IDM Issue42 One-Up

MAGAZINE
June | July 2011
42
Book Design Basics
Also in this issue
InDesigns hidden files Data Merge works miracles Tons of tips Reviews Much more
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I N D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E 42 June | July 2011
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MAGAZINE
Editorial Editor in Chief Terri Stone, tstone@indesignmag.com Editorial Director David Blatner, david@indesignmag.com Senior Editor Sandee Cohen, sandee@indesignmag.com Contributing Writers Pariah Burke, Scott Citron, Nigel French, Jeff Gamet, Keith Gilbert, Bob Levine, Michael Murphy, Pamela Pfiffner Contributing Photographer Jennifer Wills (covers and page 7) dEsign W+W Design, www.wplusw.com Rufus Deuchler, rufus.deuchler.net BusinEss Contact Information www.indesignmag.com/contact.php Subscription Information www.indesignmag.com/purchase.php
Published by CreativePro.com, a division of PrintingForLess. com. Copyright 2011 CreativePro.com. All rights reserved. Reproduction and redistribution prohibited without approval. For more information, contact permissions@indesignmag.com. InDesign Magazine is not endorsed or sponsored by Adobe Systems Incorporated, publisher of InDesign. InDesign is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated. All other products and services are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners and are hereby acknowledged.
From the Editor in Chief

You may think that InDesign Magazine is an Adobe product. Its not. Or you may figure that were part of the same company as InDesignSecrets. Were not. (Although InDesignSecrets co-founder David Blatner is also our editorial director.) InDesign Magazine is an independent entity. But we are part of something, and its big: The InDesign community. In a recent InDesignSecrets blog post, David pointed out that its a big InDesign world. While we hope you find this magazine useful, inspirational, and a good value, we know we dont have a lock on such things. We encourage you to explore the wider InDesign world. A good place to start is the blog post I mentioned; it will point you toward 150 InDesign links and resources! Enough of the wider world; lets focus on whats on your screen or in your hands right now. In this issue of the magazine, weve included techniques you can use even if your copy of InDesign is several years old. We also have a few tips so cutting-edge youll need CS5.5 to put them into action. Weve chosen this issues content so that it strikes a balance between design and technology; for example, one feature about book design, another about hidden computer files. Todays workplace demands that we embrace both design and technology. For the ultimate one-two punch, check out Michael Murphys article on InDesigns Data Merge. He takes a deadly dull spreadsheet and turns it into a vibrant work of communication art. Terri Stone
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Celebrating the art of print design

Technology may be evolving, but the design fundamentals remain critical. Learn about Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Design Standard and all the new features to speed up and simplify the design process, at adobe.com/go/design
2011 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Adobe, the Adobe logo, and Creative Suite are trademarks or registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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InSide: Table of Contents
Book Design Basics Scott Citron covers vital facts to make your book-design process a smoother, more successful endeavor. InDesigns Hidden Files Once you know where InDesign stashes its secrets, the power is in your hands. InStep: Designing with Data Michael Murphy shows you how to take a bone-dry spreadsheet and turn it into a gorgeous layout. InType: InDesign Wish List Nigel French loves InDesign, but he still has a list of things hed like to see in future versions. How about you? InTips: The Conference Comes to You Fresh off a successful conference, David Blatner brings you the experts tips and techniques. InDesigner: Lost in London Pamela Pfiffner finds a magazine going native.
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InQuestion Sandee Cohen solves your InDesign problems. InTime: Live Captions as Label Makers Pariah Burke explores an unexpected use of Live Captions. InReview: Active Tables and Grid Calculator Pro Bob Levine and Scott Citron put two helper applications through rigorous tests. Are these apps for you? InBrief: New & Improved Products Jeff Gamet wants to be sure youre up to date on whats going on in the product world outside of InDesign. InDex to All Past Issues Download the InDex and discover whats in all 40 issues of this magazine.
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Creating a new standard

Bloozie is introducing a new way of creating and sharing rich graphic documents for the iPad. By using Adobe InDesign and a few plug-ins, which are free, you are able to create SwipeDocs document very easily. Transfer the documents to the iPad using drag and drop via iTunes, or sharing documents using the Bloozie community. With the SwipeDocs app you can swipe docs on the iPad with ease, tap on the unique scrollwheel, to show the menu, tab once more to show page navigation. Tap twice on the page to hide the scrollwheel and tap twice to show it again. With Bloozie SwipeDocs we try to create a new open standard for viewing rich media on the iPad, without having a special app for different documents. Full documentation for using and creating packages is available in the help document, included in the SwipeDocs app. Adobe InDesign CS4 and CS5 plugins is available at bloozie.com FREE!
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Book Design Basics

