This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 34

David Blatner

5

It’s pretty dang hot here in Vegas this week (about 41°C), but you’d hardly know it with the astonishing infrastructure of air conditioning and humidifiers. But I tell you what’s even more hot: The never-dying enthusiasm of the InDesign community around the world! Here’s a few (well, more than a few) articles that I enjoyed recently:

• Yes, Adobe is working on an InDesign-to-iPad solution called the Digital Publishing Solution. It’s gonna’ be nifty! You can see a (over-produced fancy-shmancy) video about it here.
• Other companies are trying to make it easier to repurpose publications to the iPad, of course. HP’s MagCloud (a very cool print-on-demand magazine shop) is launching a way to put magcloud mags (just PDF files) on iPads.
• Brian Lawler has come up with three (holy moley!) articles I can recommend this week: One, just for fun (but with an educational message about object styles), a piece on how to make good-looking “sticky notes” in InDesign. The second is about the elusive Indent to Here character and how to insert it with GREP. I don’t find Indent to Here as useful as he does, but it is an important tool to know about. The third is another GREP article, this time about how to swap first and last names in a list.
• Here’s an excellent article by Terry White called 14 Little-Known InDesign Tips. Good stuff, Terry!
• Do you need to make a contact sheet with a lot of images? If you’re frustrated by the minimal tools available for this in InDesign, you should definitely check out this low-cost Contact Sheet tool by Bob Stucky (available for both CS4 and CS5).
• I love Springy on Mac OS for opening zip and epub files. It’s just an essential tool. So I was horrified to hear that the developer lost the source code in a burglary. He’s slowly piecing it together again, and it’ll likely be better than ever.
• Okay, I just have to throw this one in: The IT-Enquirer (which writes articles that I disagree with about 95% of the time) now says that QuarkXPress is better than InDesign CS5 when it comes to interactive documents. I couldn’t even bring myself to read the whole thing without retching, but I think much of his point is that QX lets you export HTML with page geometry.
• Two interesting XML articles from way back, but which I just recently noticed — one on “high tech vs. low-tech XML” and one on converting paragraph styles to XML tags when you’re using style groups. Read em here.
• I’m not sure who Spyre Studios is, but they’re doing a series of articles which are good for InDesign beginners. Here’s one on importing text and playing with typography. Here’s another on working with Color in InDesign.
• Rorohiko’s Color2Gray plug-in is a cool way to convert color images to grayscale. Developer Kris Coppieters? has written up a fun use of this tool, extending it to creating “old style” sepia-toned images.
• Data Merge is not for everything or everyone, but when you need it, it’s great! Here’s yet another overview of how Data Merge works.
• Here’s another one for beginners who like learning step-by-step: This 71-step tutorial takes you through creating a document, master pages, styles, frames, book panel, and way more!
• I haven’t tried these AlbumsInDesign scripts yet, but I’m gonna’ because they look really cool, especially for photographers who are making albums in our favorite page-layout program.
• Hey, are you making ePUB documents? Or you want to know how to? Don’t miss Liz Castro’s EPUB Straight to the Point, now available as an epub itself (prior to its soon-to-be-released print edition).
• One more on EPUB: I can’t remember if I posted this PDF before (sorry if it’s a repeat), but here’s a white paper from Adobe on the new EPUB features in CS5 (that’s a direct link to the pdf file).
• Okay, this last one is about Illustrator, not InDesign, but because I’m a halftone nut, I couldn’t resist this amazing page.

Wow, that’s a lot to get through. Well, take an early weekend and start reading! Enjoy…