations, which is neat. And so in the end, you might have like a long switchboard with different options available. I was working on a product list and this was a winery and it was a table. It's just text, right? So this can even happen within a table. And so it was very simple. So I simply did a find and change. I found, I was looking for all the text that was a dollar price. So I was looking for numbers with a dollar. I did it with GREP. We want to talk about GREP quite a bit today, actually. It's very geeky, but it's a lot of fun. And I was able to apply a condition to that, and I had another list of prices, which was the euro price for the wine, and I applied a different condition. And that way, I had a price list with just a table with the name of the wine and then the price per bottle. And I could just deactivate or hide the American pricing and activate the European pricing. And that was it. I didn't have to duplicate the file. I didn't have to duplicate the page. And if somebody says that, whatever, the spelling of the Sauvignon Blanc had to be different, I just type it in once, and it's done for every single version I create from there, from that moment on. So that's it. It's pretty innocent, but that's what conditional text does. Not one of those everyday things, but one of those once in a while things where it is going to really save you a lot of time. There we go. Let's keep going.
A couple of other small tips here. Again, just little, little tiny times here. So I am not a very well organized person. Okay? I seem to have a very clean desktop with Mario and Luigi. And I have a folder called cleanup. Yes. Yes. In that folder cleanup is another folder called cleanup.
Okay? I go three levels deep these days. So anyway, I need structure. Let's put that way. Okay? And so what I do is and this is the tip. It's stupid, but it really helps me. I have a zip file. That's my tip.
The cool thing about a zip file is that I-- This is where I enter my project number, my customer name, and the project description. And the only thing I have to do is just double click, and it will give me a folder structure I can use. Oh, another customer project? Okay. Double click. I have another structure because what else would I do? I would take the folder of an existing customer project, duplicate that, change the name, and then clear out every single individual folder until it's clean, and I can use it for my new customer, right? I don't want that. I simply don't want that. I just double click this. It just keeps producing new sets of folders for me. It's a dumb thing, but it really helps me out, just so you know. One other thing is about I want to talk about presets as well. So presets are actually quite interesting because if you look at-- I clicked that accidentally. So if you look at how InDesign ships by default. I'm just going to go ahead and just close my InDesign. I'm just going to relaunch InDesign, and I'm going to reset my preferences for a second. So I have the default installation. Yes. I want to do that. I was holding down the keyboard shortcut. It's shift control option command. It's very easy. I cannot play the piano, but I can do that. So, anyway, so the thing is if you make a new document in InDesign, if you make a new document I mean, let's be honest. Like, when is the last time that when you're creating a new brand new document, like when is the last time that you need to use black, cyan, magenta, yellow, red, green, blue? Never. So we clean this up because we have to clean it up because it's there. Okay? So what do we need? Instead, we want to use our own corporate colors, right? We want to use our own Pantone colors or spot colors or die cut colors or our customers' branding and blah, blah. We want to use all of that, right? So we do, you would go and load the swatches and import the thing, and every time and time again does not make any sense. So what we're going to do is we can configure or preconfigure InDesign. So what you do is when you have no files open whatsoever, you go and you find that one panel that you want to make changes to. For example, I'm going to go up here, choose window, color, swatches, and I'm going to come in here. I'm just going to say, you know what, guys? I don't need you.
