This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 30
Whew! The past couple of weeks have been a blur, what with the CS Developers conference and then the Print and ePublishing Conference. I’m finally getting my feet back under me, catching up with real life… and that includes reading up on the plethora of articles and videos about InDesign out there. Here’s a quick sampling of some you ought to know about.
- Terry White continues to disseminate some really good work… If you’re making ePub documents, especially if they’re headed toward an iPad, you should watch this video he made (and then download his epub of iPad tips).
- Speaking of the CS Developer Summit, if you have any interest in that kind of thing (plug-ins, scripting, and so on), Adobe recorded almost all the sessions and they’re available on the conference site. (Just follow the links to the sessions, and then look for Presentation Location.)
- People who love footnotes are frustrated with the limitations in InDesign (both CS4 and CS5). Fortunately, scripters are coming up with some good workaround. For example, check out this script from Peter Kahrel, which lets you gather your footnotes in a multi-column layout into a single column.
- Still curious what’s in InDesign CS5? Michael Murphy wrote one of the best reviews (and overviews) of the new version for CreativePro. He goes really in depth. Read it here.
- The Adobe vs. Apple soap opera continues, of course. I enjoyed this article about Adobe’s (somewhat odd) “we love apple” ad campaign.
- Okay, I really, really want to go visit this hotel, designed by Pantone.
- Did you hear about 48HR — the magazine created from scratch in 48 hours? Print on demand magazines are cool!
- You know that the Quality Assurance panel (part of the Blatner Tools plug-ins suite) lets you quickly find local text formatting (formatting applied to text beyond its style). But here’s a free script that lets you do something kind of similar: marking up any text with local formatting!
Hey, something else kind of fun: We’re going to try something new… Tuesday Tweets! This coming Tuesday at 10 am, pacific time, hang out with your favorite twitter client and look for the hash tag #IDSL. If you write anything with IDSL we’ll see it. We’ll do some impromtu Q&A, chat, and just see how it goes! See you there!
Regarding the 48HR magazine… oops! This just in: https://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/48-hr-magazine-experiment-big-hit-except-for-that-part-about-the-lawyers/
I’ve been working with ID CS5.0 for a week and I have to say I’m not sure it’s ready for prime time.
The latest glitch is objects that look fine in the layout but appear in a different location in an exported PDF. And I’m talking whole inches away, sometimes just barely on the page.
I’ve exported in IDML and re-imported, and it still occurs. Since the object in this case was a headline and this was for proofing purposes I even deleted the headline — and two whole columns of text vanished from the PDF!
If anybody asks me I cannot honestly recommend CS5.0 for production work — it’s bleeding-edge, and I have the anemia to prove it.
@Bruce: Wow, that’s very strange. Honestly, most people are not having problems like that. Have you tried rebuilding your preferences? Is it just that one file, or all files?
Yup, I’ve done the control-shift-option-command-on-startup rebuild, if that’s what you mean.
I’ve been wrestling with other CS5 issues on my main project (which seem to stem from imperfect conversion of CS3 files, a minor bug in my opinion as I can IDML them as a fix) so I haven’t had the chance to try other files to see what happens.
Well, here’s a clue. Deleting master page objects from the spread is what triggers PDF export madness. How useful!