scott

scott

Scott has 20 years' experience in the printing and publishing industry and is an accredited trainer holding the CIPD Certificate in Training Practice. He is an Adobe Certified Expert in InDesign, Acrobat and Photoshop as well as being an Adobe Certified Instructor and Adobe Certified Design Specialist.

Jun 222012
 

InDesign has always been an excellent application for generating forms but, until now, adding the form fields themselves had to be done in Acrobat Professional, a process that could be time consuming, especially if you were creating complex forms. InDesign CS6 now includes built-in form field support, making form creation much easier and faster.

In this example I am using a quote request form for a fictional design company

The form has been designed and text boxes have been drawn in the areas designated for responses.

Screenshot of InDesign form

InDesign form

To convert the text boxes to form fields, select Window>Interactive>Buttons and Forms.

May 232012
 

In parallel to the recent launch of Creative Suite 6 and Creative Cloud Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite tools also received a significant update this month. This article from Creative Pro gives a good overview but here are some of the important highlights.

  • DPS now supports iPhone 3GS, 4 & 4s as well as 3rd and 4th generation iPods
  • Social sharing, via Twitter, Facebook and URL for DPS publications
  • Improved range of embeddable fonts
May 042012
 

Screen shot of Creative Cloud graphic

Creative Cloud is Adobe’s online service which will bring together many of the leading design and production applications together with a collaborative workspace and online storage facility.

Creative Cloud is a subscription service, membership of which allows access to all of the forthcoming Creative Suite 6 applications plus Adobe Muse (for building web sites without coding), Adobe’s Touch apps (such as Photoshop, Adobe Ideas etc for mobile devices) and 20gb of free storage.

Members will be able to manage and download their software applications from Creative Cloud. Note that this does not mean the apps are streamed over the cloud, InDesign, Photoshop etc are still downloaded and installed on your desktop.

May 042012
 

Today Adobe has released an update (7.5.3) for InDesign and InCopy, addressing numerous issues.

John Hawkinson has posted an extensive list here, but notable fixes include:

Stability enhancements due to fixes to apparently random crashes when copying & pasting, exporting to PDF with text variables, file recovery, packaging & preflighting and with certain fonts in balanced text frames.

Performance improvements when moving objects when display is set to High Quality and general redraw performance improvements.

Improved graphics handling including white stitching line in JPEG export with certain placed images scaling percentage and JPEG export resolution and reduced transparency support for TIFF files from Photoshop CS6.

Apr 022012
 

Adobe recently updated the DPS components for InDesign. Before you rush to upgrade you should take a moment to consider you workflow requirements. DPS works across several systems and suppliers, not all of which update at the same time. Though Adobe updates all of its components simultaneously, Apple can take some time to approve the Content Viewer for iPad. If you upgrade InDesign’s Overlay Creator too soon, you’ll find you have generated publications that can’t be previewed on your iPad. To make sense of all the components and the best time to update, Johannes Henseler has created the Caniupdateadobedps? web page. Keep an eye on this to judge when it’s safe to update.

Mar 082012
 

Copying objects is one of those tasks we all do all the time. I regularly come across users who aren’t aware that there are many ways to copy beyond the standard copy and paste commend. Duplicating items in precise ways can be one to the most powerful ways to get a job done quickly and InDesign has numerous ways to do it.

I want to make duplicates of my sample logo. I can do it in the following ways:

1) Select the object then Edit>Copy followed by Edit>Paste

The resulting copy is placed in the middle of the page but the location  is not controllable.

Jan 312012
 

Another often overlooked aspect of most Creative Suite apps is their ability to store preset panel combinations. Adobe call these workspaces and they can be extremely useful for rapidly loading specific panel sets or just carrying out general tidying up.

Workspaces can be found in two locations: under the View>Workspaces drop down menu or, in the Application bar on the right hand side.

Screenshot of InDesign workspace switcher

InDesign workspace switcher

I this example I’m using InDesign. The current workspace (Essentials) is displayed in the application bar next to the search field. Click on the downward triangle to see a list of preset workspaces (this is known as the workspace switcher).

Jan 132012
 

Here’s another interesting DPS generated iPad app I downloaded recently. Boxoffice is a movie industry weekly magazine. It features the usual range of industry news & gossip, celebrity interviews and film previews. I think the Boxoffice design team has made very interesting use of the features of DPS to make an engaging and genuinely entertaining app.

Screenshot of Boxoffice cover 1

Boxoffice cover 1

Boxoffice makes use of DPS’s horizontal and vertical layouts to create two entirely different covers for each edition. Just rotate to switch between them. This theme is repeated in various locations in the magazine.

Screenshot of Boxoffice cover 2

Boxoffice cover 2

Dec 192011
 

In the first part of this article I described how to create and share content between Illustrator and Photoshop. Now we’ll take the artwork and use it in Illustrator and InDesign.

After clicking ok to apply my 3D adjustments I can now save the logo for use in other applications. If I were using a traditional export format such as EPS and TIFF, I’d have to flatten my Photoshop document. This would reduce the file size but it would also make editing my various text, smart object and 3D layers impossible. As most Adobe apps understand each other’s native formats, saving as TIFF and EPS are not necessary and, therefore, neither is flattening.

 Posted by on December 19, 2011
Dec 122011
 

Chances are, if you use one Adobe application, you use two or even more. As each has unique features and functions, it’s often necessary to transfer data between apps to get the results you want. Years ago it was necessary to save data in flat, exchange formats such as EPS and TIFF to get this done. Though many people still use this approach it is now very inefficient and time consuming and restricts the capacity to use layers, transparency and other effects. This two-part article presents a quick overview of some of the flexible ways to exchange data in CS5.