The First Dutch InDesign User Magazine was released yesterday. It’s a free download but registration at the InDesign User forum is required before you can download it. And because it’s a PDF Magazine you can use the links in each article to discuss or post questions at the InDesign User website. I also had the honor to contribute to the magazine and wrote an article about what to do after you’ve finished your design. I wrote about the checks you can perform to make sure your document will print fine and how to find and eliminate those small errors that always somehow sneek in complex designs. (It’s a rather lengthy article bit perhaps I’ll translate it if I get around to it). I hope the Dutch readers will find it usefull.

Nice plugin by Rorohiko: “This tool gives you a floating library-palette filled with images that are automatically retrieved from one or more folders. Point the tool to a folder, and in return it will offer you a floating palette containing the images stored in that folder, ready to be drag-dropped into your document. Very nice. Download and more information right here.

ScribeDOOR adds the ability to edit and treat text in 21 complex languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi and many Indian scripts. It can be installed, as a plug-in, in all Roman versions of InDesign CS4 (US, International English, French, Italian, Czech, Polish, and more). Menu’s are available in English and French and, best of all, your InDesign documents remain the same. You can exchange them with people not owning ScribeDOOR (although they probably won’t be able to edit the non-latin text). Up until now you had to purchase four different copy’s of InDesign if you wanted to do the same! (check out my Dutch article regarding this problem). At € 69 I feel you get great value for your money.

Via Aad Metz Linkedin Group.

Have you ever needed to hand over a copy of all the text inside your InDesign document? I have and I needed to manually copy all the text. It took forever. Now, there’s a much smarter way to do it: TextExporter: “TextExporter is a free plug-in for InDesign that export all the stories of an InDesign document into a single file (RTF, InDesign Tagged Text or plain text)”. Excellent!

By Jan: DTP Tools announces the immediate availability of a free-to-download public beta of the Blatner Tools suite of InDesign plug-ins. This collection of 12 plug-ins offers over 100 new features for InDesign users, including the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to many previously unavailable tasks, create color and style reports, create fractions automatically, build character and paragraph styles and apply them acros an entire document quickly, and more. The Blatner Tools suite was designed by longtime industry guru David Blatner, who also co-hosts the InDesignSecrets.com site.

Blatner noted, “I love InDesign, but there’s plenty of room for improvement! Blatner Tools adds many of the features my clients and students have been requesting for years. Tools to create and manage styles better, the ability to find and replace colors, to quickly identify hard-to-locate document errors — this stuff was painful before, but Blatner Tools makes it all easy!”

Bob Levine, a trainer in the New York area and an Adobe Forums Community Expert has used the beta and reported, “Blatner Tools is more than just the sum of its parts — it’s the answer to a multitude of feature requests I’ve been reading over the past five years. If you want InDesign to do more, check it out.”

The Amsterdam Chapter of the InDesign User Group has planned a new meeting for October the 14th at the Adobe HQ. My good friend and Adobe veteran Peter Villevoye will host the event and demonstrate how to save a bundle of time by letting Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign work together. If you’re still using copy/paste to move text from Word to InDesign you should really check out how to let your client do the formatting in Word. The stuff Peter will demonstrate doesn’t even require InDesign CS4. Most time-saving tricks will work using InDesign 1 as well! After Peter’s demo’s you’ll have the change to view the new and improved Adobe Digital Magazine. Bastiaan van Zwieten will show you just how he set up this new format and how you can create your own Digital Magazine with links, audio, video and lot’s more! More details about the meeting (in Dutch) after the ‘Read more’. Read more

SmartStyles is a ‘Drag and Drop’ way to automate boring, repetitive tasks like formatting objects and text in Adobe Indesign. Smart Styles allow users to create an entire library with complex pre-formatted objects. Apart from that SmartStyles can insert formulas into InDesign tables and sort rows. Check out the 2 min. video. If you like what you see, you might want to check out the new Webinar sessions. They’re starting in just two days from now on August the 27th. Registering is required.

After the summer it’s time to get back in shape. And what’s a better way than to let the Pro’s from Adobe (and WoodWing) tell you all about the new productivity Tools? Learn how you can eliminate mind-numbing repetitive layout tasks and save a ton of time with WoodWing’s renowned line of Smart productivity plug-ins for InDesign and InCopy. Maarten van Kleinwee (Senior Technical Writer at WoodWing Software) will start by demonstrating the amazing power and flexibility of Smart Styles and Smart Layout. After the break, Maarten will demonstrate Smart Image and Smart Catalog, followed by a sneak peek into the exciting world of workflow and productivity in larger organizations. If automating your workflow is something you would like to hear about don’t hesitate, because seating is limited to just 75 people. More details at the website.

By Woodwing: Any design team working with columns of text and images, and interested in saving time in their creative workflows based on Adobe InDesign, would benefit greatly by using WoodWing’s Smart Layout CS4. Working on a layout with columns of text and images can be time-consuming, especially when changes have to be made to the layout afterwards. Smart Layout changes all that. When creating text columns with Smart Layout, the columns will automatically flow around other items already on the page. By combining the separate elements of an article like the headline, intro, text and images into one Smart Layout object, the users are able to easily manipulate this object and resize or move it, keeping the relation between the elements intact. All the while, they can still access all individual elements of the Smart Layout object. In addition, Smart Layout offers easy copy-fit options.



