Balance text columns with InDesign CS5

 InDesign  1 Response »
Jun 162011
 

A question on a recent training course reminded me of InDesign’s Balance Columns feature which is easily overlooked.

If you’re the kind of person who can’t stand unbalanced text you’ll recall it used to take a fair bit of manual adjustment to make columns line up evenly.

Screenshot of unbalanced text columns in InDesign

Unbalanced text columns

In CS 5, the Balance Columns checkbox was added to the Text Frame Options dialogue box.

The feature works only on multi-column text frames. Select the frame and got to Object> Text Frame Options (ctrl/cmd+B).

Screenshot of InDesign's balance columns option

Columns are balanced  Read more...

 Posted by scott on June 16, 2011  Tagged with: ,

Man in Space

 InDesign  No Responses »
May 292011
 

BBC’s Sky at Night magazine was recently released Man in Space for the iPad. It’s a celebration of manned spaceflight and was developed & designed using InDesign and Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite.

The app makes good use of interactive features, with a clear and well structured design and plenty of navigation tools so you never get lost. The designers have opted to use landscape orientation only so this is one app that won’t rearrange itself when you rotate your device.  Read more...

 Posted by scott on May 29, 2011  Tagged with: , ,

Creating interactive documents with InDesign pt5

 InDesign  No Responses »
May 162011
 

Now that you have a document loaded with interactive content such as buttons, hyperlinks, page transitions etc, you need to export to PDF before you can make use of all those features. CS5 InDesign adds a few new options for the export process.

As previously, you can go to File>Adobe PDF Presets and select an appropriate preset.

Screenshot of InDesign PDFpresets menu

InDesign PDFpresets menu

The screenshot here shows the Rich Content PDF option which is not normally visible. To enable this, navigate to: (Windows Vista and Windows 7) ProgramData\Adobe\AdobePDF, (Windows XP) Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Adobe PDF, or (Mac OS) Library/Application Support/Adobe PDF.  Read more...

 Posted by scott on May 16, 2011  Tagged with: , ,

New features in InDesign CS5.5

 InDesign  No Responses »
Apr 132011
 

Exciting news this week from Adobe, with the announcement of Creative Suite 5.5. This is of particular interest to those creating content for ePubs, HTML and iPad from InDesign.

Amongst the new features is an Articles pane, which allows text to be ordered for output in single column layouts (such as ePub and HTML pages).

InDesign CS5.5 Article pane

InDesign CS5.5 Article pane

Additionally, multiple instances of a single piece of text can be linked together (a bit like a cross reference) and kept updated. Paragraph and character styles can be mapped to output tags for easy export to ePub and HTML  Read more...

 Posted by scott on April 13, 2011  Tagged with: ,

Interactive publications designed with InDesign CS5

 InDesign  No Responses »
Mar 282011
 

As a companion to my series on creating Interactive documents with InDesign, I’m going to highlight some of the more interesting work being done commercially with InDesign.
The first example is Born Presents created by designers Belle & Wissell.
Born Presents is an electronic publication celebrating 14 years of Born Magazine. The sample is located in Adobe’s showcase gallery.

Image of Born Presents magazine

Born Presents Magazine by Belle & Wissell

Belle & Wissell used InDesign CS5 to create an immersive, animated publication which is both beautiful to look at and intriguing and satisfying to read. The publication makes extensive use of InDesign’s animation features to make fade-ins, pop-ups, hovers, embedded video, buttons, hyperlinks and electronic navigation.  Read more...

 Posted by scott on March 28, 2011  Tagged with: , ,

Interactive guide to InDesign CS5 shortcuts

 InDesign  No Responses »
Feb 272011
 

As a brief interlude from my InDesign interactivity series, here’s a very timely example of just what you can do with InDesign CS5′s new interactivity features. Marijan Tompa has created this flash based utility which demonstrates all of InDesign’s keyboard shortcuts.

screen shot of indesign interactive keyboard by Marijan Tompa

Indesign interactive keyboard

Hover over a key to see a summary of the shortcuts attached. Click on it to get a pop up screen showing more detailed information.

Screenshopt of Indesign keyboard shortcut details screen

Indesign keyboard shortcut details screen  Read more...

 Posted by scott on February 27, 2011  Tagged with: , , ,

Creating Interactive documents with InDesign pt 2

 InDesign  No Responses »
Feb 092011
 

In this article, I’m going to be looking at some elementary interactive functions including bookmarks, hyperlinks and page transitions. I looked at setting up a document in the first part. This time I’m using an existing document which has no interactivity.

Bookmarks
This document will ultimately become an interactive PDF. One of the most useful interactivity functions in a PDF is the bookmarks pane. This is the electronic table of contents, effectively a set of hyperlinks to specific pages or paragraphs in the PDF. It’s an essential navigation tool (particularly in long documents) and I’m constantly surprised at how often this is omitted, even in eBooks created by professional publishers.  Read more...

 Posted by scott on February 9, 2011  Tagged with: , ,

10 tips for creating ePubs in InDesign

 InDesign  1 Response »
Oct 252010
 

Ebooks are becoming extremely popular due to the success of devices such as the iPad and Kindle. The good news for designers is that InDesign is fully equipped to generate the publishing industry’s preferred, ePub electronic book format. I recently delivered a course in generating ePubs from InDesign. Here are 10 tips for effectively exporting your InDesign files to ePub.

1) ePub is based on xhtml so it is a linear, text based format. All text must be set as part of a single, continuous thread if it is to appear in the correct sequence. Any items in separate boxes will be placed at the end of the document.  Read more...

 Posted by scott on October 25, 2010  Tagged with: , ,

New Groups on LinkedIn for UK Users

 Blender, InDesign, Uncategorized  1 Response »
Aug 022010
 

If you are using products such as Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, DreamWeaver, PHP or Blender then there are a number of new groups now available on LinkedIn which you might want to join.

For those who haven’t heard of LinkedIn before it is a business networking site with over 70 million members of all levels, and can be a great place to network, find new opportunities and learn from the community (plus it’s free).

The groups which have just gone live are listed below:  Read more...

 Posted by Andy on August 2, 2010  Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Using InDesign's gap tool

 InDesign  5 Responses »
Jun 132010
 

With InDesign CS5 you get a lovely new tool, the Gap tool. Basically it allows you to manipulate the gaps between boxes, thereby changing the size of the boxes themselves.

For example, if you layout eight rectangles and, using InDesign’s gap tool, you can change the position of the gaps between each set of frames, whilst the frames resize.

By default, it will move the gap that you have. However you can also…

…use the gap tool between frames and the edge of the page  Read more...

 Posted by Alex on June 13, 2010  Tagged with: ,
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