Post CreativePRO New Orleans update

June 23, 2018 1 Comment

It’s not often that I post an editorial on the site, usually the articles featured on the site outline a procedure, tutorial or general advice. For today’s post, it is worth standing on my soapbox to announce a few items:

Another great CreativePRO Conference

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This year’s CreativePRO conference was recently held in sunny (and humid!) New Orleans between June 4-8. As expected, the conference was fantastic and I left with even more pages in my notebook filled with tips, this time on Illustrator, Photoshop, and somewhat surprisingly, Excel. It was also an opportunity to appear on-stage at two brief CreativePRO organised events – the Ignite session and the CreativeWOW session.

The 2019 event will be hosted in Seattle, Washington, and marks the 10th year of the CreativePRO events that include the InDesign Conference and PEPCON.

25th article on InDesignSecrets

It was also during the CreativePRO conference that my 25th article on InDesignSecrets was published. As well as hosting this blog, I also prepare articles from time to time over at InDesignSecrets.com, so definitely check out the great articles there, as well as their Facebook page.

Youtube Hiatus is nearly over

Those familiar with my Youtube Channel will notice that it’s been some time since the last Colecandoo video was posted. Be patient, more videos are on the way. I can only say that 2017-2018 has provided perfect storm of events that have given less incentive to create video content on the Youtube platform, whether it be the “Adpocalypse”, demonetisation, or increasing the barrier of entry for monetisation. That aside, I would also like to add my Colecandoo character as part of the videos, and this requires more experience with Adobe Character Animator… as I say, the videos are on their way.

If you’re not familiar with my videos on Youtube, feel free to have a look here. As usual, if you want to be notified of new content, make sure to subscribe and click that bell that Youtube makes people click.

See you at MAX 2018

If you’re heading over to Los Angeles in October 2018 for Adobe MAX, I will see you there.

 

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Filed under News

Change the background highlight of PDF form fields in a document

June 16, 2018 Leave a comment

During the CreativePro conference in New Orleans, a question was raised during Chad Chelius’ session about Designing forms in InDesign and Acrobat: how to change the background highlight colour of the fill-in forms within Adobe Acrobat. It is possible to change the value of that colour via the Highlight Colour from the preferences panel, but this is an application-wide change, and changing the colour in one form will change the colour for all documents that are opened thereafter.

fig1

This will also only change the colour on the viewer’s PDF, not the PDF itself.

Luckily, it is possible to change the colour via scripting that will affect the current form but leave others alone. Take the following example – in this form, I would like the background to be grey, rather than the default blue:

fig2

Open the PDF that needs the background to change and open the page thumbnails panel. Right click on the page and select the page properties item.

fig3

In the new dialog, go to the Actions tab at the top right, and then add two actions: on Page Open, run a javascript, and on page close, run a javascript.

fig4

Click on the Page Open Run a Javascript selection and click edit, and in the new window, type the following and click OK.

fig4A

Click on the Page Close Run a Javascript selection and click edit, and in the new window, type the following and click OK.

fig4B

Repeat adding the page level scripts for each page in the PDF. This example has one page, but for a four page PDF, this would need to be done on each page of the PDF.

Save and close the PDF. Open the PDF again and the background has now changed to gray.

fig5

The two javascripts work by saving the current application preferences into memory, and then changing the preferences until the document is closed, and then reloads the original preferences.

The background of any PDF form opened will now be gray until the PDF is closed, so close the PDF and open another PDF to confirm that the background returns to normal.

fig6

If you would like colours other than gray, the javascript syntax for the colour can be found here:

A similar technique is shown in this article in the Acrobat Users forums.

 

 

Filed under PDFs, Scripts

Quick and Dirty comb-style forms using GREP Styles

May 20, 2018 4 Comments

I was recently asked to assist with the creation of a large amount of forms that were intended for a print output. The forms themselves were a “boxy” format that also had comb-style fields to indicate how many letters each area of the form should be.

combgrep1

The challenge with this particular brief was how to prepare the forms not only before the deadline, but so that they were also uniform in appearance. The solution was to create a paragraph style that had four GREP styles that would assign parts of the form, namely:

  • The start or end of the form
  • A letter space
  • A small comb
  • A large comb

Each part of the form is a monospaced font such as Courier New that has no fill or stroke, but has an underline and strikethrough that go to making the appearance. Take the following example that shows the style that represents the letter space:

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The character styles that represent the start/stop lines or the small/large comb fields are effectively the same, but the horizontal scale is reduced to 3% and the underline and strikethrough options are changed to show different amounts of white (or none at all).

To make the form appear, characters that would not generally be used within the form are used to activate the GREP styles. For example, the pipe symbol will not be used in the form details, so this can be used for a start/end of form. Here is a list of the GREP substitutions made in this example:

  • | = start/end of box
  • ^ = white space
  • ` = small comb
  • © = large comb.

combgrep3

The following illustration shows the GREP styles in use, how a form would appear, and then how the text appears in the story editor.

combgrep4

There are several advantages of using this method to quickly make comb style forms, such as consistent sizing in forms, or easy to copy and paste portions of a form within a document.

However, there is a significant down-side to this method of form construction, namely that it is for print purposes only. While the forms can be created quickly for a print publication, the form fields do not translate that well to interactive forms via Adobe Acrobat using Acrobat’s Identify Form Fields feature.

combgrep5

 

Filed under Fonts & Type, GREP, Page Layout

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

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