Can I get a (Microsoft) Word in edge-wise?

August 25, 2018 Leave a comment

Further to my article in April 2017 the InDesign team have certainly received the message loud and clear, and have now implemented some long-awaited improvements to InDesign. To their credit, the InDesign team have also made their communication with their technical staff far more transparent with the “wishform” page, where InDesign feature requests and bug reports can be viewed in real-time, along with their progress. The team have also made it easier to see what will be available in future versions with greater access to the prerelease program.

While I am not in the prerelease program myself, I like to have a look at the feature requests for InDesign to see what may or may not be coming to the next version. My own submissions for feature requests are usually as a result of:

A recent issue I’ve encountered during a project or forum request;
An innovation by one of InDesign’s competitors, such as Quark, Scribus or Serif;
An innovation in a complimentary application such as Acrobat, Illustrator or Photoshop;
Simply finding a bug and reporting it

During the 2018 Adobe Symposium in Sydney, there were frequent mentions of Adobe’s recent innovation, Adobe Sensei. Apart from the obvious submission to the feature requests page for InDesign to adopt Adobe Sensei technology, I was reminded of certain features that I knew existed in Microsoft Word.

For the first five years of my working life, Microsoft Word was my workhorse. I’d started my working life in an office performing clerical duties, and I would routinely use Word. Through my employer at the time, my job was slowly integrated into the printing and stationery arm that it had, and once I’d entered my next job exclusively in the printing industry, Word clearly took a back seat. I would refer to Microsoft Office products to import content into the applications I’d used over time, such as PageMaker, Quark Xpress and of course, Adobe InDesign.

That said, new or recent users to InDesign aren’t always from a marketing or graphic design background, but can be self-publishers, clerical staff, project managers, or simply anyone who has been told by their printer that they won’t accept Word files, but InDesign files are fine.

It is important to consider that users of Microsoft Office products can struggle to grasp concepts of usage that are present InDesign, and the learning curve can be steep. I’m also concerned about how new users of InDesign are acquiring their skills, given that hands-on training doesn’t appear to be a big part of this, but rather, methods such as:

Teaching themselves
On the job training from colleagues
Video courses from training sources
Video courses from anyone with screen capture software (yes, this includes my Youtube channel)

While reading InDesign forum requests lately, I have noticed InDesign users asking about features they are used to in Microsoft Word, and answers usually range from “InDesign wasn’t set up for that” or “InDesign can’t handle that”.

My question is: “Why not? Word can do this quite easily, and has done for decades!” Personally, there are many features of Office products that I think InDesign could easily benefit from, such as:

Macros
Calendars
Basic print impositions (a Publisher feature)
Mail merge
Footnotes and endnotes
Autoformat
Citations
Equations
Shapes
Smart Art (e.g. flow charts, venn diagrams, etc)
Charts and graphs

It is true that many of the features listed can be accomplished by third party scripts or plug-ins, but I would argue that if software with a lower price tag can accomplish these tasks without having to make further financial investment in a plug-in that may be obsolete upon the next CC update, how about adding these features to Adobe InDesign? It would make it easier for Office users migrating to InDesign, and would give veteran InDesign users some handy tools that were not previously available.

Adobe, mate, please add an Australian Dictionary to InDesign

July 7, 2018 1 Comment

In April 2017, Keith Gilbert wrote an article on InDesignsecrets highlighting the importance of understanding what dictionary Adobe InDesign was using when performing a spell check on documents.

This is particularly true for English speakers who live outside of the USA, UK or Canada who may not realise that there is no InDesign-installed dictionary specifically for their location.

There is no Australian Dictionary in InDesign by default

There are myriad countries that use English as its first official- or de facto language, and many are satisfied to use the English (UK) definition for their spelling. Australia and New Zealand are exceptions to this rule, but as I live in Australia, I will present the Australian arguments for using an Australian Dictionary:

With the exception of words unique to the Australian lexicon, there are other day-to-day differences between Australian English and other dictionaries, such as:

words that end in -ize in US usually end in -ise, such as criticise, realise…
words that end in -or in US usually end in -our, such as honour, colour, flavour, neighbour…
SOME words that end in -er in US usually end in -re, such as centre, metre. This is particularly a problem with metric measurements when represented in US English
SOME words that end in -og in US can end in -ogue, such as catalogue, epilogue… but obviously not all words such as smog, dog, jog…
spelling of words such as Mom/Mum, Tire/Tyre, sulfur/sulphur, aluminium/aluminum

Recognising this as an issue, both Microsoft Word and OpenOffice do provide for an Australian English dictionary. But this leads to the next problem:

InDesign can give a false impression that there is an Australian Dictionary

Take the following sentence that I have in Microsoft Word:

The ionised particles in the centre turn a red colour once the reaction is realised.

If I save this Microsoft Word file and place it into InDesign, InDesign applies the default spell-check to the text and highlights the problem words.

dict001

But if I cut and paste that sentence from Microsoft Word directly into Adobe InDesign using the clipboard defaults in the preferences and dynamic spelling turned on, here is what happens:

dict002

Note in the Character palette that the Language dropdown says English: Australian, so what’s the fuss? The problem is that InDesign is giving us a false impression. To the same paragraph, let’s type some words directly at the end of that pasted sentence – words that an Australian spell-checker would normally flag such as honor or center.

dict003

Still nothing, but the dynamic spelling should report these two words as being incorrectly spelled. What if I type some rubbish that any spell-checker should see?

dict004

Still nothing again (trust me, fxxxazzeyz isn’t an Australian word!) so any text that contains the character trait that was pasted from the original Microsoft Word sentence will be skipped from InDesign’s spell check, and it will use the default dictionary of English USA to check the rest of the text that doesn’t contain this character trait.

