June 8 2009 • 3:41 PM
By:
David Blatner
Bunch of InDesign Articles, Part 2
My, how time flies. In part 1, I see I was using Firefox. These days, I’m hooked on Safari 4. But the result is the same: Too many windows open, with too many articles about InDesign. Time to offload an share some of them with you!
- My head is in Interactive-land right now, as I’m doing some movies on the subject for lynda.com. So I was pleased as punch to see this little tutorial by Mira Rubin about building and exporting Interactive PDF files from InDesign.
- Michael Ninness wrote some wonderful tips for Layers Magazine’s “100 Wicked Tips” article. Some are CS4-only, but most are helpful for CS3 users, too!
- Rufus Deuchler wrote up a great explanation for why hyperlinks don’t work in exported SWF files until you put them on a Web server… and how to make them work.
- People sometimes ask me how to make all the text in a text frame a point larger or smaller. You can select all the text and then use the keyboard shortcuts, but that doesn’t always give you the control you want. So here’s a cool little script from Thomas Silkjær that lets you specify exactly how much larger or smaller to make the text.
- CreativePro.com ran an excerpt from Michael Murphy’s book about using styles in InDesign… this article is all about nested styles, and is a good read!
- I continue to have an interest in creating “accessible” PDF files from InDesign. This checklist from the US government might be helpful to some folks.
Enjoy!
I think Safari is by far the best of the browsers for graphics. It renders text beautifully, and it seems to work just as well on a PC as on a Mac. And importantly, the appearance is the same on both platforms (unlike Firefox).
Safari is so good-looking that I’ve got into the habit of NOT using it when building web pages. I always get a page working in the more problematic browser(s) first, then save up Safari for last, knowing it will show me the finished result as I would like everyone to see it.
I gave up on Safari 3 because it would crash most of the time. So, I went with Firefox which has been very stable. Is Safari 4 more stable? I’m willing to give it a try if you think it is worth it. I’m taking a major leap here, David, but I trust your advice.
I don’t know what the big deal with browsers is. I have a bunch of them but use Firefox because of the add-ons, it’s all good.
Thanks for the links to some interesting reading.
Well, I installed Safari 4. I’ve tried to start it three times. Crash, boom, and bang! Report sent. I’ll stick with Firefox for now. It has been working just fine.
Well I just installed Safari 4 for the PC and I think it stinks! It has abandoned the really nice way Safari 3 used to anti-alias text. It used to have a really nice “glow”.
Unless you turn on text smoothing on the PC (and it’s usually off on most people’s PCs), the best browser for text is now… Internet Explorer. — Alas, if only it didn’t do so many other things so badly.
If it were possible to upload a GIF to this blog, I’d show you the difference.
Jennie, if David offers advice, take his rather than mine. He knows a lot more than I do! Here’s mine:
If you use a Mac, text looks great all the time. I’m sure Safari 4 for the Mac is really good. But if you use a PC (or my PC, anyway, running XP) by default text looks pretty awful (to me it looks “unaliased” — jagged diagonal lines and raw pixels either “on” or “off”). You can turn on automatic text smoothing, but then other things (such as desktop icons) start to look sloppy and weird.
I wonder: am I the only person who is bothered by this? Have I got my settings wrong in some way? — That seems likely, and yet the text on other folks’ PCs looks equally bad to me. They seem to have the same settings.
Internet Explorer is bad in many ways, but it makes text looks great. Same with Safari 3, which I have just re-installed after my unpleasant bout with Safari 4. Firefox (and Opera, and Chrome, and now Safari 4) makes text look just awful on a PC, at least on my PC. I use Firefox for internet banking, or anything else that calls for security, but never out of choice. It offends my eyes.
I’ve never had stability problems with any version of Safari, by the way, on PC or Mac.
Okay, what with all the browser discussions going on this may seem OT, but I’d like to thank David for the great links at the top of the page!
Old Jeremy: I don’t use PCs but I gather from Apple’s feature list for Safari 4 that they’ve made the anti-aliased fonts an option you can turn on in Safari’s preferences. At least, that’s what I assume it means.
Whenever I do have to use a PC I’m struck by how awful text looks, so it isn’t just you. I think people who use PCs normally are just used to it so they don’t notice.
Rhiannon, thank you for that! I have re-installed Safari 4, and everything’s much better now.
A bit of web surfing reveals that my problem stems from different types of “sub-pixel rendering”. On a PC, Safari is indeed the most accurate way of rendering fonts, although that’s what gives text its characteristic “glow”. EI gets rid of the glow, and doesn’t look half bad in my opinion, but is still less true to the original fonts. In my opinion, the other browsers are non-starters for text on a PC.
Thanks again!
I use Firefox. I don’t know if I want to give Safari another chance…