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Monday, May 25, 2004

This meeting was sponsored by Silver Communications, a local newspaper printer. They provided the refreshments that we all enjoyed during the premeeting eating and greeting.

Our evening’s speaker was Jim Cooper, of Onus LLC, who presented a fascinating and lucid presentation on WoodWing’s Smart Styles. More on that below.

Attendees also received a free copy of the new publication Prepress for Digital Printing, by John C. Clem and Wade J. Link. If you didn’t get one, please email the chapter representative to have one sent to you.

At the end of the meeting we had our customary drawing for great door prizes. Winners included Russ Surles who received a copy of InDesign CS, and Pauline Goulah, who won the Smart Styles plug-in. Others received T-shirts, books, and CDs.

Now on to Jim Cooper, of Onus LLC, who presented WoodWing’s Smart Styles in a way that left the crowd “oohing” and “ahhing.” He certainly convinced me that all this hand-tooling we’ve been doing for years can be greatly simplified with the use of the Smart Styles plug-in.

For example, when you import into InDesign your Word doc with Excel data tucked in there, you can just update the link to get all the latest numbers. “Ah,” you say, “everyone knows you don’t want to do that because you lose all your text formatting with every update!” And that’s always been a very solid line of argument — until now. But now you can just set up the design once, capture it as a “Smart Style,” and repaint it onto every update. If you don’t have to touch that text to format it, you can just as easily reformat it every time the data have changed, because the more accurate and up to date your data, the more bang in your message.

When it comes to document creation, Jim defines a three-part process:

1.	Design and Define — That means that you design for the ideal. You don’t have to be practical anymore or make design compromises when you’ve got lots of pages to crank out. Just be sure to define your pages down to the last detail with paragraph and character styles.
2.	Liberate and Liquify — Here’s where the 90-second rule comes into play. Up until the last possible minute, the data live outside the page and stays fluid until the end. More on this in a minute.
3.	Import and Improve — Redesign the workflow to make it work using WoodWing’s plug-ins, Smart Styles.

Smart Styles is a miracle all its own. You drag and drop a style on a story of however many threaded frames, and then you can change five, six, seven, or more sets of attributes within a single paragraph or in a sequence of paragraphs, and do it across dozens of pages at one time.

How about a price list that has a drop-cap character style with the base text style, then a bold lead-in on the same paragraph (that retains the bolding for however many characters show up in that first sentence, before and after editing), and leader tabs in the next paragraph with the pricing, even using a character style to refine the leader dots to be less clunky. Then the entire sequence of detailed formatting is automatically applied to the next set of paragraphs down for the second product, name, or idea on your list. Not bad!

Where Smart Styles really goes to town is with tables. As great as InDesign’s table capabilities are, they don’t include the table styles of GoLive® or FrameMaker®. Applying all those table attributes, like alternating colored rows, vertical rules between columns, and text formatting — can be a nightmare of repetitive tasking. Frown no more. Smart Styles lets you save your table style and apply it to consecutive tables within a story, even including color-sequenced title bars for each new table header — the first table with a red title bar, the second with a blue one, etc. You can even save the “frame geometry” so that when you apply the “Smart Style,” the frame goes from one column to two columns (complete with the text insets). Even the transparency and drop-shadow effects can be captured as a “Smart Style.” What does the equivalent workflow look like for this set of tables in Quark? Manually specifying the vertical table rules in one chart after another could easily take days. With tables in InDesign, you can even specify your table width in Word and InDesign will maintain the exact measurement for all of the cells on import. Then “paint” the style onto a single table or a whole slew of them with one drag and drop.

Jim showed this very complex table with merged cells, various cell colorings, styled text, and more, which he said took him 2.5 hours and two pints of beer to create. Imagine having to do that all over again for the next chart. Wait… Smart Styles to the rescue. Once you’ve got one table, your worries are over. Easily create a table style that retains the exact table structure and visual formatting that you used in your placed Word table or one you created in InDesaign. Smart Styles can replicate object style attributes, text styles, and table styles. All you have to do is to drag and drop a styled page item to the Smart Styles library and the intelligent Smart Styles engine will automatically recognize formatting structure.

WoodWing Software http://www.woodwing.com For more information, visit the site.

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