InDesign

The other day, Deke called asking if I knew how to erase the contents of the "Open a Recent Item" list that appears on the Welcome Screen of InDesign. Here's how my thought process unfolded:

Thought 1) Basking in the dubious glory of the master thinking I know something he doesn't.

Thought 2) Supressing speculation on what exactly he was doing in InDesign that he wants to hide. (What, you were writing detailed stories to go with your pictures?)

Thought 3) Noticing that the only questionable thing my Welcome Screen reveals is that I've been working on things other than dekeBooks.

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One of the dirty little secrets here in dekeVille is that the some of the files for the One-on-One series have been around for a long long time. Oh, not that Deke hasn't rewritten things a neurotic number of times (he has. . . he has because he cares, and. . . because he's mildly insane) or that we haven't converted the files to whatever the current version of InDesign (we have, we have because we need to practice with the new stuff anyway). But many of these files were like houses taken down to the foundation during rennovation gone amok, but then rebuilt on that same foundation (only to realize the foundation needed to be fortified).

We realize our files are old when InDesign starts going haywire, and in our case, text wrap has been one of those telltale areas where the cracks start to show. In fact, last year, Deke and I were complaining to Michael Ninness (InDesign PM at Adobe) about how they'd taken out the ability to see custom text wrap frames, and he's all, "We did not. What are you mildly insane people talking about?"

So, we sent off the file, and the upshot was, it was, like, a CS3 document that started out life as an InDesign 2.0 file. Myke and his team didn't really have a solution for our problem (well, cut-and-repaste helped) other than to say congratulations on submitting the creakiest legacy files ever observed in the wild, but he did show me this cool trick for seeing your document's history. Simple, just open the file, hold down the Command (Ctrl) key, and choose InDesign > About InDesign (or the Windows equivalent, you know the drill) and you get this scarily revealing window (shown here with the info for one of my current projects).

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Has anyone else out there ever needed to get a preview image out of InDesign and into the world-at-large when the original linked files were not available? Maybe it's just me, because it doesn't seem like an easy thing to do.

Because I edit books on graphical subjects, many of my authors actually like to write and submit InDesign files (rather than go "old school" and turn in Word docs and a folder full of TIFFs.) Until the ready-for-production draft goes off to my brilliant composition team, I really don't need (or want) to have them send along the linked files. InDesign's preview images are certainly good enough for me to evaluate a manuscript— and, frankly, passing around hundreds of megabytes of photos during the draft stage would eat up time and bandwidth unnecessarily.

I have, however, found myself on occasion wishing I could create an independent file from an InDesign preview in an emergency. Once upon a time, my answer was to take a screenshot of the preview image in situ and then paste it into Photoshop. But now I have a better solution: Create a PDF and use Acrobat's ability to extract images.

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When you're working in various Creative Suite applications, you can change the color of the background in a document to suit your mood, reduce distractions from your work environment, or test to see how your project is going to look in the environment where it will eventually live.

In Photoshop, it's relatively simple. You have two options:

1) The first is to right-click. (Do I still need to say Control-click on the Mac? Is anyone out there foolish enough to not have a two-button mouse? Seriously, I need to know because Deke and I are bound to butt editorial opinions on this!) On the background, and choose from one of three options: Gray, Black, or Custom. The other item in the context menu, Select Custom Color, brings up the somewhat annoying but familiar Color Picker that lets you change that Custom color item to anything you want, including any number of choices from the Color Libraries.

2) The second way is to Shift-click with the Paint Bucket tool (which lives in the same slot as the Gradient tool), to fill your background with whatever you have your foreground color set to.

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