This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 19

Given our current analytic stats and the number of articles I’m seeing flying around about InDesign, I think there’s a reasonable chance that a few people are not only using this little page-layout app, but are looking for answers on how to use it better! Well, we’re here to help, of course.

Here are a few links I thought you should know about:

• Keith Gilbert is at it again, writing various useful bits for InDesign users. Here’s a clever idea for how to use conditional text to indicate where the no-break character style has been applied. Here’s a script he wrote that lets you add tool tips to buttons in CS4, so you don’t have to make them in Acrobat. Go Keith!
• I mentioned Gabriel Powell’s excellent article about creating ePub documents in InDesign Magazine a while back. Well, now Part 1 is available to everyone free as a pdf download at creativepro.com!
• There is an ongoing discussion about “This Page Intentionally Left Blank” over here in the forums, so just for kicks here are two other TPILB links:
  • Blank Web pages: The This Page Left Intentionally Blank Project
  • Blank pages at Wikipedia
• The folks at Zevrix keep coming out with new versions of BatchOutput. The newest lets you export InDesign document pages in TIFF, PNG, and several other modes, at various resolutions. It also lets you trigger Acrobat Pro’s Preflight droplets to check the PDFs automatically.
• Adobe has apparently killed their Print Service Provider program, proving once again our extraordinary prescience when we wrote this April Fool’s post way back when. Here are some interesting thoughts about Adobe’s actions.
• Our AU friend Cari Jansen has written up two must-read posts on sorting in InDesign with scripts. Here’s the first one about sorting paragraphs. It ends with a link to the second, which covers sorting table data.
• Several folks have recently mentioned that Adobe has removed the 20-user activation limit. Here’s a quick write-up about this from Adam J.
• Jim Felici wrote a good article at creativepro.com about widows and orphans and how to solve them. Unfortunately, he called a very short last line of a paragraph an “orphan,” which it plainly is not. See my comment following his article about why these should be called “runts.”
• Adobe has renamed the Adobe Community Expert program “Adobe Community Professional” in order to avoid confusion with the Adobe Certified Experts. I’m pleased to point out that a number of us here at InDesignSecrets are ACPs. Here’s a list. We proudly wear our ACP badge on our About page.

Thanks for reading! Happy InDesign-ing!