a designers guide to getting the Most from indesign
By scott Citron
Despite recent news to the contrary, books as we know them (bound sheets of printed paper, remember?) are not deadand wont be in our lifetimes. This fact is good news for people like me who appreciate a well-made and welldesigned book. In this article Ill discuss what makes a book well made and well designed, and its relation to the current de facto software for designing books, Adobe InDesign.
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Form Follows Content Before any designing can begin, the book designer must address the issue of size. Known professionally as trim size, or just trim, the choice of size is usually out of the designers control. If youre lucky enough to have some say in this critical decision, I suggest looking at other books for inspiration. Beyond the pure economics or aesthetics of book size (important factors themselves), the designer must bear in mind the practical side of choosing a trim. Consider how frustrating it would be to cook from a narrow cookbook, bound tightly, that wont lay flat while open. What about a guide book thats short and wide? Try fitting that into your back pocket. In other words, use common sense when deciding on the size or dimensions of your book. It shouldnt come as a surprise that big books cost more to manufacture and ship than small books. Discuss size with your client and printer, and become comfortable with its dimensions before you start designing.
Think it Through Dont accept the default margins and columns settings when beginning a book. Thats like buying a new car and driving it off the lot without spending a few minutes adjusting the mirrors, seat, and steering wheel. Just because all new InDesign documents default to half-inch margins and onecolumn measures doesnt mean you have to use those settings (Figure 1). If youre likely to make the same changes to margins and columns and so on, click Save Preset in the New Document dialog box so you can recall the same settings later.
Figure 1: Dont forget these are just numbers. You can make them be anything you want.
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Retooling your design after having laid out 96 pages takes time you can ill-afford to waste. Look to a books content to help with decisions of form. Chances are a book about Zen gardens would use more white space than one on the history of jazz. How a book is bound is also a key factor when beginning a design. Books that are perfect-bound or saddle-stitched need wider inside margins than those that are spiral- or ring-bound. Wide books open and lay flat more easily than those that are tall and narrow. When designing narrow books, allow extra room for inside margins so readers arent forced to crack a books spine to read text that abuts the inner margins. Master Your Pages Thinking through your book leads to one of the most important structural components in book design: master pages. Like the foundation of a house, master pages provide a foundation for your book upon which all document pages are based.
Working with master pages serves two important functions. Because master pages are a kind of a template, using them saves you from having to build each new page
from scratch. Instead, you simply create document pages that are pre-built and prestructured (Figure 2). Margins are there, columns are there, grids and guides are there.
Figure 2: Take the time when starting a project to develop your master page and any child masters that are based on it. Doing so will free your left brain from your right brain.
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Figure 3: A conventional chapter opener for a work of fiction. Book trim is 6 x 9 inches. Note the deep bottom margin and ample room on the outside margin to hold the book. Notice also how the inside margin is large enough so as not to hide text thats close to the spine.
Headers and footers are generally there. Occasionally, even repeating graphics like logos or other kinds of design elements are on master pages. As a result, master pages lend a second important function to book design: consistency. Books and long documents benefit from consistent placement and treatment of such items as chapter titles, page numbers, and footnotes. Many designers also populate master pages with empty text frames as well. Although this practice may seem like a good idea at first, I advise against it. Building master pages with text frames, whether empty or with dummy text, can create more problems than it solves because master objects are locked by default in InDesign. To access those frames, you must release the frames every time via the Command-Shift/Ctrl-Shift-click trick, with the Override All Master Page Items command in the Pages panel menu, or by clicking with the loaded Place cursor, all of which I find
annoying. Since theres nothing to be gaining by using Master Text Frames, my advice is to avoid them except for text that never or rarely changes. The other problem Ive seen is that designers forget to replace dummy text, or text from a previous edition of the publication, with new text. Thats why my advice is to use Master pages only for page items that you want to remain locked and unchanged. Things like headers, footers, and folios (page numbers) are prime candidates for master pages. If youre set on populating pages with text frames to use as placeholders, place the frames instead on document pages or even on another layer that you can easily edit. Multiple Masters. Multiple masters are master pages that are based on other master pages. Lets say youre designing a book of fiction. The main document master page includes a header for the authors name on the verso (left-hand page) and the chapter title on the recto (right-hand page). The folio
(page number) is in the footer. This master works great for most pages, but what happens when you begin a new chapter? Chapter openers are generally formatted differently than standard document pages, as seen in Figure 3. Notice how the text begins lower down on the page (called a sink) and how the page lacks a header, with just
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the folio in the footer? Although you could achieve this format change with the A-Master by manually changing the margin and overriding and removing the header, a more efficient approach is to create a B-Master thats based on the A-Master. To do so, choose the New Master command from the Pages panel menu. In the dialog box, set the Based on Master dropdown menu to A-Master (Figure 4). After you create this new master page (B-Master), you can lower the top margin for the sink and delete the header (Figure 5). Now you have a master suitable for all your chapter openers. If you later edit A-Master, it will automatically update on B-Master, too, because B is the child of A. One final tip about master pages: When creating masters, youll see theyre automatically named A, B, C, D, and so forth. Although master prefixes are limited to just four characters, youll do yourself a favor by using more descriptive names like BODY or SINK instead.
Figure 4 (above): Basing the B-Master (child) on the A-Master (parent) means that the B-Master will inherit any and all attributes of its parent. In this example Ive deleted the A-Master header and sunk the top margin 11 picas. Figure 5 (left): Here are the actual settings used for the B-Master. Note that this is only the right-hand page of the spread.
Structural Basics: Margins & Columns Once trim size is final, its time to begin laying out a books structural basics. Like an architect who draws a homes foundation before thinking about the finials on a staircase, the book designer must first give
careful attention to the two most important structural components of a book: its margins and columns. Its not always easy to choose the right margin and column settings. Historically, novels are laid out differently than magazines. Bottom margins are often deep, as are outside margins, to allow room for readers thumbs. Paperback reprints of hardbound books often defy this convention to save paper and lower production costs. Magazines, conversely, often get away with narrow margins to maximize space. But exceptions abound. Live Area. The term live area refers to the area of a book or publication thats inside the top, bottom, left, and right margins. Floating content within a publications live area, rather than placing it carefully within a document grid, opens the door to a flimsy grip on visual structure and order. In Figure 6 (next page), the page content floats inside the default margin area. The problem isnt that it looks
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terrible on this one page; it doesnt. But when you carry this kind of loose construction across a larger book, the overall effect is not one of cohesion. And a lack of tight margins
Figure 6: In this example, notice how the content floats within the live area. Anchoring your elements to margins, columns, or grids will make the job easier and improve the overall look of your page.
and columns gives the designer too many choices, which adds to design time. Now look at Figures 7a7b. Here is the same basic page with an eight-column framework that is flexible, but consistent across the book.
When setting columns, its important to recognize that columns serve not only as an efficient riverbed when flowing body text, but create a vertical structure thats consistent and predictable. If youre a designer
Figures 7a-b: The eight-column layout, shown below and right, provides structure with flexibility for infinite variations over the length of the book.
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who positions text frames using ruler guides instead of column guides, youre probably using ruler guides because nobody ever told you that a two-column page is best served by a layout that uses more than two columns. To see what I mean, look at Figure 8. In this spread, notice how the two main text frames each straddle four columns. Notice also how
two additional columns remain beyond the frames, providing structure for other page objects like captions or graphics. This brings the total number of columns per page to ten. Structural Basics: Units and Measurements Heres a fun game for old timers. Ask a group of designers how to pronounce P-I-C-A-S. Those who answer peek-uhs are under thirty. Then ask those who answered correctly, who among them actually use picas? Those who answer yes are over forty. Finally, ask those who answered correctly how many points equal a pica
Figure 8: This ten-column layout could be used in a variety of ways. Here its used to structure two simple columns and a photo caption.
(twelve)? And how many picas equal an inch (six)? Those who answer correctly are over fifty. Or sixty. Despite the unpopularity of the pica as a unit of measure, its darn handy when designing books. This is because points (and therefore picas) are still how we measure type. Almost any measurement system is better than inches. When using inches, the smallest increment that you can nudge a drop shadow, bevel, or any object effects without the need to type in an absolute value is one sixteenth of an inch. Compare that amount with the smallest increment available when using picas and points: 1 point. One inch equals 16 sixteenths. It also equals 72 points. That makes points almost one-fifth the size of one sixteenth. Points afford greater control than inches. Yes, you can type in any value when nudging drop shadows or bevel amounts. But its better to arrive at values like this by trial and error. When students tell me they dont feel comfortable with points and picas, I point
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out that once the basic document is created, you never think about the dimension of page
items again. After all, who cares if a placed photo measures 4 5 inches or 4 5 picas?
InDesign Preferences If youve never opened InDesigns Preferences settings, youre not alone. Most professional designers I train have never touched theirs, either. Fortunately, not all of InDesigns factory preferences need adjusting, but those that do will affect how you work. The table below shows Preference and settings changes I consider most important, and why.
Preference Type Description Setting Value Why Inserting text cursor in paragraph allows user to adjust leading with Option/Alt+Up/Down arrow. Convenient way to move text. Small increment makes nudging effects more precise. Gives you more control over type. Gives you more control over type.
Apply Leading to Selected Entire Paragraphs Drag & Drop Text Editing Ruler Units Keyboard Increments Keyboard Increments Enable in Layout View Picas (V and H Rulers) Size/Leading 0.5 Kerning/ Tracking 5
Type Units & Increments Units & Increments Units & Increments
Structural Basics: Grids Everyone likes to hear a good story well told. As a book designer, your job is to tell a clear story that moves logically from page to page, top to bottom, from left to right. Grids help service this journey by providing a consistent and reliable structure. I love grids because I love structure. The grid ultimately frees us to create a visual syntax based on familiar patterns and rhythms. (See the online article The Power of Grids for more on grids in general.) To explain what I mean, lets look at some examples. In Figure 9 (next page), the grid is very obvious that gives the page a controlled balance and rhythm. When viewers know where and how to read a page, they experience comfort; they can relax and turn their attention to the content. A similar phenomenon occurs when watching movies. Think about the experience of watching a sure-footed film with a strong story that immediately captures your attention from its opening frames. The
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way the narrative pulls you along from scene to scene. Compare that experience with the way you feel when a movie rambles aimlessly for the first thirty or forty minutes.
Just as books can have multiple master pages, they can (and often should) have multiple grids. One grid may not provide enough variety. Regardless of how many grids you employ or their level of sophistication, whats important is that grids are there to help you know where to put what. If a grid starts to feel too constricting or mechanical, its time to rethink your grid. My last suggestion when it comes to grids is learn to take advantage of the Create Guides command (Layout > Create Guides) for building grids on master pages. Using Create Guides allows designers to quickly and accurately create grids, delete grids, and control gutter widths of a grid that fits to your page or page margins. Or try Grid Calulator Pro (review on page 79).
Figure 9: Just because a grid is obvious doesnt mean it has to look boring. I created this twelve-column structure to hang the pages two photos and two main text blocks.
Love Layers, But Not Too Much Before the introduction of Adobe InDesign, many of us spent years designing documents without the benefit of layers. When InDesign came on the scene, some designers continued to work on only one layer. Others, who were more familiar with Photoshop, adopted Photoshops one object per layer workflow. I remember an InDesign class I taught years ago where a student built a simple document with over fifty layers. When I asked her why shed used so many layers, she told me that she learned to do so in Photoshop. Somewhere between the everythingon-one-layer approach and the one-itemper-layer method lies the optimal way to use layers in InDesign. I limit the number of layers I use to the essentials; generally, thats between one and three layers. Dont confuse multiple layers with multiple masters. When structure is needed, master pages with well-defined columns and ruler guides are always preferable to asking
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the same thing of layers. Text wont autoflow through faux columns on layers using ruler guides the way it will on master pages built with column guides. Youll do yourself a favor by understanding how layers work. Become familiar with how to copy objects from layer to layer using Option/ Alt-drag and drop. Need to move a layer object onto a hidden or locked layer? Hold the Command/Control key while dragging the little color square onto the new layer. Use Paste Remembers Layers, a handy feature when you need it. And if you can, take advantage of InDesign CS5 improved Layers panel, where each page item is now on its own layer. Use Styles If I had to choose the one thing InDesign users could do to improve their efficiency as designers, it would be to understand and master the art of using style. This particularly applies to books and other long documents. But creating style sheets in InDesign
is so easy and fast that its even worth it for shorter documents. Instead of listening to me prattle on about style sheets, Id rather direct you to my friend and colleague Michael Murphys outstanding (and not too thick) book, Adobe InDesign CS4 Styles: How to Create Better, Faster Text and Layouts. Michael is not only a master of using style sheets but of explaining how they work. If time is of the essence, read only chapters one, two, and four. Luckily for you who arent in a bookstore, chapter two is available for free on CreativePro.com. And ignore the CS4 part of the title; even if youre using CS5, its still very relevant. Placing Text One of the most potentially hazardous operations when designing a book is placing text. Not because placing text is technically difficult. Its not. Instead, its because the possibility of losing critical formatting like italics and bolding is so great.
InDesign offers two methods for getting text into a document. The first is via copy and paste: Select your text in the original document, copy it to the clipboard, move to the InDesign document and paste. The problem with this method is that, depending on your Preference settings, your text may come in fully formatted as it was in the original word-processing document (which might be exactly what you want, but I doubt it), or your text will be pasted in with no formatting. This means all formatted text will be converted to plain text. All bold and italics will be gone, gone, gone! Also, you may lose special characters and other important things. The second method for importing text into InDesign is InDesigns File > Place command. You navigate to your Word document, choose it, and click the little place cursor, which then drops text on your page. The next thing that usually happens is you discover that your placed text is highlighted in pink, which is InDesigns way of telling you
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Resources
Books and Articles
that your text uses fonts you need to activate. Sound familiar? Replacing missing fonts is actually a minor problem with an easy remedy. Simply load the missing fonts and the pink highlighting disappears. Just be sure, view your page in Normal mode instead of Preview mode (View > Screen Mode > Normal). Preview mode hides the pink highlighting, though InDesign does still place square brackets around the names of missing fonts to help identify them. The more serious problem when bringing in text by either copy/paste or File > Place is complete loss of formatting. There are several ways to either mitigate or eliminate this problem. Some are easier than others. Good: Make sure your Word document is properly formatted with paragraph and character styles before placing the file in InDesign. The styles neednt be named or even defined the same way as in InDesign, as long as theyre consistent. This also means
Adobe InDesign CS4 Styles: How to Create Better, Faster Text and Layouts Create a Classical Page Grid in InDesign InDesign Type: Professional Typography with Adobe InDesign book design / brainstorming / creativity Microsoft Word for Creative Pros Moving Text from Word to InDesign Professional Design Techniques with Adobe Creative Suite 3
Real World Adobe InDesign CS5 Strip the Crud from Word Files Before You Map Styles Strip Word Formatting When Importing Text into InDesign and Quark
Plug-ins and Scripts
Blatner Tools Auto Create Paragraph and Character Styles Grid Calculator Pro
there should be no local formatting (i.e., highlighting a word or line and clicking the little i button for Italic or the B button for bold) because its easily overriden when you apply InDesign styles. Better: Use the Style Mapping feature of the InDesign Word Import Filter when placing text from Word. To invoke the Import Filter, click the Show Import Options radio
button in the Place dialog box. With the Word Import Options dialog open, click the Customize Style Import radio button to make the Style Mapping button available. In the Style Mapping dialog, match styles coming from Word with styles youve already established in InDesign. Unfortunately, style mapping doesnt always work as expected, due to what Word
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calls underlying styles. The workaround involves importing the Word doc into a dummy InDesign file, selecting the text, exporting it to RTF (Rich Text Format) and reimporting the RTF into your InDesign layout. For step-by-step details, refer to Anne-Marie Concepcins article for InDesignSecrets, Strip the Crud from Word Files Before You Map Styles, or get yourself a copy of the essential bible, Real World Adobe InDesign CS5 by David Blatner, Olav Martin Kvern, and Robert Bringhurst. Best: Adobe InCopy (about $250). Create an InCopy document with all the paragraph and character styles you intend to use in InDesign. Give it to the writer of your book or publication. Instruct the writer on how easy it is to use and apply styles while writing. Finally, explain how sad it is to see a full-grown designer cry like a newborn when trying to format a Word document. Heres my last text tip. Thomas Silkjr is a Danish graphic designer and scripting
hobbyist. Thomas has written a wonderful script called Auto Create Paragraph and Character Styles. Its a free download (donations accepted). Although you may know nothing about scripts and may never have used a script in InDesign, now is the time to learn. Its easy. Thomas website explains where to install the script and how to use it. Working with Images After dealing with the headaches of text and text import, working with images is one of the most joyful parts of book design. My most important advice when it comes to placing images in InDesign: Stick with RGB images the whole way through. CMYK images are big, bloated, look like hell, and often uneditable in Photoshop. To get a feel for what RGB images look like when printed in CMYK, go to View > Proof Setup and then View > Proof Colors. When your publication is ready to send for printing, go to File > Export > PDF and use the Press
Ready profile preset or any other setting that will convert RGB to CMYK. Ive been following this workflow for years with no problem. Lets talk briefly about file formats. PSDs are my favorite format. They can do it all (well, almost all) and InDesign has access to all embedded layers and layer comps (Object > Object Layer Options). TIFFs are excellent and can be built with layers, although InDesign cant access those layers. Even JPEGs are fine. Just be careful not to save over JPEGs multiple times, which reduces the quality. The EPS format has long been dead and should be avoided when possible. If a client hands you an EPS, use it. It wont kill you. But if youre creating an image from scratch, whether vector or pixel-based, do not save it as EPS. Try PDF, which is much more modern, compatible, and versatile. And if someone tries to tell you that you have to use EPS files because your printer insists on them, tell your printer to take a hike since theyve obviously been living in a cave.
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End Paper Designing books and publications is one of the most exciting and rewarding jobs for graphic designers. I love it. Can it be tedious? Mind-numbing? Exacting? Yes, for sure. But the satisfaction you get out of walking into a bookstore and seeing a book you designed on the shelf is worth the effort.
Print Solutions That Will Make You
Scott Citron is a designer and publishing consultant in New York City and an Adobe Certified Instructor in InDesign, InCopy, Photoshop, Lightroom, and Illustrator. He is the current head of the New York InDesign Users Group and is the author of Professional Design Techniques with Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Adobe Press, 2008) and Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques (Adobe Press, 2010), co-written with Michael Murphy. Hed like to hear from you: scott@scottcitrondesign.com.
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Adobe InDesign and Adobe InCopyUSER GROUP COMMUNITY WORLDWIDE INDESIGN
Ten Steps for Building Your InDesign and InCopy Expertise

