This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 59

David Blatner

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Oh, there’s so much good stuff afoot today! I’m pleased to share a boatload of great links for you, our intrepid InDesign user:

• Marijan Tompa has been creating some amazing scripts, add-ons, and resources for InDesign users, and now he’s finally put them all in one place on his new site. Check it out!
• This article on “why ebooks aren’t there yet” sums it up beautifully (though I disagree with #3 for several reasons, including the fact that writing in a book’s margins is evil… a point that my wife seems to completely ignore)
• Often we publishers need to communicate data, so here are some ways to create compelling infographics!
• If you weren’t able to make it to the Print & ePublishing Conference in DC (or even if you were), you will likely want to check out Claudia McCue’s cool handout for making an animated widget in InDesign.
• Diane Burns did a great session about tables (including those that don’t look like tables) and CreativePro.com agreed to  publish her InDesign Magazine article on the subject for everyone to see.
• Brian Wood has been busy making movies again. Here’s one on creating a bunch of frames quickly with the gridify feature in CS5. Here’s another really fun one, showing you how to create a cool-looking pop-up in a PDF file (using InDesign CS5).
• Is Print dead? Um, no. Not even close. I liked this article titled “Tired of Apologizing for Print Success.”
• Jim Felici’s article about centering type covers ground that I remember talking about in 1990 — and yet it’s still just as relevant as ever! Read it!
• In case you’re still curious about InDesign CS5.5 and whether it’s worth the upgrade (it is), here’s a review at Ars Technica. However, he seems to be confused about which features are new in CS5.5 and which were new in last year’s CS5 (like the Page Tool).
• Using tabs in InDesign can be more confusing than you might think. Here’s a tutorial that covers tabs and tab leaders pretty well.
• Our forums are full of the most amazing solutions for people. I recently saw this short script that tells InDesign to embed every image in a document. Cool! (Personally, I would rarely embed everything, but it’s an interesting idea.)
• Here’s an Illustrator trick, but because it has to do with patterns (one of my favorite topics), I have to include it here! (Besides, Kevin is a leader of the Seattle IDUG.)
• How much do you like InDesign? Do you like it as much as this person?
• Bruno Herfst (with an Australian postal address and a Dutch email address) seems to be writing a lot of cool scripts. Have you seen these? I need to set aside some time to play with some of these, such as the find/change master pages, and the “Place files on pages” script that places one image on each subsequent page of a document. Nifty!
• Here are 11 InDesign tricks you should know.

Interactive

• PressRun wrote up an interesting little piece about Apple’s iOS5 Newsstand. (Is it just me that is bothered by the double-s in that word? I keep wanting to type Newstand.) By the way, Paul Danter from PressRun was at PePCon this year, and wrote up a little piece about it here.
• Adobe is definitely on the CSS3/HTML5 bandwagon, in a big way, and this news that their code has entered WebKit is potentially exciting for the future of great-looking HTML pages.
• Cari Jansen presented some great information about EPUB at PePcon, and some of it is starting to filter out into the wild. Here’s an article describing her experiments with fixed vs. relative to page size settings for images when exporting EPUB from CS5.5.
• Here’s a fun case study of an interactive (flash) brochure created for Park City. You can see it in action here.
• Many people would like to create a fixed-layout EPUB file (where you can control the layout of objects on the page better than the normal MS Word-like flowing nature of most epubs). Liz Castro has been doing some experimenting on this, and has come up with some good lessons. Here’s something on how iBooks creates a “visual TOC” for these kinds of books.
• I’m sort of blown away by this report about the Florida state legislature effectively banning print textbooks by 2015. We’ll see if it becomes reality.
• Terry White has an impressive video showing how to convert InDesign’s animations to HTML5 animations using Adobe’s Wallaby technology. This is pretty cool if you’re trying to create animations that play on the iPad (for example, using DPS).
• I loved this “open letter to publishers” complaining about the horrible typos in so many ebooks (especially those converted from pdfs or using OCR).
• This was a fun little read (and even funnier image from Book Expo).

Whew! That’ll keep you busy for a while. Happy InDesigning!