This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 55
The tragic disasters in New Zealand and Japan have been a reminder to us how important it is to help each other out, no matter where our friends and colleagues are. We hope you’ll consider a donation to a relief agency at this time. In fact, if you donate more than NZ$20 to a Red Cross fund, Rorohiko will give you a free license for the excellent Text Exporter plug-in!
In other news, we’re so pleased to announce that because of people-helpling-people, Marijan Tompa will be able to travel from his home in Subotica, Serbia, to the 2011 Print and ePublishing Conference in Washington DC in May! This is a great story of the worldwide InDesign community pitching in to help this very deserving guy. Of course, we hope to see you at the PeP Conference, too!
Here’s more good news and help from around the globe:
- Here’s a fun little tip from Brian Wood on InDesign’s magical Auto Correct feature.
- Jim Felici does such a nice job of explaining type concerns. Here’s one on the topic of aligning baselines. Pay particular attention to the First Baseline Offset feature — I like the way he sets it to Leading!
- I call them “runts” but some people call them “orphaned words” (little words at the end of a paragraph). Here’s a little piece on getting rid of them with grep styles.
- You have to check out what DTP Tools is going with their new revision of their Layer Comps plug-in. Wow.
Interactive and eBooks
- eBooks are not a new phenomenon… here’s an illustrated history of the past 40 years of eBooks. I still have some of my Voyager eBooks on floppy disk around my office! Loved that stuff.
- This is a really nice EPUB book design.
- If you’re considering taking your publication to the tablet, read this: Many Tablet Publications Are Hopeless
Not Really About InDesign, but Interesting
- Some of you were at last year’s Print and ePublishing Conference in Seattle and got a chance to tour the Adobe offices there. I was so pleased to see that this building has gotten this award for being super duper “eco-green”!
- I’m intrigued by this new “standard” that Adobe is proposing, called CSS Regions.
- Since you’re probably also an Illustrator user (if you’re not, you should be!) you should know about Mordy Golding’s Real World Illustrator book and blog. Here’s a good article called Convert PDF Pages to Illustrator Artboards.
- Are you curious about tatoos? Do you have one? I love Ina Saltz’s Body Type books. Wow.
- And in case you missed this horrible/funny magazine cover “typo”… check it out. (I say “typo” because there’s a reasonably good chance this was photoshopped. Nevertheless, it’s a good argument for careful proofreading!)
Enjoy!
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David, concerning DTPtools and the layer tools, i didn’t find an answer to a question i’m having watching the video or the website :
How does a document made with layer groups and comps turn when it’s opened on an indesign that has none of the plugins ?
Is it just save to the last state ?
Is there some “export layer comps to files” feature to be able to deal with multiple orientations ?
Does it play nice by changing the whole document’s page setting in that case ?
It looks like the Rachel Ray cover is a fake.
Here’s the original (with commas): https://www.tailsinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Tails_Oct2010.jpg
What happened to the GREP for getting rid of orphans? The link above no longer works and I can only find ones that address certain sizes of words (5-10 characters, for example). I want the one that gets rid of ALL Orphans! I know about NO BREAK character style. It is the GREP I am having issues with. Thanks and much the love all the time.
Diane, it looks like that link has gone dead. Sad. Do you want something that applies No Break to the whole word, no matter how long it is? You could use something like
. \w+[[:punct:]]$(which means any character followed by a space followed by a word followed by punctuation, followed by the end of the paragraph.)That might work. Mainly, I just don’t want lonely words at the bottom of paragraphs.
Thanks, David!
Nope. didn’t work.
Well, it’s hard to troubleshoot these kinds of things in the comments at the bottom of a blog, Diane. Can you perhaps open a forum post and I’ll reply there? Or email me directly.
I understand, David. I just mainly wanted to know why the link was dead. or where I could find that info.