Podcast 71 Transcript

To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 71 page.

Anne-Marie: Welcome to InDesign secrets, Episode 71. I’m Anne-Marie Concepción
and I’m here along with my co-host David Blatner.

David Blatner: Well, howdy do?

Anne-Marie: Howdy do, David. How are you?

David: I am well, and you?

Anne-Marie: I’m doing great.

David: A pleasure to be here today.

Anne-Marie: Our podcast and blog at InDesign Secrets.com are the independent
resource for all things InDesign.

David: It’s true! And we are going to be talking all about InDesign today.
We’ve got all kinds of cool news. We’re going to be talking about
some of the hot button posts that have shown up on the website,
including talking about the totally crazy InDesign certification
exam, and some stuff about shifting gray scales.

We also have an interview. We got some nice feedback from people
when we did that interview with Deke McClellan a couple times ago.

We’ve got another brand new interview with Jessica Chase, who is
the editor and publisher of a new online magazine. We’ll be telling
you all about that in just a moment.

Then we are going to have a quizzler, another quizzler. But it’s
not going to be too hard. I think almost anyone could do this one,
with a little bit focused attention and then we’ll do the obscure
InDesign feature of the week.

Digital magicians. Ooh, that was like stereo. Jinx.

Anne-Marie: Now you can’t speak for the rest of the podcast.

David: Oh, dang! [laughs]

Anne-Marie: All right. Well, the news.

Anne-Marie: First of all: come to Miami. Some see us in Miami. The last week in
February is the InDesign conference where David and I will be
speaking and doing a life podcast episode. And then there’s a whole
bunch of other conferences rolled into that with Mogul Media,
right?

David: Yes, well, there’s the pixel conference, which is basically
Photoshop for designers. And there’s the Vector conference which is
Illustrator and Flash. And then there is a brand new conference we
are trying out called the Acrobat, the Conference for Acrobat
users, or something like that. And basically it is all about PDF
and Acrobat and it’s going to be great. We’ve got Ted Pedova coming
in and Angio Kamodo and just a lot of great talent coming in to
talk about Acrobat and PDF. So if you are in a PDF workflow you
definitely need that conference, so…

Anne-Marie: Definitely.

David: We’ll see you in Miami. It’s going to be nice and warm. And it’s
going to be good information and lots of fun so that’s going to be
great. Hopefully we will see you there in a couple of weeks. That
will be great.

Also, another conference that I wanted to mention is, we are also
working on the InDesign Conference Master Class, which is going to
be… Yeah, another Master Class conference. We did one of those
about a year and a half ago in Seattle. We’re looking at doing
another one somewhere on the West Coast, maybe in the fall. And so,
I just wanted to let people know that we are looking at doing that
and it’s going to be really great. It’s sort of high end InDesign
stuff with InDesign engineers and…

Anne-Marie: High geek. That’s what I call it.

David: Yeah. Major, major high geek.

Anne-Marie: I’d like to know something. When are we having a mistress InDesign
class? What’s all this master crap?

David: Yeah, it’s a good point. It’s a good point. And you know we have
been hearing about this for a long time now, about needing a
mistress InDesign conference. We’ll work on that. We’ll see if we
can do a mistress class.

Anne-Marie: OK. That’s good.

David: All right.

Anne-Marie: OK. I want to remind people about David’s free InDesign tip of the
day plug-in. I have been using it. I love that thing. I’ve learned
a couple of new tips, too.

David: Cool.

Anne-Marie: You can download that from our website and that was done in
conjunction with DTP tools, a wonderful plug in developer. Free for
Mac or PC and it works in other versions, not just CS3, right
David?

David: Yes, CS, CS2 or CS3. So whatever you want.

Anne-Marie: It’s slick. Cool.

David: OK. So we should probably talk about these hot posts of the weeks
that some stuff has been showing up on the website that have gotten
people all railed up, you have posted something about the Adobe
certification exam.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. Actually my post was about the practice test.

David: Oh, yes.

Anne-Marie: Adobe finally released the Adobe certified expert exam for CS3. I
think for all their programs, just in January. Whenever they do
this, they put up a guide to taking the test that includes some
practice questions. And if you are not familiar with this test,
it’s between 60 and 80 multiple-choice questions designed to see if
you are an expert in the program.

You get two hours to take it. You sit in a proctored situation,
like at a pro-metric training location where they take away you’re
briefcase and your purse, whatever, and they stick you in a locked
room, in front of a computer, with a camera on you. All right, so
it’s actually very formal and you have two hours to pass the test.

