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*** DesignGeek ***
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Tips and techniques for the digital designer
In this issue:
-- InDesignSecrets.com is Live
-- What's Different about this File?
-- Fastest Way to Translate a Web Page
Issue 53, 5/24/06
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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But First, a Note to My Geek Friends
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It's not your imagination, I've only been able to manage one DesignGeek issue a month for the past couple/three months. I'm not going anywhere and I'll be returning to my twice-a-month schedule shortly. (I love that term, "shortly." Could be 15 minutes ... could be 15 weeks. A very forgiving term.) But I will be writing at least one issue every month; it's truly my favorite "job" out of all the things I spend my time on. And the backlog of story ideas ... egads, it's enormous.
I do have some exciting news -- a lot of my time has been focussed on three new web sites that I'll be rolling out on my own or with partners in the next couple months, all of a DesignGeekish nature. So if you like my writing here, you'll love my writing there too! I announce the first one below; keep an eye out for news about the other two in upcoming DesignGeek issues and on Seneca's home page.
Thanks for your patience and support!
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InDesignSecrets.com is Live
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Most DesignGeek readers are aware that for the past few months I've been doing a more-or-less weekly podcast (free audio program) with David Blatner called InDesign Secrets. In each twenty-minute episode we answer listener questions, tackle the tough nuts of page layout, and share our favorite techniques and shortcuts with a lot of humor and, hopefully, insight.
You can listen to the podcast in iTunes -- no iPod required -- or any other software/online service that collects new episodes of your favorite podcasts for you. In iTunes, just search for "InDesignSecrets" in the Music Store to find our info and a Subscribe link. You can listen to any of the nineteen episodes we've completed so far. (We'll be recording number twenty later this week.)
When you create a podcast, we've learned, you also need to create a web site to host it. Until last week, David and I have been relying on a barebones site we cobbled together in a couple hours last fall. We just needed something halfway decent to list our podcast episodes while we worked out the design and content we *really* wanted.
I'm happy to say that the new design went live last week, check it out:
http://www.indesignsecrets.com
Our new site uses the popular and rock-solid Word Press 2.x blogging engine to manage content, with a theme we had custom designed for our purposes.
http://www.wordpress.org
It's hugely fun to be able to post a story to the site and moments later, to read the comments that visitors have added to the post. Hey hey, the "community" is working! That's one of the main things we've been pining for since starting the podcasts ... now listeners can comment directly on the podcast episode they're reacting to, in addition to writing us at info [at] indesignsecrets.com.
We're just starting to populate the categories (News, Events, Text Secrets, Color Secrets, etc.) with stories and tips, but since it's a blog, you can subscribe to it with any blogcatcher software and be notified immediately when new content is posted. Or you can just visit it periodically, as with most blogs all new content appears on the home page as it's added.
Hope to see you there!
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What's Different about this File?
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The other day I was looking at a custom keyboard shortcut set I had made in Illustrator (Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts) and trying to remember what changes I had made to the default keyboard shortcuts that caused me to save this custom set in the first place. What was different about this keyboard shortcut set? Which commands had I thought important enough to change?
Like the CS2 versions of InDesign and Photoshop, Illustrator lets you create text files of your keyboard shortcut sets -- the custom ones you create as well as the default ones that come with the program. But the sheer size of the files made it impossible to compare them by eye and detect the differences.
Then that word "compare" stuck in my brain ... compare, compare, where had I recently seen that command? After a bit of noodling around I remembered that it was in Microsoft Word. If you go to Word's Tools > Track Changes fly-out menu, you'll see the command for Compare Documents. Adobe Acrobat and Barebones Software's BBEdit (Mac only) also have Compare Documents features, but I remembered I thought Word's was cool because of how it noted differences with the same Track Changes mark-up I was used to. They really stick out in a document, easy to find.
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Make the Text Files
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Word's Compare Documents feature works with any two files that Word can understand. But I wanted to compare keyboard shortcut sets, which Word doesn't recognize as text files.
No problem. To make a text file of a keyboard shortcut set in Illustrator CS2, open the dialog box (Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts), select the shortcut set you want from the drop-down menu, and click the Export Text button at the right. You're prompted for a name and location of the text file it will create. To compare two sets of keyboard shortcuts in MS Word, you'll need to make two text files of course -- one of the Illustrator Defaults set, and one from your custom set.