I don't need you. However, I might actually need other colors. Okay? So I can always say here, load swatches. I can go and find another InDesign file, which I can double click and it will import their swatches. And from that moment on, let's just try it just for fun. So let's say, for example, let's do this one. This was my handout from my preconference. I'll just do this one for example. So I'm just opening this up. So these are the swatches that we use there. And now the moment you've done that, every single time you create a brand new document, you are going to start out exactly with those swatches, right? Cool. Styling. We're going to talk about styles quite a bit today, actually. Paragraph styles, character styles, object styles, table styles, cell styles, anything else, right? We got to import the style because I want this specific body copy, which is 10 points in our corporate font and blah, blah, blah. You don't need to do that every single time, right? The only thing you do is there's no file open right now. You go to window. You choose styles. You're going to go ahead and choose paragraph styles. It's empty. Yes. This is how you're going to start out. You simply load paragraph styles. You go ahead and you choose a file. Then you choose which styles that you want to import. I'm going to uncheck them all. I'm going to say I always need to use the body, and I have to use whatever, bullets. And choose okay. And now you've got these two styles. Every single document you open and start now, start, not open, start now is going to have those styles. I like to do this. I like to simply have a file that does this. This file has two different object styles. This is an object style that is using a magenta looking stroke with one point. It's dashed, and it's using a spot color called die cut, and it is set to overprint. Well, this one does the exact same thing with this green, and it's called fold, also set to overprint. This thing like every single time you use a die cut or a folding line or whatever it is, right, and you make a PDF, first thing you do, check your color separations, you know? Remove that spot color, remove that die cut, and see, is it really overprint? Yes or no? And if it's not working mistake. Darn it. Let's go back. I said overprint. Don't do that. Simply make sure you import those object styles because let me show you where they are. If you have object styles in here, you can simply just say that you can just, whatever, have any tool, and you're like, whoop, that is a curve. And you say, this is going to be a die cut. And bang, it's set to overprint, same color, and everything else. Again, you can preconfigure this as best as you can to see little time savers. Once you set up or once your team is set up, it multiplies the benefit of just doing these things and spending a bit of time with InDesign. Again, small little tip, but it's, I think it's interesting.
Another small little tip. Let's open this one here. So this is a-- Not this one. I'm going to open up a different file. Let me open up-- Let me do this one here. I've got a nice document. Baking magazine. Here we go. Baking Magazine. Now, what if you're working on this file and you're like, okay, this is nearly done and you've got styles, for example, then you've got paragraph styles, this is ingredients head, and your coworker is like, hey, I know you're working on that one thing. I need to create a flyer and I have to use the exact same look and feel and then you have to reuse the styles and stuff.
Can you share that style with me? And you're like, okay. I know how to do this. I can do that. So what do we do? We do this, right? So we're like, actually, I'm going to take that. I'm going to copy that new file to click Okay. I'm going to paste that because now it brings in the styles, right? Then I'm going to email that to that person. He's going to or she's going to open that up. They're going to go oh, great, they're going to copy it. Open up in their file, paste it, so it brings in the styles, and then delete it because they actually don't need it. And they're yes, I got the styles now. There must be a better way, right? Now, you can if you want to, you can use libraries. I'm a really big fan of libraries. So, again, so you've got them here inside of Illustrator, for example. So they're called libraries. Here they are.
And here as well in InDesign, they're called CC Libraries. They're not called libraries. There's a very long and boring story why that is. Okay. So if you ever have issues falling asleep, call me. I will tell you all about it. So, anyway, so the cool thing is that it's really simple to actually pass on things with others. Now, again, I'm a really big fan of libraries. But if you don't really have a library already set to go with your coworker, then you have to go to the library's panel, and you have to create a new library, and you have to drag it in, and then you have to click invite, and you have to type in their email address, and they click the link in their inbox, and something else opens up. It's great once this is established and you can put stuff in and it comes out on the other end. But if this is just a very quick and dirty, hey, I'm sitting across you, at the desk, I just want to throw you this, right? The only thing you do is this. You just move this to the side. You take your finder window or your Explorer if you're a Windows guy or gal, and you simply do this. You take whatever stuff you want and you go, that's it.
And you get a snippet.
And I'm going to call this one ingredients.
That's it. Oh, no, it's 98 kilobytes. Okay? So then your coworker creates a document. And, let's say this person is creating a, yes, A4 document here. And they're like, okay, cool. Thanks, Bart. Because this is on a server or this is a quick email, and they were like, rip, drag, and drop this in. And either they simply click to place or undo. Look at my cursor. If I press and hold down the option key, which is alt on Windows, look what happens. Alt, I'm going to click here. Click. It snaps and is placed exactly on the same x and y coordinates from where the snippet was originally saved. So this is a logo, an icon, legal disclaimer, whatever it is, folding line, you click, and it's going to end up in the exact same space, right? Now, if you don't feel like fiddling around with the window and dragging everything, if you don't want to do all of that, then it's absolutely fine. Let me show you how you can do that. So if you just simply go to the, the export menu, a file export, I'm pretty sure, I mean, you're all the design experts, right? You all know what's here. You do, you know all these usual suspects. There's no snippet there. Now if you have anything, there's, Paul Trani is everywhere. I clicked. It's always Paul. Anyway, he's nice, though. Cool. So if you have a selection of something and you go back to the export window, look what happens.