And it’s something like between 75 and 80% correct to pass the test
and then you can become an Adobe Certified Expert. Which has some
benefits. And cool stuff.

So anyway, I looked at the practice test for CS3 and half of the
questions were insane. They make no sense — they were like in
broken English. They were very confusing and I have nothing wrong
with posing difficult questions to see if you really know InDesign
or not in a test, but these were real head scratchers.

So I just pulled a couple of them, as an example, and sort of
dissected them in a post and said, I cannot believe that Adobe
would actually put these out there for the public. I think they are
trying to scare people away. Because if this is the practice test,
how bad must the real test be? And then, boy did we get a lot of
responses. I think we immediately had like 30 responses in half an
hour with people who have taken the test or the re-certification
test.

Many experts who have failed by just a few questions, and they all
said, yes the test was crazy. The test was worse than some of the
practice questions I posed and what is going on over there?

David: Yes, questions that simply have no answer at all or they have
repeated answers that were all like gibberish. Clearly something
went terribly, terribly wrong somewhere and Adobe is now aware of
this problem and they are rushing to fix it. Hopefully they’ll fix
it, but clearly something went terribly wrong and in the meantime,
there are a lot of people who have to take this test, especially
the recertification in order to get their credentials, and so on.

So it’s a real problem night now.

Anne-Marie: And I’m really glad that our audience, the blog readers, at least,
took the time to post their comments because I really think that
people might be passing around the URL to that post with all the
comments to see that this is really a hot issue for a lot of
Adobe’s top InDesign experts and that they should pay attention.
So, it’s always good when people contribute and it’s not just
something David or Sandy or Steve, kind of like ranting or writing.
You see, it’s not just us, it’s lots of people who…

David: …around the world. It’s quite endemic. So that’s certainly
something to be aware of, if you want to take the test, beware.
Hopefully we’ll get information about when it’s revised. I don’t
know if we will or not.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, it would be nice.

David: With luck it will be. The other thing though, earlier you said
there were some benefits of having one of these ACE things and I
think there’s some real questions being raised about, is there a
benefit of having the ACE? Of having that after your name or
wherever you put it. Especially if Adobe is going to be putting out
these exams that are so incredibly poor.

When I took the test, this was for CS2, I was astonished that the
kinds of questions they were asking were just meaningless
questions. They were like, what is the wording in this dialog box?
A few questions had to do with, do you know how to use the program?
But most of it was, “Can you remember the wording in this dialog
box?” kind of questions. That’s just useless. It really made no
sense at all to me.

So I was angry back then about the exam. Now it’s gotten even
worse. But if Adobe does not turn it around and get something
that’s really useful, then I think the whole purpose of the
certification goes down the tubes. People will say well there
really is no reason to have certification. Anyway, I’m just in a
little rant there.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, I know what you’re saying. They would ask, two of the choices
in the multiple choice test would be open up the paragraph style
settings dialog box. And the next one would be open up the
paragraph style options dialog box. You’re like, what is that
dialog box called?

You’re supposed to have memorized the titles of the dialog boxes.
Not all the questions, but a significant number of them sort of
freak you out as you’re going through it.

David: Right. Whether you know that wording has no bearing on whether you
know how to use the program or not, and that’s very frustrating to
me. Because the important thing is, do you know how to use the
program, can you get the job done?

I thought your comment in that blog post that was most important
was in answering how do you prepare for this test. You said,
basically look at the documentation. Because clearly these
questions have been pulled from the documentation.

Anne-Marie: From the help file.

David: Even when the documentation makes no sense, it doesn’t matter.

Anne-Marie: Correct.

David: It’s just the wording that’s in the documentation, study that until
your eyeballs fall out. Anyway, that was interesting. The other hot
button post that we should point though out is this thing that I
mentioned about the gray scale images shifting. Or images in
general shifting, colors shifting and so on on your page, when you
add transparency to the page.

We’ve gotten a number of comments before I posted that, so I was
prompted to do it. Since then, people kind of went nuts on there
saying yes, yes, yes, this is a huge problem. Where you’re working
along and all of the sudden everything changes because you just
added a drop shadow somewhere. We mentioned this way back in an
earlier podcast about the transparency blend space, but went into a
little bit more detail in that blog post, so people should check
that out.

But what was interesting about that blog post, about the comments
that came out of that blog post that I found interesting was, I
think it was Klaus in Norway, who was talking about how on his
Windows machine whenever he adds transparency to a page, all his
type kind of fattens up and thin lines kind of get a little fatter.
And I thought he was insane.

