This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 112
I’ve been training InDesign users for a decade, but I’ve never had a student like the one I’m working with now: my 9 year old son! He decided (on his own) to start a newspaper for his 4th grade class. He has several other kids writing stories, and he’s enjoying laying out the paper in InDesign. How amazing to watch him learn (he’s taking to keyboard shortcuts better than many adults).
Anyway, it’s a great reminder that it’s fun to learn new things. And with that in mind, here’s lots of stuff for you to learn from!
- Did you miss Nigel French’s article about how to make bullets and numbered lists in InDesign Magazine? Well, we’ve reprinted it here on CreativePro!
- Read this story of how InCopy saved one company a lot of money.
- Want to run one script on a bunch of files? Use Rorohiko’s Batcher!
- Box.net is a great way to share assets. Enter Silicon Connector, which lets you link InDesign to Box files!
- This is a fun tutorial on how Lucy Williams created a cool poster using InDesign for Happy Dog
- Considering moving your static 2D publication into an interactive app? It’s a good idea to sketch out how it’ll work. This article at TFP explains how and why.
- John McWade wrote a great piece on why sometimes bad typesetting is better than good!
- What did the Victorians do when it came to font rasterization?
- If you want to bone up on the basics — publishing terminology, technology, and fundamentals — I recommend taking a look at Hal Hinderliter’s 2nd edition of Desktop Publishing for Prepress Production. You can find it at the iBookstore or Amazon.
- Making PDF forms, but you hate that big purple “Please fill out the following form” alert that shows up in Acrobat? Do two things: Make a comment below (some people at Adobe don’t believe that users dislike this), and check out this document javascript solution.
- Updating to Apple’s Mavericks OS X 10.9? There have been a few problems:
- The great Conrad Chavez wrote up a terrific overview of Adobe software compatibility
- Here’s a solution to problems people have had running InDesign and Photoshop CS5 (and earlier)
Enjoy!
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Regarding Mavericks: Many people were having trouble with the Adobe Creative Cloud (ACC) app. Adobe has released a new version of ACC this morning which should fix at least some of the issues. Quit and restart ACC to upgrade.
Rorohikos batch script is good – but there’s a free Batch Convert that will run a script and save the document on exit.
https://www.kahrel.plus.com/indesign/batch_convert.html
It’s free.
I wrote a free script — Batch process scripts — that runs a script (or set of scripts) against a bunch of documents: all open/in a book/a folder.
https://kasyan.ho.com.ua/batch_process_scripts.html
It’s the 1st version so it’s far from perfect yet. I didn’t have time to get it into shape, but I’d like to know if someone is interested in developing it further. If so, let me know at askoldich [at] yahoo [dot] com
I LOVE Acrobat forms. And I love being able to make them both beautiful and functional using InDesign. And part of my living is made by making those forms. But I also hate that big purple “Please fill out the following form.” I find that it confuses my students and customers alike. So please, Adobe, let go of the purple button. It’s unnecessary and confusing.