This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 70
Good stuff just keeps pouring out there for InDesign users hungry to learn! Let’s just jump right into it!
- Sandee Cohen has a good article here on InDesign’s really cool (and underused) Separations Panel.
- We’ve talked about the Page tool here, but it’s always good to get a different perspective. Here’s a write up at Computer Arts.
- If you love typography and the history of characters, you’ll enjoy this: Ralf Herrmann presented at the ATypI conference 2011 in ReykjavÃk on the Capital Sharp S (Eszett) in German/Austrian.
- Holy toledo, it took long enough: Adobe finally released Acrobat Reader for iOS. Unfortunately, it’s pretty limited. No dropbox support, no hyperlinks, forms, or annotations. But as Bob Levine recently remarked, you have to release version 1 first!
- Friend and colleague Sharon Steuer did a great AskaCSPro on using Brushes in Illustrator. It’s not InDesign, but it’s still cool!
- Mike Rankin came up with a good little grep: “Eliminate the scourge of whitespace-only paragraphs with this GREP query.”
EPUB and Interactive
- Publishers should be ashamed of themselves… in a rush to get ebooks out as quickly as possible, they’re not proofreading ebooks!
- iOS5 now offers a Newsstand — a way to find your magazines in one place — and a number of magazines created with Adobe DPS are starting to appear on it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that single-edition dps apps can be added to the newsstand, which is kind of frustrating.
- Here is another great article about Newstand… I’m particularly curious about what Zinio and PixelMags are doing!
- What I want to know is how many of the webkit CSS codes (or this list of safari css extensions) work inside epub readers… and are they all going to be supported in EPUB3?
- I enjoy learning about the different experiments publishers are undertaking to figure out what will and won’t work when selling digital books, such as this report on cookbooks from Hearst. Are people really reading on tablets? This article says yes!
- Want to put video in a DPS folio? Steve Werner wrote up a short article here, and has an article in this month’s InDesign Magazine. Also, check out Keith Gilbert’s checklist here!
- Okay, in case you’re into EPUB + MathML, it’s quite intriguing that iBooks (based on webkit) seems to be able to support mathml now, though it’s not perfect. Here’s a way to check what mathml support your browser has.
- I just learned that Aquafadas (which makes a good InDesign-to-EPUB solution), is now extending their reach to create EPUB3 fixed-layout! This looks fascinating.
- Colin Fleming is doing some new videos on DPS. Here’s one on working and previewing your documents offline. Here’s another one that describes how DPS integrates with Apple’s Newsstand service (which only works for Pro and Enterprise customers).
- Baker Framework has been updated to version 3.0!
Enjoy!
I’m being picky here but it’s Adobe Reader for iOS, not Acrobat…
ePub list getting longer, InDesign list getting shorter (+1 of those was an Illustrator one) :(
Nonetheless, a good list of articles :) Thanks David.
@Stix: Yes, you are correct… good catch.
@Eugene: Okay, point taken. Though most of the “epub and interactive” links are InDesign links, or at least links that I think InDesign users need to be aware of. I just break them out so that people who are interactive-phobic can avert their eyes.
ePub is hot right now.
I’m interested in fixed layout epubs, but they seem to perform a bit sluggishly in my tests. Hopefully that can improve. I like the indesign DPS tools in CS 5.5, but absolutely do not like having to upload files to adobe to distribute them (or the costs that go with it). Hope someone comes up with an easy and cheap standard for tablet apps… and soon.
I suspect we are still in the VCR/Betamax stage of ebook development. My money is on epub once it incorporates more support for HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript technology. At least I hope that is the winning direction, since those are open standards that can?t be controlled by any one company.