Anne-Marie: He put up some screen shots and you could definitely see it.

David: Yeah, well, I figured he had just faked those. [laughs]

Anne-Marie: Is there a program where you can fake images? Is that what you’re
trying to say?

David: So I was prompted to actually launch my Windows machine and try it
out. I tried it both on my Windows machine in XP and also running
Vista in Parallels on my Mac and in both cases, he’s absolutely
right. All kinds of stuff fattens up whenever you add transparency,
the type gets darker, it’s really ugly.

Anne-Marie: But it’s the same thing as turning on overprint preview, isn’t it?

David: Well, it’s actually not exactly the same. Overprint preview does it
a little bit, you get the same kind of fattening, but when you add
transparency you get a lot more. It goes even more.

Anne-Marie: Really?

David: Yeah, it’s really traumatic. So I asked somebody at Adobe and he
wrote a great post, emailed back to me, and I posted it there,
describing why that happens. It has to do with the anti-aliasing
and how that’s different on Windows and so on. So people should
definitely check that out if you have any questions about why that
might be happening on your Windows machines.

His comment, Matt Philips from Adobe, was actually that it also
happens on the Mac, but you typically don’t really see it on the
Mac, probably because of the difference in gamma. The native gamma
of your Mac system. But it was intriguing, so there’s all kinds of
good information out there about that.

Anne-Marie: Well that’s great information. I didn’t see that comment. I’ll have
to check it out. Great.

David: Yeah. Sometimes that’s the thing about these blog posts, people
will comment on them sometimes days or weeks or even months later.
It’s sometimes hard to find those old comments when they show up.
And if you’re in that boat, if you’re one of our blog readers,
don’t worry, Anne-Marie and I are working on a solution to that
right now. So hopefully within not too long we’ll have some new
ways that you’ll be able to go back and find those old comments.

Anne-Marie: I can’t wait for that to happen, that’s going to happen very soon.
OK, so let’s go on. I’m very excited about this interview with
Jessica Chase.

David: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anne-Marie: I just learned about her last week and she was happy enough to join
us in our pod cast, and so let’s take a listen.

We want to welcome a guest to our pod cast today, her name is
Jessica Chase. Jessica is the editor of “ZigZagZine,” a new
magazine done completely in InDesign, which she lays out, that
started late last year. And one of the reasons we want to interview
her is because Jessica is the youngest person I know who uses
InDesign. Jessica, how old are you?

Jessica Chase: I’m 10 years old.

Anne-Marie: [laughs] I love it. Can you tell us about the magazine?

Jessica: Well, “ZigZagZine” is basically, I lay it out in InDesign and then
publish it on the web as a PDF. It’s contributed to by kids of all
ages - though I try to cut it off in the teenager area - from all
around the country, hopefully in the future. Right now, people can
send in contributions to info@zigzagzine.com which forwards to my
email address. And they can then see their works published in the
zine. We publish fiction, non-fiction, art, all sorts of stuff.

Anne-Marie: I downloaded the past couple issues, it’s very colorful.

Jessica: Yeah, I was trying to go with a bright, kind of primary colors
theme, because it’s just more attractive than going with some dull
colors.

Anne-Marie: That’s true, we don’t want to be subtle. So, David, are you
impressed?

David: I am totally impressed and I just think it’s awesome that you’re
doing this. I’m curious, why InDesign and how did you get involved
with InDesign?

Jessica: Well, I first got the idea for ZigZagZine just from out of nowhere.
I guess mainly my inspiration was Mom, since my mom had her own
magazine and she’s the best editor I know. So, well, she’s the only
editor I know.

Anne-Marie: What was your mom’s magazine?

Jessica: Mac Chicago, and later it was Digital Chicago.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, that’s where I got my start writing many, many years ago.

David: You’re not in Chicago now, right? Where are you now?

Jessica: We’re in San Francisco… in San Francisco, California.

David: Excellent.

Jessica: And the main reason I’m using InDesign actually is we started out
with the the, I guess you could call it the Mac equivalent of
Microsoft Word and InDesign almost blended together, except in the
Mac style pages from Iroco 8.

David: OK.

Jessica: Actually the first issue we did was in Pages, but we ended up
switching to InDesign for the second issue and we are planning to
do that in the future, because it’s just more professional and you
can do more things with it. Pages is great for the basic stuff, but
for doing something like this, InDesign is definitely better.

