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Viewing 15 posts - 781 through 795 (of 1,335 total)
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  • in reply to: Grep Styles and performance #56975

    Heh heh. They are great innit?

    It's no more than logical that there is some penalty gets added for lots of, or very complicated — or both :) — GREP styles. I guess I'm lucky because my larger books (> 600 pp) get divided into separate files per chapter, only being glued together with the Book function on final exports. That might lessen InDesign's burden a bit.

    But it seems the GREP styles get processed as soon as you enter or change them; there is a delay, and then suddenly you see your text re-flow, highlight, format, and generally magically get transformed into smart text, and after that I haven't noticed (yet) any substantial extra delays on redrawing and editing the text.

    As for a separate GREP section: well … I dunno. I really enjoy pointing people towards a GREP search/replace or GREP Style solution even if they ask something not immediately related to it. They wouldn't know to ask such a question in a hypothetical GREP forum if they hadn't already considered using it in the first place.

    in reply to: Panel view #56974

    Unfortunately it's completely beyond user control.

    In recent Photoshops, you can select a preferred panel text size out of a set of not less than 3 (yeah three!) options, which I've nicknamed “Small”, “Smaller”, and “Useless”. Nevertheless — you have a choice …

    Sadly, even though Adobe is now on “Creative Suite” number 5, even tiny useful little ideas like this are not propagated onto the other programs.

    Complain, loudly and sincerely, to Adobe, using their Feature Request/Bug Report Form. When lots of small voices are shouting at the top of their lungs someone might just hear you.

    in reply to: Any Way to Synchronize a Book to Turn On/Off Layers? #56962

    David, it can be scripted but only if all layer names across the entire book are the same. It needs some consideration — what if you hide all layers but one, and there is a document in the book without the one remaining visible layer?

    (I realize a perfectly reasonable answer would be “Do what the user asked, then put the blame on him if it's not what he intended”.)

    in reply to: A Creative Suite upgrade question #56957

    The 'upgrade' from CS2 to CS5 doesn't really upgrade the active installation, it's more like an automatic discount on the next purchase. You don't have to have CS2 (and CS3, and CS4 :) ) installed before you add CS5, it comes as a complete package.

    You do need to have the serial number from that CS2 ready, so the installer will know you are using a valid upgrade.

    (Read https://forums.adobe.com/message/2907349 for a similar question — the Eligibility Chart referred to by Peter Spier is at https://www.adobe.com/products/…..n/upgrade/)

    in reply to: Script to convert all colors to CMYK Process? #56956

    Yeah, sorry — I accidentally left out what it was for. This is Javascript, which is something entirely different from Applescript; they might as well be two different languages. Oh wait — they are :p

    The AppleScript Editor can only handle AppleScript; with the ESTK you can edit lots of different programming languages, but fortunately its default setting for new documents is … Javascript! (A lucky escape for me, there!)

    I prefer Javascript over AppleScript — both scripting languages have their strengths, but Javascripts single huge advantage is the same script works on both Mac OS X and Windows versions of InDesign!

    AppleScript, on the other hand, only works on OS X. I've said on a few occasions the third supported option, VBScript, has no good points at all – but that's just me. Anyway, VBS only works on Windows.

    (Edit:)

    .. saved it to my Indesign CS5 scripts folder, restarted Indesign ..

    You don't have to do that! Next time you save a script into the Scripts folder and go back to InDesign, you will see it's already there, in the Scripts panel!

    in reply to: Extremely slow performance #56954

    Disabling Live Screen Redraw in the preferences should help you get going. I can't imagine what the developers were using — liquid nitrogen cooled octo-core systems with a terabyte of RAM, something like that?

    Working in CS4, I also leave Live Spell Check and Autocorrect switches off (as all of my text comes from external sources), and Live Preflight too (since “Dead Preflight” would have been a better name).

    Only when I'm finished working on a document I switch Live Preflight on, then go have a cup o' coffee, and come back to read … “No errors”. (At least, on the good days.)

    in reply to: Script to convert all colors to CMYK Process? #56943

    I wonder if this is enough:

    app.activeDocument.colors.everyItem().properties = {space:ColorSpace.CMYK, model:ColorModel.PROCESS};

    Save a copy of your document before, and check everything after running!

    in reply to: HELP! Automating text formatting and GREP questions #56935

    (The easiest way would be if someone can name a font where either character 'y', 'e', 's', 'Y', 'E', or 'S' looks like a check mark … Now that would make it totally automatic and transparent!)

    in reply to: HELP! Automating text formatting and GREP questions #56934

    1. Basically, what Laurent said, but in a more expansive way:

    * Apply default formatting to, say, “$” with 3 digits.

    * Adjust font, size, and/or tracking for 2 digits. Then make this a character style named “Wide”.

    * The same, for 4 digits. Make this a character style “Narrow”.