A similar technique of assigning text the [No Language] character trait is used to bypass spell-check and described in this indesignsecrets video:

This presents a real problem, given that none of the text with the Australian dictionary character trait are truly being checked for their spelling.

Installing an Australian Dictionary is overly-complicated

Sandee Cohen wrote up an article on InDesignsecrets detailing how to install a hunspell dictionary and there is another set of instructions on the Adobe InDesign help page on how to do this, but quite frankly both processes are more complicated than most users are prepared to tolerate.

Vote to change this!

There is a suggestion on the InDesign Uservoice page to add an Australian Dictionary to the interface. If you would like to see this added to future versions of InDesign, please vote here!

Filed under Communication, Fonts & Type, Housekeeping

Do you REALLY need to trash your preferences?

May 13, 2018 2 Comments

As a regular in the Adobe InDesign Forums, from time to time I see this one line given out as a “cure-all” to any issue occurring in InDesign: Trash your preferences. There’s even dedicated instructions on how to trash your preferences in the main screen of the forums, so it should be the first thing to do once InDesign goes off the rails, right?

NO!

When I see this suggestion offered as a solution to a strange or bizarre situation that a poster is encountering, the person offering the advice usually neglects to tell the poster that by doing so, all of their settings and preferences will be gone, and have to be reset. There is also no guarantee that trashing preferences will resolve the issue that the poster had, and in doing so the poster not only has the same issue, but now has the complication of rebuilding their preferences.

Instead of this advice, I would suggest a checklist of the following:

Is the issue happening in all documents, or just the one that I’m working in? What happens if I try in a new document?
Could it be a conflict with other software? What happens if I close other software and try again?
Could it be InDesign itself? Does restarting InDesign help?
Could it be the machine? Will a restart return InDesign to normal?
Is an InDesign plug-in to blame, or a recently installed script? If the plug-in or script can be turned off, does this make a difference?
If you have access to other versions of InDesign, is the issue able to be replicated in other versions of InDesign?
If you have access to InDesign on other platforms (e.g. there are other machines in the office that may run InDesign on another operating system) is the issue able to be replicated on other operating systems?

If the fault is persistent, before going to the forums, check the Adobe InDesign Feedback page first. Does the fault appear on this page as either a bug or feature request?

If the fault is not listed here, then go to the InDesign forum and search the forum first for the particular issue. Chances are if you are experiencing the issue, that someone before you has as well.

If the forum is showing no results, feel free to ask the question but remember to state:

the version of InDesign being used;
the platform and version of the operating system that is being used;
what is done to trigger the fault (e.g. When I print; When I click on the pages panel…)
what the fault actually is (e.g. a warning comes up; it crashes; the image appears backwards…)
any debugging you have taken to remedy the fault (e.g. I tried turning it off and on…)

Posting on this forum may take some time to receive an answer, as the majority of posts are handled by other users. Occasionally the Adobe staff will answer the queries, but they are clearly identified as “STAFF”.

If one of the responses that is received on the forum is “trash your preferences” ask the following questions:

What led the poster to come to that conclusion that trashing preferences would resolve the issue? Did they suffer the same fault and this solution worked for them?
Look at the poster’s history. Do they have a habit of suggesting this solution over and over again?
Did the poster warn of the side-effects of trashing your preferences?
Is this the consensus of all other posters on the thread, or are there other solutions that have been offered?

My concern with providing the “trashing your preferences” option as a solution is that it should only be performed as a last resort when all other methods short of a reinstall have failed to resolve the issue. In recent years, I’ve seen this advice given out on the forums like candy at Halloween, and no doubt I too have suggested it more than once.

If you have received “trash your preferences” advice on the forums, don’t be afraid to ask for a second opinion.

Filed under Communication, Housekeeping, News

Quick-tip: rename all links in an InDesign file

July 23, 2017 Leave a comment

When working with difficult clients, it can be tempting to take out some frustration on the clients’ files, such as naming links within a file rather inappropriately. An example would be a picture placed into an InDesign file with the name lousypicture.jpg. Seems harmless enough, but this is a tame example compared to what might be going through your mind as a reader. Also, no – I’ve never done this and I’ve always behaved in a professional manner to my clients.

Seems like harmless enough fun… until the client requests packaged InDesign files of their artwork. Then it’s easy for the client to see all of the inappropriate names that were given to the links in their artwork, and unless they have a sense of humour about it, expect to receive… negative feedback.

If you’ve been in a situation like this and needed to rename all links in a document, then scripter Kasyan Servetsky has an ideal script for you: batch rename and link. Once the script is run, it renames and relinks all links in an InDesign file based on their page number and their position on the page. So a name such as lousypicture.jpg will now become AA_0002_r1.jpg

I’d originally used this script four years ago when I received a strange use-case where a customer wanted the images from their annual report labelled in terms of what pages the images were on, and this script was quite handy for that.

However, I can see the more appropriate use-case of having to rename inappropriate or offensively-named links when handing files over to clients.