The instructions are roughly the same for comparing keyboard shortcuts sets in InDesign and Photoshop. In InDesign, the button is called "Show Set." Photoshop will create a web page (a local .htm file) listing all the keyboard shortcuts in the selected set when you click the Summarize button in the same dialog box. Word recognizes .htm files with no problem, but you could copy and paste the text shown in the browser window to an actual text file if you want.
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Find the Differences
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In Microsoft Word, open the text or .htm file containing the "original" text .. .the default keyboard shortcuts in this example. While it really doesn't make a difference which file is opened first, I think it's easier to understand the Track Changes mark-up on the modified set ("here's what's different from the original"). Word applies the changed text mark-up to the second file you open, which we'll do in the next step.
From the Word menu bar, choose Tools > Track Changes > Compare Documents. You'll immediately be prompted to locate and open the file you want to compare to the current document. If your file is inaccessible, try choosing "All Readable Documents" (instead of the default "All Word Documents") from the Enable drop-down menu at the top of the dialog box. Select the text or .htm file of your custom keyboard shortcut set and click the Open button.
Word opens the file you selected and automatically adds brightly-colored markup to the file indicating everything that's different from the first document you opened. The marked-up changes are quite easy to find just by scrolling through the document, but if you like, you can use the Next and Previous buttons in the Reviewing toolbar (View > Toolbars > Reviewing) to jump the cursor to each marked-up change.
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Compare Page Layout Stories Too
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If you have a situation where you're not sure if the text in an article is exactly the same as the text in the same article in a previous version of a project (or you want to confirm that requested changes to a story were made) you can use the same technique to compare them. Both QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign allow you to export individual stories as stand-alone text files. If you export them as RTF (rich text format, includes most formatting information), Word will detect and mark-up *changes in formatting* as well!
To export a story from Adobe InDesign: For each version of the layout that you want to compare, click inside the target story and choose Export from the File menu. Be sure to choose either Rich Text Format or Text Only from the Format drop-down menu at the bottom of the Export dialog box, then name and save the file in a location you'll remember. Proceed with the steps explained above to compare the two files in Word.
In QuarkXPress, you export text from a story via the File > Save Text command. Choose either ASCII Text or Rich Text Format as the file format in the Save Text dialog box. You could choose a Microsoft Word format if you want, but there's no reason to in this case. Do the same for both versions of a story, then compare them as described above.
Who knew Word would come in so handy?
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Fastest Way to Translate a Web Page
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English speakers: When you arrive at a web page that's in a language you don't understand, try this:
1. Copy the URL of the web page from the browser address area to the Clipboard (Edit > Copy).
2. Click inside your browser's Google Search field (or go to Google.com and click in the Search field there)
3. Paste the URL (Edit > Paste) into there and hit Return/Enter.
When you search for a URL in Google, the search results page shows only one hit, that exact page. If you're lucky, you'll see a "[Translate this page]" link after the search result. Click that link and Google will show the same URL -- the same web page -- but the text will be translated to English.
It's only a machine translation, and it only works on live text (not text that appears in an image), but it's often more than enough to suss out the meaning of a page.
Google can translate these languages into English (sorry, not the other way around): Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese
Here's a neat way to test out Google's translation prowess. A friend of mine, Adobe trainer/consultant Rufus Deuchler, maintains a blog in both English and Italian, two languages he speaks fluently. Compare how Rufus translated the Italian version to English versus how Google translates it.
Rufus's site, Italian version (I think it's his native tongue):
http://rufus.typepad.com/rufus/italiano/index.html
Compare Google's translation of that page to Rufus's own English version:
http://rufus.typepad.com/rufus/english/index.html
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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 Eaton Aerospace (InDesign, Bridge); Source Media (QuarkXPress); Synergy Creative (Advanced Photoshop); Navta Associates (InCopy); University of Iowa (InDesign, Photoshop, Bridge); World Library Publications (InDesign, InCopy, Bridge); Loyola Press (InDesign, InCopy, Photoshop); Planned Parenthood of Chicago (Illustrator); and PC World Magazine (InCopy, 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.
Please forward without cutting. Please contact Seneca for reprint permissions. We don't guarantee accuracy of articles. Company or product names mentioned in DesignGeek may be registered trademarks, we use the names in an editorial fashion with no intention of infringement.
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