This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 70

David Blatner

6

Good stuff just keeps pouring out there for InDesign users hungry to learn! Let’s just jump right into it!

• Sandee Cohen has a good article here on InDesign’s really cool (and underused) Separations Panel.
• We’ve talked about the Page tool here, but it’s always good to get a different perspective. Here’s a write up at Computer Arts.
• If you love typography and the history of characters, you’ll enjoy this: Ralf Herrmann presented at the ATypI conference 2011 in Reykjavík on the Capital Sharp S (Eszett) in German/Austrian.
• Holy toledo, it took long enough: Adobe finally released Acrobat Reader for iOS. Unfortunately, it’s pretty limited. No dropbox support, no hyperlinks, forms, or annotations. But as Bob Levine recently remarked, you have to release version 1 first!
• Friend and colleague Sharon Steuer did a great AskaCSPro on using Brushes in Illustrator. It’s not InDesign, but it’s still cool!
• Mike Rankin came up with a good little grep: “Eliminate the scourge of whitespace-only paragraphs with this GREP query.”

EPUB and Interactive

• Publishers should be ashamed of themselves… in a rush to get ebooks out as quickly as possible, they’re not proofreading ebooks!
• iOS5 now offers a Newsstand — a way to find your magazines in one place — and a number of magazines created with Adobe DPS are starting to appear on it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that single-edition dps apps can be added to the newsstand, which is kind of frustrating.
• Here is another great article about Newstand… I’m particularly curious about what Zinio and PixelMags are doing!
• What I want to know is how many of the webkit CSS codes (or this list of safari css extensions) work inside epub readers… and are they all going to be supported in EPUB3?
• I enjoy learning about the different experiments publishers are undertaking to figure out what will and won’t work when selling digital books, such as this report on cookbooks from Hearst. Are people really reading on tablets? This article says yes!
• Want to put video in a DPS folio? Steve Werner wrote up a short article here, and has an article in this month’s InDesign Magazine. Also, check out Keith Gilbert’s checklist here!
• Okay, in case you’re into EPUB + MathML, it’s quite intriguing that iBooks (based on webkit) seems to be able to support mathml now, though it’s not perfect. Here’s a way to check what mathml support your browser has.
• I just learned that Aquafadas (which makes a good InDesign-to-EPUB solution), is now extending their reach to create EPUB3 fixed-layout! This looks fascinating.
• Colin Fleming is doing some new videos on DPS. Here’s one on working and previewing your documents offline. Here’s another one that describes how DPS integrates with Apple’s Newsstand service (which only works for Pro and Enterprise customers).
• Baker Framework has been updated to version 3.0!

Enjoy!