Agate on InDesign

Does anyone do it? Is it user-friendly? Will the style sheets make this doable on deadline material?

We're still doing our agate in Harris, every other page in the paper in ID. That will probably change within the year.

 

I've been doing my agate/scoreboard in inDesign for years.

The only real pain in the ass is that the AP, in its infinite laziness wisdom, don't have a clue how to place tabs in between the standings, so I have to manually tab every standing. And they still, for some Godforsaken reason, insist on putting games played in the NHL standings, even though most papers have switched to narrow broadsheets which prevent an extra line of (useless) text.

I do, however, use style sheets for things such as headers, sub-headers, etc.

 

That AP business is what I'm afraid of. I know in the past, I've done search-and-replaces to strip the manual justification down to a single tab stop between items. Change em-space, then en-space, then thin space to tab symbols. Then crunch two symbols down to one symbol four or five times to get it down to a single symbol. It's one step with a script, I would imagine.

 

Fornatuely, MLB, NBA, NFL and NHL are the only real bad ones, and their seasons don't parallel too much. With the NFL, you only have to do it once a week (perhaps manually change the Monday and Thursday games). The WNBA and MLS are small leagues, and in the case of MLS, I often update those by hand.

MLB and NBA are bitches, because not only do they have so many teams, but in our paper, I have to change the small 1/2 symbol into a three-character half game (find and replace works well there).

My prep and college leagues, I just do by hand. I don't like the way the leagues do them in most cases.

But yeah, for all intents and purposes, the AP can go to hell.

 

InDesign isn't so bad for doing agate.
We have scripts that we can run which will automatically code up most agate for us (we share production resources with our sister paper and their guys wrote the scripts).
However the stuff the scripts don't work for can be a pain in the backside to code.
Additionally, AP doesn't always like to use a paragraph between leagues (or sports) in Transactions so having to manually go through that and check things is a pain.
Also, why for some golf tournaments does AP feel the need to put what country the golfer is from in the agate? That pretty much blows any hope you have of keeping it to one column, one line per golfer.

We use InDesign and InCopy within a Jazbox shell. Jazbox is the mainframe/directory where all the stories and agate come into/are stored in. It goes down more often than Linda Lovelace or Jenna Jameson, especially on deadline.

 

If you're having to do a lot of the same things over and over, I'd advise you to learn how to set up some searches using GREP and then save them. You can highlight the standings part of a file so that it only searches the text selected, then find any space before a number and replace it with a tab. Keeps you from having to put in each tab manually.

And if you have a consistent style for days in standings or such, you could set up a search to find any line with a series of letters followed by "day" in it and style that line and save the search so you just have to run it and make sure it didn't grab something you didn't want it to. Could hit several standings at once that way.

Really, if you're styling agate by hand, GREP could be a great friend.

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/indesign/cs/using/WSFB3603CC-8D84-48d8-9F77-F3E0644CB0B6a.html#WS1952D538-1335-4b1d-BA5E-FA5A176FDC9Fa

http://indesignsecrets.com/favorite-grep-expressions-you-can-use.php

 

Probably belongs on the AP thread, but how much do you want to bet if we said something to AP New York about this, they would say there's nothing they can do about it?

 

I just assume its a glitch with the way our system imports the AP content - some days the paragraphs are there, others they're not. Just like some hours we'll get all the takes of the scores/major scores for college hoops, other hours I'll get some of them in our system and have to go on the web to AP Exchange to get the others.

 

We have the exact same problem with transactions. Which undoubtedly means everyone does.

And I know, if I call, they're going to tell me that they can't even see the lack of manual justification there. They do the same thing anytime we try to get certain parts of boxscores fixed.

 

You actually got a reply?

They've been calling DC United just plain DC in the MLS standings for years now. And they spell out Sporting Kansas City, which obviously doesn't fit on ANYONE's boradsheet. They call them Toronto FC, but not Seattle.

Then again, if they had brains, they would add Monday's games to the Friday standings when they move for the many papers that don't publish on Sunday.

And since when did they decide they couldn't spell Connecticut and Massachusetts? They changed the Top 25 this year to just UConn and UMass. Lazy bastards. /soapbox

 

UConn and UMass I don't mind. ALL CAPS in the roundups, however ...