This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 18
It’s 2010! How did that happen? I must have blinked. For a moment I thought it was still 1995 and I was getting ready for the ServicePlus conference. Then I looked at all these windows open in Safari and I thought: Hey! Time to share all the good news!
Lots of fun goodies in the bunch today:
- Here’s a fun time-lapse movie of the making of a magazine cover. This guy really does it all right, down to the use of a “layer sandwich” to put the image above and below the vector masthead. (Background music lyrics are less than optimal; better to ignore those.)
- We’ve talked about nested styles in some detail, but we don’t often mention line styles in CS4. To see a video about it, check out this movie from Jeff Witchel from Layers.
- What’s up with Adobe’s Certification? Why bother? There are lots of good reasons to get certified, or at least study for the test, as outlined by Mike Rankin here.
- Confused by fonts, abbreviations, and initialisms? Check out this wonderful article about font codes.
- I’ve mentioned IDMLlib before, but it’s nice to see that they’re up and running with 1.0. Anyone using their stuff? I’d love to hear examples.
- Bummer that ID magazine has shut, but please note that that is not InDesign Magazine!
- I had missed this 3D extrude script from Jongware… kind of funky and doesn’t always work for me, but perhaps I’m using it wrong. I’ll have to try harder. Anyone else using it?
- I love this PDF from Michael Murphy showing what happens if you Alt/Option-click on various InDesign UI elements. Wonderful!
- If you’re a student, you can get the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium edition for $405 at Amazon. I didn’t realize that! Wow, that’s an amazing deal.
Okay, that’s enough for now. Get back to work! It’s a new year, and deadline are already starting to get tight. Also, forgive me the plug, but check out indesignsecretslive.com for more on the new conference and North American seminar tour!
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That Extrude script is pretty neat. Nice way to make Canyon like ridges with plains on the top. Or core segments. I think it will be trial and error and a bit tricky though to get it working well on text. Maybe a few examples from…. ahhem… the experts to help us neophytes out?
… a bit tricky though to get it working well on text…
Yah… Ideally, you would start the script and get an outline copy to move around and scale at wish, before committing to ‘render’. Sadly, ID scripting is not yet that far! As it is, it would take a dedicated plugin for that kind of interactivity.
I’m thinking about an upgrade, as I suddenly have some serious competition in the Javascript department :-D
3D shading? Curved “swoosh” text? Faster drawing? I need to think about it …
Apropos of, well, something else, I just read that Adobe has now killed the 20-times max. limit for activations! I think that’s good news, worthy of, well, being mentioned somewhere on this site?
https://blogs.adobe.com/OOBE/2010/01/removing_deactivation_limit.html
Thanks for the link, Klaus! But note they say over and over that they’ve killed the 20-times DEactivation limit. No mention of RE-activating it.
So sure, you can DE-activate it now as often as you want! But good luck reactivating it!
I’m half-joking … assumably they’re talking about a 20-times deactivation/REactivation limit that’s been lifted.
Still.