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*** DesignGeek ***
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Tips and techniques for the digital designer
In this issue:
-- Drag from Bridge to QuarkXPress
-- MacBook Warning
-- My Lynda.com IC/ID Video Training is Live
-- Removing Hyperlinks from Word Files (a Quickie)
Issue 63, 5/30/07
Written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion
... for her clients, colleagues, random contacts and interested subscribers
(c) 2007 Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
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Drag from Adobe Bridge to QuarkXPress
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Adobe Bridge, the free digital asset management program that comes with any Creative Suite product, is one of my favorite programs. When I'm working in InDesign, Photoshop or Illustrator, it's indispensable for quickly finding, previewing, and organizing all the files involved in a project.
Just like the Finder or Windows Explorer, you can use Bridge to find, organize, rename, and open any file on your computer. Beyond that, there's a lot of extra Bridge-only features you get with the Creative Suite programs and file formats, as you can imagine, but not so much with files created from non-Adobe software like Microsoft Office or Corel.
But I did learn of a neat thing you can do with Bridge and QuarkXPress v6.x or v7: Drag and drop. With a little bit of prep, you can drag single or multiple images, PDFs or text files right from Bridge's window onto a QuarkXPress layout and they appear just as though you went to File > Get Text or File > Get Picture in XPress.
Actually, you can drag and drop from Windows Explorer into XPress without any prep whatsoever. [Edit: No, you can't drag/drop from the Finder too, as this article originally stated. My mistake! I figured if it worked in Windows -- which I tested -- it had to work in OS X, which I didn't test. Thanks to Jay Nelson for the quick heads-up! --AMC] But combining Bridge with XPress just gives one that special Geek Thrill that makes it all worthwhile, no?
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Wait, You Need a Free XTension
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QuarkXPress isn't "Bridge aware" right out of the box. You need to go to Extensis' site and download and install their free drag-and-drop XTension (Mac OS X only) first. The XTension is designed to work with Extensis' Portfolio 8 product (a wonderful digital asset manager) but owning Portfolio 8 is not required.
Extensis' free QX-Drag&Drop XTension
(aka "QuarkXPress drag-and-drop XTension for Portfolio")
http://tinyurl.com/92323
You'll see on this Mac downloads page (scroll down a bit) they have an XTension for QXP 7 and another one for QXP 4-6 (I only tested the v7 one for this article). Download the one you need, drop the XTension into your QuarkXPress XTensions folder and restart the program.
Obviously Extensis didn't intend for it to be used with Bridge; so who knows how long it'll last. But in the meantime, check it out. From the Bridge window you can drag and drop any file format that QuarkXPress has a filter for: EPS, TIFF, DOC, PSD (if you have the PSD Import filter in XPress), and the rest.
The ultimate coolness is that the XTension adds a bit of InDesign-ness to QuarkXPress. To wit, you don't have to be on a specific tool or even have a box waiting! Drag and drop a picture and XPress makes the picture box on the fly, sized to 100% of the image. Drag and drop a Word document, instant text box. PDFs? No problem. After you drop them, all pictures and PDFs appear in the Utilities > Usage > Picture panel as usual, linked to their originals.
Ready for this? Drag and drop *multiple* files (even a combination of text and image files at once), and QuarkXPress creates their boxes with aplomb, bloop-bloop-bloop. They appear stacked on top of each other, offset a bit so you can see them all, just as in InDesign CS2. (InDesign CS3 has a bunch of new features for multiple-image importing that the XTension can't replicate.)
If you do have a picture box or text box waiting, you can drag a single file into the layout (this won't work with multiple files) and hover over the box. When the box highlights, drop the file and it goes right into it, nice and neat.
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Your OS or Bridge?
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Remember that XPress versions 6 and 7 for Windows already have a basic drag and drop ability. Without the XTension I've been talking about, you can drag and drop from Windows Explorer one file at a time, into a waiting text or picture box. But with the XTension, the basic feature is enhanced for Windows, and added to the Mac OS Finder as well: You can drag multiple files from Explorer/Finder into a Quark layout, and placeholder boxes are optional.
So why use Bridge? Because you can't get the Finder or Explorer to do Bridge's powerful searches, filtering, or sorting; and you can't get a tiny window to float over an XPress layout as you can with a Bridge window in Compact mode, making it much easier to do the drag-and-drop procedure.
And ... because mashing up software from Adobe and Quark like this is just too much fun.
