This Month in InDesign Articles, July 2016

David Blatner

I’ve finally figured out who is behind the American and European political climate: the companies who make blood pressure medicine! Their sales must be going through the roof. Fortunately, I’ve discovered another method for chillin’… learning awesome tips about InDesign. Just read some of these links and you’ll be happy in no time:

• Erica Gamet wrote up a few great tips that she learned (or re-learned) at PePcon: The Print + ePublishing Conference this year. She also recorded one of those tips (plus some interviews… including one with me) in this YouTube video on her channel.
• It’s an age-old question: How to center an object on your page? Note that this technique doesn’t always work perfectly! It may be off a little bit. The Align panel is always precise.
• Not sure whether this article is telling us that we should do more yellow books, or make book covers a different color in order to stand out!
• Tzvia wrote this terrific piece about what’s going on with EPUB and W3C. Here’s a good follow-up that argues that all publishers should join the W3C  (See my note in the comments.)
• Recently, some people have pointed to a rise in print books sales (which sounds great), but it’s very possible that the rise is almost entirely due to coloring books.
• You’ve heard me say before that good indexing is important in any kind of long document, like a book. Here’s an argument for why this is perhaps even more true in ebooks.
• Have you designed an innovative typeface, something way out there? Submit your design to the “Speculative Typeface Design” contest!
• Jeff Witchel came up with a great tip for building a table of contents using “next page number”
• I mentioned Markzware’s free IDUtil last month; but check out this movie about even more cool things it does (including comparing docs and packaging them).
• This magazine from Allegheny university was created entirely in InDesign and exported as an HTML site using in5. Cool!
• What if you could just point a small device at some formatted text (as in a book or magazine or sign) and it could capture the font and style and apply it to text in InDesign? That what Spector, a new device-in-the-making, may offer.
• If you don’t know about Split and Span in InDesign, you have to go read this now.
• Print dead? I don’t think so! Check out these $$ numbers by Daniel Dejan.
• I love seeing what InDesigners are creating with Publish Online! Diane Burns has a series of projects curated here.
• OK, this is about Photoshop rather than InDesign, but these five super easy techniques captured by Keith Gilbert are useful for almost anyone!
• Justin Putney is making in5 even better… if you need to export HTML5 out of InDesign, you’ll want to see how v3 is getting more capable.
• I am so excited to see that a bunch of Emigre fonts are now in the Typekit library! This includes Matrix II, which we used for my book The Joy of Pi back in the late ’90s. Awesome!
• I love books! I’m not embarrassed to say it! If you like books, it’s fun to watch this short video on the history of what makes a book.
• Leaving out an Oxford Comma is one of my great pet peeves, so I was so pleased to see this video (among others) created by the Comma Queen.
• Curious about what’s new in InDesign CC 2015.4 (that’s the June release)? Terry White recorded a video about the new features here.
• If you’re into making Data Merge stretch and do things you never expected, you must read (and see) Colin Flashman’s Better Infographics for Data Merge.
• Need to export from InDesign to WordPress? I haven’t tried this new plug-in yet called iziExport  but I have to say it looks fascinating! If you try it, let me know how it goes.
• Finally, you know we have our own forums here at InDesignSecrets, but whether you use ours or the ones at Adobe, this article by Conrad Chavez provides terrific advice about how to get the most out of it.
• A lot of InDesign users complain that when they export a form from InDesign as an interactive PDF, some of the settings (such as the font, size, and color of text inside text fields) doesn’t work. That’s where FormMagic comes in handy. Here’s an article about how you can even use FormMagic in a batch process on a folder full of PDFs.

Enjoy!