This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 103

David Blatner

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Whoosh! Here we are in February. PEPCON is coming like an express train (the early bird registration ends March 1). And InDesign users everywhere are wanting to get more efficient and do their work better. That’s where we come in. Check out these great links to greatness.

By the way, if you’re anywhere near Seattle next weekend, and you love type, you definitely should head down to the Adobe offices for a fundraiser to help the Hamilton Wood Type Museum.

• SWAPP is an iPad app? AND a web site! Check out my article on Share Vector Shapes Between Apps in this issue of SWAPP from Adobe!
• Illustrator has been around since the very dawn of electronic publishing. Now its history is recorded in a wonderful free iPad app called AI Early Years, including awesome photos.
• I have always wanted to do more 3D work, and Photoshop CS6 makes 3D so easy! Howard Pinsky shows how it’s done in an exclusive video at creative pro.com
• Have I mentioned DTP Tools’ IDML iPad App before? You can export an IDML file, put it on an iPad, edit it on the go, and then put it back into InDesign!
• What happens when you select some text and use a keyboard shortcut to make it bold? What if you press Command/Ctrl+Shift+B again?
• Ariel Walden has some good scripts available — mostly commercial, but a couple free ones, including the cool-looking Quick Apply with Next Style
• Another cool script: Export paragraph style description settings to CSV, which could be a boon for anyone who needs a detailed look at how paragraph styles are made. (Of course I’m biased but the commercial Blatner Tools also lets you do this in a slightly more elegant way.)
• Wow, it doesn’t get much better than 10 Free and Beautiful Serif Fonts.
• Great article by Tina Henderson about easing into GREP styles.

Interactive

• Ajar Productions has been hard at work with their fascinating tool that exports HTML5 pages from InDesign layouts. Now in version 1.1, you can even export iPad Web Apps! You should definitely give it a try.
• Tina Henderson has been fighting the good fight on DPS apps for a while, but she’s starting to think that perhaps Apple iBooksAuthor is the way to go. Interesting perspective!
• Bob Levine wrote up a good article about how to make a PDF from a DPS app on his new site.
• Rick Borstein wrote a nice article on Adobe’s devnet called Using InDesign object libraries to accelerate creating DPS publications
• Exporting HTML or EPUB from InDesign? You want to read this article by Michael Murphy about a frustrating bug in the export filter.
• Making DPS apps? Monica Murphy over at Tech4Pub has published a good tip called “Using Apple’s Application Loader to Upload a DPS App.”

Enjoy!