Tip 1
Wake Up Your Mac On Schedule
If your Mac is asleep or shut down when it should perform backups or maintenance, those routines won’t happen. You can work around that problem by scheduling your Mac to wake up or turn on a few minutes before the scheduled tasks. Here’s how: Choose Apple menu> System Preferences, select Energy Saver, click the Schedule button, and then check Start up or wake. Now you can set the days and time you want your Mac to automatically wake up or start up so that your scheduled maintenance or backups happen when they should. You can also schedule it to shut down.

Tip 2
Rotate Single PDF Pages in Preview
By default, when you ask Preview to rotate a PDF, it rotates all the pages in the PDF. If you want to rotate a single page, simply hold down the Option key while selecting the Rotate Left or Rotate Right option. This is handy if you have a PDF with a mix of portrait and landscape-oriented pages.

Tip 3
Merge Graphic Styles in Illustrator
You can combine the attributes of two or more graphic styles in Illustrator to create a new graphic style. Just select the styles you want to combine by holding down the Command key and clicking on them in the Graphic Styles panel. Then choose Merge Graphic Styles from the Graphic Styles panel menu. If an attribute (stroke, fill, etc.) is different in multiple styles, then the attribute from the first graphic style in the panel will be used for the merged style.

Tip 4
Quickly Close Dialogs in InDesign
Here’s an easy way to close the Tabs, Find/Change, and Spelling dialogs in Adobe InDesign CS3 with a single keystroke: Simply make sure your your cursor focus is inside the appropriate dialog, and then press the Esc key on your keyboard.

Tip 5
Return a Rotated or Sheared InDesign Object back to Normal
After experimenting with the Rotate, Shear and Transform tools in Adobe InDesign, you may want to return the objects back to their original appearance. Don’t waste time trying to readjust the objects using the same tools. Instead, switch to the Selection tool, click on one of your edited objects, then set the Rotation Angle and/or Shear X Angle fields in the Control palette back to zero. Simple, really.

Tip 6
Guide Manager: Set a Grid of Guides
QuarkXPress 6 and 7 (and 4 & 5 with Quark’s free Guide Manager XTension) include a Guide Manager in the Utilities menu. Under its Add Guides tab you can place guides either vertically or horizontally, or both. They can be applied to the current page or spread, or all pages or spreads. You can control how many guides to add, how they’re spaced, and whether their location relates to the edge of the page, the margins, an arbitrary amount of inset, or an absolute position.

Tip 7
Two Tips for Preview
Mac OS X 10.4’s Preview application has several hidden features. First, if you drag a folder of images onto Preview, they will appear in a drawer on the side of the main window. If you then Control-click the white space in the drawer, you can change the sort order of the images. Second, to copy a portion of an image, simply click and drag a selection rectangle on the image, press Command-C to copy it, then press Command-N to create a new file containing the contents of the clipboard. But here’s the REALLY hidden tip: to see the pixel dimensions of your selection as you’re making it, hold down the Option key before starting to drag.



Tip 8
Quick Fix for Blown Out Skin Tones
Often, the face in a photo has a highlight area that has lost its color. An easy way to repair that is to create a new layer and cover up the problem area with a patch of your desired skin tone. Then set that new layer to a blend mode of “Color”. (To get the patch of color, use the eyedropper to sample a good area of skin, then create a selection to cover the problem area and fill it with that color.)

Tips and Tricks Archive

August 2007

June 2007

March 2007