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*** DesignGeek ***
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Tips and techniques for the digital designer
In this issue:
-- New Source for Adobe Bridge Tips
-- Use Flickr for Off-Site Image Archiving
-- Find Fonts Used in InDesign Style Sheets
-- Come to my InCopy/InDesign Workshop in May
Issue 51, 3/14/06
Written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion
... for her clients, colleagues, random contacts and interested subscribers
(c) 2006 Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
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New Source for Adobe Bridge Tips
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I've been doing a lot of work with Adobe Bridge lately, mostly because I had to do a live, hour-long e-seminar about it ("Adobe Bridge: Your Creative Hub") for Adobe a couple weeks ago. They recorded the Breeze-based presentation and as soon as it's publicly available on their site I'll let you know.
In the meantime, though, you might be interested in listening to the podcast I did answering some of the questions that the seminar attendees (over 450 people! -- luckily all on mute) entered in the Chat window during the live seminar. The "Special Edition" podcast I did about it, episode 12, has a specific focus on how InDesign and Bridge work together, since it's part of David Blatner's and my InDesign Secrets podcast:
http://www.indesignsecrets.com/podcast.html
While researching Bridge and any Bridge information on the web in preparation for the seminar, I ran across a couple of newish whitepapers on Adobe's site. One is on using Bridge and Version Cue, and the other explains the concept and use of metadata/XMP for creative professionals. I put links to these on my Adobe Bridge resources page:
http://www.senecadesign.com/designgeek/bridge.html
But after all my online research, my favorite find was stumbling across Gunar Penikis' blog:
http://blogs.adobe.com/bridge/
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Gunar's Blog
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Gunar is the Product Manager for Adobe Bridge. Can't get any more direct-from-the-source than that! He and Arno Gourdol (Bridge Engineering Manager) just started posting tips and inside information about Bridge to their blog.
Tips such as:
- How to manually edit keywords in a text editor and make them available to Bridge. (So much faster than clicking those little "New Keyword" and "New Set" buttons at the bottom of Bridge's Keywords panel!) With this method you could make one master set of keywords and standardize them across your workgroup.
- How to add a "Reveal in Bridge" context menu entry in the Finder or Windows Explorer.
- New Bridge features available only to Adobe Production Studio users, such as animated GIF previews for animation presets and templates.
I didn't talk about Gunar's blog nor any of these tips during the e-seminar or the podcast, since you really need to be a somewhat experienced Bridge user to appreciate their worth. DesignGeek subscribers, on the other hand, are a savvy bunch, and the Bridge users among you will probably be jumping to Gunar's blog before finishing this issue, assuming you've stuck around long enough to reach this paragraph. ;-)
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Use Flickr for Off-Site Image Archiving
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Another thing I learned while researching Adobe Bridge is that you can drag and drop images from Bridge right to the free Uploadr tool for Flickr. (Not only that, but any keywords that you added to images in Bridge get converted to Flickr tags!)
Flickr
http://www.flickr.com
Flickr, for the unitiated, is a free online photo sharing service used by a lot of bloggers but definitely not limited to that group. After opening up a free account (if you already have a Yahoo! account, you're halfway there -- Yahoo! now owns Flickr) you upload your images to the Flickr web site, usually via their on-line form that allows you to upload up to five images at once. Or, you can download a free Uploadr utility for Mac OS X or Windows XP and drag/drop piles of images from the Finder or Explorer (or Bridge!) for immediate uploading to your online account.
Flickr Uploading Tools
http://www.flickr.com/tools/
Once your images are uploaded you can give friends and family the URLs to see your images. You can specify if your images are private or public. You can also comment on your own and other's images, tag images with keywords and then do searches based on those tags across the whole flickr userbase, join groups of other flickr users to post all your images to a single "photostream,' organize your images into thematic sets, order prints and pick them up a nearby Target, even create calendars, photobooks, and posters from your images for a very reasonable fee via an affiliated service, Qoop:
Flickr print services
http://www.qoop.com/photobooks/flickr_user/index.php
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Move to Pro for Archiving
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With the free Flickr account you're limited to uploading 20MB of images a month. (Actually it's a bandwidth limit, not a storage limit, but basically it means the same.) After a month the "counter" gets reset to zero and you can upload another 20MB, which is more than enough for most bloggers, family photo hounds and eBay power sellers.