1. Learn about whats new with the InDesign Family of products at www.adobe.com/go/indesignfamily 2. Keep up-to-date on the latest InDesign and InCopy news at InDesignSecrets.com, an independent website with expert podcasts, blogs, techniques, and more. 3. Sign up for a free InDesign tip of the week at www.indesignmag.com. 4. Check out Total Training for Adobe InDesign CS5 at www.totaltraining.com. 5. Attend a free Creative Suite 5 eSeminar and learn whats new in InDesign CS5 at www.adobe.com/events. 6. Skip over to Lynda.com to try their InDesign and InCopy online training. 7. Tune into Adobe TV, your online video source featuring innovative techniques and tips for getting the most out of Adobe InDesign and InCopy at www.adobe.com/ go/adobetv. 8. Visit leading InDesign, Digital Publishing and Creative Professional social media channels such as the InDesign Facebook page, Adobe Digital Publishing blog and Creative Suite Design Facebook page. 9. Locate Adobe Certified Instructors and Adobe Authorized Training Centers in your area at partners. adobe.com. 10. Go where the leading InDesign and InCopy industry experts gather. Check out upcoming InDesign and Creative Suite conferences at indesignsecretslive.com, www.mogo-media.com, and kelbytraininglive.com.
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The Secret, Hidden Files of Adobe InDesign

uncover the mystery and power will be yours!
By Keith Gilbert
Did you realize that as you work in InDesign, the program is quietly creating and maintaining a set of hidden files? Knowing a thing or two about these behind-the-scenes files can be beneficial in a number of ways. You can tweak many of these files to enable InDesign to do things that cant be done any other way. You can do some things faster or more efficiently by directly manipulating these files instead of using the InDesigninterface.
Knowing where these files live lets you create backups of these valuable files and share shortcut sets, autocorrect files, and more betweencomputers. Lets explore what these files are, where they are, and what you can do with them. Ill give you the exact path to each file for the US English version of Macintosh CS5, as well as CS5 running under Windows7. If youre running Windows XP or Vista, an older version of InDesign, or use a language other than English, the path may be slightly different. You can always use Macintosh Spotlight or Windows Search to locate the files on your hard drive.
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Ground Rules
Before exploring what these files are, Id better explain a few things about how InDesign manages them. InDesign stores the files in two main locations. The first location is in your Applications/ Adobe InDesign CS5 folder (Mac) or Program Files (x86)/Adobe/Adobe InDesign CS5 folder (Windows). The second location is Users/ YourHomeFolder/Library/Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version 7.0/en_US (Mac) or Users/ YourLogin/AppData/Roaming/Adobe/ InDesign/Version 7.0/en_US (Windows). Note that 7.0 indicates InDesign CS5; if youre using CS4 youll see 6.0, and so on. If you work for a large organization with IT support, you may not have the necessary Administrator access to get to (or even see) all of these files. You may need to enlist ITs help to gain access. Some of the files mentioned in this article dont exist until you use the feature at least once in InDesign. For example, you wont find
any Autocorrect files in the Users location until you make an edit to the Autocorrect list in Preferences > Autocorrect. When a file exists in both locations mentioned above, the file in the Users folder takes priority, and InDesign ignores the file in the Applications or Program Files folder. Most of the files discussed in this article, even those without an xml filename extension, are XML files. XML files are just text files that contain XML tags and other information. Special XML editors such as Oxygen have special features for editing XML files, but you can use any text editor, such as TextEdit, TextWrangler, or Notepad (Figure 1). Just be sure to make careful changes to the file, paying attention to the syntax of the surrounding text. Save the file as a text-only file when you are finished. Always quit InDesign before making any changes to, or copying or moving these files. This is important because InDesign doesnt write to some of these files while the program
Figure 1: Editing an XML file using the Oxygen XML editor is handy because Oxygen color-codes the XML tags and gives you nice indenting. But you can use any text editor to edit an XML file.
is running. For example, if you change a preference, InDesign doesnt save that change to disk until you quit. Before you modify any of these files, make a backup copy of the original file so that you can retrieve it later if you need.
Defaults
The InDesign Defaults file stores all of your preferences and defaults. Any changes that you make inside the Preferences dialog box or to your default settings are written to this file as you quit InDesign, so that the next time
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TIP: The free Preferences Manager script makes short work of managing multiple defaults styles and copying them from computer to computer.
you launch InDesign, the preferences and defaults are the way you left them. Various things can cause this file to get corrupted, which then leads to any number of strange InDesign problems. Thankfully, you can delete this file any time, and InDesign will replace it with a factory fresh copy of the standard preferences anddefaults. Alternatively, if you change a lot of preferences and defaults, its smart to quit and make a copy of the good version of your InDesign Defaults file. Later, if you need to delete a corrupted InDesign Defaults file, you can just replace the deleted file with the copy you made, so that you dont need to reset all your preferences and defaults to the way you want them. The file is located here: Mac: Users/YourHomeFolder/Library/ Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version 7.0/en_US Windows: Users/YourLogin/AppData/ Roaming/Adobe/InDesign/Version 7.0/en_US
Unfortunately for those of us who like tweaking XML, the InDesign Defaults file is an exception to the rule: It is saved as a binary file, uneditable by text editors.
Windows: Users/YourLogin/AppData/Local/ Adobe/InDesign/Version 7.0/en_US You can delete all of the files in this folder at any time, and the next time that you run InDesign, the necessary files will be recreated fresh and new. (Youll lose any edits you may have made to those files, but given the crashes, those files were probably toastanyway.)
Recovery Data
When you relaunch InDesign after it crashes, the program attempts to recover any documents you had open, along with nearly everything youve done to the document since the last save. Generally, this works well. But once in awhile it can get stuck in a loop, where a document is causing InDesign to crash, but every time that InDesign starts up, it attempts to reopen the document, which causes it to crash, which causes it to reopen the document, which... Get the picture? One way to recover from this situation is to delete the recovery files. Theyre located here: Mac: Users/YourHomeFolder/Library/Caches/ Adobe InDesign/Version 7.0/en_US
InDesign Lock Files

Have you ever noticed little transient files appearing on your hard drive or server with a funny name like ~hidden files of id~xq__ vx.idlk? (See Figure 2.) Closer examination will reveal that the .idlk file is 0 kb in size.
Figure 2: An InDesign Lock file.
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These files have a very important purpose. Whenever you open a file, InDesign auto-generates a filename using some cryptic rules, and adds an idlk extension to the filename. When you close the InDesign file, InDesign deletes the associated .idlk file. Why? When you open an InDesign file, it first checks to see if an associated .idlk file is stored alongside the InDesign file. If so, that tells InDesign that someone else has the file open, and youll get a message on your screen to that effect. When the other person closes the file, the .idlk file is deleted, so that someone else can edit the InDesignfile. Knowing this, you would never want to try to delete an .idlk file, unless you are absolutely sure that no one else has the associated InDesign file open. (If InDesign crashes, those lock files sometimes get left behind and so you may find them on your hard drive, even when InDesign isnt running. At that point, you can safely delete them.)
Keyboard Shortcut Sets, Menu Sets, and Workspaces

