This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 63

David Blatner

6

Tuesday is a lovely day to take a moment and read through some of what the world is saying about InDesign (or watch some videos!). We have a bunch of good stuff to check out today, including some awesome scripts you’d better know about.

• You know you can move your FrameMaker content into InDesign (using the MIF Filter), but did you know you can get your InDesign content into FrameMaker? (Tom really needed to have used the map styles to tags feature in CS5.5!)
• Want to make pretty tables in your InDesign files? Here’s a set of 10 nice table styles you can use in your docs. Unfortunately, you have to “pay” for them by letting them tweet to all your followers.
• Funny: Claudia McCue reminds us that in The South, they don’t click buttons, they mash them.
• Trying to get the best-quality cover for your EPUB? Read this article.
• Still curious about whether to upgrade to InDesign CS5.5? Jay Nelson has written a good review (and oveview) of it at Macworld.

Scripts and add-ons:

• Have you ever noticed that there is no find/change for cell styles? What if you want to find all the “cellA” styles and replace them with “cellB”? You can use this script by Loic (here is the direct download of the script). If you want to see it in action, see this video.
• Anyone who wants to create an index in InDesign should know about IndexMatic. There is a free (limited) version, but now version 2 “pro” has many new features and is only ?39.
• Peter Kahrel has created a free script that is a far better paragraph-sorter (for alphabetizing paragraphs). It is even language-aware!
• What if you could apply a master page based on a paragraph style? Here’s a freelow-cost script that helps you with this. (If you need more control than the script offers, I suggest looking at Auto Flow from in-tools.com.)
• I’m very excited that Adobe has finally updated its Adobe Digital Editions! The last version was sooooo terrible. This is still just in beta, but it’s already looking a bit promising.
• For those of you who have been waiting for a CS5.5 version of the Kindle export plug-in, wait no longer!
• Into scripting InDesign? Do you speak German? If so, check out this new book by Gregor Fellenz, in print at amazon.de or, as a very nicely-formatted epub from the publisher’s site.
• I love google docs, especially when two or more people are working on the same file. If you haven’t see the beta for Em Software’s DocsFlow, you should. It lets you place google docs files into InDesign (and even merge formatting changes). The first public beta is now available for Windows users.

Enjoy!