I’m often asked if I have written a book or plan to write a book…and the answer is no.

I get asked to write books from time to time by various publishers and the answer is always the same: “I’ll think about it.” Then, after 15 minutes or so…”No thanks.”

There are many reasons I don’t want to write a book, but one of them involves my unwillingness to put something that is ever-changing, like the technology we use, into a permanent form. I just can’t think how much sleep I would lose if I wrote something in a book, then, after it was printed, realized a better way or that I was just plain wrong about something.

An example of this is this nifty new feature in InDesign that I demonstrated awhile back at the Photoshop Convention in Munich, Germany. I was showing Adobe Bridge CS4 and all the new features…cool stuff…and wanted to show how you can use Bridge with InDesign to place graphics and text quickly.

I selected several photos in Bridge, held down my mouse and flipped over to InDesign. This loaded my cursor in InDesign with 12 photos.

If you’ve never used the Multi-File Place before, InDesign CS3 and CS4 allow you to cram a bunch of files for placement into the cursor for faster page layout. You can choose multiple files, including all file formats InDesign supports, including text, photos, Word, PDF, InDesign and more…very fast.

And you can scroll through the contents of the cursor previews by banging on your right and left arrows. If there is a file you don’t want, after all, just hit escape and it will be…uh…unloaded.

New in CS4 is the ability to hold down your Cmd/Ctrl + Shift keys and your cursor icon changes from the preview into a grid of small squares. You are now setup to place your files in a grid on your page.

As you drag, you’ll notice there are only nine frames. You can hold down your left/right/up/down arrows to change the space between the frames, which is cool, too, but there are only nine of them.

When you let go of your mouse, the files are placed in the newly created frames, and any files left over are still loaded for placement elsewhere.

BUT I WANT 12 OF THEM!!!

So this is where my reason for not wanting to write a book comes in. While demonstrating this new feature, an attendee at the conference raised his hand and said “How do I get 12 of them?”

Crap…

In my job of learning software, I try lots of things. I push buttons and hold down various key combinations to see what happens. For the life of me, I had not figured out how to get InDesign to change the number of frames from nine…and I tried everything…so I thought.

I told him “I don’t know of a way…”

What a loser I am.

Well, after a few days I was playing with Bridge and InDesign again and I lifted a finger (not the way you might think) and there it was. The secret key. The hidden code. The secret passage.

After you start drawing the grid holding down your Cmd/Ctrl + Shift keys, release your Shift key and now, if you bang on your up/down/left/right arrow keys, you will remove and add frames both horizontally and vertically, depending on which you hit. And it’s sticky, so if you create a 12-frame grid, it will be a 12-frame grid the next time you do it (this session…next time you restart InDesign it goes back to the default nine frames).

Imagine my turmoil if I had written that in a book instead of only letting down 30 people, or so. I still lose sleep at night thinking of ways to contact those people in Munich and admitting my ignorance and showing them the missing link to total grid control.

I need therapy.

And finally I’ll note that even though there might be some use for this, it’s limited, in my opinion. It automatically places the photos in order of their names, and you can’t control it. So if you wanted to place photos in a certain order, that is not numeric or alphabetical based on the first character, you’re out of luck on this one

You also can’t numerically control the spacing (gutter) between the rows and columns, so from a design perspective, it’s not as precise as I would like. What if you hit your up arrow twice and left arrow twice to create the look you want for this grid…how are you going to remember that in six months when you need to recreate it?

But it’s fun to show your friends.

If you have ever wanted to link a text frame from one InDesign document to another, you can’t. But I have written a little step-by-step trick that allows you to do it now, thanks to CS4’s Conditional Text feature.
I just posted the tip on my buddy David Blatner’s InDesign Secrets Blog. Check it out at: http://indesignsecrets.com/threading-text-from-one-document-to-another.php.

Please Note: In the story to follow there is a reference to the possibility of a Miss Margeret Sturton from Winchester drinking excessively. This rumour has been dispelled by the aforementioned Miss Sturton who, in fact, claims to be a teetotaler. Therefore, it must be assumed she was not drinking excessively, but, more likely, out all night dancing with Germans who had been drinking excessively. We regret any inconvenience the below reference may have caused.