Everybody knows you can customize InDesign to your liking, such as using Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts to create your own set of keyboard shortcuts, Edit > Menus to save sets of which menu commands are displayed, and Window > Workspace > New Workspace to save the arrangement of the panels on your screen. Unfortunately, the dialog boxes for these commands dont have a button that makes it easy to share these settings with another computer or another user. But you can locate the keyboard shortcut sets, menu sets, or workspace files that you create and copy them from one computer to the same location on another computer. (These files wont work cross-platform, only from Mac to Mac, or Windows to Windows.) After youve copied the file to a second computer, go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, Edit > Menus, or Window > Workspace to select
the name of the file you just copied. Now the copied file will be active. Note, however, that if you copy a workspace between two computers that have different screen resolutions, you may get strange results when you choose the workspace. Heres the location for finding and copying the files: Mac: Users/YourHomeFolder/Library/ Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version 7.0/ en_US/InDesign Shortcut Sets or Menu Sets or Workspaces Windows: Users/YourLogin/AppData/ Roaming/Adobe/InDesign/Version 7.0/ en_US/InDesign Shortcut Sets or Menu Sets or Workspaces If you want to remove some or all of the default workspaces, you can find and delete the files here:
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Mac: Applications/Adobe InDesign CS5/Presets/ InDesign Workspaces/en_US Windows: Program Files (x86)/Adobe/Adobe InDesign CS5/Presets/InDesign Workspaces/ en_US
Scripts
Scripts are a fantastic way to automate tedious processes in InDesign and improve your efficiency. The easiest way to locate the proper folders for installing scripts is through the Scripts panel itself. In the Scripts panel, you should see two folders: Application and User. Just select one of these folders and choose Reveal in Finder (Mac) or Reveal in Explorer (Windows) from the Scripts panel menu (or right-click and choose Reveal from the context menu; see Figure 3). This will take you to one of the two Scripts Panel folders on your hard drive. This is where you should copy any script filesAppleScript (Mac), Visual Basic (Windows), or JavaScript (Mac and Windows)that you develop yourself,
Figure 3: You can use the Scripts panel menu to locate the installation folder forscripts.
have someone develop for you, or find on the Internet. You can copy scripts to either of the two Scripts Panel folders, as long as you have permissions on your computer. For example, some people dont have administrator permissions, so they cant add scripts to the Application folder but may be able to add it to the User folder. Scripts in the User folder wont be available to someone else logged in on the same computer but under a different account.
useful in a pinch. If you have a font that you cant install on your system in the usual way, try putting it in this folder. Any fonts that you put in this folder will be activated automatically, but will be only available to InDesign documents. Think of this as a way of bypassing your operating systems font mechanism, for use by InDesign only. Note that InDesign can resolve aliases (Mac) and shortcuts (Windows) in this folder. That means you can drop an alias/shortcut of a whole folder full of fonts into the Fonts folder, and InDesign will suddenly be able to see and use all those fonts.
Autocorrect Presets
Editing this file enables you to quickly add and remove words from the Autocorrect list. This is helpful if you have a huge list of words to add, or someone else prepares the list for you using a word-processing program. Theres no need to alphabetize the words you add. You may also copy this file to the same location on another computer (even between
Fonts
The Fonts folder, found in Applications/Adobe InDesign CS5 (Mac) or Program Files (x86)/ Adobe/Adobe InDesign CS5 (Windows), can be
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Macintosh and Windows) to share your customized Autocorrect file with someone else. Mac: Users/YourHomeFolder/Library/ Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version 7.0/en_US/ Autocorrect/en_US.xml Windows: Users/YourLogin/AppData/ Roaming/Adobe/InDesign/Version 7.0/en_US/ Autocorrect/en_US.xml
Mac: Users/YourHomeFolder/Library/ Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version 7.0/en_ US/Find-Change Queries Windows: Users/YourLogin/AppData/Roaming/ Adobe/InDesign/Version 7.0/en_US/FindChange Queries
Windows: Program Files (x86)/Adobe/Adobe InDesign CS5/Presets/multimedia InDesign CS5 also includes 17 controller skins that control the appearance of the playback controls for video. If you have other controller skins from Flash projects saved as swf files, you can use them in InDesign. For example, if you own Flash Professional, you can find 27 additional controller skins here: Adobe Flash CS5/Common/Configuration/ FLVPlayback Skins/ActionScript 3.0 When youve found them, you can put these (or other) controller skins here: Mac: Applications/Adobe InDesign CS5/Presets/ multimedia/FLVPlayback Skins Windows: Program Files (x86)/Adobe/Adobe InDesign CS5/Presets/multimedia/FLVPlayback Skins
Audio and Video

When you place an FLV video in InDesign, you have the opportunity to specify a Poster image and a Controller skin in the Media panel. If you choose Standard for the Poster, youll see an ugly film icon appear for the poster image. If youd rather change the standard image to something else, edit the StandardMoviePoster.jpg file in Photoshop. The same can be done for audio files by editing the StandardSoundPoster.jpg file. These files are located in: Mac: Applications/Adobe InDesign CS5/Presets/ multimedia
Find/Change Queries
When you use the Find/Change command, you have the option to save your Query by clicking on the disk icon in the Find/Change dialog box. While you can specify a name for the query, you cant specify where to save the file, nor is there an export/import feature to make sharing queries easy. But you can share your Find/Change queries with others by locating and copying the xml files for your queries from one computer to the same location on another computer even crossplatform, from Mac to Windows or viceversa.
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Swatch Libraries
Do you tire of wading through a long list of color swatch systems every time you create a Pantone color with the New Color Swatch dialog box? When was the last time you used a Toyo or HKS color? By moving some files to a subfolder, you can make the color swatching systems you use every day appear at the top of the list (Figure 4). To do so, first open: Mac: Applications/Adobe InDesign CS5/Presets/ Swatch Libraries Windows: Program Files (x86)/Adobe/Adobe InDesign CS5/Swatch Libraries Either remove the .acb files for the swatching systems that you never use, or put them in a subfolder named Less used. This will group them at the bottom of the list.
your computer, so you can find and copy this file to the same location on another computer. For this to work, both computers must have all of the fonts referenced by the Glyph Set installed. Any Glyph Sets you create are stored in: Mac: Users/YourHomeFolder/Library/ Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version 7.0/en_ US/Glyph Sets Windows: Users/YourLogin/AppData/Roaming/ Adobe/InDesign/Version 7.0/en_US/Glyph Sets Even though the Glyph Sets file doesnt have an xml extension, it is an editable xmlfile.
Figure 4: By moving a few files, you can sort your frequently used color swatch systems to the top of the list (right).
New Page Sizes

The New Page Sizes.xml file is where InDesign stores custom page sizes. If youve added custom page sizes to the Page Size list in the New Document dialog box (you can do this by choosing Custom Page Size from the
Glyph Sets
The Glyphs panel lets you create named Glyph sets that can store frequently
accessed characters. Theres no interface for sharing these glyph sets between users or computers, but InDesign saves these sets to
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Page Size pop-up menu), you can copy these settings to another computer by copying thisfile. Mac: Users/YourHomeFolder/Library/ Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version 7.0/en_ US/Page Sizes Windows: Users/YourLogin/AppData/ Roaming/Adobe/InDesign/Version 7.0/en_US/ Page Sizes
Mac: Hard drive/Library/Application Support/ Adobe /Templates/en_US/InDesign/6.0 Windows: Program Files/Common Files/Adobe/ Templates/en_US/InDesign/6.0
Explore!
As you can see, InDesign scatters a lot of files around on your hard drive. Knowing where these files live, what theyre for, and how to use them to your advantage can come in handy. Happy exploring!
Templates
InDesign CS3 and CS4 had a New > Document from Template command that would launch Bridge and display several dozen templates to choose from. This command, and the associated templates, didnt ship with CS5. If you have ever had CS3 or CS4 installed on your computer, you can get at these templates with any version of InDesign. Find the templates buried here:
Keith Gilbert has worked as an independent consultant and educator in the design industry for 25 years for clients such as Apple, Adobe, Best Buy, Cargill, General Mills, Lands End, Medtronic, Target and the United Nations. He is an Adobe Certified Instructor in InDesign, InCopy, Illustrator, Photoshop and Acrobat, and the Chapter Representative for the Minneapolis InDesign User Group. You can read his Tips & Techniques Blog at blog.gilbertconsulting.com.
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InStep: Data Merge
By Michael Murphy
unlike jumbo shrimp, the phrase data-driven design is not an oxymoron. Combining the organization and structure of a spreadsheet or database with the typographic and layout power of indesign can generate great-looking informational design in a handful of simple steps.
Data and design might seem like strange bedfellows, but with a little InDesign know-how, you can combine the two to achieve layouts that are effective and informativeand do so surprisingly fast. For example, I recently used InDesigns built-in Data Merge to bring a modest spreadsheet to visual life (and get around the limitations of Table and Cell Styles), saving a tremendous amount of time in the process. This layout, which I created for Inbound Logistics magazine, originated as a spreadsheet of data compiled about the strengths and weaknesses of locations around the world for companies to consider setting up logistics operations. The spreadsheet (Figure 1) contained valuable, wellresearched information that warranted a presentation more interesting than a mere table. Instead, I
Designing with Data
Figure 1: The Excel spreadsheet from which this project started has valuable information but no visual appeal.
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InStep: Data Merge
chose to produce individual tables for each country, including an image of its flag, and distribute those tables across several spreads against a map backdrop (Figure 2). Although the end results were impressive, the Data Merge part didnt vary at all from any textbook Data Merge. Lets take a high-level look at that process.
Figure 2: With the help of Data Merge, I generated 24 of these complex tables from the spreadsheet data, then used them throughout this multi-page magazine layout.
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InStep: Data Merge
1. Understand the Components
There are two things you need for an InDesign data merge: an InDesign document, and a data source file. The InDesign document is where you design static page elements and establish data placeholders in preparation for the merge. The data source is a tab- or comma-delimited file (most commonly saved from a spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel or from a database). From these two, a new merged InDesign document is produced that incorporates the information from your data source into your design (Figure 3).
Figure 3: The Data Merge workflow requires a data source linked to an interim InDesign document with data placeholders, from which another merged document is generated.
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data data data data data data data data data
data data data data data data data data data
2. Plan, Design, and Decide
This isnt, technically, an InDesign step. Its a combination of sketching, trial-and-error, problem-solving, and decision-making that gives you a concrete goal to shoot for. What matters most is that you have a final design planned out and a data merge source that is ready to generate multiple iterations exactly the way you want. After youve run the data merge, any adjustments you make will need to be done object-by-object. You want to avoid that additional work, or keep it to a minimum. So its worth taking a step back to be sure everythings thought through before you start. In my layout, each countrys data was presented in
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InStep: Data Merge
a complex table that included other tables anchored within it as anchored objects, as well as anchored text frames and images, and multiple paragraph styles. The tables were so precisely formatted that they were beyond the practical capabilities of InDesigns Table and Cell Styles feature, so I opted to create one perfect table as a basis for the others (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Using text for one countrys data copied and pasted from the original spreadsheet, all of the design choices and practical considerationsavailable space, arrangement of individual pieces of data, etc.were first rendered in black-and-white to speed up the process, then I added color. With the aesthetic choices decided and applied up front, the rest was in the hands of Data Merge.
3. Start with the Data
You cant put data placeholders into your InDesign document unless you have a data source, so lets start there. Ill assume you received an Excel document as your data source. Excel is the ideal environment for sorting and organizing data until youre ready to hand it off to InDesign. There are only two absolute rules you must follow to make a data source InDesign-ready: It must have a header row. All image files the data source refers to (see step 4) must be at their specified location.
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InStep: Data Merge
Beyond that, InDesign is pretty flexible. For example, youre not required to use all the data in the source file. You may link to data from a 20-column spreadsheet, but if there are columns of data you dont need, just dont create placeholders for that data in your layout. Also, your spreadsheet can contain blank cells (a.k.a. empty fields) if theres no relevant data for any one item. InDesign even offers options for handling empty fields (see step 10).
4. Identify your Image

