This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 22
Macworld was wonderful and packed full of people and good buzz. I hope that every company that decided not to exhibit is feeling regret and is making plans for the end of January 2011. The good news is that with the smaller exhibit hall, there was more time to see fun new things and run into more friends, such as Jay Nelson, Lesa Snider, Paul Schmidt (ex-ALAP and now ex-Quark), Shellie Hall, Sandee Cohen, Jeff Carlson, Russell Brown, David Biedny, and many others.
There wasn’t much InDesign-related software at the show, though I did get a demo of the very promising-looking TypeDNA. I look forward to seeing this more when it’s actually released (they’re saying perhaps next month).
Of course, Macworld wasn’t the only conference going on… there was also TED, at which Wired editor Chris Anderson demoed an iPad version of the magazine (on something that was a bit bigger than an ipad). We’re not sure how it was made, but we know that Wired is laid out in InDesign, so we think they must have used some sort of InDesign-to-iPad conversion workflow… perhaps via XFL? Email me if you know!
Meanwhile, there were lots of other fun articles bouncing about the Interweb, including:
- Pariah wrote a nice piece about Tinting Grayscale Images
- Have a bunch of empty pages in your document that you don’t want any longer? Check out this free script from Harbs at in-tools.com which removes them for you!
- Here’s a little video by Jeff Witchel about making custom strokes in Illustrator. Okay, it has nothing to do with InDesign, but I think it’s cool.
- Okay, Jeff is cooking on all kinds of things. Here he writes a nice little article for Layers about creating mixed ink colors in InDesign.
- Adam Jury shows some clever preflighting and document checking techniques in his latest videocast #8.
Happy InDesigning!
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Wow – Jeff’s been busy :) His tuts are top notch stuff and he’s also a really nice guy. I could have really done with the link to Mixed Inks last week, I spent about an hour explaining this to someone over the internet only last week, sigh. Well I have it bookmarked now for easier reference.
That TypeDNA looks good. Seems it might take a bit of work in font matching :)
Harbs scripts and plugins are always amazing, I saw on the User 2 User forums that Harbs had trouble locating one of his OWN scripts, saying he simply had too many and they aren’t organised. It’s a sad day when you have created so many scripts that you can no longer find them :D
I don’t have my headphones with me today – so I can’t listen to Adam’s videocast, but I watched some of it, seems like some great ideas there.
Thanks for the list of articles, some very good reading there.
Always a pleasure
help, help, help please with print to booklet!!!
I’m relatively new to Indesign from Quark, (where I used to create printer spreads by sectioning and numbering, then manually dragging pages around in the pages palette to create printer spreads.) While the Indesign Print Booklet option seems great, I cant get it to work. I’ve read many posts and “how to articles” but none of them seem to help the problems i’m having. I can get it to export to Acrobat, but then i cant find the file… yes, i’ve done searches.
So ultimately my question is, is there a way to work with master pages, sectioning and numbering, a la Quark, to manually move my finished pages into printer spreads?
please help. thanks.
@diane: I would encourage you to write something in the forums (click Forums in the nav bar above) about this. You can move pages around if you first turn off Allow Pages to Shuffle in the pages panel menu.
But in general, it’s way easier to just create the pdf normally, then use an Acrobat imposition plug-in to move the pages around.
David, thanks, I’ve been to forums and read some of what other users had to say and their workarounds but to date none have worked for me… HOWEVER, your method of moving the acrobat pages around appeals to me and i’ll explore that. Thanks especially because i’ve got a 40 page document coming up soon that goes to a printer who requires printer spreads (some still dont and prefer pdf reader page order (god bless em)
so its off to Acrobat i go to check out the imposition plug in.
thanks again
David,
InDesign publishes to e-books. See:
https://blogs.adobe.com/digitaleditions/indesign-epub.html
I want to compliment you and Olav Martin Kvern on Real World InDesign CS4. Excellent. Only wish on it is that it needs color but you have given readers a better step-by-step set of how-to-do-its than I’ve found elsewhere.
Keep up the good work.
HawaiiBill
@Bill: Yes, I know about epub export from ID, but I don’t think that’s Wired is doing here. ePub is very rudimentary publishing. Wired’s demo (like this video that Sports Illustrated made) is definitely not epub. It’s flash based or an actual app.
Thank you for the kind comments on Real World InDesign!
@David
I think I want that iPad now?
@Diane
Instead of Acrobat, you could check out Cheap Imposter for the Mac.
https://www.cheapimpostor.com/
It’s free and it’ll impose your PDF into printers pairs ? it’ll even give you PDFs you can manually duplex. I use it all the time when I’m in a rush.
Hi David
I think you can find alot of answers on your Adobe & Wired questions from the blogpost at Adobe Blogs/Digital Publishing – https://bit.ly/9T0jvq
/Mattias
@Mattias: Thank you for that link. Looks like I’m not the only one who was curious about that workflow. So this was AIR… perhaps the future is InDesign to XFL to Flash to tablet? Sounds like I may need to learn actionscript after all. ;)
A good wrapup The Wired story is https://bit.ly/aQIGgL
Between tinting grayscales and 2-color mixed inks my day, week, month has been made. My life just got so much easier!