Encyclopaedia-style InDesign running headers, where pages have many, one or zero headings

So, you can have a heading running on each page that varies automatically based on the most recent heading (or, occurrence of any other paragraph style) by putting text with InDesign text variables based on the Running Headings text variable type ( type > text variables > define). Example tutorial.

So, for a textbook, novel, etc, where chapters span multiple pages, you could have the title of the latest chapter run in the header of each page automatically:

For a book like a dictionary, where each page contains multiple headings, you could get running headers that show the range of each page, by using two Running Header text variables, one set to "First in page", one set to "Last in page":

My question is, what if you have an awkward book or report with sections that have very variable lengths, which can be very short (several on a page) and can be multiple pages? Imagine something like an in-depth dictionary or encyclopaedia, where most entries are short, but a few are necessarily exceptionally long.

The ideal result would show just one running title where there's one or less header on the page (where the result of the "First in page" and "Last in page" lookups are the same), and the first and last where there is more than one (where the result of the lookups is different):

I can't find any way to do anything like this, however - even with manual input. Using the Dictionary-style method like above gives ugly duplication in cases where there are one or less entries:

Re-jigging the content of the book or changing the heading hierarchy isn't an option - they're all of equal importance, regardless of their awkwardly varying lengths. I'm fine with answers involving scripting or some way of manually varying text from one master page text frame between pages - but I'd really not like to need to manually set a whole different text frame in the same place with the same style on every page then manually type into and adjust all of them as independent elements...

Answer

What about several sets of master pages, each with a different variable in the header depending on what your needs are? I do this all the time with columns and sections.

content - Is a website sidebar a user blind spot?

I've seen studies about how ad blindness can prevent users from even noticing ads exist on a website, but are there any studies that perform the same research for the entire sidebar?

On some sites, like this one, I use the sidebar quite frequently as it has it has useful content relevant to the main content on the page. On other sites, like blogs, I find I very rarely ever use or even look at the sidebar. While these are my own personal browsing habits, I'd love to see some empirical data on what kinds of sidebar content is most engaging and whether there is such a thing as sidebar blindness.

Answer

It can be, if you answer yes to anyone of these questions:

• Has your sidebar remained the exact same for the last 3 months?


• Does your sidebar exhibit signs of “sidebar creep” ?


• Was there a time when people clicked around in your sidebar, but now you’re thinking you might have dreamed it?


• Do you have more than 4 affiliate buttons showing at one time? (not a guarantee of sidebar-blindness, but a possible indicator)


• Do you have 3 or more of your own offers and specials showing at one time?


• Do you have more than 1 social media feed in your sidebar? (ex: latest tweets, latest Flickr photos, latest Facebook statuses)



• Do you have anything in your sidebar that makes you look less cool than you really are? (ex: I have 40 Twitter followers! 12 people subscribe to this blog!)


• Is anything in your sidebar boring, unimaginative, or physically painful to look at?

All from Sarah J. Bray who wrote the post "How to avoid a devastating case of sidebar-blindness (gasp!)"

When I read it I realized I scored 6 of 8 just because I use the sidebar as "the place for everything else, that isn't really valid, but I need to fill the space with something-area". Leading to the fact that no one reads it (me included).

Probably it's better to leave this area empty, if one doesn't have anything valid to put there which could be related links to the content in the middle or great images. I'm going back to the drawing table with mywebsite.com.

technique - Is writing big facts about a character's background good when first introducing them?

I hope this question is not mainly opinion based, I'm really just looking for a writer's handbook/source/acclaimed author saying this is either good, okay or bad. I think it might not be so good, which is why I'm asking.

In the very first sentences of my book, I introduce Nick, the main character. At the time of writing, I thought little of the words I jotted down. But now, reading it in retrospective, something was off to me. Take a look.

Splinters flew as Nick chopped the logs. A great pile of firewood towered beside him. Deep ravines laid in the haft of the axe, shaped by Nick’s hands. The axe had belonged to him since a young age. He was soon to be the lumberjack of the homestead, like his father before him. He died, along with Nick’s mother, a winter night. Such was normal for low-level servants of the King. So, without his mother of father, Nick was without family. The closest thing he came to family was Brad, who was his best friend, and the other servants on the farm.