References
Figure 5: References to images in an Excel spreadsheet require the full image file path and an @ symbol at the beginning of the column header name.
InDesigns Data Merge isnt just a mail merge with better typography. You can also use it to include any type of image you could manually place in a layout. All you need to do is identify the full path to the image file in your data source. On the Mac, this could be something like Macintosh HD:userfolder:Projects:Client Name:Images:imagename.psd. Windows users should replace the colons in that example with backslashes (i.e., C:\userfolder\Projects\Client Name\Images\imagename.psd). To tell InDesign that a column contains image references, add the @ symbol at the beginning of the column header (e.g., @photo). Unfortunately, if you type this in Excel, it will think youre creating a formula (and complain that youre doing it wrong), so you need to type an apostrophe () before the @ symbol. When you hit Enter, or tab out of that cell, the apostrophe wont be visible, but Excel will accept the @ in the header cell, and InDesign will have what its looking for as an identifier of image references (Figure 5).
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InStep: Data Merge
5. Save as Tab- or CommaDelimited
Before a spreadsheet can be used by InDesign, it needs to be saved as either a tab-delimited (.txt) or comma-delimited (.csv) file. You can save a tab-delimited version from Excel by choosing Save As, then selecting Text (Tab delimited) from the Format pull-down menu in the Save As dialog, but youll be confronted by up to 8 export dialogs and cautionary alerts. I prefer a quicker method: Select all of the data from your Excel spreadsheet (including the column headers), copy it, paste it into any plain-text editor, and save it as a .txt file. If you need or prefer to go the CSV route (it makes no difference to InDesign), choose Save As in Excel, then CSV (comma-delimited) from the Format pull-down. Once your datas in one of those Data Merge-friendly formats, you need to connect it to your InDesign file. With your InDesign data template file open, go to Window > Utilities > Data Merge (CS5 and 5.5) or Window > Automation > Data Merge (CS4 and earlier) to access the Data Merge panel. From the panels flyout menu, choose Select Data Source, then navigate to and select the tab- or comma-delimited file you created in the previous step. Once imported, your data source files column headers appear as a list in the Data Merge panel (Figure 6). Text-based data appears with a T icon next to the header name, and image references (any column beginning with the @ symbol) have a picture icon next to them.
6. Link Your InDesign
Document to Your Data
Figure 6: The Data Merge panel reflecting the column headers of the data source file. Note the image icon next to the Flag Art Item.
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InStep: Data Merge
7. Add Data Placeholders
In your layout, replace any temporary text you may have used in your template with a placeholder from the Data Merge panel (Figure 7). To do this, either select a column header name from the Data Merge panel and drag it into a text or graphic frame, or put your cursor in the appropriate place in a frame, then click on the column header name in the Data Merge panel. Placeholders appear as the data sources column header name, surrounded by pairs of angle brackets, in whatever style youve applied in your layout.
Figure 7: The table shell with data placeholders added. Red dots appear where the placeholder name is treated as overset text because its name is longer than the data that will ultimately appear in the cell. The labels for the data (GDP, Exports, etc.) are static elements that are common to all tables. Note the <<FLAG ART>> placeholder in the graphic frame where the flag will go.
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InStep: Data Merge
8. Clear the Decks
InDesign can do a single-record or multiple-record data merge. The former creates a new page for each record in the data source file; the latter fits as many records as it can on one page before creating another page. To be able to produce a multiple-record layout, you must follow a few rules about how you set up your interim InDesign document for the merge.: A multiple-record data merge can only be produced from a single-page InDesign document. Having two or more pages restricts data merge to single-record mode. Everything on the document pageeven if it has no data placeholders in itwill be duplicated in the merge process. If the other objects on your page prevent more than one record from fitting (such as a big background image), Data Merge will behave as if its producing a single-record layout because the document cant accommodate more than one record per page. So, If there are page elements you want on the page that dont need to be part of the merge, move them to the master page. To test your success with the set-up process, check the Preview box at the bottom of the Data Merge panel (Figure 8). InDesign then temporarily replaces the placeholders you added with the information from the first record (row) in your data source. You can click the forward and back arrows at the bottom of the
Figure 8: The Data Merge panels Preview checkbox lets you swap out placeholders for actual data prior to creating the merged document. The numeric field allows you to jump to any record (row) in the data source file and preview its data in the layout.
9. Preview Your Results
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InStep: Data Merge
Figure 9: A record previewed using the Data Merge panels Preview feature. All data fits in the allotted space even though the placeholders didnt.
Data Merge panel to preview each record (Figure 9) and check for problems, copyfitting issues, etc. This is particularly important in a table-based layout like this because overset text in a table just disappears. Since data length can vary, you want to be sure that a tablebased design will accommodate the longest possible instance of any data element. If you plan to create multiple records per page, as I did, youll need to go beyond the Preview checkbox and choose Create Merged Document from the panel menu. In the Records Tab of the Create Merged Document dialog (Figure 10), change the default from Single Record to Multiple Records, and select the Preview Multiple Record Layout checkbox.
Figure 10: Multiple records previewed from the Records tab of the Create Merged Document dialog. With the default settings, only six instances of the country data tables can fit on this page. The frame containing the blue background on the page is on the master page, so its not a factor in the merge process.
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InStep: Data Merge
If the multiple record layout needs tweakingto fit more records on a page, add or remove space between records, etc.switch to the Multiple Record Layout tab. There, you can adjust margins, space between columns, space between rows, and indicate whether the layout builds Rows First (across, then down) or Columns First (down, then across). By adjusting my margins and column spacing (Figure 11), I was able to fit nine country tables on a page instead of six. I ultimately moved them around in a more free-form fashion in the final layout, but for something like a yearbook where the number and arrangement of records per page is essential, these controls make adjustments simple and immediate.
Figure 11: In the dialogs Multiple Record Layout tab, I adjusted margin settings to fit three tables across the page, resulting in a grid of nine tables per page.
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InStep: Data Merge
10. Set Additional Options
The Options tab of the Create Merged Document dialog allows you to establish frame fitting and centering options for the images imported during the merge (Figure 12). You can also opt to have InDesign remove blank lines where theres a placeholder, but no data (a blank cell) for that placeholder in a given record. Theres also an option for setting a cap on the number of records the merged document can contain. Once that limits reached, additional documents will be created containing the remaining records up to that perdocument limit. So, if your data source contains 200 records, and you set a 50-record limit, four merged documents will be created.
Figure 12: Additional controls in the Options tab include frame fitting, and a means for splitting the merged document into multiple documents by setting a maximum record amount per document. For this project, I opted to have my flag images fill their frames proportionally and be centered within those frames. Note that this setting applies to all images that are part of the data merge.
11. Create the Merged

Document
Clicking OK in the Create Merged Document dialog both commits your settings and produces the final InDesign document (as yourfilename-1.indd). Unless you need to run the merge again, youre finished working with the interim document where you did all of your set-up. (Its a good idea to save that file, though, in case the data changes and you need to merge again.) In the new, merged document, there is no longer a link to the data source file. All of the data brought in during the merge process becomes static text within the InDesign file. If your design calls for each record to appear on a defined grid, youre done. However, for this project, Data Merge was the most efficient way to create 24 complex, identically structured and formatted tables, which I then manually moved around in a layout with map backgrounds. As a final step, I customized some table attributes individually to better
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InStep: Data Merge
Figure 13: A single page and a spread from the final layout. I added the maps and introductory text to the merged document and arranged the tables accordingly. I also did a little color customization (not possible with Data Merge) to match the country colors on the map.
connect them to the maps, and I added introductory text for each region (Figure 13). But that was all fine-tuning, and I could spend the time doing that because using Data Merge for the heavy lifting saved me hours of potentially painstaking work.
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InStep: Data Merge
Everywhere you look, theres no escaping how data-driven our world is becoming. All that data, in theory, is making our lives easier, more informed, and everything more immediate. But data Is only as good as how you present it. Using InDesigns Data Merge, you can take advantage of all of the benefits of structured data and transform into great-looking layouts.
Michael Murphy is a graphic designer, author of Adobe InDesign CS4 Styles: How to Create Better, Faster Text and Layouts, co-author of Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium CS5 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques, author of the Lynda.com course InDesign CS4: Learning GREP, and the creator of theindesigner.com podcast and blog.
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InType: Wish List
By nigel French
The Impossible Dream?
Even in indesign, theres a long and winding road to type utopia.