More options. Yeah. They made it difficult to find that one, right? More options. You can just say InDesign snippet. You give it a name and bang. You save it somewhere. And, yes, you can have a library of snippets. You can save it anywhere and that's it. Okay? Now keep in mind, if you export something as a snippet and it has an image, obviously, it will save the preview of the image. It will save the linked location to that original image. But obviously, when that person drags that into their InDesign, it will find that image on that same location. So if that person does not have that image available on location, you will have a missing link. If this is something that's on a shared server, no worries. Everything's going to go great. If that's not the thing, obviously, there is the good old package that you can always use if that's the thing that you want to do. But we're quickly just handing something out to somebody else. Very easy. Very easy to do. Cool. What time did we start? We started at 1:30, right? Okay. Cool. Now let's move on. Let's start to make things a little bit more complicated, right? These are quick little tips. Let's dive a little bit deeper here, right? Let's make this a little bit more and more exciting. So for example, what if I have something that looks like this, a table? Okay? And somebody says, hey, I want to make this table a lot more legible. So especially the percent change is really important, and so I've got some negative numbers here. Can you make all the negative numbers red? And you're like, sure. I'll just find them by looking at them, and I'll apply red. That's what you asked me to do.
It can go quicker. Okay? There's a couple of ways to do this. Now, I have a dynamic way, if I wanted to, to do a pretty complex find and replace option. I can use a GREP for that, and I can even find and change and do this as an action, as a command that will execute that one thing for me, right? The problem is when somebody gives me new numbers, and I'm like, this again now because there's new numbers and I have to rerun this one thing. So that's not going to help me. So I want something that's a bit more dynamic. Now I'm going to keep using GREP for this. Now, for those who are unfamiliar with GREP, GREP stands for general, regular, expression, parsing. So now you understand what it does.
You're using regular expressions. It's a type of, it's not even programming. It's just a type of expressing, how you define a range of characters. For example, words that have five letters and start with a capital letter, for example, right? Or numbers between this and this number. It allows you to describe a range of characters, and you can make that very, very complex. And the cool thing about GREP is that GREP manifests in two different locations. You can use GREP here and you can use GREP as part of styles, and that's where it gets really interesting. So let's take a look at my styles here. So I have a paragraph style that's called numbers right aligned, and that's just everything you see, right? And I also have created a character style. Now, I'm not using a character style at the moment. It's not being applied. However, I made one that simply turns everything in red. That's it. Okay? Now I am going to edit, I'm going to use my styles panel from here. I'm going to edit that style, style options, and I'm going to go here. I'm going to choose GREP style. I'm going to keep this really simple just to get you guys started, right? Now I'm going to choose new GREP style, and I'm just going to clear this out because you get a GREP expression for whatever reason. And I'm just going to clear this up. Now, I'm going to say apply the style, the character style red to preview.
What defines a negative number? There's a hyphen, right? Okay. Cool.
Hyphen. Well, perhaps, let me click here. Now all my hyphens are red. Cool. A number, any number.
Okay. Let's use a wild card. Any digit. Cool. We found one digit. Oh, shoot. This one has two digits. Okey-dokey. Then, well, if I type that again, then it's only going to find two digits. Okay. So I need to find more than one. That's better, right? One or more. That's better. To do that, you simply type one digit. You type a plus, which means one or more. Okey-dokey. We can find everything now until we run out of digits because now there's a full stop.