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MacBook Warning
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If you're an experienced Mac user who is now the proud owner of an Intel-based laptop, especially if you used to use a "regular" Mac laptop (a PowerBook or an iBook), you may not have bothered to read the User Guide that came with your new baby. What's to learn, right? It's faster and it can run Windows. The end. Let's start loading software!
I'd like to call your attention to page 15 of said manual, in the section on Putting Your MacBook to Sleep. Right after it tells you how to put it to sleep by closing the lid (duh), you'll find these lines with a boxed rule around them:
"NOTICE: Wait a few seconds until the sleep indicator light starts
pulsing (indicating that the computer is in sleep and the hard disk
has stopped spinning) before moving your MacBook Pro. Moving
your computer while the disk is spinning can damage the hard disk,
causing loss of data or the inability to start up from the hard disk."
And by "a few seconds" they actually mean more like "twenty to twenty-five seconds." Try it! Close your MacBook or MacBook Pro laptop and watch that little light by the latch. It stays steady for a long time before going into "pulse mode," unlike the older Mac laptops, which start pulsing within two or three seconds.
It's quite difficult to break the habit of closing your laptop and then almost immediately sliding it into your bag or picking it up and moving to another room. Especially when a cab is waiting or someone is holding the elevator door for you! But wait you must. During those twenty excruciatingly-slow seconds, the Mac is writing a lot of data to the disk before it actually goes to sleep. Jostling it around then is the same as jostling it around while it's saving a morning's worth of edits to a huge Photoshop file or something.
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Safe Sleep
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So what is it doing while the light stays steady? It's going into "Safe Sleep" mode by writing the contents of RAM to the hard disk. You probably already know that if you leave the laptop asleep long enough without being plugged in, it'll eventually run out of power and shut down on its own. Without Safe Sleep, after you plug it in (or put in a fresh battery) and start it up again, you'd have lost any unsaved changes in any documents you left open.
With Safe Sleep, after starting it up again, you'll see a little progress bar appear temporarily, indicating that it's restoring all your documents and open applications to the state they were in before the laptop lost power.
The Safe Sleep feature is found on all the Intel-based laptops, and may be enabled on other Intel-based desktop Macs, but I haven't been able to track down that information. No matter, because the issue of moving the computer while it's doing its Safe Sleep thing (writing RAM to the disk) is only crucial for the laptops, which tend to get moved around a lot, especially after a busy laptop owner snaps the lid shut.
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Disabling Safe Sleep
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If you just can't stand the Safe Sleep wait, or you don't trust yourself to remember to wait in the first place and possibly damage your hard drive, you can disable it. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a neat little shareware program, script or widget that'll do this for you. You'll have to get your hands dirty in the Mac's Command Line Interface utility program, Terminal.
Everything I say from here to the end of the article comes with a caution that I'm not a Unix geek and am just reporting what I've read on many, many learned forums on the subject. And I've done the following steps myself with my MacBook Pro with no ill effects. Still ... be careful out there.
Open the Terminal program from Applications > Utilities and enter this command:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
... then hit Return, and enter an admin password when prompted. Now you can quit Terminal. The next time you close your laptop's lid, note how much more quickly it goes into normal Sleep mode.
By the way, you'll still have a large file sitting in /private/var/vm called "sleepimage" that was reserved for Safe Sleep, equivalent in size to the amount of RAM you have installed. So if you'd like to free up a gig or two of hard drive space, you can delete this file with no ill effects. You'll need a utility that lets you see invisible files on your Mac in order to do this, or you can remove it via Terminal (press Return after each line):
cd /var/vm
sudo rm sleepimage
If you change your mind and want to reenable Safe Sleep, issue this command in Terminal:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3
... entering a Return and supplying an admin password if prompted. There's no need to restart the Mac, and the invisible sleepimage file will rebuild on its own.
Here are a couple web sites with full discussions about the Safe Sleep issue, if you'd like to read more. I'm using the TinyURL service because the actual URLs to these blog posts and forum threads are really long.
Macworld article by Rob Griffiths:
http://tinyurl.com/ugzrp
OSXHints.com thread:
http://tinyurl.com/3covm6
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My Lynda.com IC/ID Video Training is Live
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My first Lynda.com video training title went live a couple weeks ago. Right now the lessons are only available online, but a DVD will be available for sale shortly:
InCopy CS3 + InDesign CS3 Integration
http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=323
If you're not a lynda.com member, you can only view the first few introductory Quicktime movies for free. Once you subscribe (as low as $30 for a month), all the videos are accessible, for my title and almost 300 other ones.
