Digital Publishing Suite Freebies to Make iPad Publishing a Bit Easier

Bob Levine

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One of the things I love most about the InDesign user community is the willingness to give. This is easily confirmed by the myriad free scripts and plug-ins, blogs with tips and tricks, and user forums all dedicated to InDesign.

In that spirit, I’d like to point out a few freebies for those of you interested in Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite tools. For those of you unfamiliar with DPS, these are collection of plugins and AIR applications that allow InDesign CS5 to publish to the iPad and hopefully soon, to other tablets.

Templates

Petteri Paananen has kindly supplied an InDesign CS5 file with portrait and landscape mock ups of the iPad with a background simulating the look of apps published from InDesign. By using this you can take your own screenshots from the iPad or straight from InDesign to show a client what their app will look like. You can download the template from the eDocker website freebies page.

Along the same lines, Keith Gilbert has created 1024 x 768 horizontal and vertical templates for InDesign CS5. He’s included guides to provide a safe area from scroll bars and menus. You can read more about that and download the demos from Keith’s Blog.

Color Profiles

And to wrap this up, Christian Albrecht was kind enough to supply an ICC color profile for Photoshop files destined for placement in InDesign. This profile was written to help designers get better color accuracy when designing for the iPad. The file can be downloaded from here.

Finally, if you’re at all interested in checking out the tools that Adobe is developing, you can join the official prerelease program by filling out the application on this page. You’ll need to scroll down to Adobe Digital Publishing Suite in the list of products and fill in the rest of the required information. You must be using InDesign CS5 to use these tools. They are not compatible with earlier versions.