Can I type in the periods? Not really. A period is a very specific and special character in the world of GREP, like that is the ultimate wild card. If you type in a dot, that means any character, any punctuation mark, any uppercase character, lowercase. It could be anything, right? It could be an anchored object. It could be a hair space, an M space. It could be anything. So if you really want to have a period, you simply have to escape its GREP function, and you do that by preceding it by a backslash, which is a bit odd because I'm adding a backslash to really make it an actual literal point while here I need to add a backslash to make it a GREP expression, which is a bit confusing, but, hey, that's how the universe works. And now, obviously, I've got more numbers. Again, so I'm just going to repeat that same bit here. Again, a bunch of numbers, and it has to end with a percentage. And that finds all of the negative numbers for me. And that's the only thing I had to type in. And so the cool thing is that all this stuff is live, which means that I can come in here and say 1.2%. No. Minus 1.2%. So it is actually going to just change formatting based on whatever settings you apply, and this one's a very simple example. Okay? A new number is coming in from Excel. Copy, paste, put it in there, you're done. It's going to do that automatically. Now let's build on that knowledge because we're all semi GREP experts now, right? So let's build on that a little bit here. So I am going to-- I love this file. Not because it has women's shoes or anything. It's just, there's just so much to do here for me, right? And so let me just quickly run a few more GREP expressions here, right? So I'm going to do the following. So, clearly, I've got a bunch of shoes and, I've got the name of the shoe and I've got some text here. I've got sizes, material, style, and colors, which is like a recurring category. And then I've got a price, which looks like this, and there's just so much work here, right? Imagine these are 12, 16 of these pages here. And so what I can do is, I can apply these styles. I'm just going to take a look here. So this one's called product name. Now to apply styles, what you can do is you can simply just use an eyedropper tool. Now there's a slow way of using the eyedropper tool, and there is a quick way. And I see a lot of people using the slow way. Let me tell you what the slow method is, right? The slow method will be this.
So eyedropper tool is over here. There you go. So slow method is this. I select this text, double click. I take the eyedropper tool, and I borrow that style. This is the slow method. Who's using the slow method? Quite a few people, right? The quick method would be you take the eyedropper tool first with nothing selected. You click anything you want. It's now full. And now you go and you take a walk. And you go click and click and click and click. And you click somewhere where there's nothing to empty it out. You take the next style, and you do the exact same thing. And you just apply it that way, that way, that and that. You click and it's empty. And now this is a lot quicker, right? It depends how quick you are with the mouse. Now I've got sizes and material and everything else. So what I want to do is I want to take that and this is actually a character style, it's called all caps. So I have to apply all caps to the word sizes, material, style, and colors. Now I'm going to do that by taking this existing style, which is product description, and I am going to set that as part of my GREP because it's a recurring pattern and that's where GREP excels. So I'm going to say, okey-dokey, I want to apply the style, all caps, to, not the numbers, I'm with that, two the word sizes.
And I can make another one if I want to, and I can say all caps, and I can say material.
This is taking way too long. This is taking way too long. Okay. Sizes, option, or which is a pipe symbol, right? Material or style or colors.
It does it everywhere.
And if you're now thinking, yes, but what if I have a line that says, we have an amazing style. Yes. It's going to find that style. That word unless you put a safeguard in. What makes this word unique? It start the paragraph starts with that word, which means that you can, if you want to, put your cursor at the beginning and say that one more rule, it has to be at the beginning of the paragraph.
And then it's only going to find the ones that actually start here, only those instances of that word and not the ones in the sentence. Okay? Cool. Interesting. Let's take a look at my prices here for a second. Okay? So I've got whoops. I've got all these prices. What makes up a price? It's a number, a digit, and it's preceded by a dollar sign. Okay. I could do my little eyedropper tour again if I wanted to, but I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to do find and replace. I'm going to say find, not in text, but GREP, find a digit. We know this now, right? But it has to be preceded by a dollar sign. So which means anything that's a dollar and a number. The problem with the dollar is it's like a period. It has a GREP function already, so I have to escape it again. You put a backslide in front of it. And now this is going to find every single dollar that's followed by a number. So the only thing I do is I'm going to change the format. I'm going to say I'm going to apply a price style to that, change all, and there we go. I've got my prices. The prices are fine, but I want to change some of the details. Okay? I want to get rid of this period, and I want to let me show you what I'm going to do. I'm going to take get rid of this period, and I want to just take this double 0, and I want to make this like superscript. It has to be smaller and higher. It looks better in my catalog. I have created two different styles for that specifically. Let me show you how that works. So I've got one, which I'm selecting now, and I'm going to apply that. I call this one decimals, invisible decimal. It does this. The whole thing it's doing is it's, I'm being mister smarty pants here. Is it's actually, giving this a one point size and no fill and no stroke. It's there, but it's just invisible. It's so small that everything just closes as if it was never there. That's what I do. And then I've got this, these two numbers here, right? And this should be like that. But the problem is it could be 99 cents. It could be 0. It could be 50 cents. It could be anything, right? So I'm going to undo this. How do I define that, and how do I make that go automatic? So, again, we're going to use some GREP.