But get this: Upgrade your Flickr account to "Pro" for only $25 a year, and the limit gets raised to *one hundred times* that amount: 2,000MB, aka 2GB. Per month. To get an idea of how many photos fit in 2GB, I selected my main "photos" folder on my hard drive which contains all the images (hundreds at least) from my digital camera for the past three years. On my Mac, Get Info told me the folder's contents totaled 1.1 GB.
Obviously I haven't been taking enough pictures! Or at high enough quality I guess. And most of them are .jpgs ... but even if I had a folder full of 300 ppi, RGB TIFFs, with the Pro account I could upload over 150 5x7s a month. Flickr supports JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, and PNG image formats.
So if you need off-site backup for your images (in addition to your DVDs or an external hard drive), Flickr can be a cost-effective solution. The bonus is that you'd have access to your images from anywhere with an Internet connection.
It's a sweet workflow: Upgrade to a Pro account and use Bridge to sort/find the images you want to back up (or publicize, or show to clients), put Bridge in Compressed view so it floats above the Flickr uploader program like a palette, drag the images over and click the Upload button. Magic!
Flickr Upgrade Account to Pro
http://www.flickr.com/upgrade/
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Find Fonts Used in InDesign Style Sheets
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Any InDesign user who has ever needed to change the fonts used in a publication knows this frustration: Neither of the two find/change font features in InDesign (Edit > Find/Change and Type > Find Font) can access the fonts specified in Paragraph or Character styles. You have to edit each style individually to change its font spec -- an onerous task if you're dealing with twenty bazillion style definitions.
A little over a year ago I wrote about a method that made the task of converting a publication's fonts slightly more tolerable by combining Find Font with Redefine Style:
Find/Change in InDesign Style Sheets
http://senecadesign.com/designgeek/dgarchives/designgeek35.php
But what about a simpler task: Just figuring out which fonts are specced in the styles themselves? Perhaps InDesign is telling you it's a missing a font but you can't find where it's being used, so you suspect a style is calling for it. But which one? Or you've been giving a blank layout template with little or no content but a slew of styles. How do you know which fonts you'll need?
I have two solutions for you.
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Sneak a Peek in InDesign
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To quickly browse through all the styles used in an InDesign document and see which font each one calls for -- without messing up existing formatting and without having to open any dialog boxes, try this simple method:
1. Choose Edit > Deselect All
2. Open the Character palette so you can see the font name and style fields. (Or put the Control palette in Character formatting mode by switching to the Type tool, and view the font field there.) If you use the Character palette it doesn't matter which tool is active.
3. Select the first custom style name listed in the Paragraph Styles palette.
4. Look at your Character palette. See the font name and style it's showing? That's the one the selected style sheet uses.
5. Click the second style listed in the Paragraph palette. Look at the Character palette. And so on.
6. Do the same for the Character Styles (which may or may not specify fonts).
Since nothing is selected, no formatting is affected as you highlight each style. If you come across a style containing an unwanted font, you can double-click the style to open the Options dialog box, change the font it calls for in the Basic Character Formats panel, click OK and go on to the next style.
Caution: When you're done, the last style you selected will be the new default for the Type tool, even if you had a different tool selected. So to reset the default styles, be sure to click on [Basic Paragraph] in Paragraph Styles and [None] in Character Styles before you go on to the next task.
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Get a Typeface Listing in Bridge
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You may already know that Adobe Bridge lists all the typefaces (not individual fonts -- just the "family name") specified in InDesign CS2 documents. Did you know it also lists all the typefaces called for in the document's style sheets, even if no actual text in the layout uses them?
For this reason, I find it handy to use Bridge to quickly get a sense of "which crazy fonts did the client use in this thing" without having to open either the document or InDesign itself.
1. Open Adobe Bridge and in the Folders panel, locate and select the folder containing your InDesign file.
2. Select the thumbnail preview of the InDesign file that Bridge shows you in the large content area.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the Metadata panel at the left. All the typefaces used in document text and in its styles are listed.
Remember, this only works for InDesign CS2 documents (layouts and templates), not those saved in older versions.