Anne-Marie: Great. Interesting.

David: And how did you learn InDesign? Your mom showed you how to do it or
did you…Or was it come intuitively?

Jessica: Well, I guess, partly from just poking around, and figuring it out,
I kind of got the hang of it. But I also watched through the
tutorials that come with Creative Suite 3.

Anne-Marie: Ah-ha. Yes.

Jessica: You guys did some of those, didn’t you?

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: We did. We did.

Anne-Marie: Which tutorials did you like better, David’s or mine?

David: You don’t have to answer that.

Jessica: Both, both. [laughs]

Anne-Marie: Oh, that’s cool. I’m looking at… Right now I’m looking at the PDF
that you did for the January issue and for our listening audience,
we’ll put a link to this PDF in our show notes, but if you do to
Zigzagzine.com you can download all the issues for free, right?

Jessica: That’s right.

Anne-Marie: And I like your fonts that you used. Where did you get the
nameplate fonts in Zigzagzine?

Jessica: You mean for the title?

Anne-Marie: Yeah, I like it. You don’t have to tell us who you stole it from.
That’s OK.

Jessica: I don’t actually remember. Mom just found a font site on the web
with that I think.

Anne-Marie: That’s very cool. And the cover story is all about the year of the
rat that you wrote.

Jessica: Uh-huh.

Anne-Marie: Chinese New Year.

Jessica: Yep.

Anne-Marie: That’s very cool.

David: So what is it about InDesign? It sounds like you are really
enjoying it. You are enjoying how you can create professional
looking layouts easily with it. Are there any particular features
that you just really love? Or any that are frustrating you?

Jessica: Well, one of my favorite things that Pages lacks is the pace board,
because if you like have an image that you are…you want to put it
in on the page but you are not quite sure where and you can’t just
drag it in. And Pages doesn’t have a Pace Board, which I was
slightly disappointed to find out, because it’s always… Before
for layout I didn’t actually use InDesign, I used Pagemaker until
it got too old for my computer.

Anne-Marie: So you were used to a pace board?

Jessica: Yeah, I was very used to having a pace board so when I got Pages
and I realized it didn’t have a pace board, it was kind of like, I
felt like I was lacking in necessary ingredients. So that’s
probably one of my favorite things about it that I like, compared
to Pages.

David: Cool.

Anne-Marie: That’s for sure.

David: Because this is a PDF only magazine, are you doing any of the
interactive PDF stuff in it, like hyperlinks or bookmarks or
anything like that?

Jessica: Not too much. I mean, mainly it’s just links off to other web pages
off the PDFs. Maybe in the future we can.

Anne-Marie: You are doing hyperlinks. I’m looking at it now. There are
hyperlinks. She’s even got a tiny…

Jessica: Yes, we’re doing hyperlinks, but…

Anne-Marie: …tiny URL, link for recipe for ming gow, that’s sticky rice bake
for the Chinese New Year.

David: Mmmm, I’m getting hungry.

Anne-Marie: That’s great. Well, your website is also great, it’s a nice little
blog there and I just think it’s fantastic. I’m really happy that
you are publishing this magazine and that you have decided to use
InDesign.

I hope that it does well for you. I have one issue though. I don’t
know if you notice, but in the InDesign end user agreement, when
you buy software. You are actually agreeing to this contract. And
it says that your first three publications need to have at least
one drop shadow per page.

David: Yes, Yes. There’s not enough drop shadows.

[laughing]

Jessica: OK.

David: We’re just teasing you.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, there’s not one drop shadow in the whole thing, which is
refreshing.

David: Wow. You should get a prize, like an award prize just for that, for
not using drop shadows. Everyone who uses InDesign uses drop
shadows. This has been great. Thank you so much, Jessica. I totally
appreciate you taking the time.

Jessica: Thanks for having me.

Anne-Marie: Thanks. Talk to you later. That was great. 10 years old, can you
believe that?

David: It’s hard to believe because I’ve got a five year old and I’m
thinking in five years he’s going to be publishing his own
magazine. Holy mackerel.

Anne-Marie: Well, that’s Jennifer’s daughter for you. I guess the magazine is in
their blood.

David: I guess so. Good point.

Anne-Marie: Yes, yes, it’s true.

David: Good point.

Anne-Marie: And how sweet that she learned InDesign from our videos.

David: Yes. Indeed.

