UPDATE 2021-10-08: Enfocus Pitstop has released an update that now resolves the error that was brought about by the update of Adobe Acrobat DC. However, I will leave the article posted for posterity.
Have you ever received a client’s InDesign file and sent it to PDF or print, only to measure the document and realise it is a different size to the one that was in InDesign’s document setup?
What could cause this issue to arise?
The page tool has been used
It is likely that at some stage between the initial creation of the file and receiving the file, at least one page size in the document has been changed using the page tool.
Preflight should tell me… right?
Well, that depends. If you are using either of InDesign’s default preflights (i.e. [Basic] or Digital Publishing) then preflight will not flag a warning.
More comprehensive preflights such as the VIGC profiles look for much more than InDesign’s default preflights e.g.:
As a side-note, the Document portion of the Preflight Profiles dialog box is also handy for authors who are making saddle stapled publications that must have page-counts in multiples of four (an issue I’ve faced several times) e.g.:
Or for larger offset publications where folded page signatures are likely to be prepared in minimum multiples of eight e.g.:
There are also scripts to highlight this
I’m working on a startup script that – upon export or print – should provide an alert dialog box warning that there are size discrepancies… but in the meantime there are some other scripts that work by providing alerts to a document’s page sizes, or a script hosted over on Kasyan Servetsky’s curated list that makes a list of the page sizes in a document (look for “Check all pages” once the link loads).
What I think would ultimately help everyone would be if the Document Setup window would change once page sizes in a document were no longer the same, such as this mockup e.g.:
When proofing PDFs of books to clients, it is often important that the client sees the proof as a series of left and right page spreads. PDFs made with any of InDesign’s default settings (these are the options in the Export Adobe PDF dialog box in the top dropdown field in square brackets) will show the PDF in Adobe Acrobat as it’s default view – single pages.
Adobe Acrobat does allow for pages to be presented in two-page appearance, but this is controlled by the user. If the user is unaware of this feature, then they will be viewing the PDF using Acrobat’s default single page view.
It is possible to change the view settings of a specific PDF while in Adobe Acrobat and this is done from the Properties option from the File menu.
The page viewing defaults of Acrobat itself can also be changed, but this will view any PDF that has not had its preferences changed when the PDF was made.
It is worth noting though that prior to 2015, the widely accepted method to prepare a PDF as readers spreads was to do this from InDesign’s Spreads radio button in the Export Adobe PDF dialog box.
While this does prepare what appears to be readers spreads, it does so with some disadvantages:
The centre spread line cannot be seen. This can be addressed by using the page border script from Indiscripts that applies a page border to all pages. Run this script prior to exporting the PDF to generate the page border and then export the PDF, then rerun the script to turn the border off.
The page count is incorrect. The folios will still appear to be correct within the PDF, but the page navigation itself will show the page count as half the number of original pages plus one (e.g. a 16pp file saved as spreads will now show up as 9pp in the PDF’s navigation).
However, from June 2015 it has been possible to set the default view options when exporting a PDF from InDesign for viewing in Adobe Acrobat.
This allows PDFs to contain the correct page count and to also show the page split between the spreads while still showing the pages as spreads.
Should be problem solved, right?
Unfortunately, no. Despite the dropdown now being available, there’s no ideal way to prepare readers spreads to suit all PDF readers or platforms.
Unless InDesign users read all of InDesign’s patch notes (maintained by James Wamser) or were otherwise made aware of this change, then normal habits would persist, and users would continue to prepare spreads using the spreads radio button.
If the dropdowns had been used, this only makes viewing the spreads possible in Adobe Acrobat (Reader or Pro), but unfortunately this software is no longer the preferred option for viewing PDFs. Besides Mozilla Firefox and Adobe Acrobat, most PDF readers only support single page view.
Even if Acrobat or Firefox are being used, users can still override the view either manually, or using Acrobat it can be done by default using accessibility in the preferences
So what can be done?
There are effectively four options:
First option is to prepare PDFs based on an audience using Acrobat only as their reader and use the dropdown option for spreads. If the PDF is exported from InDesign using a PDF/X standard, Acrobat will also show the PDF as it appears in InDesign’s overprint preview.
Second option is to prepare a PDF using the pre-2015 method of using the spreads button and the Indiscripts page border script.