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My Wishlist
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I want a "Show Styles" button in the Styles palette like how there's a "Show Sets" button in the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog box. Show Sets creates a text file listing all the commands and their keyboard shortcuts in the selected set of shortcuts. "Show Styles" would create a text file listing all the styles and their specifications in the current document.
If anyone's listening, I'd also like an "Include Styles" checkbox in Find/Change's Formats areas.
Can I get a witness? Second my emotion here (or tell Adobe your own wishlist items):
Adobe product feature request form
http://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html
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Come to my InCopy/InDesign Workshop in May
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Curious about InCopy? Want to get a hands-on taste of how your editors can edit the stories in your layout on their own computers while you're working on it on your own? Curious about how InCopy performs as a Microsoft Word replacement? Need to learn tips and techniques for getting the most out of this workflow and avoiding common pitfalls?
Come to my InCopy/InDesign Workshop and bring your editors with you. It's a full-day, hands-on pre-show session at the upcoming InDesign Conference in Chicago (sweet home Chicago!) on May 15 -- the full conference takes place May 15-18. The conference's schedule page contains descriptions of all the sessions, including my all-day InCopy one at the top -- note how there's plenty of content for editors and designers alike:
http://www.theindesignconference.com/schedule.php?sid=1&cid=12
The workshop fee is only $99 if you register by the early-bird deadline of April 2, 2006. If you enter my DesignGeek discount code when you register (good only for e-mail subscribers to DesignGeek -- I won't be posting this on the web site), you'll get $25 off that price, and a higher discount, up to $100, if you register for the entire show.
Register for the 2006 Chicago InDesign Conference (or just my workshop):
http://www.theindesignconference.com/registration.php?sid=1&cid=12
DesignGeek discount code: [sorry, this was for subscribers only -- subscribe today and request the discount code in the subscription form's Comments area if you'd like to use it. --AMC]
If you're coming to my InCopy thing, bring your laptop, or rent one from the show organizers, load up InDesign CS2 and InCopy CS2 (and a few of your own layout files); and you can follow along as I step you through setting up and using an InDesign/InCopy parallel workflow. Tip: If you don't own the software, wait until the show is less than 30 days away and then download and install the free tryouts from Adobe's web site.
You don't have to have a computer though; I've done this workshop many times and even the people who just sit back and watch get a lot out of the day!
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Or Attend InCopy Lite
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If you're not quite at the point where you're ready to take a full-day class, you might be interested in a regular 50-minute session I'm doing during the full conference on Tuesday, May 16th, "InCopy for InDesigners." Scroll down the schedule (URL above) to see a description of the session.
InCopy for InDesigners will give you just enough information to show you how the workflow works, enlighten you to the possibilities of using InCopy instead of Word with your workgroup, and afford plenty of time to answer any questions you might have.
Hope to see you there! Chicago is beautiful in May, by the way. ;-)
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MASTER THE NEW CS2 APPS WITH HERGEEKNESS!
Do you like what you read in DesignGeek? Find anything useful? Bring me or any of my hand-picked Associate Geeks in for a session or two of hands-on training for your workgroup; here in Chicago or any other city near an airport, and you can have this level of expertise all to yourself. All training comes with three years of 24/7 follow-up support for each student by phone or e-mail.
To learn more, or hear what other clients have to say, contact us or fill out the no-obligation "Request a Training Quote' form on Seneca's site:
http://www.senecadesign.com/training/request.html
Recent training clients in Chicago and throughout the U.S. and Canada include Planned Parenthood of Chicago (Illustrator); PC World Magazine (InCopy, Bridge); The Higher Learning Commission (InDesign, Bridge); Digi-Key (InDesign); Kalmbach Publishing (advanced InDesign and InCopy); Human Kinetics Publishing (InDesign, Bridge); and World Book Publishing (Photoshop, Illustrator, Bridge).
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DesignGeek is a free bimonthly publication written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion, a cross-media designer and authorized Adobe and Quark training provider. She owns Seneca Design & Training, Inc. in Chicago, Illinois (http://www.senecadesign.com/).
To subscribe to DesignGeek or read archived issues, go to its home on Seneca's site:
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To unsubscribe, follow the link at the bottom of this page.
Contact Seneca by phone at 312-946-1100 or e-mail at info@senecadesign.com
Copyright 2006 by Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
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