This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 60

David Blatner

9

It’s summer! Woo hoo! (Well, okay, for those of you in the southern hemisphere: It’s winter! Woo hoo!)

Fortunately, that oppressive sun/cool won’t stop us from learning more about the page-layout tool we love so much. Here’s a list of fun articles, movies, links, and more for your summer (winter) enjoyment:

• The new edition of InDesign Magazine came out last week for subscribers (though it will take another week or so for it to show up on the site, for technically awkward reasons). That said, you really want to read this one, as it’s packed with info! Great articles on designing books, finding InDesign’s hidden files, and much more. (If you’re not a subscriber, you can get one year for $25 plus their great Type Super Guide by using the code SUPERTYPE in the coupon code field. Offer ends at the end of this month.)
• Michael Murphy has updated his excellent “how to make accessible pdf files” video for CS5.5… now it’s two parts! Here’s part 1, and here’s part 2.
• The Inkling textbook engine is blowing me away. Check out what they’re doing in this article and video.
• If you’re frustrated by EPUB (as I have been), you must watch this short movie showing what is possible with the new EPUB3, coming to a reader near you.
• Chris Kitchener, Senior Product Manager for InDesign interviewed in this video.
• Here’s a nice article about creating animated layouts in InDesign from Computer Arts.
• I don’t remember if I linked to this article by Keith Gilbert in which he points out an important trick when resizing documents in CS5 (using the Page Tool instead of using Document Setup).
• Nested Styles are old news, but not enough people use them! If you’re among those who don’t use them, watch this movie.
• Use a Mac? You have to check out Dan Rodney’s excellent list of Mac keyboard shortcuts!
• Want to watch a interesting  webinar on typography on both the web and print? It’s free, presented by Carolina de Bartolo, from Adobe’s Ask a CS Pro series.
• There’s a problem with the Swedish version of InDesign CS5.5 — when you press Return, you get a column break! Oops.There’s a fix posted here. [Hold on… Adobe fixed this in their new 7.5.1 updater!]

Plug-ins and Add-ons

• You make annotations to PDF files in Acrobat, but when you get back to InDesign, you can’t see them! Recosoft’s PDF2ID tool lets you import PDF annotations (it’s a little known feature there), but here’s a whole new Annotations plug-in from DTP Tools that focuses on this… and it even lets you accept/decline text edits! Amazing!
• I’m intrigued by this new free “bookmaking” plug-in from Blurb. Has anyone tried it yet?
• Similarly, Cacidi has launched something called Bloozie that lets you export an InDesign document into a format suitable for viewing on the iPad. Interesting!
• Typefi has released their CS5-compatible version of AutoFit. Yay! This is an amazing free plug-in.
• If you haven’t seen Marijan Tompa’s list of add-ons on his new site (including his new one to create form objects such as text fields from InDesign), you need to check these out.
• For those of you interested in GREP, you really need to check out this “grep queries manager” from Peter Kahrel, and this “what the grep?” tool from Theun de Jong.
• A silly and simple plug-in for InDesign.

Happy InDesigning!