This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 69

David Blatner

6

The publishing world may be in a massive revolution, but InDesign remains at the hub. Therefore, the more you know, the better off you’ll be in the swirl and churn of the industry. Here’s some links that might help you in the pursuit of all-things-indesign:

• I’ve made no secret of my aversion to the very powerful and amazingly helpful XML (ITARWTAGWXMLTCI: “If there’s any reasonable way to achieve the goal without XML, then choose it.”) However, jeez, sometimes XML is totally the way to go. Check out this great article about XML and its partner XSL.
• I just came back from Adobe MAX (as you may have read). If you weren’t able to go, check out the many free recordings of sessions.
• Silicon Publishing and Fotalia stock photography service have teamed up to offer you a free plug-in for InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop.
• StockInDesign has done it again: Here’s a really pretty book template you can pay for with a tweet.
• Typefi is running two webinars in October on “The Case for Automating the Production of Accessible Documents.” Cool!
• Here’s a great free script from Harbs and In-Tools that lets you Convert Colors to Grayscale in InDesign. Check out the comments at the end to see a script by Rob Day that converts the whole file!
• The Colmin8r has been mighty busy recently, writing up lots of prepress-related InDesign issues, such as this one about whether to set line art to overprint or multiply.
• Okay, this is too much fun: interactive kerning.
• Need to make graphs? My son’s teacher just sent a link to this amazing site that will generate all kinds of charts for you, and then let you download them as PDF (or other file formats).

Interactive/EPUB/DPS

• If you’re living under a rock, you may not have heard that Amazon is going to be releasing a new tablet, called the Kindle Fire. This is the most exciting tablet news since the iPad 1. Read about it here. Even better, Adobe is on top of it already. Here’s more on what publishers (such as Conde Nast and Hearst) are doing.
• Making eBooks? You might find this set of icons and a template from Smashing Magazine useful.
• I’m very intrigued by what Circular Software is doing: Exporting fixed-layout EPUB files from InDesign! It’s still in beta and has some issues, but it’s clearly getting better. If you test it, let us know what you think!
• Want to create a print-on-demand book and sell through Amazon? This is a good look at how things are changing vis a vis Lightning Source and CreateSpace.
• Bob Bringhurst has compiled a list of recent articles about DPS. If you’re interested in that technology, you should check it out!
• We don’t normally announce new companies, but I can’t help pointing to a site which our friend Harbs is involved with: PrintUI.com
• Check out this free new ebook about EPUB3 from O’Reilly!
• I enjoyed this little glimpse at children’s ebooks. (My personal bias: My kids still read 99% of their books in print form. I’m sure that will change someday, but I still love seeing piles of hardcover and paperback books strewn about.)

Enjoy!