This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 108

David Blatner

It’s hot! Well, at least it’s hot here… we just had a google hangout with a colleague in Australia and she was bundled up for winter. But it’s not just hot in a climatological sense! It’s a hot time for InDesign. People teaching, people learning, people experimenting… and here at InDesignSecrets, our goal is to bring it all together in one place. For example, check out these great links!

• The folks at Technology for Publishing are running a series of interviews on the topic of “Women in Media.” Here’s one on our very own Anne-Marie Concepcion!
• Making DPS apps with scrollable text? Be sure to read Bob Bringhurst’s Tips for Editing DPS Scrollable Frames in InDesign
• Here’s another DPS tip from Keith Gilbert: watch out when moving between folio, article, and layout levels.
• lynda.com has published several new titles you really should check out:
• Creating an Interactive PDF Magazine
• InDesign Insider Training: Interactive PDFs
• Print Production Essentials: Embossing, Foil Stamping, and Die Cutting
• InDesign CC Essential Training
• InDesign CC: Interactive Document Fundamentals
• Max Dunn at Silicon Publishing wrote a lovely and fascinating piece in appreciation of InDesign and ID automation.
• DocsFlow from Em Software lets you link Google Docs files to your InDesign files intelligently. They have a new beta for version 2.0!
• Optical Margin Alignment (sometimes called hanging punctuation) is very cool, but not one of the more obvious features. Here’s a short video by Jeff Witchel that explains the feature.
• Erica Gamet has done some terrific training at CreativeLive recently; you can see a short segment from one of her classes here, where she shows a grep find/change to correctly format phone numbers.
• We first talked about color swatches that couldn’t be deleted a few years back. Claudia McCue takes it even farther with a geeky tip about getting rid of stubborn color swatches.
• Okay, this one just for fun… for all of you who love fonts, maybe a little too much, this cartoon.
• You know I love InDesign and think it’s the best layout tool in the world, but I do keep hearing from people who either can’t afford ID or want to use an open source or inexpensive alternative. Here are a few alternatives it’s good to know about.
• Is print dead? I don’t think so, if you look at what’s up with Vogue.

Enjoy!