I'm going to go into my price section, and we're going to start out by just finding in this price style, finding all of these periods and give that specific style. Now we know already what we need to do here. So I need to apply my invisible decimal style. How do I express an actual period? It was a period, but it has to be preceded by backslash. Thank you. There you go. Found all of them.
And now I have to find all these double digits that have to get that other style, right? So GREP style. I'm going to say, decimals, double digits. So it's backslide D, backslide D.
That's also a backslide D. Well, okay. That makes sense. So okay.
What makes that text I'm looking for? What makes that unique? It is preceded by a period, right? The period is still there. I didn't get rid of it. It's just, it has a very specific format. It's still there. So if I say, okey-dokey, you can apply that style to that double digit in the end, but under the condition that it's preceded by a period. However, do not touch the period. I want to apply it to that. Okay? So the condition is there should be a period. I don't want to apply it to the period itself. Okay? I'm just giving it circumstances when to and when not to apply this style. It's a little bit more complex, but I'm sure you're going to get it. You're all very smart cookies. So I need to say, only apply this, right, if there is a period preceding it. The problem is if I do this, it's also going to apply it to the actual period. I have to say, yes, but this is just the circumstance. It's not the thing you have to apply it to. It's just the circumstance. So to do that, we have to use something that is called match. And we have a positive and a negative match. Now we type from left to right, which means that if I start typing A, B, C, everything that I continue typing is what I'm looking ahead to, and everything that I already typed is looking back, right? So basically, A, B, C. A is in the past, and D is going to be in the future. So that's just to express a direction in which it has to go and find these characters. So in my case, if I see that those double digits, it has to look back and say, yeah, there was a period just before me, right? So I have to look at a look behind option. I'm going to choose positive look behind. And this thing, I'm going to take this out and put this in here.
And that's it. I understand this looks like nothing. I do get that. You get used to that. Okay? And now I've said only apply decimals to a double digit if you find a positive match of it being preceded by a full stop. And that's it. It has now done that everywhere. This is what we get, which is cool. It just does it everywhere because now I can look at my prices. I can say, actually, these shoes are $5 or $19 or 19. Nothing really happens, 55, happens live.
Okay? And that's the cool thing about using a system like this. You set this up once for templates. This is absolutely amazing. You can do so much cool stuff with this. Now, let's keep going. This is a title.
I just read it off the screen. So, but you can also make this a very long title. Shoot, I don't have enough space in my text box.
My style guide says that it has to be a round 38.903 points. But if the text has to be smaller, we have to maybe go back to 35 points or even 30 points, right? So let's say we've got these three sizes for titles. There's a short title and then the text can be bigger. It could be midsize or it could be other otherwise. Now I have done the math. So I went into the window menu, and I've picked info, and I'm just going to do this for a second here. So I know that, currently, I have 20 characters in this text frame. And I know that once I get the 22 characters, that's when the text frame is full on average. So anything that's 22 characters and beyond, the text has to be smaller. That's what I have to do. How small? Well, I've already made that decision. So I have created character styles, and I've named them like so. I've said, if I see more than 22 characters, reduce the size to 35. And if you've got even more characters, reduce it even to 30. That's how I want to do things. But now I have to explain that in GREP. So let's give this one more go.
Let's change this. I call this variable header. It made sense. So let's make this a reality. So I'm going to say GREP style, apply this. When? If I have more than 22 or more characters, what was the ultimate wild card in GREP? It could be anything. What was that? - [Woman] Period. - Period. Thank you.
