New lynda.com Course: Creating Long Documents With InDesign CC

As I was preparing for my session on long documents for the InDesign Conference earlier this month, I realized that 2014 is my 20th year making books and other long docs. And it has been a blast making all those pages on everything from gardening to geometry to fruit to football. So it feels like perfect timing that I get to share some of the stuff I’ve learned along the way with a new lynda.com course, Creating Long Documents With InDesign CC.

The course is composed of 52 movies in all, covering the whole process of working with long documents, from the initial planning and templating to final output.

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Here’s the official course description:

Creating Long Documents with InDesign shows designers how to plan, create, and output book-length documents using InDesign CC features and third-party plug-ins. Publishing veteran Mike Rankin focuses on long-document elements such as page and chapter numbering, tables of contents, cross-references, and indexes. The course also provides strategies and best practices for document construction, from creating master pages and applying consistent formatting with styles, to placing text and images and outputting to both print and interactive PDF.

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Topics include:

Using automatic numbering for pages, sections, and chapters
Using text variables for running headers
Creating templates for InDesign, InCopy, and Word
Formatting page elements with object styles
Automating text formatting with nested styles and GREP styles
Controlling color with swatches
Building page elements with libraries and snippets
Performing GREP find/changes
Tracking changes
Adding footnotes and indexes
Using InDesign book files
Preflighting documents

So if you need to work with long documents, check out the course and let me know what you think!

Not a lynda.com member? Get 7 days of free unlimited access to lynda.com.

Garrick says:

November 20, 2014 at 12:02 pm

Thanks Mike, I don’t prepare many long documents, so I’ve picked up bits and pieces as I’ve needed them. Nice to have a logical, ordered course so I can fill in the gaps. Starting to watch this evening!

Mike Rankin says:

November 20, 2014 at 12:30 pm

Thanks Garrick! Hope you like it!

Buck says:

November 20, 2014 at 1:13 pm

I completed a previous version some time ago, and it’s good to see the updated version of this course. Considering the quantity of docs in a book that I’m now creating, I need this as a refresher.

Thank you.