Sorry if the excerpt was a bit lengthy, I know this is not a critique site. Now, at first it's OK, I'm just describing what he's doing. But it quickly gets into how his parents died and all that. This is not a vital part of the story, not at all, I just wanted to tell my readers why he was the lumberjack. And also to illustrate what kind of situation he's in. But when I think about it, is it too soon to say these things? Perhaps the reader can just wonder about these details for a bit. Here's another example of this, coming straight after the first excerpt.

-Hey, you done soon?

Millie was exhausted. She did all the small jobs on the farm, like transporting the firewood from the chopping block to the shed, or the fireplace. Since she was just twelve there wasn’t any specific job given to her yet.

Once again, the details are not very important. Her age could be told in a different way, through her actions for example. So, is it "bad" to say details like these, and background material, so early in a character's introduction?

Also, sorry if it looks like I want you to critique the entirety of my story. That is not my goal, I simply want to know if the potential problem of mine is a problem.

Answer

There are many styles of story-telling. Consider, for example, the start of the Lord of the Rings:

Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar, and had been the wonder of the Shire for sixty years, ever since his remarkable disappearance and unexpected return. The riches he had brought back from his travels had now become a local legend, and it was popularly believed, whatever the old folk might say, that the Hill at Bag End was full of tunnels stuffed with treasure. (LotR, book I, chapter 1 - a Long-Expected Party)

In this passage we are told, rather than shown, that Bilbo is rich, peculiar, has had adventures etc.

This style of telling rather than showing was common in medieval (and earlier) stories, which served as one of Tolkien's sources of inspiration. You might also find it today in the fantasy genre, inspired by Tolkien. (Though you might also find this style in other genres, and many fantasy works do not lean that much towards telling rather than showing - this is a tool, that an author might or might not choose to use.)

Now that we have established that a preference to tell rather than show elements of the character's background is a tool, let us examine how to use this tool.

First, your language cannot be dry. You are not reading facts off a list - you are telling a story. Compare

On his brow sat wisdom, and in his hand was strength (LotR, book II, chapter 1 - Many Meetings)

to "Glorfindel was strong and smart". The first is flowery - it sets the scene as much with the language, as much as with what is being said. The second is dry and boring.

Second, telling works very well when you are informing the reader of static details that would be well known to the characters around your MC. That is, you use telling to paint a picture: blonde hair, blues eyes, no parents... Dynamic aspects (that is, things that are not true, have been true for some time and not likely to change soon) are better shown than told. Telling something that everybody around the MC knows allows you to paint the picture quickly, instead of creating a scene where the piece of information would be brought up, but would elicit no reaction in other characters, since they are aware of it all already.

tl;dr: As others have mentioned, you are telling rather than showing. If telling rather than showing is a conscious choice on your part, that is perfectly fine. To make it work, you should make the telling engaging, and you should keep it to facts that are static and well-known (in-world) about your character.

usability - Web-Based SQL Query Builder

I've built a simple web-based query builder using a series of dropdown lists such that the only typed input is the final value field.

In the example above simply adding the filters consecutively would not produce the desired result set, each of the "OR" clauses should be grouped together.

I'm struggling to come up with a way of providing the user with a simple interface to define/display/edit groups. I don't think it's possible to infer filter groups (using the current interface) based solely on the order of AND/OR filters. Is it?

Answer

You can have a look at the Gestalt principles of grouping to get ideas. Following these principles could mean using, among others:

• 
  

  Identation as mentioned by @ethrbunny to give a sense of nested queries,

  
  
  


• 
  

  Using the

  ---

  to group conditions (i.e. remove from each and every row, and include only where a group starts and ends),
  
  


• A special row which would include just an AND or an OR could indicate where a group starts. That would suppose you give the user to "add condition" or "add group".


• Allow saving queries, so that a query can be set as a condition in another query, thus allowing the user to effectively use a pipeline of subqueries.