So it's 22 and more, so I have to do one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. You can do that, but we're not going to do that here. One period. If you want to define quantity, curly braces.
If I type in 22, that means exactly 22. If I say a minimum of 22, you add a comma. That's it. We're done.
Let's try this again. Let's add the second. Let's add that second style. Same thing, same code. Anything, 26 characters. Again, I've measured this beforehand, right? Now, let's all take a look here. This is my Info panel. So we've got 20 characters, right? So I'm going to type in one more character, 21. Look what happens. Twenty two. Bang, it's smaller.
Type in more, smaller.
If I reduce text, it will grow.
That's all stuff you can do using GREP.
Let's talk about images here. Let's look at these shoes. These shoes are a bit small. I want to make these shoes bigger. How do you make these shoes bigger? Well, I'm going to make one larger. So I'm going to just select this one, and it's been reduced to 8%. Let's go and say what I'm going to like bigger, bigger, bigger. Good enough. If only I had a way to now make these shoes the same size. And I don't want to select all the frames because I don't want to scale the frame. I want to scale the shoe, the contents of that frame.
I'm going to use the eyedropper tool.
When you double click the eyedropper tool, you can say that it should not pick up text formatting. It should only take up object sizes. And you can say, take the size and be bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger.
If you have a coworker that you absolutely hate, you double click their eyedropper during lunch break and you deselect everything.
It's always fun. I mentioned this before in another session. I would love to do a session like how to annoy your coworker. There's so much you can do with this stuff. It's just that you can hide the save command if you want to. You can change colors. You can even do like, if you look at your paper swatch, there is no pencil icon here. You can double click that and you could say, you have blue paper now.
And they will not have a clue what happened because there's nothing there. It's just weird. You can do all sorts of stuff. My favorite one is Illustrator. That is by far my favorite because what you can do is, if you look at Illustrator if they use the program regularly and you're drawing, drawing, everything's amazing, so what you do, again, you wait until they have their lunch break. And you go into the preferences and then you set a constrained angle. So, let's say, seven degrees or something. And then from that moment on, every single time they want to draw something, it's just drawn like this.
It's amazing. It's absolutely made of-- I love that session. So much stuff you can do. Anyway, cool. So I've just done this. I've just used my eyedropper tool to do a click, click, click, click, click. All of them, right? But they're no longer in focus. I got to move them now within the frame. How we're going to do this? So I can click the contents of one. I can nudge it around. However, I'm just going to select all of these. Hold on shift key, select all of these. Now there's two ways to accomplish this. Either you use a menu command here or you use a shortcut. The menu command is Object, Select, Content, or you use Shift, Escape. When you do that, I'll zoom out. When you do that, you have everything selected and you nudge everything at the same time.
It's these little things, right? And this is going to allow you to do a lot of things here. Really cool. I've got some stuff on the sides. Again, you're either one of two people. Either you do this and you select this and you go no rotation, fix whatever it was, and then do the rotation again. Or you're one of those yoga people that does this all the time while they're doing this, right? So what you can also do is just go into pages, you right click that page, and you say view op-- You say click, and then you say page attributes, rotate spread view, which means you are only rotating the camera and not the page. And that's important, by the way, because if you have a drop shadow effect applied and you actually rotate the page, the shadow is going to be cast in the wrong direction. I sometimes see this in book publishing. And so I just say 90 degrees clockwise, and you do your thing, and then you see this little cute little icon here. You go back and just clear that. And you say, rotate, spread, view, clear, rotation. And that's it. And you're done.
That was a fun document. Let's say goodbye to it. Let's move on to the next one. All right. Climbing.
The session description promised fun with tables. So let's jump into that. Okey-dokey. Oh, boy, tables. Who doesn't like a good table? Right? So this is a table I have here, and I want to show you guys a couple of tricks, right? I'm going to take your hand and guide you through table land and show you a couple of the tricks you can do when you're using tables. Now, first of all, I have to add two additional columns because I got some more text from my customer. Two additional columns, right. So let me guess. We're going to do this. We're going to go column, right click, insert column, and then do one column to the right. No. Instead, hover your cursor over the outer edge, click and hold down the mouse, then press and hold down the option key, and you decide how many you want.
