This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 35

David Blatner

7

If you’ve been following the news, then you know that the whole world has gone crazy for InDesign! The InDesign political party has gotten underway, bringing the message of InDesign-for-Everyone to the voting public. In areas where there is no voting public, the InDesign party is simply staging a party. So party on with these InDesign-centric (mostly) articles, brought to you by your favorite InDesign news source, InDesignSecrets.

• Martinho da Gloria, the creator of the amazing LayoutZone tool, has come up with another jaw-dropping feature: MultiFindChange. This is the tool that everyone who has do perform a lot of find/change operations has been waiting for. If you were ever tempted by the FindChangeByList script, but it was too scary, or you’re brave enough to use that script anyway, you must try out MultiFindChange.
• Our friend Brian Wood is doing a number of InDesign videos and tutorials on his askbrianwood site. Here’s one on using MiniBridge and Gridify.
• Need to shift everything on a particular layer up, down, left, or right? Check out this new feature of the Rorohiko LayerLifter plug-in.
• If you use layer comps in Photoshop (if you don’t, you probably should), you need to know about this little CS5 bug, documented by our friend Claudia McCue.
• The difference between plug-ins and scripts is confusing. Add to that the new concept of an Extension. Here’s an article that breaks it down for you by a guy who knows.
• Into print-on-demand, but you want it for magazines? Check out Brian Lawler’s article about HP’s MagCloud service. (They also offer an iPad publishing option!)
• How curious that Roger Black and others are starting to sell templates for newspapers, magazines, and other publications. Their company, Ready Media, doesn’t say how much these puppies cost.?

iPad and epub Stuff

• On the iphone/ipad front, I was intrigued by this news story of the New York Times offering its iPad app technology (for a price) to other companies. I love reading the Times on their device.
• Speaking of iPad, looks like the Lonely Planet books have gone interactive. I used the print versions extensively in various travels in my youth. I think interactive books like this are the future, but I think iBooks (and other ebook readers) have a long way to go before they’re as useful as they should be.
• Everyone is waiting to see what Adobe will do with the whole iPad thang. They’ve been talking about their Digital Publishing Solution, but here’s an article that goes into more detail than I’d seen elsewhere and makes it clear that these tools are being added to InDesign.
• I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s worth mentioning again that Liz Castro’s book about epub has hit the literal and figurative shelves.
• The Woodwing solution for iPad magazines has become famous, but a lot of people think it’s only for huge publishers. Not so, says Woodwing. Granted, it’s not cheap or for the mom and pop shop, but medium sized publishers should have no trouble with it. Here’s his blog post on it.
• If you’re making EPUB docs from a non-English version of InDesign, please read Liz Castro’s warning about italic and bold text coming out as normal. She keep posting all kinds of good stuff on that site, including this article about making an index in an epub.
• Did I already link to this article about “how we make epub docs“? Well, if I haven’t, now I have.

Other Cool Stuff

• These InDesign keyboard stickers (showing common shortcuts) look pretty darn cool. We should get us some of these…
• What a cool typographic poster! The Periodic Table of Typefaces.
• Pantone keeps coming out with new colors. If you want to use their new Pantone PLUS colors, then download their (free) libraries for InDesign.
• Into scripting InDesign? Don’t forget to bookmark this great site: InDiSnip.
• Mordy Golding’s Real World Illustrator CS5 is out! I can’t believe he beat us. (Real World Adobe InDesign CS5 is shipping, um, later this week or early next week.) Here’s a fun post by the guy who did the cover illustration for Mordy’s book.

Wow. That’ll keep you busy for a while!