InDesignSecretsInDesignSecrets Podcast 187
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See the Show Notes for links mentioned in this episode.
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Special episode with Anne-Marie and co-host James Fritz!
- News: Upcoming speaking gigs at Macworld, PEPCON, and Adobe MAX
- Solving Paragraph Composer Annoyances
- Fritz’s UberCool Moo.com Business Card Project with InDesign
- Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Protractor
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INDESIGN “PRODUCTION NIGHTMARES FROM THE TRENCHES” STORIES: We want to hear your stories! Send us a short (less than 3 minutes) “InDesign doc/client/user/coworker Horror Story” that we can play on the air (you’ll be anonymous) in an upcoming episode: leave us a voice message at +1-801-459-4477 to record it, or send in your own voice recording. Please follow-up with an e-mail, which we will keep private, including any additional information that you’d like us to know. You’ll get a nifty gifty from us if we play it in a podcast!
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> David’s speaking at Macworld where he’ll be talking about his new book, Spectrums: Our Mind-Boggling Universe from Infinitesimal to Infinity
> Anne-Marie is presenting a workshop at O’Reilly’s TOCCON, Feb 12–14 in NYC, titled, “Beautiful Typography in EPUBs”
> Fritz, David, and Anne-Marie will be presenting seminars and labs at Adobe MAX, May 4–8, 2013 (right after PEPCON!)
> Let’s give our conference its own line: Come to PEPCON! Our annual Print + ePublishing Conference, this year April 28–May 1 in Austin, Texas
> Here’s Fritz’s author page on this blog and at lynda.com
> Bats under the Congress Street Bridge in Austin
> Willie Nelson’s 80th birthday bash!
> Fritz was probably thinking of TypeFitterPro from Teacup Software
> Great posts about the Paragraph Composer are here, here, and here
> Harb’s Freeze Composition script
> Adobe’s Muse Site of the Day
> Moo.com! The online business card provider that Fritz did that cool project for
> Mike Rankin’s awesome InDesignFX ebook (comes with editable sample files!) and lynda.com videos
> More on the protractor
See for yourself!
The protractor also worked in my version of CS4 with the Angle’s in the info
Yeah I think it’s been there a while. I wish it had a little half-moon icon like the protractors I used to use in school.
James mentioned a plugin for tighter and looser paragraph settings . . . it’s not from Typefi. It’s called Typefitter Pro, and it’s from Teacup Software. Typefitter Pro is great – I use it all the time, but it’s not cheap. So, when I compose type for a book designer, I use the Typefitter Pro buttons to make new settings and then make new para styles such as “body tight, body tighter” so that the designer can apply these to individual paragraphs as needed.
mchak, thank you! Yes David spotted that, so I put it in the show notes above (8th little >) … I didn’t know that you could use that to make “body tight” “body tighter” settings as paragraph styles! That could save some time. Working on a project right now (designing templates for a journal) where we’re doing that manually. I’ll check it out.
Yes, I make the tight and tighter styles for books where the designers don’t have Typefitter pro and might want to change the settings . . . on their end, it’s not as handy as having the plugin, but it’s a poor-designer’s workaround. If you have Typefitter Pro, it’s instructive to apply it once, then take a screenshot of your Justification settings dialog. Then do it a 2nd time, & take another screen shot, to see how it’s adjusting the glyph scaling, word & letter spacing. You could do all of this manually and make these styles without the plugin once you see what it does, but again, that’s more cumbersome. But, could be worth it on a big project.
Excellent suggestions. Thank you!