Some people's mouths are open. Okay. That's it. That's simply it. And you can also just copy existing text and paste existing text, and then you can copy text that came in from your customer. And if you then say, paste without formatting, it will replace all the formatting. Copy, paste without formatting. As long as you have the same amount of returns in your text, if you compare that to the number of rows in the table, the formatting will align. It will match up.
I'm going to merge this here, merge cells. Merging cells makes me happy. Now let's take a look at a couple other things you can do. What if somebody says, actually, we have this line here, and the table has to be stretched out up until this guide I've got here. You're like sure, I can do that. First, I'm just going to drag this point until it reaches that point. Then I'm going to select everything, and then I'm going to right click. I'm going to say distributes columns. No. No. No. No. No. Let's go back. Again, put your cursor on the outer edge of your table, click and press down, then add the shift key, and you have your table accordion. And you're like, it has to fit this. Okay? And that's it. It's really that easy, right? You're going to be so excited if you want to do tables from now on. Same thing here at the bottom. Say, okay. This is the bottom of the table. Okay. Look. Click and hold down add option for more rows or click and drag with the shift key to stretch this that way. It's the exact same thing. It's neat.
Now, let's add a couple of other things here to this table, right? Let's add something that's cool. So, I have icons from Illustrator, and I have to place these icons here inside this table. And if there's one thing that has paced me off in the past, it is placing images in cells. Now there was a really big change that nobody talked about a couple years ago, and that is that you can take cells, split the cells.
I said take cells.
Split the cells vertically, and you can take cells and you can choose table, convert cell to graphic cell.
This is a graphic frame now, and it's a cell.
And now I have to divide the space a little bit because, clearly, I don't have enough room for my text. Now I could click and drag this edge, but as these are the rules of table land. If you click and drag this here, it's going to expand the entire table. However, if I were to click and press down and then hold the shift key, it will only change the spacing in between these cells. And this will allow me to actually fit all this stuff in. I'm going to just for the fun of it, just going to make this a little bit wider. Just ignore that it's not properly aligned for a moment here. Cool. And now I'm ready to place my icons. We have some fun with these icons. I'm going to show you how flexible you can make this. Okay? It's going to be so satisfying. Look, I'm just going to hit command D to place. I'm going to go and find here, diving deep, climbing links, climb icons.ai. I'm going to show my import options. I love artboards. If you really don't know how much I really love artboards, check out my session tomorrow. I've got four right now, right? So I've got four icons. I'm going to select all of them right now, and I'm just going to place them. So let's say, for example, this is number of days.
This is the difficulty, whatever, maybe altitude, and let's say this is the season, right? Now it is filling up these frames, but it's cutting off some of these icons, especially in the cloud. This doesn't really make any sense. So I'm going to select all of these. Now, you will be tempted just so if you're new to this stuff, you're going to be tempted to use your selection tool to try and click and shift click all these different icons. Remember, a table lives within a text frame. You operate it using a text frame, which means that if you want to use or if you're inclined to using this tool here, it is not going to allow you to make so it does not work. So you take the type tool and then you can select them. It's still a cell. Remember that. Okay? Now object, fitting, frame fitting options allow me to set a few settings. Hit the preview button. I am going to fit the content to the frame proportionally-- And I'm going to choose autofit. I wish that was a setting in the gym. That'll be amazing. And I am going to add some crop amount to this. Okay? That's better. I'm going to add some crop amount. Now, crop amount is really important in this very particular case if you're using autofit. It's a bit more complex. I can potentially use the padding, which is on the top right of my control bar just to add some padding in the cell. That is something that's more meant for actual text. It does work with images, but not for the thing I'm going to do right here. Okay? Just trust me on this for a second. What I'm going to do instead is I'm going to use this option, which is called crop amount, which I think might be the option that nobody's ever used in their lives before. Even I have not used that at all until I needed this specific scenario. Now take a good look at the icons themselves, right? I'm going to put my cursor in here. I'm going to press the down arrow. Okay? So see what happens? This does two things. It makes these icons smaller and it gives you epilepsy. That is the second thing. So the thing is the moment you have sufficient padding, you click Okay. And now, check this out, when you have more room, you simply enlarge this and it's just going to shrink these icons for you or make them grow or whatever it is. No more cut off images or anything. This really is the sweet spot of what is that we want to do. And that is how you have fun with tables.
