No tips or tricks this time out. Just a heads up that next Monday and Tuesday I’ll be posting InDesign-related news and tidbits from the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. Tools of Change is a conference on emerging trends in digital publishing. It is organized by O’Reilly Media, publisher of the Missing Manual series, and those software books with the pictures of animals on the covers. They also publish a few InDesign titles, including GREP in InDesign and XML Publishing with InDesign.

So how does the conference relate to InDesignSecrets? I think it’s fair to say that in publishing, the only constant nowadays is change. From where I sit, nearly everything has changed in the last four years. My company never stopped making books, but how we do it has changed radically. InDesign is still at the heart of things. But now it’s floating in an alphabet soup of CMS, DAM, and heaping helping of XML. For some of our projects, the InDesign document is 100% disposable, no one ever sees it. It’s just a step along the path to a press-ready PDF. For other projects, designers still hand craft every page. Two extremes with one thing in common: InDesign. It’s still in place, but everything around it is in flux.

My goal is to learn as much as I can about the evolution of this thing we call “publishing.” I want to see how InDesign is being integrated into the publishing systems that will be on display. I’m very interested in the Adobe session on Digital Publishing, in which they’ll be demonstrating their vision of the future. I’m also going to Quark’s session on Dynamic Publishing. Wait a minute, did he say the “Q”-word?” Yes he did. The reason I’m interested is that Quark Dynamic Publishing System does not require you to use Quark XPress. You can use InDesign and InCopy with it. Crazy, huh? Up is down. Cats and dogs living together! And I’ll be documenting it all. I’ll also post tidbits in abbreviated form on my Twitter page, for those who like their news in 140 characters or less.