Third option is to lobby the manufacturers of the non-Adobe PDF reader software to bring their software into line with the PDF specifications set out by Adobe itself (and while they are doing that, also update their readers to also accept form fields and commenting functions!).
Last option is to do nothing and leave the pages as single spreads… and that isn’t necessarily a bad option. If the PDF is being created for onscreen viewing only, and the viewer must see something that is intentionally spread over two pages such as an image that crosses over two pages, then single pages should be fine.
Last word
It is of note that people are not just consuming information on a single desktop monitor, but may have two or more monitors in which software windows are being juggled around; or on a mobile device that is more natural to be held in a portrait fashion. Social media apps such as TikTok and Instagram are designed for mobile devices to be held in a portrait orientation. It’s hard for me to admit, but left and right hand pages are just a legacy of printed books as their assembly creates this phenomenon. Unless there is a crossover between the two pages, a reader will usually read the content on one page, adjust their gaze and read another – their focus of vision can’t be on both pages at the same time.
Also, if the PDF is intended for print by a printing company, don’t provide them a PDF as readers spreads as they won’t be able to impose the pages for printing without breaking the PDF back into single pages.
A colleague of mine recently had a task of inserting lineart scans into an InDesign file and then rotating the images so that they were straight on the page.
During this process, he’d asked:
What’s the shortcut for rotating an image by a fraction of a degree?
While I can remember many of the shortcuts used in InDesign, I couldn’t remember a shortcut for this item, and after consulting my InDesignSecrets shortcut poster I realised that there isn’t one. There is a shortcut to increase the angle from 1 degree to 5, but not smaller increments… which I thought was something that people would have asked for by now.
For the task he was doing, he definitely needed one, otherwise the workflow was:
Select the item to rotate;
Go to the rotate tool;
Type the fraction and click OK
Check the result and if further adjustment was required, click back into the rotate tool and type a new fraction and try again until acceptable.
A shortcut would definitely make this easier.
Tomaxxi to the rescue
Luckily, one was easy to find online. Scripter Marijan Tompa (whom some may know by the name Tomaxxi) wrote an article on how to write such a script.
In my colleague’s case, the script only needed to be adjusted by changing the angle from 45 in Marijan’s example to 0.1 like so:
var myTrans = app.transformationMatrices.add({counterclockwiseRotationAngle:0.1});
var myObj = app.selection[0];
myObj.transform(CoordinateSpaces.pasteboardCoordinates, AnchorPoint.CENTER_ANCHOR, myTrans);
The script was saved as rotateAnticlockwise.jsx and added to the scripts. A second copy was made but this time adjusted from counterclockwise to clockwise like so:
var myTrans = app.transformationMatrices.add({counterRotationAngle:0.1});
var myObj = app.selection[0];
myObj.transform(CoordinateSpaces.pasteboardCoordinates, AnchorPoint.CENTER_ANCHOR, myTrans);<code>
This too was saved as rotateClockwise.jsx. and added to the scripts.
From here, my colleague could then go to the scripts palette and run the scripts as required.
Similarly, my colleague could make sure that scripts was checked from the quick apply menu.
And from here, go to quick apply by pressing Command + Return and typing the first few letters of the script. This choice would stay in the quick apply so need only be done once.
But the title of the article was a shortcut, so shortcuts had to be applied. That is easily done though by going to the Edit Menu and selecting Keyboard Shortcuts.
In the next dialog box, choose Scripts from the Product Area, navigate to the appropriate script, then place the cursor in the New Shortcut text field in the bottom right and press the keys to become the new shortcut. If the type beneath says [unassigned] it means it won’t interfere with other shortcuts, so click Assign. Do the same for both scripts, choosing different shortcuts for both.
Done. My colleague now had his shortcuts and could rotate the images without having to keep moving his cursor to the rotate panel and manually key in entries.
Given the scripts now had their own shortcuts, these were also visible in the scripts panel, just in case my colleague forgot what the shortcuts were.
But importantly because shortcuts were assigned, they could also be hot-keyed to his ergonomic mouse. Similarly, the commands could be hot-keyed to other inputs such as those discussed in a previous article.
On that note, I thought a shortcut like this would exist, given the amount of other shortcuts that allow for nudging/moving in smaller units. What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments whether this is a specific use-case, or something to be pursued over at the InDesign suggestions.
