Archive for 2007

It seems like each day there is a new script coming out to do something cool in InDesign. But what about all the old scripts — those that were written for CS or CS2? Can you use them in InDesign CS3? If you’re a CS3 user with old scripts, you may find that they fail, [...]

OK…Christmas has already come and gone, I know, but it’s still technically the holiday season, and the title of this episode is the title of a Christmas CD project I recently designed. That’s the project I showcase in this episode, in which I demonstrate a holiday grab bag of InDesign goodies including: starting a document [...]

InDesignSecrets.com has grown quite a bit over the past two years; in fact, we had over 220,000 visitors serving over a million files last month alone. So today we moved to a new server. (Though we’re still with our great and very helpful ISP, Phillips Data.)
However, these things always make us nervous, especially when databases [...]

Sometimes it’s the little tips that can relieve the biggest frustrations. For example, it always made me crazy that I couldn’t drag the left or right edge handle of a very short text frame to make it wider because the dang “in port” and “out port” gets in the way. After all, if you click [...]

DTP Tools, the makers of plug-ins such as History, Keyboard Shortcuts, and Cross References has a trick up their sleeve that they’re about to release on the industry: The ability to rotate whole spreads 90 degrees to make vertical spreads — where one page is on top of the other. They recently announced that this [...]

I had a need recently to type out a bunch of data (like name, code number, price, and so on). It wasn’t enough work to warrant building a database (in my opinion), and I didn’t have a database handy anyway. But the problem was that I was forever forgetting what text should come next. That [...]

Listen in your browser:
InDesignSecrets-067.mp3 (15.5 MB, 33:48 minutes)
(or read the transcript.)

• News: Two new InDesign books, Helvetica movie, InDesign Conference in Miami, Florida
• XML and InDesign: Overview, basics, when and how and why
• Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Formatted Only Once
  

SS wrote: My company just upgraded our font library to the OpenType versions. We have found a puzzlement with ITC Zapf Dingbats Std. In InDesign, if you select that as your font and start typing, you get the “unrecognizable font” pink boxes with x’s inside. But if you switch over the glyph palette, you can double click on any of the characters from Zapf STD and they will show up. We’ve tried on the PC and the Mac, in different versions of InDesign, to make the Zapf STD type work, but no joy.

Sometimes it’s two steps forward, one step back. There’s no doubt that OpenType fonts are better in many, many ways (same font for both platforms, huge character set, “intelligent” character substitution, and so on). But with every gain there is a loss.

In this case, it has to do with “encoding”…

PMF wrote: Can you make letters interlock in InDesign? That is, have part of a letter cross over another letter but have another part stay behind the letter so that it links rather than just goes on front or behind. I know you can do it in Photoshop, but is there a way to do it in InDesign?

I learned something new and interesting about InDesign while researching your question! I’ll get to that in just a moment First, the one thing that is for sure is: You can do this, but you have to convert the text to outlines.

Here’s the original three letters in a text frame…

Do you help design or produce cool stuff using InDesign? Or do you train companies that do? InDesign Magazine is looking for interesting work to showcase in the “InDesigner” column. Past companies that have appeared in the column include large companies such as Microsoft (Games Division) and McDonalds, medium-sized newspapers such as the Kitsap Sun, book publishers such as Dorling Kindersley…