As I write this Im at the Print & ePublishing Conference in Washington, D.C., which has been an inspiring few days. Rubbing shoulders with so many passionate and talented InDesign users has got me thinking about how to make InDesign better. Im not talking about overarching improvements that redefine the very notion of what publishing is, but rather of small, sometimes cosmetic, often simple type-related improvements. Visionary? NoIm more concerned with improving and consolidating what we already have. As the Creative Suite has evolved, InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop have all become more streamlined as they learn from each other. With similar interfaces, we can now bop back and forth between applications without missing a beat. That said, there are several relevant Illustrator and Photoshop features that InDesign has yet to incorporate. Of course, InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator are different animals, designed for different purposes, but theres a tremendous amount of overlap, especially in their typographic features, so it makes sense to bring all the typographic capabilities of the Creative Suite under one umbrella, namely InDesign. Lets start with the Illustrator features Id like InDesign to adopt. Illustrator Features Id like in InDesign Im not saying InDesign should try to outvector Illustrator, but sometimes, especially
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InType: Wish List
Figure 2: Can InDesign have these, too?
if Ive recently been working in Illustrator, I find InDesign a bit lacking. For example, wouldnt it be nice there were a Make Guides feature? That way we could turn a rectangle, a circle, or a series of radiating lines into guides. There are workarounds and I know there are scripts, but I want to be able to select an object and with one keystroke convert it to a non-printing guides. And while InDesign has excellent support for guides, what with Create Guides, Baseline grids, Smart Guides, etc., theyre all rectilinear and the world isnt always rectangular shaped. Sometimes we want a radial alignmenta clock
Figure 1: The ability to radiate spokes around a circle and then convert them to guides would make using a radial grid, as in this discography, much easier.
face, for exampleor to align elements to guides drawn at a specific angle of rotation, such as with a diagram or flowchart (Figure 1). My second request relates to color. If youve seen Kuler, you probably felt it was the coolest thing since Keyboard Cat. Its great that theres Kuler support in InDesign, but whats missing is the ability to create color groups on InDesigns Swatches panel. After all, Kuler generates themes of related colors, so its natural that wed want to keep these colors together. Im not asking for the full-blown wizardry of Illustrators Live Color, just the ability to create folders on the Swatches panel (Figure 2), like we already have for organizing Paragraph and Character Styles in InDesign. And what about those type warping options? Illustrator has them. Photoshop has them: Rise, Wave, Arch, Arc, etc. Why not InDesign? I know they can look cheesy, but sometimes, used discerningly, theyre just
the solution we need for a title treatment (Figure 3). And if Adobe is going to trust us with the Shear tool, then surely we can be trusted with Warp tools, too.
Figure 3: Sometimes you want to warp it. This example uses Arch.
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InType: Wish List

Figure 5: This mock-up is how it might look if we could globally set the casing of heads and subheads.
Photoshop Features Id Like in InDesign Photoshops type features are modest compared to InDesigns, and yet Photoshop has a couple of things that InDesign could benefit from. Have you ever scrubbed (dragged) over the Set Font Size icon to scale your text in Photoshop? Arent scrubby sliders great? Of course, we already have several ways to scale our text in InDesign, but theres always room for more, especially when sizing display type (Figure 4). And what about those Effects? I love that we have live effects like Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Bevel and Emboss, etc., in InDesign, but when Layer Effects were ported over from Photoshop, Adobe forgot a few things. Wouldnt it be nice if we could
Figure 4: It would be convenientand coolif we could size out type dynamically, the way we can in Photoshop.
add a texture or apply a Pattern Overlay, or emboss a stroke? Ventura Publisher Features Id Like in InDesign!? If youre old enough to remember Ventura Publisher, then youre showing your age. Ventura (may it rest in peace) was a beast after using it everything seemed easy by comparisonbut it did have some fantastic features. For example, you could select non-contiguous paragraphs and apply a Paragraph Style to them all with a single click. Hold down the Shift key, click on the paragraphs you need to stylemaybe all the subheads in your publication across multiple pagesone click and theyre styled. I know we have the Eyedropper, I know we have GREP Styles, Find/Change, but theyre not them same. By the way, Ventura had this feature in 1987! Another feature Ventura users took for granted was the ability to set the casing
options for a style. And I dont mean just ALL CAPS or Small Caps, but the option to choose Title Case. (You can apply these manually, but I want to do it in a paragraph style.) Even better would be the option to exclude articles and prepositions or have Sentence Case (Down Style) casing, where only the first character is capped. This would make styling headlines and subheads faster and more consistent (Figure 5). Of course, just like Balance Ragged Lines, it wouldnt be foolproof and we shouldnt relinquish responsibility for checking our heads and subheads for stylistic consistency, but it would relieve us of a lot of
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InType: Wish List