There may be occasions where more than one character style has to be applied to the same words, such as a highlight, italic, etc. I recently saw this request over at the InDesign requests page.
In the request, the requestor does hint at a way that this can already be achieved in InDesign, though it can be time consuming. Let’s start from the beginning and look at some text that has an italic character style applied to it.
But if I apply a separate highlight character style that I’ve also made…
The highlight appears but the italic is removed. Reapplying the italic character style to the word only changes the word back to italic and doesn’t preserve the underline.
One solution is to do a local override – that is to manually apply the appearance but without using a character style
Note the plus that appears to the right of the Paragraph Style 1 – this indicates a local override is present.
That works, but let’s say that the client asks for all italics to now be a tint of the colour initially used. That’s fine if character styles were applied as the italic style needs to be changed once in the properties of the character style. However, all the italics applied using local overrides will need to have their fills reapplied with the new settings.
Yes, the eyedropper tool and find/change can assist, but if character styles were applied, these additional steps would not be necessary.
In this circumstance, making a third style that has both the underline and italic would make sense.
In this case, it adds one more character style – not a big deal, but in a large document, the quantity of character styles can grow fast.
GREP Styles to the rescue
Take this chemical equation in a science textbook. It currently looks like this:
The subscripts in this equation have been applied with a character style that I’ve named sub. However, the author wants the reaction only in bold. If the equation is highlighted and then has a bold character style applied, this happens:
All of the subscript formatting of the numbers are lost.
I can then create a second style called “bold sub” that has bold and subscript properties and base the style on the bold formatting, but I then have to make sure I correctly apply the newly created style to the appropriate numbers… this now introduces a level of human error.
But what if I could apply the bold style and keep the subscripts? It is possible using GREP styles. Using the GREP code from this CreativePro post (look for Laurent Tournier’s post dated Oct 9 2010 in the comments) apply it to the paragraph style.
[editor’s note – I’ve adjusted mine to account for the naming of elements 113-118 as of 2018, so if you want that amended code, contact me via my contact page]
Now apply the paragraph style to the recently bolded text.
Brilliant! Note how the I-beam cursor is between two subscript numbers, yet the character style shows that this is bold only.
This technique can also be applied to other formatting where subscripts or superscripts need to be preserved, such as:
Ordinal Numbers
Numbers written with scientific notation
Squared or cubed measurements
It just requires the right GREP syntax. All of the above examples used GREP styles to format the subscripts and superscripts only. To learn this technique and others, apply to join the Treasures of GREP Facebook page.
Once again to illustrate the point, the author wants these six lines in bold. By highlighting the lines and applying the bold character style, the subscripts and superscripts stay in tact.
Nested styles
Similarly, this can also be achieved with Nested styles. Take the last two lines in the last example prior to applying the bold – if I want the ordinal number at the start of the line to be bold, I don’t have to write a GREP style but I can use a nested style such as the one below.
That will give me this result without applying any manual character styles to the text:
There are catches to this technique
The first catch is that the character styles must have the minimal amount of style changes only. That is the sub character style only changes the position of the character to subscript, so that is the only item that style will apply, while maintaining the rest of the paragraph style’s formatting.
The second catch is to be aware of the style hierarchy. The following list is in order of what style overrules another (from most to least dominant):
Local override
Local character style
Nested style
GREP style lowest in list in the paragraph style settings
GREP style highest in list in the paragraph style settings
There can be several advantages to layering character styles by using GREP styles:
Less character styles.
Time saving for commonly formatted items such as ordinal numbers.
Consistency based on GREP patterns for words.
Similarly, there can be drawbacks with this technique:
Looks for particular words or phrases, so not appropriate for instances where dozens of words or phrases may make more GREP styles than are manageable.
Applies to paragraph styles, if used over many paragraph styles, the GREP style needs to be applied repeatedly. Scripts can help with this, such as one I wrote on my scripts page, or GREP Editor from Peter Kahrel.
Can’t take a bold style and italic style and combine them – it can only apply additional attributes that weren’t there previously.
GREP styles (along with live preflight, page thumbnails, dynamic spellcheck and any other service that has to run while the document is being composed) can slow the processing speed of the machine, particularly on larger documents.
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