Read more

By Gabriel Powell: In Instant InDesign Episode 7, I introduced you to the amazing capabilities of EasyCatalog. Now I’d like to show you how to create a template that automates the production of a product catalog. Originally, this episode was going to demonstrate the entire process from start to finish, but I quickly discovered that there just wasn’t enough time in one episode to teach you everything. So I’ve created a third part, which will be covered in Instant InDesign: Episode 9. Check out more Instant InDesign in the RSS-feeds.

I love using InDesign and PDF. But ever since I started using real PDF workflows I grew contempt for printers with really old workflows. Especially the ones that will open my Certified PDF file in Adobe Illustrator just to print it. Almost every printer claims they’ve got a true PDF-Workflow and can process certified PDF files… It doesn’t happen often but occaisionally when it’s time to process my files a printer is on the phone asking me to please send an EPS, the InDesign file or ‘what not’ because they haven’t got this-or-that font. That’s all I need to know. They’re opening my PDF files in Illustrator. I can try to confince them Illustrator is not a PDF-editor and if they really want to work like that they could buy Pitstop Extreme. But usually they haven’t got a PDF-workflow because they don’t want to invest in more up-to-date software or an up-to-date RIP, so convincing them to update is not an option. So whats left? Manually select all text in my InDesign file, set everything to outline text-box by text-box and pray to God I don’t press Comamand+S and screw up my original file? Nope. There is a much quicker and easier way to set all text to outline in InDesign but it’s hidden… Read more

Don’t forget the Amsterdam InDesign User Group is holding a meeting in Amsterdam next week, Wednesday the 27th. Both the Acrobat and InDesign User Group are working together to make sure you’ll have a good and informative day. Topic of the day is how to use both InDesign and Acrobat to create interactive PDF forms. These forms can be filled out on a computer and electronically submitted through email or the internet. Gabriel Powell (check out his RSS-feed called Instant InDesign over at your at right or his free ‘how to video’s) will discuss how to design a PDF form and he’ll explain just how to export it to PDF. Acrobat will be used to automatically convert it into an interactive form. Yuri Doesum (yes the same one that helped me set up the DEA or Digital Engineer Assembly last year) will demonstrate different methods for distributing a form and collecting responses. There are only 75 seats available so if you think your PDF-form designing-skills need some updatin’ I suggest you sign up. And hey, it’s free! (“Free” is a word we Dutch absolutely love).

I personally dislike using Live Preflight-profiles but they can come in quite handy especially if you’re new to this whole ‘graphic design’ thing or if you’re a webdesigner needing to do some occasional print work. (What’s a Live Preflight? Check out Lynda.com’s short video and accompanying 600 Mb sample file). Nice, but – as always – the Preflight is only as good as the profile defining the preflight. And this is where those nice people from Belgium come in. The Ghent Work Group VIGC got together and created 13 Live Preflight Profiles for the creative professional. Why 13? Read more

Putting white text on a colored background? We’ve all done it. Oh, it looks great on your screen. But when you receive the printed artwork it doesn’t look all that good. If you look closely you can see the white type is a bit blurry, almost like something took a lot of little bites out of the type. This not-so-sharp phenomenon is due to the offset printing process and the way color is replicated (using halftone dots). But there is an easy way to reach much higher quality – and better readable – type. It requires almost no effort and all you need is InDesign. Take a look at these screenshots and extreme close-up photo’s. Read more

One of the things you really have to learn ‘as you go’ is designing with folds. There really is only one way of creating a perfect design with folds in it: Designing, printing, getting out the scissors and probably re-designing) . Only with a dummy-shape in your hand can you really see what will happen when you actually fold your design. And if you’re new to this – or just in a hurry – you are likely to make little mistakes. But if you’ve got InDesign there is an automated way to produce folds with little or almost no effort. Read more

Good colleague (Dutch InDesign trainer and speaker at my Digital-Engineer event last year) Frans reports about a bug in Adobe’s Indesign CS4 for OSX. I hadn’t noticed it because all the artwork I create using inDesign gets send out like a certified PDF. But if you send out complete InDesign ‘packages’ you need to be aware InDesign won’t collect all the links when you ‘collect for output’. So what’s up? As always, when you know what to look for the answer is simple. Read more

InDesign’s standard transparancy-flattener setings (Low, Medium and High) are nice, but to get your artwork flattened just right the settings really need some tweaking. Just about everything I create is done using InDesign so applying the right transparancy-setting is very important indeed. When I’m talking about ‘the right setting’ I mean ‘right for print and ‘artwork to be delivered as a Certified PDF’, of course. There is no need to go experimenting. A group of companies inclusing Adobe and Enfocus have already done that for your convenience. You just need to click the download button and install the proper settings. Read more

You might have heard about the RGB-workflow and InDesign. But what exactly is it? What can you do with it? How do you set it up? What’s the advantage? A lot of good questions and I’ll try to answer them in this article. Just keep in mind: There’s really only one strategy for graphic designers using the RGB-workflow: Retain as much information as possible. Read more