This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 56
Okay, so it’s been a little busy around here… Adobe announced CS5.5 and registrations for the Print and ePublishing Conference have been going crazy! It’s clear that we’ll sell out before the May 23 conference — it’s just a question of how quickly. If you’re thinking about attending this awesome event, now’s the time to jump!
So the upshot of all this is that I’m behind in getting these great articles, videos, and whatnot to you… well, better late than never!
- Mike Rankin and I wrote an article about making smaller InDesign and PDF files (reducing file sizes) for InDesign Magazine. It was recently “reprinted” for free at creativepro.com… hope you enjoy it!
- This is a great explanation by Harbs of why it’s so hard to save back to earlier versions in InDesign. He’s right.
- Keith Gilbert offers this set of good tips for copyfitting text in InDesign. By the way, Keith also has two new ipad apps out, which you can read about here.
- Are you an InDesign scripter? Here’s what’s new with scripting in 5.5.
- Everyone knows that Acrobat is the best program for viewing PDFs, but not everyone uses it. But how good (or bad) are other PDF viewers? The folks at VIGC put a bunch of PDF viewers to the test.
- Curious about who (and how many) are using which version of InDesign? Rorohiko thinks they know.
- Ornaments and ornamental glyphs are so fun. Check out how to make them even more useful in this article by Jim Felici.
- For all you printers out there: Definitely read this white paper on Adobe’s new APPE2 (adobe pdf print engine 2).
EPUB and Interactive
- Hot off the press, Liz Castro has figured out how to embed fonts in EPUB docs for ipad, iphone, and nook!
- Here’s a great wiki on epub. It’s far from complete, but there is some interesting info there.
- Speaking of great EPUB tips, check out this massive brain dump!
- If you’re into Adobe’s DPS solution for tablets, you have to watch Colin Fleming do a sneak peek of the new Overlay Creator panel.
- Vikrant goes into lots more detail about what’s new in CS5.5 regarding EPUB export. And here’s his blog post on what’s new with 5.5 accessibility (I’m very, very happy they fixed this stuff!).
- While Adobe continues to push it’s DPS technology for tablet publishing (including bundling some of the tools with 5.5) there are a number of competitors out there, including those who base their stuff on InDesign. A new one is magplus, spun off from the folks who created the Popular Science app.
- Woodwing — probably the biggest dps competitor — has proposed a very cool idea: What if there were an open standard for tablet publishing. They suggest (surprise!) their own format, which they dub OFIP.
- Need a script to move all your buttons to a single layer? (Scripters definitely need to check out his explanations.)
The Kindle export plug-in got updated a few weeks ago (I told you I was behind!). Here’s the release notes.
Happy InDesign-ing!
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Interesting links and news as usual..many thanks. I am particularly interested in the push to make epub more robust.
Is it possible to save pages of an Indesign file to create a separate indd document?
In regards to reducing InDesign file size:
Let’s say you have a company logo in both blue and white. Is it more efficient for you to link to two separate Illustrator files…one that’s the white logo, and one that’s the blue? Or is it better to link to one Illustrator file that has a layer with the blue and a layer with the white, and you make whichever color you want displayed visible using the layer object visibility options?
@Bethany: The difference in file size (for a vector logo like this) is likely so small that it doesn’t really matter. You can’t link the same graphic frame to two different graphics, so with the first route you would need two different frames, leading to a very tiny bit larger document. So a layered AI/PDF may be slightly preferable.
When trying to make a small PDF file, does it matter if I reduce the INDD file size? Like reducing image size as described in article.
Thank you for the link to the reduce file size. A friend and fellow designer and I were talking about this subject just rearlier today, so that is great. The article offered some tit-bits that I had no idea about – so yeah!
Interesting links and news as usual..many thanks
@Lenny: You asked “Is it possible to save pages of an Indesign file to create a separate indd document?” Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a direct way to do this, although someone has likely created a script for it. (Know of any to point to David?) Until a script is available, you either have to do a Save As and delete the extra pages you don’t want, or create a new document first and then drag and drop the pages from one to the other or use the Move Pages command, available from the Pages panel fly-out menu.
IMHO, it is time to add “New Document” as a destination to the Move Pages command, like what Photoshop offers when duplicating a layer. If you agree, add a “+1” vote here, but also submit a feature request here:
https://adobe.ly/InDesignFeatureRequests
@Michael and Lenny. That would be a great feature but how would that work if there was threaded text on the page? Would the thread start from the beginning or would it be broken when you create the new document?
@Bob: I can’t speak for everyone, but I’d want it to break and have the text on the page be the new “start” for the story. I suppose what you want depends on why you are duping the page/spread to a new document. Is it just to capture the layout “structure” to reuse for different content? Or is it literally to pull out a subset to save off as a smaller document? For me, it would mostly be the later.