This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 78
I can’t believe that no one noticed that “This Week in Articles” missed numbers 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, and 76! I just skipped past them. Not sure what on earth happened there… I must have typed 77 instead of 71. Oh well, those aren’t particularly interesting numbers anyway — except 72, of course. Speaking of interesting numbers: today is 63… I mean 11-11-11. Tomorrow will, I assume, be 1-00-00-00.
Aaaaanyway, let’s dive in and take a look at my quasi-weekly roundup of articles you may have missed:
- Mike Rankin blows us away again with his free video on making Polaroid frames for images in InDesign.
- On the topic of free movies: Check out this free video (by yours truly) about fun, hidden Easter Eggs in InDesign.
- Do you produce documents in other languages? Here’s an amazing article about how to add many other languages to InDesign!
- My friend Glenn Fleishman presented a wonderful short talk about the joys of letterpress at Ignite Seattle recently. The photo of Film Strip is mine!
- Letterspacing is super-important when dealing with readability, and I’m forever seeing type too spaced out or too smooshed together. Here’s a great article on getting it just right.
- On the other hand, sometimes it’s fun to go totally overboard with type. Check out these “7 Lively Sins” by Nigel French (originally in InDesign Magazine).
- One more tutorial on type rules — this time something on setting up optical margin alignment and indents.
- Adobe is headed in a very interesting direction with this week’s introduction of the Adobe Creative Cloud. I say “interesting,” as I’m not sure if it’s entirely good or bad… but there sure is some exciting elements to it! For example, the ability to get access to pretty much every Adobe app for only $50/month? That is sure to be mouth-watering to many folks. However, I don’t yet understand the weird news that you have own CS5 or CS5.5 in order to upgrade to CS6 (for the individual products, not the subscription). More research necessary.
- If you’re a developer (or feel like becoming one), you should check out the new CS Extension Builder prerelease!
- Are you a beginner or know someone who just needs to get up and running fast? Here’s a little Intro to InDesign.
- Like fonts? Like a whole bunch of fonts all averaged together into one font? The font is now available for free!
- Do you like InDesign’s online help system? You can rate and provide feedback on it now.
Interactive
- Adobe announced this week that they were shutting down new development on Flash Mobile. This does not mean that Flash is dead, or event that Flash is less relevant. It’s just Flash Mobile, not the many other aspects of Flash. Here is a good roundup of what happened.
- The single-edition DPS option is now available at the Adobe Store for $395. Interesting!
- Where do you think EPUB files should begin? That is, what should be the first page you see when you first open an epub? Liz Castro weighs in on the matter, and discusses how to control it. (You can see my position in the comments after that post.)
- While Adobe is clearly focused on letting people create digital magazines, some other companies are looking outside that box at other kinds of publishing. ScrollMotion, for example, is starting to explore what large companies need for creating business presentations.
- And speaking of alternatives to Adobe DPS, check out Twixl Publisher, which is now 2.0!
- Cari wrote up a good article on using Marijan’s link-renaming script, and why it may be very important to you before exporting EPUB files.
- I’m really intrigued by what Walrus is doing, but clearly they’re up against a number of frustrating challenges.
Enjoy!
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I agree: the news about the upgrade pricing for CS 6 are weird. Such an important change should have a proper announcement, instead of being mentioned en passant in a blog post about other suite features. If that’s true, I wonder whether Adobe is being a bit greedy lately. First they changed the (already short) 18-month version cycle to an even shorter 12-month cycle. Now this.
Read carefuly: 50 dollars pm ON AN ANNUAL PLAN. That is a ‘lease’ for one year. End the subscription aftet a year: software gone.
Good to read that for CS6 there still will be ‘old school’ licences but if I read it right, an upgrade price will only be for CS5/5.5 users. So users of older versions pay full price?
Thanks for the excellent list of articles.
Adobe need to sort out their wording and be crystal clear. I’ve seen this mentioned on several other forums/blogs in the past week, seems like everyone is confused.
I think Adobe’s approach lately seems to be a little all over the map. It seems they are unsure of what tools to push people to for tablet publishing so they are including an option in flash, Dreamweaver, and indesign and none of them seem to be fantastic solutions. Indesign to produce folios comes the closest, but the licensing fees are still high for “digital distribution”. Digital distribution? Isn’t that what the internet is for? Imagine if they restricted PDF distribution to only be through Adobe servers.