Anne-Marie: I couldn’t have paid her for a better answer. [laughter]

David: So we’re going to send Jessica some more videos or a book or
something to keep her going with more education and who knows, by
the time she turns 15 she may know more than all of us.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. That’s right. So soon we’ll be watching Jessica Case
presents Adobe InDesign CS9.

David: There you go.

Anne-Marie: Here we go.

David: Hey, we’d better do the quizzler. Let’s sneak that in there.

This week’s quizzler is another keyboard shortcuts one. Because you
know how we like keyboard shortcuts. So in this one, it has to do
with view magnification, right.

So, the question is how many different keyboard shortcuts can you
think of having to do with view magnification? Zooming in, zooming
out, on the page you are on. So you want to zoom in on it, you want
to zoom out on it. How many keyboard shortcuts are there?

Give us a list of all of those. Like, command one, control one on
Windows always goes to actual tool view, 100% view.

Anne-Marie: Just look under the view menu and you’ll see like… I’m looking at
it and it says “Zoom in, Zoom out, Fit page in window, Fit spread
in window, Actual size entire pace board.” That’s six there.

David: I know but there are more. There are more, but they don’t list
there. I.

Anne-Marie: I don’t know why because they had a bid on space in the menus and
they lost or something like that?

David: Maybe so.

Anne-Marie: But there are more. What are they? Now you have to stay on the same
page. We’re not talking about the ones like jump to the next
page…

David: Yes, right, right. Absolutely. And you know quitting and re-
launching doesn’t count. You know, crazy stuff like that. So…

Anne-Marie: Yes. Fritz, we’re talking about you, all right? So, please, give us
a break. [laughs]

David: That’s right. So hopefully you’ll find all kinds of ones that…
Email us at info@indesignsecrets.com with your Quizzler answer.
Then put Quizzler in the subject line, would you? Because that way
it’ll pop up on our radar faster.

Anne-Marie: That’s right.

David: Don’t put it in the show notes, just email us,
info@indesignsecrets.com.

Anne-Marie: And let’s say that people have until midnight February 22nd.

David: 22nd. February 22nd.

Anne-Marie: The Friday before the InDesign Conference.

David: There we go. I know. That’s going to be…

Anne-Marie: That’s right. So while we’re at the InDesign Conference, we can
test all the correct answers out. And then, out of the winning
answers, if there’s more than one, we’ll do a random drawing and
then we’ll announce it at our next podcast at the show.

David: Yeah. And what do they win? How about a copy of “Real World
InDesign”?

Anne-Marie: That’s a good one. “Real World InDesign CS3″? Or CS2? You trying to
get rid of those?

David: [laughs] CS. Anyone want a CS book?

Anne-Marie: [laughs]

David: “Real World InDesign CS3″. That’s the 900-page huge, mondo book
about everything you ever want to know about InDesign that I wrote
with Olav Kvaern. Why don’t we send out one of those?

Anne-Marie: OK.

David: Excellent.

Anne-Marie: Let’s do that.

David: That’s a $50 value, $50, $55 value, or something like that.

Anne-Marie: Signed by David Blatner.

David: It will be… Sure, we could do that. Excellent.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. All right.

David: Hey, the obscure…

Anne-Marie: Oh yeah.

David: What’s that thing called?

Anne-Marie: It’s called the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week.

Anne-Marie: It is digial… Oh, sorry. [laughs] Digital…

David: Good.

Anne-Marie: Editions.

David: Good. You got it! Good.

Anne-Marie: Thank you. Thank you.

David: Good job, Anne-Marie. Digital Editions. What the heck is that, and
where is that?

Anne-Marie: I know where to find it…

David: Really?

Anne-Marie: … and that is about the extent of my knowledge.

David: OK.

Anne-Marie: It is under the File Menu in CS3 only; it’s a new CS3 feature. Go
to File, CrossMedia Export, and you will see XHTML/Dreamweaver, or
XHTML/Digital Editions.

David: Right, right. And it confuses people, because there’s two different
XHTML things, right? Do I want the Dreamweaver version or the
Digital Editions one? And the answer is, you want the Dreamweaver
one, you don’t really want the Digital Editions one. [laughs]

Anne-Marie: [laughs] Yeah.

David: Digital Editions is a technology that Adobe’s been working on for a
little while for doing eBooks. EBooks, and, you know, magazines,
and that kind of thing. And it’s kind of a wacky mix of HTML and
Flash and PDF and, I don’t know, there’s all kind of stuff kind of
stuck in there.

Anne-Marie: But it’s not a PD… You can’t open those with Reader or Acrobat,
right?

