This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 45

David Blatner

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Holy cow, there’s a lot of InDesign-related stuff popping up. Must be springtime somewhere. (Not here in the northern hemisphere, but somewhere!)

• Hey, Michael Murphy’s review of my BlatnerTools Suite of plug-ins (from InDesign Magazine) is live for everyone to read!
• Long live print! And where there is print, there is paper, and where there is paper, there is often folding! Check out the great text and video at Sappi paper on all these subjects. (Thanks to Terri Stone at CreativePro.com for her links to that.)
• Jay Nelson’s review of InDesign CS5 in Layers magazine.
• James Felici continues to write great pieces on when and how to use type features, such as this one on baseline shift.
• Do you work with footnotes and endnotes? Then you must read Cari Jansen’s report on what works and what doesn’t with these features!
• This is a nice tutorial from Computer Arts, showing how one designer tackles a multi-page magazine feature layout.
• You have a small image that you need to expand into a large one. Unless that “small image” has a huge resolution, you’re stuck. Or are you? Some folks are getting great results from products based on fractal mathematics. You can’t put data in where there isn’t any, but you can often fake it far better than just upsampling in Photoshop. For example, check out Genuine Fractals from OnOne Software.
• InDesign Magazine ran a great piece by Keith Gilbert a couple of months ago, on the subject of making grids of objects, that creativepro is now publishing for everyone.
• Acrobat.com is opening up, including non-US folks to their paid subscriptions, and adding two new services: SendNow and CreatePDF. You can read about that all more here.
• Just on the off chance you’re tired of Helvetica and Arial, here’s a wonderful reminder of many other options by Robin and John.
• I want to go to TypeCamp! This sounds like way too much fun.

Interactive Stuff

• Many people have wondered why we can’t just create HTML5 pages and convert them into an iPad app… well, it’s starting to be possible, with the Baker eBook Framework. It just started, but this promises to be very exciting as it develops.
• Here’s another option for the HTML eBook-on-device option: Booki.sh. Wow. Incredible.
• Liz Castro has caught on to the “edit an epub directly on the device” fad! Check out the article, but don’t forget to read the comments at the bottom!
• One of the problems for digital magazines has been “how to offer subscriptions.” Newsweek has just started, but it may raise more questions than it answers.
• What iPad magazines are doing well? Here’s a great round-up at Forbes.
• Glenn Fleishman has an excellent analysis at The Economist blog of the whole “lending ebooks” thing (which he considers a sham).

Whew! Okay, now back to work!