Other similar ideas might exist. Hope that helps! :)

characters - Options for point of view in a story

At first I was going to tell my story told from my main character's point of view, but now I'm wondering if I should make it coming from the point of view of a third-person narrator.

I wanted the main character to display her thoughts and emotions to the reader, but I also wanted the reader to experience scenes with other characters without the main character knowing. The only way I can think to do this is to have it come from a third-person narrative point of view. What are my options?

Answer

First of all, don't confuse point of view with person. You can write in the third person and still tell the story from one character's point of view.

Second, third person is the normal mode of storytelling. All this stuff about limited vs. omniscient is largely a distraction. It is an analytical scheme used to classify the POV at various points of a story. Unfortunately what tends to happens with analytical categories it that people tend to turn them into prescriptions, and then they become puritanical about them and start insisting that a work must be in a single category from beginning to end.

This is all bunk, and you would be well served to forget all about it and just write your story in the third person in the way that seem most natural to you.

Sometimes when a story is not working, an analysis of the story may reveal that the way POV is used in that particular story is not working, and those categories might be useful for describing what is going wrong. But in no way does that mean that every story that uses POV in the same way will not work, or that any general rules for what you must do with POV can be derived from the failure of POV in one particular work.

Fill your head with your story and write it down as it comes to you. Until you have real mastery of story craft, don't mess with any fancy literary techniques, or mess with restricted persons or POV.

drawing - How to improve angle and proportion perception?

Im having a bit of a problem with my perception of angles and proportions. While I compare some elements of my drawing to each other, they seem to be fine. In a portrait, say, the browridge seems to be at a proper proportion and angle to the nose. The nose seems to be fine with the lips, and the lips seem to be ok with the chin. But when the wholeness is taken into account, the results are quite off.

I actually have a picture i drew basing on a photo taken from http://lovecastle.org/draw/:

As you can see, the part from nose to chin is too short, so is the hair from mouth to arm. The forehead came up too big, so did the nose. I didnt actually see it until my friend pointed all this out, and now it hits me whenever i see this picture. Its quite painful, to be honest ;)

Im trying to avoid making this mistake again, but it is a lot of work. I measure and compare almost everything against everything when I draw, and still sometimes after a day or two I find the effects to be off in some way.

Also, there is another problem I have with strict measuring. Sticking out my hand with a stylus or a pencil isnt exactly reliable, at least for me. Quite fast im getting tired of squinting, closing one eye, trying to lock my spine, hand and elbow in exactly the same position to take measurements. When working from a photo, its quite enough to shift my weight on my chair or move a bit, to make the proportions go wrong. Id imagine that similar problems would be in effect in drawing from life. The person youre drawing moves a tiny bit, and the relations between your "landmarks" change, the shapes change, and so do your proportions.

So, my question is, what can I do about it? Are there any particular exercises or drills I can do in order to improve in this field faster? I found this:

http://ctrlpaint.com/videos/visual-measuring

but how many boxes can you draw? I'd love to get to know some other exercises, to bring in some variety to my drawing "workouts". If such exercises could be done while doing normal drawing, all the better. Ive seen people who just get the proportions and angles right at a glance, and I want to work towards such proficiency.

edit: a new grea video came out on ctrlpaint: http://ctrlpaint.com/blog/measuring-proportion

Really helpful!

color - CMYK colours wrong on export in Illustrator

I am making a flyer on Illustrator. It has a grey background 0,0,0,30 is the CMYK value. When I export to any format or even in RGB the grey seems to have a red hue to it.

How do i get a realistic transfer of the colours im working in when exporting?

Answer

Under 'File' check that the document mode is set to CMYK. Instead of 'Export' go to 'Save a Copy' and choose 'Adobe PDF'. In the options dialogue box click on 'Standard' and select a suitable print standard such as PDF/X-1a:2001

I just did an 'Export' as JPG from Illustrator and checked it in Photoshop with the 'Info' tool and the colour shows as 0, 0, 0, 30. It looks grey on the screen, too.

I cannot replicate the problem so suggest you check that the colour mode is CMYK not RGB (under 'File' 'Document Color Mode') and also check you are using CMYK in the colour palette and/or swatches.