This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 57

David Blatner

3

You know how sometimes you need to write an introduction to a list of articles, but you’ve got a headache and you just don’t can’t manage anything to say besides “here’s a bunch of really good articles and videos that I thought you should know about…”?

• Our friend and colleague (and speaker at the 2011 Print and ePublishing Conference) James Wamser has his first video title available at lynda.com: InDesign Print Production Guidelines. It’s about 90 minutes of goodness! Here’s a sample movie, where James talks about Preflighting:

• It’s always good to review the basics… here’s a good article on some of InDesign’s typographic niceties, including white spaces and special characters.
• Here’s a wonderfully obscure solution to a wonderfully obscure problem — when InDesign’s Paste feature no longer works (due to XML tags)… moral of the story: Don’t mess with AutoTag or other XML tags unless you have a large bottle of Ibuprofen nearby.
• Lorem ipsum is random text for filler, right? What about images? If you’re building a web site for a client and need to fill it with some random images, try LoremPixum. Very clever!
• If you haven’t heard about Adobe’s not-yet-released Muse project, you should at least know about it. It’s something I’m getting increasingly excited about.
• Do you speak Belarussian? Know anyone who does? Here’s a translation of Claudio Marconato’s blog post about GREP into that language.
• This page raised my curiosity for two reasons: First, it has some good links to book design. But second, it seems clearly about SEO: He’s writing basic blog posts and trying to dupe people (like me) into linking there, even though the blog post he wrote has nothing at all to do with the focus of the rest of his site. Well, I guess it worked.

Interactive

• What if your digital book on your iPad could control your application. The folks at DI are doing that with Photoshop now.
• I think the Baker Framework for creating iPad apps is very promising — it’s all just based on HTML5 and appears to be free. Read this interview with one of the co-founders.
• Liz Castro has some good insights into controlling the width of your images in EPUB files.
• Want to build interactive documents in InDesign? Now you can read/view Chris Converse’s book/video on the iPad… as an iPad app!
• Speaking of tablets, need to compare and contrast all the tablets on the market? This table should help.
• And if you’re wondering how well your own magazine may fare on an iPad/tablet, read this article about how Conde Nast is “tapping the brakes” on their production schedule.
• And one more article about Adobe’s DPS, called Adobe’s Digital Publishing Mistake (my favorite part: the quote from Adam Burks of MacUser).

Fortunately, there are many other options for InDesign users who want to create iPad apps.

In the meantime, keep InDesign-ing!