David: That’s right. That’s right, you have to use the special Digital
Editions application, which will magically read all of this stuff
and blur the lines and you’ll come up with this really cool eBook
with all this information. But the truth of the matter is, I just
want to say really clearly now that in my humble opinion, Digital
Editions is not ready for prime time.

Anne-Marie: Right.

David: It’s getting there, it’s an interesting idea, I really…

Anne-Marie: Have you made any Digital Editions books?

David: I have looked at a couple of Digital Editions books, and they’re
clunky and problematic. Now, I don’t think I’ve gotten the most
recent version. I should download the most recent version of
Digital Editions before I totally rant on them. But basically, I’m
just not super-impressed. They’re trying to come up with something
which is almost iTunes-like, but for eBooks. And I applaud Adobe’s
impetus. I applaud what they’re trying to do with eBooks, because I
am a huge eBook advocate.

Anne-Marie: Yes.

David: I think the future of books… There will always be print books,
obviously. I really believe there’s always going to be print books.
But there are so many books out there that should be eBooks.
Textbooks for students should be eBooks. It’s just insane to charge
someone $100 for one of these huge textbooks that they have to lug
around. Japanese Manga, there’s Japanese… They print so much on
paper, and it’s an incredible waste, it’s like, you know, this
should be an eBook. And in fact, it is sort of turning into cell
phone magazines. There’s a lot of technology that should be on an
eBook, not printed matter. But…

Anne-Marie: It is definitely an interesting market niche. With the Amazon
Kindle, right…

David: Yeah, yeah yeah.

Anne-Marie: That’s another kind of eBook that requires a Kindle reader.

David: [laughs] The most ugly eBook on the planet.

Anne-Marie: Really?

David: The Kindle, basically, is the Radio Shack, TRS, Piece-O-Junk.

Anne-Marie: Well, I’ve gotten a couple of calls from some of my book publisher
clients asking me if we teach how to convert books to Kindle.

David: Wow. They’re PDFs.

Anne-Marie: And I’m like… Really? Well, no… they actually, apparently some
kind of HTML is better than PDF format for this.

David: Oh, interesting. Interesting. Well, maybe it’s Digital Reader.
Digital Edition, maybe that’s what they are using. I don’t think
so, though.

Anne-Marie: If you go… We’ll put a link in the show notes, but on Adobe’s
website, they have a Digital Editions library so you can browse and
download these Digital… [laughs]

I’m not going to say it anymore.

David: Digital Editions.

Anne-Marie: They’re eBooks and they’re magazines in this format along with the
actual reader. It’ll automatically download whenever you double-
click on one of these files, it’ll prompt you to download the
reader. The Digital Editions Reader, if you need it.

David: Good, good.

Anne-Marie: It’s available for both Windows and Mac.

David: Yep.

Anne-Marie: And there’s some good books available on it.

David: A couple. A couple. They’re going to have to do a pretty major
overhaul of this if they want people to really take note on a large
scale, I think. It’s the same thing with the Kindle, the Amazon
Kindle. It’s like, people have good intentions, but somebody
somewhere needs to jump in and do a real eBook reader of both
hardware and software, and otherwise, it’s just not going to go
anywhere.

Anne-Marie: I don’t think that we have completely explored the possibilities of
PDFs. I don’t even know why we’re talking about it yet, another
version of an electronic reader that you need a computer for.

David: Absolutely, absolutely.

Anne-Marie: You know?

David: PDF, PDF, there’s a lot of stuff you can do with Acrobat PDF just
by itself. And I think that, you know, there’s got to be even more
at some point.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

David: OK, so that’s basically what Digital Editions is, and why I think
that you don’t necessarily want to be choosing it from the Export,
the CrossMedia Export submenu from InDesign’s File menu, but at
least now you know. So now you know, so now you know.

Anne-Marie: Now you know what that Obscure Feature is, and that is the purpose
for us presenting it to you.

David: Exactly. There you go.

Anne-Marie: That’s right. We have done…

David: We’ve done our job.

Anne-Marie: We’ve done good.

David: Thank goodness. So that’s it for episode 71.

Anne-Marie: [laughs]

David: Be sure to check out the show notes on our blog at
indesignsecrets.com. We’re going to have links to all of the
different things we mentioned here. We’d love to hear what you
thought of the show. Leave a comment there in the show notes or
email us at info@indesignsecrets.com. Until we meet again, this is
David Blatner. [laughs]

Anne-Marie: And this is Anne-Marie Concepción, for InDesign Secrets.