Free InDesign Video Tutorials
Looking for a one-stop shop of all the free InDesign CS4 video tutorials (produced by Adobe) available online at the moment? Bob Bringhurst just posted links to them. He also has links to many other InDesign CS3 videos and general online resources, including our favorite, InDesignSecrets.com. 
Bob Bringhurst is the lead documentation writer for InDesign and InCopy. Like Tim Cole’s Back Channel, Bob has his own blog called InDesign Docs. It was moribund for many months —I guess he was busy writing the CS4 documentation!—but it looks like he’s back in the saddle, posting new articles every couple weeks or so.
One of the best ways to encourage blog writers to keep at it is to respond to their posts with comments, letting them know you’re out there. If you find Bob’s post helpful, let him know! (And throw a comment or two Tim’s way, too … he’s been posting some great content over there.)
By the way, you’ll notice David did some of the free InDesign CS4 tutorials that Bob links to. Way to go David!
Wow, just checked out the Cross Referencing video and one or two others.
Cross reference is powerful. Does this mean I can say goodbye to the TOC feature? Because the Cross Reference looked great.
I can’t wait to get into more of these videos and hopefully I’ll be on CS4 soon.
Well done on the videos.
Thanks, Eugene. We’ll have to go into more details on x-refs in a future podcast or blog post, but right now I feel that text variables should be used for running headers, layout > table of contents should be used for a list of paragraphs (such as a TOC), and x-refs should be used for… well, just for x-refs inside a paragraph.
I suppose you could use x-refs for a TOC or even an index, but I have a feeling that it wouldn’t be nearly as efficient as using a feature that is better designed for it.
It’s a great question to ask someone from Adobe at the ID conference next week. I’ll see if we can get it answered.
I totally agree that xrefs are there for a specific reason and not TOC and Index and Running Heads. It was just something that popped into my head, finally a visual warning letting me know that it needs to be updated. TOC at the moment has no visual warning, nor does it have a panel
I’ve been longing for xrefs and they look great, they seem to work very well. I can’t wait to update all our publications with xrefs, it will be a long process, but I think it will be well worth doing.
I look forward to the write up on the feature and the full extent of it’s power.
I’ve heard that ID does not allow you to have more than one TOC. In my current FM workflow, I have a TOC, an LOF (List of Figures) and an LOT (List of Tables). How would I accomplish the same thing in ID?
@Kelly: You can do this with the Layout > Table of Contents feature. Set up the dialog box, then click Save Style to save it (one for list of figures, one for list of heading, etc.)
Sweet! Thanks. That’s much more elegant than the FM way. No more reference pages!
Is there a way to get an ID’s TOC to create hyperlinks AND bookmarks in one fell swoop? I have a TOC at the beginning of my document and I need it clickable (like cross references).
I opened up the PDF in Acrobat and there actually do appear to be links there. The first one was Link to Named Destination: p0. What??? I didn’t make that named destination and I don’t know how to edit it. It appears that ID does not make the links correctly… or am I missing something?
Well shoot… I tried it again and it worked. So I guess that p 0(zero) refers to page 1. (Since I think that Acrobat page numbers start at zero. So named destination p 17 takes me to page 18. I don’t know why it didn’t work earlier when I tried.