This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 13

I’m getting ready for a camping trip with my father-in-law. I haven’t been camping for years, and this will include backpacking out, including carrying our own water up a (small) mountain. Why? What insanity has overtaken me, getting me to leave my iphone and laptop behind in search for a slug to lick? (No, that’s not referring to InDesign’s slugs… it’s a ridiculous reference to this Nicholas Kristof article in The NY Times.)

I’ll tell you why: I don’t know. But sometimes you have to do crazy things, even if they involve the analog world where there is no such thing as Undo and nothing as beautiful as an InDesign splash screen.

Fortunately, many of you will be safe and snug with your copy of InDesign. And to keep you amused, the other contributors of InDesignSecrets will be typing merrily away… and there are always other sites with other InDesign articles on them, including:

• Setting the size of text to an absolute measure. A free script by Gerald Singelmann.
• Holy moley: layout tool plus pixel-editor (with cool extras!) written entirely as an AIR app (on the desktop or in a browser)… video shot at Adobe MAX 2009. I want some of these features in InDesign!
• Here are a couple of interesting scripts from Stanislav Antos that you might like. One generates numbers (would be especially helpful for people making tickets!) and one that keeps track of time. I haven’t tried them yet, but let me know if you like them.
• I think Anne-Marie pointed this out already, but there are some great tips in Michael Ninness’ “indesign power shortcuts” video session from MAX.
• Everyone wants to make ePUBs all of a sudden… EasyPress now has an InDesign to EPUB tool. Haven’t tried it, but it seems promising.
• Adobe continues to have various problems with its accessibility solutions (InDesign’s accessible pdf export is full of bugs, for example), but they insist they’re making progress. Here’s a blog post about what’s happening with Digital Editions.
• Are you a scripter? Check out Kris Coppieter’s post about sending “meta info” back to your users.
• Here’s a follow up movie to last week’s video on making an invitation in InDesign from Layers.

Happy InDesigning!