LAYOUT : the newsletter of page design

Here’s a little Adobe InDesign trick that might help you accelerate the laborious task of styling up repetitive text listings. It works with InDesign versions CS2 and CS3.

In my example, I have a long, multi-page listing of website articles. Each item has a title, a brief description and a website address, and I want to style them differently. Now, there are various ways I could do this. For example, I could style up the first item, then copy and paste the styles one by one using the Eyedropper tool. If I create Paragraph Styles, I could use the Paragraph Styles palette or use Quick Apply to apply them, one by one again. But that’s too slow. Here’s what I’d do, step by step:

1. Create new Paragraph Styles for your items. In my case, I need four Paragraph Styles: heading, body, URL and empty line. If some of these styles are already used elsewhere in your layout, duplicate them and rename them ‘listings head’, ‘listings body’, etc. This way, you can continue to fine-tune your listings later without interfering with the rest of your publication.

2. After creating the Paragraph Styles, re-open the Paragraph Style Options window for the first style (in my case, ‘listings head’). You can do this by holding down Ctrl-Alt-Shift (Windows) or Command-Option-Shift (Mac) and double-clicking on the style name in the Paragraph Styles panel.

3. In the Paragraph Style Options window, click on the Next Style pop-up and choose the Paragraph Style that you want to apply to the second line (paragraph) of your listing item (in my case, ‘listings body’). Click OK.

4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 with the other Paragraph Styles for your listing, each time choosing the appropriate Next Style. The final style (in my case, the one for the empty line) should point back to your first style (in my case, ‘listings head’), completing the loop.

5. Select the listings text. In the Paragraph Styles palette, right-click (one-button Mac mouse users should Ctrl-click) on the first style and choose Apply “firststyle” then Next Style.

6. Blimey, your entire multi-styled listing has been formatted in a split second.

Normally if you want to fill some text with an image rather than a flat colour or gradient, the routine in Adobe InDesign (and QuarkXPress too) is to convert the text into a group of irreguarly shaped boxes and put the image inside them. The obvious problem with using InDesign’s Text > Create Outlines command (and QuarkXPress’ Style > Text to Box command) is that once you’ve done it, you can’t re-edit the text; instead, you would have to delete the current text-shaped boxes and start again.

Here’s a way of doing it in InDesign CS2 and CS3 without converting the text to outlines but keeping it as live, editable text. Place an image on your page, then draw a text frame and put some text inside. Make sure the text frame is in front of the image.

Select the text frame and use the Swatches palette to give it a fill colour of [Paper]. The text itself should be [Registration].

With the text frame still selected, open the Effects palette and apply the Lighten transparency blending mode.

This causes the image behind the text frame to show through the black text characters.

Align the text and image frames precisely, and you have a textured text fill.

And best of all, the text remains editable. Here, we changed the word ‘water’ to ‘layout’ simply by typing over it.

Just remember that this trick only works when designing over a white (no colour) background.

A recent tech note from Adobe lists the current Internet browsers that can open Adobe PDFs without launching Adobe Reader 8 or Acrobat 8 externally.
Mac: Apple Safari 2.0.2
Windows: Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 1.5 and 2, AOL 9, Mozilla 1.7
The tech note also lists the office programs that support Acrobat’s PDFMaker plug-ins.
Mac: Microsoft Office X (SR1) and Office 2004
Windows: Microsoft Office 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007; Microsoft Publisher 2002, 2003 and 2007; Microsoft Visio 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007; Microsoft Project 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007; Lotus Notes mail client 6.0, 6.5 and 7.0; AutoCAD 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007