Stop Entourage background disk churning.
Get to know InDesign’s Info Palette.
InDesign’s humble Info palette may not inspire a lot of interest at first. But take a moment to explore some of the handy details it provides. Once you get used to the variety of information it can display you’ll be heading there all the time.
To show the Info pallette, choose Window > Info from the top menu bar.
The information displayed in this palette changes depending on the object you are working with in InDesign. You can use the Info palette to quickly check the printing resolution of placed graphics, get a quick word count on text, or other handy details.
Digg This Button Cheat Sheet
Adobe Creative Suite 3 to be announced March 27.
Adobe will launch formally announce Adobe Creative Suite 3 at a special event in New York on March 27. (Update: The software will not ship until later in Spring 2007.)
This will be the first Universal Binary version of Creative Suite, and Adobe is calling the event the largest software release in its history. If you’ve been looking for an excuse to finally buy that Mac Pro, this could be it.
While we wait, enjoy an Adobe UK video teaser: What’s in the Box?
Convert scans to searchable PDFs in Acrobat.
This is one of those tips that is hard to describe or visualize. But when we demonstrate it to someone new, we usually hear “Wow, that’s cool.”
Adobe Acrobat Pro includes a special OCR (Optical character recognition) feature you can use to convert scanned documents into searchable PDFs. The twist with Acrobat Pro is that instead of converting your scan to a straight text file, you can leave the visual appearance of your scanned document untouched, and yet the text itself becomes selectable and searchable in Acrobat.
Tom Fishburne’s Brand Camp Cartoons.
Use Photoshop’s Background Eraser Tool.
Update your Mac for Daylight Savings Time.
In 2007, several countries change the dates on which they observe Daylight Saving Time (DST). In the United States, all states except Arizona and Hawaii will begin observing Daylight Saving Time on March 11.
Your computer may need to be updated to adjust for these changes. Apple has released updates to fix this problem. If you’re running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.3 (Panther) use your Mac’s Software Update feature (Apple Menu> Software Update…) to automatically download the new DST update.
Shortcut Cheat Sheet for Safari & FireFox.
Fast way to straighten a photo in Photoshop.
What’s the fastest way to straighten a crooked or tilted photograph? This is one of those classic bread-and-butter Photoshop tips that sometimes slips through even the most experienced designer’s bag of tricks.
Select the tape measure tool (it shares space with the eyedropper in Photoshop’s toolbox) and drag a line across part of your image that should be straight horizontal or vertical. Then choose Image > Rotate Canvas > Arbitrary.
Photoshop auto-calculates the value required to straighten your image. Click OK and your image is all squared up.