    In the paragraph style for this text, add 2 GREP styles:

    * Apply “Wide” to the text “$ddb”

    * Apply “Narrow” to the text “$ddddb”

    2. Short of replacing the text 'yes' with an image, as explained in the Adobe forum, no easy way.

    You can search for 'yes', case sensitive and 'whole word', and replace it with the character ? — that's that tick mark from Zapf Dingbats. Insert it once in your document, using the Glyphs panel; then copy and paste it into the Replace field. Create a character style with the font Zapf Dingbats, and select that in the Replace With formatting field.

    You could try this, and see if it works for you:

    * Replace each occurrence of 'yes' with 'yes?'. Remember to select both 'case sensitive' and 'whole word' when replacing.)

    * Add two more character styles: 'Checkmark Hide' (set the Horizontal width in Advanced Type to 1%, and the text color to [None]) and 'Checkmark Show' (have it only apply the font Zapf Dingbats).

    * Add two more GREP styles to the paragraph style. Apply “Checkmark Hide” to this:

    yes(?=?)

    so the characters 'yes' followed by a checkmark are hidden.

    * Apply 'Checkmark Show' to this

    (?<=yes)?

    so the correct font is applied to every checkmark which is preceded by the text 'yes'.

    in reply to: Prices formatting question #56927

    Yeah, that's exactly what I meant — although I shouldn't have said 'kerning', because you cannot get that (easily) into a Character Style. It's totally do-able with some negative tracking, though, and with the same net effect.

    Apply a character style with a huge value (about -350) to the following

    .(?=ddb)

    The tracking value depends on where you want the cents to line up, so first create and apply the style, then change the amount of tracking in the Character Style with Preview enabled.

    GREP styles for superscrcipt price

    in reply to: Prices formatting question #56925

    https://carijansen.com/2009/07/&#8230;..9/tip-091/ !

    (I must admit I'm not sure about the 'above the comma' part — perhaps you need an additional GREP that applies a huge negative kern over a comma which has a digit to its left and no more than two at its right.)

    in reply to: accidental discovery #56919

    My colleagues were suitably impressed when I showed them this one! They were equally amazed by the Place Multiple Images in a Grid option and the useful little popup menu when you right-click on the Cell Strokes selector …

    So, David, this was a 'known trick'? Are you kidding — how many people knew this, then, and how many more are there? :)

    in reply to: Change hyphenation options in script? #56918

    (Would you mind asking script-specific questions in the Scripts section of the forum? I think David wants to keep his forum tidy ;) )

    This quick hack of a Javascript will reset all 10 (!) hyphenation options of each paragraph to the values defined in the applied style. I tested only on a small document; I suppose it might take some time on a longer document (whereas the number of paragraph styles has no influence at all).

    allPars = app.activeDocument.stories.everyItem().paragraphs.everyItem().getElements();
    for (p=0; p<allPars.length; p++)
    {
    style = allPars[p].appliedParagraphStyle;
    if (!style.isValid) continue;
    allPars[p].hyphenWeight = style.hyphenWeight;
    allPars[p].hyphenateAcrossColumns = style.hyphenateAcrossColumns;
    allPars[p].hyphenateAfterFirst = style.hyphenateAfterFirst;
    allPars[p].hyphenateBeforeLast = style.hyphenateBeforeLast;
    allPars[p].hyphenateCapitalizedWords = style.hyphenateCapitalizedWords;
    allPars[p].hyphenateLadderLimit = style.hyphenateLadderLimit;
    allPars[p].hyphenateLastWord = style.hyphenateLastWord;
    allPars[p].hyphenateWordsLongerThan = style.hyphenateWordsLongerThan;
    allPars[p].hyphenation = style.hyphenation;
    allPars[p].hyphenationZone = style.hyphenationZone;
    }

    in reply to: Recommended typeface and font #56895

    You'll want a good, clean, readable typeface. Use big letters if you don't have a long résumé ;-)

    Use lots of leading — up to 1½ of your point size, but don't go wild and use twice the point size.

    A trick to make your resume look longer than it is, is to put headers (“Grades”, “Previous occupations”, stuff like that) into a left column with a small bold font, and put the actual data in a right column, so it takes up more vertical space.

    If you are applying for a design job, you should try to make it a calling card for your design skills, and in that case I'd rather say: follow your intuition! “Would I hire me if I used some drop shadows?”

    in reply to: Define table row heights, column widths in styles somehow? #56864

    .. but but but .. I added the message there to warn there is no Cell Style named “myCellStyle” in your document!

    You are supposed to use the correct cell style name in the script name. If you name the script “Resize_SomeTotallyRandomNameHere_5mm.jsx”, it'll try to use “SomeTotallyRandomNameHere” for a Cell Style name — and if you don't have that style, it'll warn you and don't do anything at all.

Viewing 15 posts - 781 through 795 (of 1,335 total)