Indesign Secrets

Who says data and design are mutually exclusive? Not InDesign, that’s for sure. Under the right circumstances, data-driven layout is the way to go. Unlike XML, which makes designers run from their computers, the Data Merge feature in InDesign is an easy way to accomplish fast, flexible data-driven layout creation and updates. Using a subscriber’s […]

Maybe it was that lunar eclipse we had a couple of days ago, but suddenly we’re getting bombarded with emails asking whether such-and-such is possible in InDesign, and the answer is usually “Sorry, no.” I mean, InDesign can do a lot of stuff — plenty of things that you might not expect it to do […]

Last week in the first part of this back to basics series on tab leaders we discussed creating dotted tab leaders in the Tabs palette to separate columnar text. Now, let’s talk about formatting those leaders.
Tab leaders—dots, underscores, hyphens, smiley faces, whatever—inserted via the Tabs Ruler are automatically the same font and color as the […]

I don’t like to have extra stuff floating around my InDesign documents. For example, I don’t like to have blank, empty frames sitting around — I always take the time to delete them. Similarly, I like to remove the blank carriage return at the end of text frames so that the story ends without an […]

In a previous post, How to Export Basic HTML Out of CS2, I provided a step-by-step method for exporting the stories in your layouts to HTML from within InDesign CS2 or CS3, basic formatting intact, using a little XML Tags trickery.

(Although CS3 has a dedicated File > Export > XHTML feature, you can’t get the same basic HTML mark-up that this XML-ly method produces, the mark-up that I believe most web developers need — see the extensive comments to the above post for details. If in doubt, try both methods and show them to your web team; see which they prefer. I could be wrong!)

In the first article I mentioned that it was possible to include your layout’s images in the exported HTML, but “they require just enough extra work that I’ll leave that to another post.”

And so here we are.

Listen in your browser:
InDesignSecrets-058.mp3 (13.7 MB, 28:53 minutes)
(the transcript of this podcast will be posted soon)

• Funny AutoCorrect Tip for College Newspapers
• Hot Button Posts of the Week: Runners-up were the ones on Hidden Characters and the Free Script for Right-to-Left Text; winner was Sandee’s Shrink a Vector-Heavy PDF
• Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Non-Joiner
  

This is one of those really esoteric solutions that makes sense for the two or three people who need this specific feature, but I’m writing it out hoping that others will take the concept behind the feature and apply it elsewhere.
First, here’s the problem.
I generate a TOC from the Chapter Names and the A Heads […]

MH wrote:

We are doing a series of children’s books and ample space in between words is crucial — but I want the tracking between letters to stay the same.

I know just what you mean: My son is steeped in the mysteries of how letters form words right now and word spacing is crucial! I wrote about word spacing last year, but I focused on using InDesign’s secret keyboard shortcut. When you’re doing a whole book, you certainly can’t rely on the shortcut; you need to define the word spacing as part of the paragraph style. Fortunately, this isn’t hard to do…

This just came from a post on the user to user forum where someone wrote she was having problems with text that jumped its leading increments.
It was an obvious problem with text aligned to the baseline grid.
But a comment the user made that the text behaved fine when it was on the pasteboard startled me.
She […]

One of the most common requests we see from InDesign users is “How do I do cross-references in InDesign?” Everyone assumes that x-refs must be really easy in a program as powerful as this, but unfortunately Adobe has not yet implemented this feature into the program. So here are a few options you should check […]