Or, you can fill out a simple web form and then log in for a free 7-day trial of everything on lynda.com:
Free Lynda.com Trial
http://lynda.com/freepass/seneca
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Why I'm Excited
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It's not just that it's sort of thrilling to see my name included in lynda.com's drop-down list of Search by Author, in the company of luminaries like Deke McClelland, Bert Monroy, Eric Meyer and (of course) David Blatner. Or that I may earn some royalties if enough people view my videos -- that and a quarter will buy you a candy bar; InCopy is still a pretty small market.
It's that after teaching InCopy and InDesign to so many end users for the past few years, it was immensely satisfying to pull it all together in a way that I think makes the most sense for users new to the workflow. There are over eighty videos (a total of 8 hours of training), with entire "chapters" devoted to essential topics like Tracking Changes and Assignment Workflows.
Initially, I had so much content and so many techniques and tips I wanted to include -- for editors, designers, and production managers -- I didn't know where to start. Chris Mattia, my Lynda.com producer, spent hours helping me to whittle and finesse my massive outline to an understandable, smooth flow of information.
He was also gung-ho for an idea of mine that lynda.com had never done before: Video tutorials that switched between the Mac and Windows interfaces in single, smooth shots. I thought this would be the most realistic way to teach the workflow; since the typical scenario is that designers are on Macs using InDesign; writers are on Windows using InCopy.
Now, if you watch any of the workflow-specific tutorials, you'll see how the same layout looks to a Mac-based designer in InDesign and a Windows-based editor in InCopy, and how each person is notified of and updates the other's changes. You can't even tell we had to use two different video capture programs to make the magic happen.
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Behind the Scenes at Lynda.com
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These videos are not your typical YouTube things. The people at Lynda.com have two fully-outfitted professional recording studios, one on either coast. Tutorial authors are flown in, put up in a nearby hotel, paired up with an on-site video producer, and then basically held captive in a soundbooth for as long as it takes to complete the title. (Captivity is easy to take when you're in the beautiful resort town of Ojai, California, though.)
My title took a solid week. Each five-to-ten minute video took an average of 30-40 minutes to set up, rehearse, record, and re-record. And that was just for the recording itself. There were also weeks of outline and file preparation, and the weeks of "post" by the lynda.com sound and video engineers -- editing all the raw captures into tight and smooth video tutorials.
Knowing all the work that goes into a single title, I'm so impressed that Lynda.com has hundreds more, and are releasing new ones seemingly every week. (The latest lynda.com email in my InBox announced *four* new titles.)
If you need to get up to speed on any of the new Adobe CS3 programs, Microsoft's just-released Expression Design, or even the new-to-you QuarkXPress 7, Lynda.com has you covered. (Plug for my bud: Be sure to check out David Blatner's InDesign CS3 Essentials title, it's great!) They have an impressive collection of non-software-specific titles too, topics like Search Engine Optimization, Podcasting, and Font Management (8.75 hours! oy!).
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Removing Hyperlinks from Word Files
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One last quickie to round out this issue, then I can send it off.
You know how when you import Word files into InDesign or QuarkXPress, you sometimes get unwanted hyperlinks? Ugly underlined things colored a garish RGB blue? That's because Word is set by default to convert email addresses and URLs into live links, and that's its built-in Character Style for them.
I'm not going to get into the details of how to fix these in the layout program (or turn off the Word default) because I've already written them up in a post to my InDesignSecrets.com blog:
http://indesignsecrets.com/cleaning-up-hyperlinks-from-word-text.php
What I wanted to call out in this quickie was a tip provided by one of the blog readers in their comment to the story. Since then it's been one of the most popular tips I've mentioned during training sessions.
Kazimierz Kapusniak said you can quickly and easily clear out all the hyperlink formatting in the Word document itself, before you import it. Open the Word doc in Word, select all the text (Command/Control-A), then press Command/Control-6. [DesignGeek readers wrote in to note that you have to use the "6" from the top row, not from the number pad. Thanks, guys!]
All the hyperlink formatting disappears, but the linked text remains. No other formatting is removed.
Unbelievable. Why couldn't I have learned this, like, ten years ago!
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DesignGeek is a free monthly 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 2007 by Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
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