TIP: Color-Coded Highlighting from InDesign Magazine
Kathleen
kat
TIP: Color-Coded Highlighting
Just about everyone has opened a document or placed copy only to see the text highlighted in a color. Here's what those highlight colors are telling you:
Pink: Missing font.
Yellow: Hyphenation and Justification (H&J) settings have been violated.
Amber (dangerously close to yellow): One or more alternate glyphs have been substituted for one or more glyphs in a font's standard set.
Green: Someone has applied manual kerning or tracking.
You'll always want to fix the missing font problem. But the other three colors don't necessarily mean anything is wrong; InDesign is simply alerting you to a change.
Roy McCoy
> You'll always want to fix the missing font problem. But the other three colors don't necessarily mean anything is wrong; InDesign is simply alerting you to a change.
Yes, that's why I never see these three, I've always kept them turned off. I've turned them on now just to see what happens, and may leave substituted glyphs on. I doubt that I want custom tracking/kerning highlighted, though I can imagine its perhaps being helpful on occasion (to see if there's still somewhere I haven't kerned something or other, for example).
One thing I have NOT turned on, however, and will NEVER turn on, is highlighting of purported h&j violations. This is really galling. I'll try not to go into a full-fledged rant here, but such highlighting was always very useful in PageMaker and I pretty much always had it on and took advantage of it. What I could and did do then was to work on text until it was clean of any such highlighting. This went out the window with InDesign and somebody's brilliant idea to display three levels of violation, the lightest one being so minor that you could never get rid of all of it and would actually never want to.
I mention this here because some time ago I asked whether anyone had experienced any advantage whatever from having to hit the tab key to get to the leftmost entry box in the Photoshop levels dialog, as became necessary in CS4. Nobody said they had, and I was very pleased to see that this had been corrected in CS5 (or maybe 5.5, I'm not sure), so that you were now immediately in the entry box without having to hit a pointlessly unnecessary tab. This encouraged me to think that the Adobe people here may be actively taking notes on what is said (we *are* the most competent and eloquent users of the software, after all :-), so that it may make sense to register a gripe (as for example Michael B. has repeatedly done, also recently). The three-level h&j highlighting SUCKS. I NEVER use it, though I always used the highlighting before and would very much like to continue to be able to.
It's impossible to think about this without remembering Caleb's assertion a month ago, "Personally I think that too many preferences are antithetical to usability." That could send me into a belated rant too, but I'll try to stay calm and merely say that this, if it is generally true at all (which I'm not sure of), is nonetheless not so in the case of InDesign's damnable h&j highlighting. If Adobe wants to retain this brilliant enhancement, fine - but it should provide an option or options for making it practically usable, as - again - it always was in PageMaker.
Thanks,
Roy
Roy McCoy
> One thing I have NOT turned on, however, and will NEVER turn on, is highlighting of purported h&j violations.
That said, I turned it on anyway.
That done, I immediately turned it off.
Is it just me? Do other people - designers! - really not mind having their work spotted throughout with variegated yellows? Or have others turned off the h&j highlighting too, for the same reason?
Dave Saunders
on looking for egregious h&j problems that might have eluded my naked
eye. Or perhaps to compare degrees of badness if I don't like the way
a paragraph is set and I'm fiddling with it to improve its look.
Otherwise, it stays off.
Dave
Roy McCoy
Roy
Michael Brady
On Jun 17, 2011, at 6:41 AM, Roy McCoy wrote:
> Is it just me? Do other people - designers! - really not mind having their work spotted throughout with variegated yellows? Or have others turned off the h&j highlighting too, for the same reason?
I've never turned the H&J thing on, ever. What does it do? I only leave the pink "missing font" highlight on. Every now and then--I mean, every six months--I'll see an ochre yellow highlight in table cells. I've deduced that that indicates some kind of spacing or fitting limit. I've not figured out where the control for that highlight is hidden.
I turn off the new, annoying automatic frame highlighting--all those flickering lines were giving me sensory overload like in the scene at the beginning of Andromeda Strain. I Hide Frame Edges unless I need to see them for specific tasks, then I turn them off again. I usually work with the margins and guides visible, but toggle them off when I need to see the layout without clutter. I turn on the document grid as needed. I usually work with the entire pasteboard visible, but when I need to focus on just the design, I use W to gray out everything else.
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Michael Brady
www.michaelbradydesign.com/Blog/ | mich...@michaelbradydesign.com
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Dave Saunders
but who can really remember?
Roy McCoy
> I honestly don't recall. I expect I had the same attitude then as now,
> but who can really remember?
Ah, that's right. I kept using PageMaker in OS 9 for ten years, and
long after everybody else had switched. So my memory would be fresher
on this.
Michael B.:
> I've never turned the H&J thing on, ever. What does it do?
What it *used* to do was highlight lines whose word spacing and/or
letterspacing didn't conform to parameters that the user could
determine. This was sufficient, and you could always get your text
fixed up so that the highlighting was eliminated. Now, however, they've
stuck you with three mandatory levels of alleged violation, with dark
highlighting for egregious, medium for middling, and light for minor.
The problem is that the minor instances are generally not worth
"correcting", so you have to either put up with annoyingly unnecessary
highlighting throughout your text, or have it turned off altogether -
which appears to be what people here have done. It shouldn't be too
much of a programming challenge to enable suppressing display of the
minor levels, but maybe somebody thinks (erroneously) that this would
make the program less usable.
> I only leave the pink "missing font" highlight on.
That's been my preference too, as I said. It's surprising and
interesting that you wouldn't be using the h&j flagging, as I recall
your indicating a while ago that you did a lot of hyphenation in order
to maintain even spacing and color in text blocks.
> Every now and then--I mean, every six months--I'll see an ochre yellow
> highlight in table cells. I've deduced that that indicates some kind of
> spacing or fitting limit. I've not figured out where the control for
> that highlight is hidden.
Hmm. Maybe someone else will tell you what that is. I may have seen it
but don't recall now.
> I turn off the new, annoying automatic frame highlighting--all those
> flickering lines were giving me sensory overload like in the scene at
> the beginning of Andromeda Strain. I Hide Frame Edges unless I need to
> see them for specific tasks, then I turn them off again. I usually work
> with the margins and guides visible, but toggle them off when I need
> to see the layout without clutter. I turn on the document grid as
> needed. I usually work with the entire pasteboard visible, but when
> I need to focus on just the design, I use W to gray out everything
> else.
So you and Dave and I would seem to be on the same (unhighlighted) page
on this.
Thanks,
Roy
Michael Brady
On Jun 17, 2011, at 9:25 AM, Roy McCoy wrote:
>> I've never turned the H&J thing on, ever. What does it do?
>
> What it *used* to do was highlight lines whose word spacing and/or
> letterspacing didn't conform to parameters that the user could
> determine.
Oh, that. I thought H&J referred to "hang and justify," i.e., hanging indentions. Yeah, I keep that thing off. It's a pain in the retina. I can eyeball the page for poor text color, rivers, ladders, etc. (and the yellow highlight doesn't catch those last two blemishes). Besides, readers look at the page without the benefit of yellow highlights.
Robert Severn
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