Let Adobe Know What You Want drudgery. InDesigns Change Case feature is frankly a bit rubbish because theres no way to make the changes globally, in a style. And on the subject of Paragraph Styles, wouldnt it be nice to be able to print out the spec of our styles? And Some Miscellaneous Stuff My humble list isnt just about incorporating useful stuff from other programs. Have you ever hunted for a character in the Glyphs panel and felt like youd have more chance of finding your missing sock in the tumble dryer? Wouldnt it be great if the Character Viewer (Mac)/Character Map (Windows) were combined with the Glyphs panel? That way you could select a glyph to get feedback on the key combination required to input it, or press a key combination to see what glyph that would give you. On the subject of glyphs, how great would it be if we could save our own custom glyphsas typeto our custom Glyph sets? No more clunky inline graphics, but rather, we could make the company logo, our end of article ornaments, our custom bullets, into a typeface: type characters that would be part of the text flow. If youve used Text Variables, youll know how useful they are for running headers or footers. Youve probably also run into their shortcoming: Since theyre regarded as a single character, they wont break at the end of a line, but rather scrunch up the text in a very unattractive way. In a similar vein, it would be great if Section markers could incorporate Character Styles. Captions, Live and static, were interesting additions to CS5, but theres a limited choice of where the caption goes: above or below or left or right of the image in a text frame that is the width or height of the object. What if you want the caption in a specific frame thats less than 100% of the width of the picture frame? And then there are footnotes Its a well-documented shortcoming of InDesigns footnotes that they dont span If you have a feature request for InDesign, you can make it here: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/ mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform or on this new site: http://indesign.uservoice.com
multi-column text frames. And dont get me started on endnotesInDesign doesnt even know what they are. These and other limitations provide opportunities for plug-in developers, many of whom do a fantastic job, but wouldnt it be nice if they were fully incorporated into the base version of InDesign? Enough of the griping. InDesign: I love you and its only because I care that I criticize.
Nigel French is a graphic designer, photographer, author, and teacher living in Brighton, UK. He is the author of InDesign Type and Photoshop Unmasked, both from Adobe Press, as well as several titles for the Lynda.com online training library.
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InTips: PepCon Comes to You
By david Blatner
For everyone who couldnt attend the indesignsecrets 2011 Print & ePublishing Conference, some of the speakers share their tips and techniques.
In case you hadnt noticed, the publishing industry is in a period of rapid change and massive upheaval. If youre not already doing two or more peoples jobs, plus being asked to create both print and interactive versions of your documents, then count yourself luckybut know that its coming soon. I believe the only way to survive these days is to plug in to the Community. After all, no one can know everything anymore. Youre already plugging in by reading InDesign Magazine, where top-notch experts share their tips and techniques. But theres nothing like a face-to-face event to get the inspirational juices flowing, learn a huge amount in a short time, and network with colleagues who are battling on the same shifting ground as you. With that in mind, the 2011 Print & ePublishing Conference was an extraordinary event for InDesign users. Im biased, of course, as I was the co-creator and co-host (with Anne-Marie Concepcin), and because InDesign Magazine was a primary sponsor. But the greatest value of the event was the collection of 20+ presenters, who brought
Get a Taste of What You Missed
Figure 1: 400 people from around the world converged in Washington, D.C., for the Print & ePublishing Conference. Here, Adobe Senior Product Manager for InDesign Chris Kitchener asks a question of the audience. Photo courtesy: Jim Beales.
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years of expertise and enthusiasm to share with everyone. As a subscriber, youre likely familiar with many of those names, including Keith Gilbert, Russell Viers, Nigel French, Diane Burns, James Fritz, Mike Rankin, Gabriel Powell, Steve Werner, Claudia McCue, Mordy Golding, Michael Ninness, and Cari Jansen. (You can see a full list of the speakers here.) Its hard to capture the myriad tips from the conference sessions in an article, so instead I asked all the speakers for a tip or two that they wanted to share with you. Here are some of my favorites. Notes on Frames You can insert notes in textand manage them with the Notes panel. But what if you want to add notes to objects, as well? Use the Script Label panel: Select any object on a page, and then enter your note for that object in the Script Label panel. Of course, this panel was never intended for this purpose, but that
shouldnt get in your way if it works for you! Michael Ninness I Need My Space(bar) In CS5 or later, select several ungrouped objects and start dragging a selection handle. Hold down the spacebar and InDesign distributes objects in the direction you drag instead of scaling them (Figure 1). Hold down Option-Spacebar, and the distribution pivots from the center of the selected objects!
Figure 1
Heres one that works in all version of InDesign: You can reposition an object while youre drawing out a frame. Dont release the mouse button! Just hold down the spacebar and drag the object to a new position. Then release the spacebar and finish drawing the object. Claudia McCue Finding Inspiration With any new design project, its tempting to go directly to the computer, but often its more productive to take a step back and do some research. Pretty much anything we design has been done before in some form. Rather than reinvent the wheel, take inspiration (and caution) from how other designers have tackled similar design problems. Subscribe to design magazines and blogs, collect samples of good (and bad) design, build a library of design anthologies and history books. Our predecessors
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may have used different tools but design principles havent changed. Book design, magazine design, CD cover design, poster design, logo designyou name it, they all have a rich history, much of it documented in print and online. Think about how classic designs might have been executed if their creators had had InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator and about what makes a design successfulor not. Studying design styles is also an excellent way to develop your own. Nigel French Use Hard Light One of my favorite transparency blending modes for creating realistic effects is Hard Light. It gives you a greater range of tones than you can get with Overlay or Soft Light, and its less prone to blowing out highlights or plugging shadows like Color Dodge and Color Burn will. One fun trick you can do with Hard Light is to simulate scotch tape. Start with a rectangle in the shape of a strip
Figure 2
of tape. Fill it with 20% black in the Swatches panel and set it to Hard Light in the Effects panel. You might need to reduce the opacity a bit, too. Now give it a very small drop shadow directly behind (with a Distance of zero or one) and voila: tape (Figure 2)! Mike Rankin
Scale Frame and Content to Specific Measurement Value Say you have a frame that is five inches wide, and you want to scale it and the picture inside the frame down to three inches wide. You probably know you can change the width and height of any selected object to any specific value by entering the desired
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measurement into the Width and Height fields in the Control panel. However, that only changes the width and height of the selected frame, or the selected image within a framenot both at the same time. If you use the Scale X and/or Scale Y fields in the Control panel, you do scale both the frame and its image simultaneously, but you have to do the math because the Scale X and Scale Y fields use percentages by default. Dont want to do the math? You dont have to. Simply enter 3 in into the Scale X field. Michael Ninness The Incredible Growing Text Frame Need a text frame that grows or shrinks depending on the amount of text it contains? Try a one cell table. You can turn off the strokes, add a fill, and text inset. As long as the row height is set to At least (the default), the cell will change height according to the amount of text within (Figure 3). Diane Burns
View a Story in Multiple Windows InDesign lets you view one document in multiple windows. When working on a long, text-heavy document, it can difficult to judge the effect of text changes on pages that appear later in the document. For
example, in a book or multiple-page article, you may want to adjust the text early in the story to shorten the story by a few lines. By viewing the document in two separate windows, you can adjust the text in one window and use a second window to see the effect
Figure 3
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your text changes are having at the end of the story. To get a second window, choose Window > Arrange > New Window. Jay Nelson Preview Your Folio After creating an interactive document with the Overlay Creator, test it before you download it onto your tablet. To test your open document, choose File > Folio Preview. Or, to preview the entire folio, click on the preview link at the bottom of the Folio Builder Panel after you selecting your folio. James Fritz Two Ways to Handle CSS When exporting your InDesign composition to HTML for the Web (File > Export, then set Format to HTML), InDesign CS5.5 creates a list of CSS styles that appears in the Head section of the HTML file with style declarations (attributes). If the Include Style Definitions checkbox is selected in the
Advanced area of the HTML Export dialog, InDesign will actually attempt to match the attributes of the InDesign text formatting with CSS equivalents (Figure 4)! However, if this option is deselected, the HTML file includes empty declarations that can later be customized with a CSS editor like Dreamweaver CS5.5. Jerry Silverman Align Left Edge of Drop Caps Often, when you create a drop cap in InDesign, the left edge of the character is not perfectly aligned with the left edge of the text frame. Some folks still use this old and painful trick: Insert a white space character in front of the drop cap and then manually add negative kerning to it. Ick! Instead, simply choose the Align Left Edge option in the Drop Caps and Nested Styles section in Paragraph Style Options. (Note: This is now enabled by default in CS5.) Michael Ninness
Figure 4
Articles That Dont Export In InDesign CS 5.5, the new Articles Panel is a great new way to control the order of your content when exporting to ePub. But what if you have elements on your page
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that you want in the Articles panel, but dont want to be included in the ePub? One option is to click on the Create New Article button at the bottom of the panel; give it a name; and then make sure to deselect the Include Article checkbox (Figure 5). Any elements that you add to this particular Article will effectively be ignored when exporting to ePub. Ron Bilodeau
Figure 5
Use a Custom Dictionary A custom dictionary is a great way to ensure consistent spelling of technical jargon for specific projects. To create a custom dictionary, choose Preferences > Dictionary, and click on the New User Dictionary icon. Give the dictionary a name, and store it anywhere youd like. When you want to add a selected word to the custom dictionary, choose Edit > Spelling > Dictionary. Then, be sure to change the Target pop-up menu from the default User Dictionary to your custom user dictionary before adding your word. Be careful: If you add several words throughout a work session, and then InDesign crashes, youll lose all the words youve added in that session, even if youve been saving your InDesign file along the
way. Curiously, InDesign doesnt actually write the words youve added to the custom user dictionary file until you quit InDesign. So save and quit every so often! Keith Gilbert The Spelling Menu Sometimes you know a word is misspelled, but youre not sure how to spell it correctly. With Dynamic Spelling enabled (Preferences > Spelling > Enable Dynamic Spelling), you can right-click on a flagged word to choose from a contextual menu of suggested corrections. Mike Rankin Lines with Strokes? Youve turned a line into an arrow using InDesigns Strokes panel. But perhaps you cant see the arrow clearly over a dark background and you want to add a small white outline. Unfortunately you cant add two stroke colors to one object in InDesign. So
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Figure 6
lets cheat a little and add an Outer Glow effect instead! This creates the appearance of a dual stroke (Figure 6). Youll probably want to set the blending mode to Normal and Opacity to 100%. To remove the fuzzy edge on the glow, change the Spread value to 100%. Cari Jansen Font Identifiers A client gives you a newspaper ad from five years ago and wants you to match the font they used. Thank goodness there are free online tools that help you identify a font from a sample! Here are four I like: FontIdentifier Identifont WhatTheFont (free iPhone app, too!) www.whatfontis.com One nice feature of the last one is that you can tell it to list only free fonts, commercial fonts, or both. Also useful: it provides a long list of alternate fonts, so if you have
a font you like, but want a slightly different one, you may find an acceptable option in the list of results. Jay Nelson
Add One Color You can add colors from another file to the Swatches panel by choosing Load Swatches on the panels flyout menu. But what if you
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Figure 7
Guide to Folding Types
Within the eight broad folding families there are dozens of variations of styles, some simple and others as complicated as origami. Shown here is a sampler of styles, color-coded by family and ranked in terms of complexity. Although there are too many variables to provide a reliable cost comparison, it can generally be assumed that the more difficult the fold, the longer the production time and greater the cost. For a detailed explanation of all folding styles within each folding family and how the folds are achieved, we recommend the book, FOLD: The Professionals Guide to Folding, available from foldfactory.com. Front Opening Triple Parallel Level 3 Letter into Roll Level 3 L-Cross Specialty Back Opening Double Parallel with Outside Short Fold Level 2 4-Page Standard Level 1 Reverse Accordion with Fold-in Level 2 Double Gate Level 3 Letter Fold Level 1 Double Parallel into Double Parallel Level 2
want to add just one color? Choose New Color Swatch. Under the Color Mode menu, choose Other Library (Figure 7), then select the file containing the colors you want to add. The colors from the file will show up as
Figure 7
individual swatches that you can add one by one to your current file. Diane Burns Free Scoring & Folding Guide Sappi Fine Paper is offering their free The Standard No. 4, Scoring & Folding, which features examples of folded printed projects, along with tons of tips and techniques for achieving optimum results when designing print projects for scoring and folding. The book includes a wall-size poster (Figure 7) featuring all of the folding families at a glance. The Standard is also a three-dimensional folding demonstration in itself. As an educational reference tool for designers and printers, The Standard provides invaluable technical and creative knowledge to take optimum advantage of the unique possibilities that printing provides. Click here to find it. Jay Nelson
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Vertical Letter with Exposed Flap Level 1
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Front-Opening Double Parallel Level 1
Tent with Short Fold Level 1
2-Story Map Level 3
Asymmetrical Roll Level 3
8-Page Broadside Level 1
Semi-Gate Level 3
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Front-Opening Triple Parallel Accordion Level 2
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Angled Accordion Level 2
Iron Cross Fold Specialty
Reverse Roll with Short Inside Fold Level 2
Checkbook Specialty
Accordion into Accordion Level 2
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Triangle Specialty
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Roll Fold Level 1
Gate Fold Level 3
Gate into Double Parallel Specialty
Wrapped Accordion Level 3
3-Story Map Level 3
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Letter into Accordion Level 3
Double Parallel with Center Fold Level 2
Open Gate Specialty
Broadside Letter Level 2
Accordion with Fold-In Level 2
Box Top Specialty Folding Families
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Accordion Family Basic Family Exotic Family Gate Family Map Family Parallel Family Poster Family Roll Family
Fold Complexity Levels Level 1 standard, easy set
Accordion Level 1
Corner Folder Specialty
10-page Parallel Level 3
Gate into Gate Level 3
Vertical Semi-Gate with Center Fold Level 3
up on the folding machine, fast machine running speed. Level 2 moderate makeready, possibly slower folding machine speed, some special considerations. Level 3 longer and more
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Double Accordion Map Level 3
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difficult makeready, possibly requires special machinery, slower folding speed, need for greater bindery expertise. Specialty unconventional, possibly involves hand-folding, special equipment, processes and considerations, extra
Double Parallel Gate Level 3
Accordion with Outside Short Fold Level 2
Broadside Vertical Roll Level 2
4-page Pop-up Specialty
production time, may require services of a specialty bindery.