One last thing when we're done with tables, right? We have to close this frame. We sometimes have to close this frame, right? And you can do this simply by double clicking it. It's going to snap back up. And fun thing is that whenever we work on tables, a lot of people see this as like you're working on a car. It's like, you want to have a change to this table? You want to change the data? Let me pop the hood. And what we do is we do this open and then we just do our thing. And you're like, okay.
We can work with this and you close the hood again, right? That's how you do your table thing. Now the problem is every single time you make a change to this table, text is being added, more characters, text jumps to a second line, a table expands, retracts, and whatever it is. You have to constantly keep double clicking this thing or whatever it is. So what I like to do is I like to access the text frame options. Now text frame option is something you can do by simply pressing command B, control B on Windows, or menus. I'm a double click kind of guy. So I like to simply just take the table, and then if you press and hold down the option key, which is alt on Windows, just see like you would drag a copy out, right? I'm just going to double click, and that's going to give you my text frame options. It's really simple. Just double click. It's really easy. And here, I'm going to go into auto size. I'm going to say, you know what? Auto size in height only and make sure everything snaps to the top and click Okay. And now take a look at this edge here. I'm going to choose Okay and snap. And now, remember my accordion? If I were to do the accordion thing by expanding the row height, it would immediately be overset, right? Now look now. If I do the exact same thing now, hold down the shift key, it's just going to grow and shrink together with whatever space is required in that table. I no longer have to pop the hood and expand that, do your thing, and then put that back. It's just going to grow and shrink together with the table. It's these little things that gives you comfort, right? That's the cool thing. I've got six minutes left, people. Six minutes. What am I going to do with six minutes? Yeah. That's a good one. Let's do this one here. A little bit out of the box thinking here. I did some layout for magazines-- And I occasionally came across interviews. And so let's assume that we have an interview with this, this guy here, Blake, Blake O'Brien. And then, obviously, there's a question and then there's an answer. This is how this works.
And just to make sure that everybody really knows that it was Blake that was answering the question, like they would always put Blake, right? Like that. And if the question was actually asked, they add a queue because it's a question, right? So how can you do this? Because this does not necessarily come in that way from your editor, and this article might be three pages long. How do you do that? Well, I have made this very simple for myself. And what I've done is I've basically looked at my paragraph styles, and I have two styles, question and answer. Okay? And this is the question style and this is the answer style. It's that simple. The thing is I want to add the Q and then the column and then Blake and everything. I have to do that now. The problem is I cannot be bothered by doing this manually. I'm like, come on. I have stuff to do. I could potentially do a find and change. I could say in GREP, find every first character of a beginning of a paragraph and then put that text in. I could do that, right? I could work on that and then chew on that little bit and then, do the math. Okay. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to keep it. I'm going to make this very simple. Look, I'm going to start with Blake. I'm going to edit the style that defines the answer, right? Check this out. I'm going to go into bullets and numbering. I'm going to choose not a bulleted list, which is this. I'm going to choose a numbered list, which is like one, two, three, four, etcetera. And the cool thing about that is you can manipulate that field. If I type in hello, it is going to add hello. If I type in Blake-- I have to learn how to type first, space, it will always have his name here. And I can even apply a character style to that. I called this one person of interest, which will make it stand out even more. And as you can see, it's now being added everywhere. I can do the exact same thing for my question. This is something that's been around for a very long time. We're abusing this option a little bit, but that's fine. Because by default, it says, give me a number and a period and a tab, which is that's what I'm getting, a number, a period, and a tab. I don't want that, guys. I just want to have Q, colon, space, and that's what I've got. And the cool thing about this is that, again, this is all live, which means that if you hit Enter or Return, if you ask a question and say, did you enjoy this session? And Blake can say, of course, I did.
And there we go.
And that, with three minutes to spare, that was my session, guys. Hope you enjoyed this.
[Music]