My new friend Margeret Sturton from Peter Symonds College in Winchester, England emailed me with a question the other day, and it’s worth sharing.

She attended the Fall Yearbook Conference we host every year and she saw me color balance a photo with a yellow cast very quickly using the eyedropper in Photoshop. I don’t know if I just did it too quickly or if she had been drinking excessively, but she didn’t get the notes down properly. So here is the refresher course for her and perhaps a new trick for the other two people who might happen to read this article.

It’s all about gray. In a photo studio, when setting up lights for a photo shoot, photographers will use a gray card in a photo to measure the color balance of the set. The logic is this: if the lights are throwing off a yellow cast, the gray card will turn yellow, as well. Then, when developing the photos (or adjusting digitally in Photoshop) if you make the gray card (which became yellowish) gray again by adding filters, etc…the rest of the photo will adjust, also.

So image a gray card that shifted to yellow ten percent. That means the rest of the shot has taken on a ten percent yellow cast, as well. Make the gray card gray by taking out the ten percent yellow and the same amount is subtracted from the rest of the photo giving you color balance again.

Simple.

So here is the problem with photos NOT taken in a studio: where’s the gray card? It’s a little hard to get David Beckham to hold a gray card while dribbling down the field for a shot. Nope…you have to find your own gray card in a shot.

Look around you…there’s gray everywhere…especially in Seattle. If you have a photograph that has something in it that is supposed to be gray, you’re set. It doesn’t matter what shade of gray. It could be concrete, a metal trash can, a gray car or a dark gray sweater…doesn’t matter.

Once you find that you’re only a click away.

Notice this photo of a P-51 Mustang. It has a slight yellow cast turning the sky a bit green. You don’t really notice it in the plane so much, but often in a photo some areas show a more pronounced problem then others. Note: I’ve seen people focus on the problem areas by making selections (like of the sky) and only adjusting that. I recommend you try this solution first and then do selective adjustment only if really necessary.

Now, select Image> Adjustments> Curves (or Levels, but I prefer Curves). You will see three eyedropper tools. The white one sets the White Point and the black one sets the Black Point (which we will discuss at another time). The middle one sets the Gray Point. Choose that one.

Now simply click on something in the image that is supposed to be gray and BOOM…Photoshop neutralizes the color of that pixel to gray again, and applies the same adjustment to the rest of the photo.

If you don’t like the adjustment, keep click on gray stuff until it looks the way you want it to. Just like the airplane photo above…the sky is blue again and the plane looks better after a single click of my mouse.

I had a lady ask me one time “What if there isn’t anything in the photo that’s gray?”

Well…then you can’t use this technique. But if there IS gray, you’re set.

After showing this trick at a conference in Oklahoma, a person in the audience approached the next day and said “I saved about three hours work adjusting photos last night. I had a bunch of photos of old people to adjust and all I did all night was click on gray hair, click on gray hair, click on gray hair….

Have you ever opened you InDesign document only to have it scream at that your missing fonts?
Who needs ‘em? Just print it, anyway, you’re thinking?
Ahh if it were only that easy.
No, you have to find ‘em, one way or another. But what if the missing font isn’t really there? What if it’s on the list but InDesign won’t show you where it is or won’t let you swap it with something else…now that’s wierd.
One trick I like to do first is the ol’ InDesign Interchange Format.
I received a file from a reader just this week with Times Bold Condensed showing up for no reason. Sure enough, it didn’t exist in the doc. After running it through the inx format…good as new.
Click Here to Watch the Video
Or what about when you copy and paste from another document, or drag from the library and all of a sudden…when the fonts were fine…they’re not fine anymore? Now that’s just crazy.
We’ve created a little video to show you one common reason for The Great Missing Font Mystery.
Click Here to Watch the Video
If you have other examples of missing font issues, be sure to let us know…we’ll add them here.