OP U S WE B MATTE TE XT 6 0 L B
Folding styles presented on this poster are from the FOLDRite system. To learn more about FOLDRite, visit www.foldfactory.com/what_is_foldrite
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Let InDesigns Help Help You Get in the habit of looking for subtle help prompts within InDesign. For example, when you hover over the yellow Live Corner diamonds in the corners of a frame, InDesign displays a tool tip that reads, Drag to set corner size. Opt-click to change shape. (Press Shift to change one corner.) Similarly, hovering over the icons at the bottom of the Links panel displays all kinds of useful information, such as how many missing links, how many unique links, keyboard shortcuts, and more. Certain panelssuch as the Data Merge panel, the Object States panel, and the Articles panel
(the last one is new in InDesign CS5.5)will under certain conditions offer helpful hints right on the face of the panel. The ultimate helper, of course, is the Tool Hints panel (Window > Utilities > Tool Hints). Keith Gilbert Kill the Stroke! Did you just draw a rectangle and end up with a stroke on it that you didnt want? You can quickly change the fill and stroke attributes of any selected frame by pressing the following keys: Press the X key to toggle between the Stroke and Fill attributes. Press Shift-X and the fill color and stroke color will
swap places. The comma key (,) applies the default color to the fill/stroke; the period key (.) applies the default gradient to the fill/ stroke; and the forward slash key (/) sets the current fill/stroke to None. These shortcuts work in Illustrator, as well. Michael Ninness
David Blatner is the Editorial Director of InDesign Magazine and the co-host of InDesignSecrets.com. Please see this page for detailed bios of each of these speakers.
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InDesigner: Lost in London
lost in london
lucy scott Editor tina smith Designer Contact: http://www.lostinlondonmagazine.com
By Pamela Pfiffner
Londons publishing scene, like the city itself, is a study in contrasts: edgy graphics and elegant design, brash editorial and refined discourse, sensational journalism and discreet observation. The newsstands are crammed with magazines and newspapers that reflect the citys vibrant urban culture. But into this publishing cacophony comes a new magazine with a different mission. Lost in London celebrates the citys quiet side by exposing readers to the rural pleasures hidden within its urban confines.
Lost in London was created by editor Lucy Scott and designer Tina Smith, who had met while working together for the trade publication Property Week Global. The idea for the magazine came when the two womenboth of whom have extensive publishing experiencediscovered they shared a love of the English countryside. There is plenty of media about both the glitzy and gritty sides to London, but we felt there was another way of looking at our city,
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Smith says. What we call London was not so long ago countryside dotted with villages, and still today we have an abundance of open space, wildlife, rivers, and ponds. Scott and Smith saw an opportunity to capture the attention of Londoners who are rediscovering the citys traditions while exploring new ways of living. We have markets hundreds of years old where butchers are still busy making Cumberland sausages, Smith says. We have a growing craft movement, and more and more Londoners are growing their own vegetables. We wanted Lost in London to filter out the drudgery of commuter life and show Londoners how they can live simply in the city. Launched in October 2010, Lost in London is published quarterly, in sync with the seasons. The magazines look and feel is designed to underscore its connection to the natural world. The design is supposed to reinforce an old-fashioned, more rural way of life, Smith says. The images are big
Lost in London is a magazine for city-dwelling country-lovers, says designer Tina Smith. The cover illustration reflects the changing seasons set against the backdrop of iconographic London buildings, such as Big Ben, the Millennium Wheel, and the OXO Tower.
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tap the thumbnails below to view the other pages in this article
and luxurious and the paper stock is recycled and heavy. Because its design intentionally evokes a quieter, simpler era, Lost in London doesnt make use of InDesigns more complex features. But with the magazines focus on beautiful photography and illustration, Smith relies heavily on InDesigns fluid interaction with the other Creative Suite applications. Being able to open linked files directly into Photoshop from InDesign is a godsend and saves no end of time trawling through my disorganized folders of images, Smith says. High-resolution viewing is also really essential to us, where we often have two images with intricate paths to overlay. Basics such as typographic controls and rules options are also essential to the magazines design. Scott and Smiths hope is that Lost in Londons classic design, focused editorial, and high production values will make it a magazine to savor on a lazy Sunday
We are both country lovers at heart, Smith says. We wanted to get something else out of our city. And we found that we were not alone.
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afternoon and keep as a reference and inspiration. Stories are long and run linearly without the multiple access points of modern magazine design, Smith says. No advertising appears in the magazine. Operational costs are funded by subscriptions and newsstand sales. Lost in Londons list of resellerswhich includes organic farm stores as well as the Tate museumsunderscores the magazines visual and editorial mission. As in the United States, the publishing environment in London is shifting away from print to digital and online. But while large publishing companies scramble for revenue and readers, opportunities arise for small, independent publishers. The indie scene [in London] is really flourishing, notes Smith. Like vinyl for music lovers, printed books might not be the most widespread and convenient means of consuming, but their tactile nature make them objects to
Text continues on page 63.
Spring chickens
Hen keeping brings a bit of country life to an urban garden. But be prepared for some ups and downs, writes Sara Ward
Photographs by Adam Johann Lang
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All over London there are groups of people who are starting orchards, keeping bees and chickens, learning and teaching about our wildlife, and starting craft groups, says Smith.
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tap the thumbnails below to view the other pages in this article
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tap the thumbnails below to view the other pages
treasure. I think its another symptom of the way the nature of magazines is changing, not dying. Scott and Smith are aware of the volatility of the magazine market, however. Both of them work as freelancers, so Lost in London isnt their sole occupation or means of support. Our priority is making a great magazine, not launching a successful business, Smith says. If the demand dries up, well stop printing it. In keeping with the magazines tagline Living Simply in the City, Lost in London is swimming against the digital stream. Smith says there are no plans to create an iPad version of the magazine. She says, At the moment I think well be sticking with print.
Pamela Pfiffner is the founding editor of InDesign Magazine. Currently, she is a writer, editor, and jack-of all-publishing trades in Portland, Oregon. We were influenced by old natural history books from the 1930s, Smith says. Contemporary independent publications that celebrate more down-to-earth lifestyles also informed the design. The text face is Bembo and display faces are from the AW Conqueror family, a free font designed by Jean Francois-Porchez.
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InQuestion: Send Sandee Your Queries
By sandee Cohen
inQuestion is a regular column devoted to answering your questions about working with indesign.
Master Page Items Sneaking Through Q. I have a long, facing-pages document with seven different master pages, each set up with greeked text showing how text on that kind of page should look. When I need one of the seven types of pages, I apply the master page and override the text items to add the text in that position. But when I add a page, and the spreads repaginate, all the following pages reapply the master page items underneath the overridden items. Is there a way to stop the master pages from reapplying overridden items when I need to repaginate? I want the items that I havent overridden to move (folio, etc.) but not the overridden text. A. This is a tricky one, I agree. Theres no way to stop the master items from sneaking back onto the page if youve overridden some elements. However, I have a problem with putting the greeked text on the master to begin with. Instead of frames with greeked text, I would use guides, not text frames, to indicate where the text should go on the page. But if you must have those greeked frames, try this. Create a layer and call it Greeked Text. All the greeked frames should be on that layer. Then create another layer called Overridden Text. As you override a frame, move that frame from the greeked layer to the overridden layer.
InQuestion
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Then, when youve finished overriding the text elements, turn off the visibility of the greeked layer. That way even if the master elements do sneak back onto the page, they wont show in the final layout. I also suggest choosing Layer Options from the Layers panel menu and setting the greeked text layer to not Print as shown in Figure 1. That way even if you forget to hide the layer, it wont print.
I start the second question at 2 and reset the answers to a, b, c, and d? A. While you could manually apply a Restart to change the numbers, theres a more sophisticated method. Figure 2 is an example of what youre looking to do. Each question continues the numbering from the previous question. However, the lettering for the answers resets after each question.
In the Bullets and Numbering area of the Paragraph Styles dialog box (Figure 3, next page), set the List Type for Numbers and set the Numbering Style for 1, 2, 3, 4 You can set the options for what elements come after the number and the character style as desired. Notice that the Level is set at 1. Thats good! Lets go on to applying letters to the answers. In the Bullets and Numbering
Figure 1: The Layer Options dialog box.
Numbering Multiple-Choice Questions Q. I want to set up styles so that my multiplechoice questions are numbered 1, 2, 3, and the answers are lettered a, b, and c. Ive been able to apply the numbers and letters, but how do
Figure 2: An example of multiple-choice questions where each question continues the number of the previous question, but the answers restart their lettering.
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section, apply Numbers as the List Type, but change the Format from numbers to lowercase letters (Figure 4).
Figure 3: An example of how to apply numbers to the questions in a multiple-choice test.
Figure 5: In this example, all the numbered and lettered paragraphs numbered list that restarts after each header.
Figure 4: How to apply letters to the answers in a multiple-choice test.
If you preview this, youll see that a problem has developed (Figure 5). Instead of the
questions and answers restarting for each question, theyre all in one long sequence. Figure 6 shows the trick to make this work correctly. Set the Level for the answers to 2. The option to Restart Numbers at This Level After becomes available. Leave it as Any Previous Level. Because the answers are on a higher level than the questions, they restart to the letter
Figure 6: How to set the Level to force the answers to reset after each question.
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a. Because the Level for the questions (level 1) is lower than the level for the answers, the questions continue their sequence. But what if you want a series of steps with headers that dont have any answers, as shown in Figure 7? Set the headers as you did before, but with two important differences (Figure 8): First, set the Format for None. This makes the headers numbered lists that dont have any visible numbers. Second, set the Mode to Start at 1. This makes each header start
Tracking Changes in a Document Q. I want to use the track changes feature to keep a record of what changes Ive made to a document. But when I turn on track changes, nothing shows up on the page. Is there something special I need to do?
Figure 8: An example of how to set a header to force the renumbering
back with an invisible number 1. The steps then reset accordingly.
A. I think I have your answer, but first, lets go over some things you should do to track text changes in a document. (Note that InDesign records only the text changes in a story, not changes to layout or images.) First, you need to choose File > User and make sure you have a unique user name in the User dialog box (Figure 9). InDesign
Figure 7: An example of headers with no numbers followed by a numbered list that restarts after each header.
Figure 9: Enter your user name and color for tracking changes.
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needs to know who you are to track the changes you make in the document. You can also use the Color menu to assign a highlight color to differentiate your changes from others who work on the document. Next, open the Track Changes panel (Window > Editorial > Track Changes)
Enable/Disable Track Changes Show/Hide Track Changes
and make sure the button to Enable Track Changes is active and the button to Show Track Changes is turned on (Figure 10). Most likely, youre still not seeing any changes in your document. Thats because the track changes feature doesnt work on the layout view of the document. Switch to
the Story Editor (Edit > Edit in Story Editor) to see changes in the text (Figures 11 and 12).
Sandee Cohen is the only third-party author to have written educational materials for all versions of InDesign. Her latest books are the InDesign CS5 Visual QuickStart Guide and From Design Into Print: Preparing Graphics and Text for Professional Printing.
Figure 10: The Track Changes panel is where you can turn on the track changes feature as well as see or hide the changes.
Figure 12: The layout view of the document only shows the last edits applied to the text. Figure 11: When you view the document in the Story Editor, you can see the markups for the changes that have been applied to the text.
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InTime: Live Captions
By Pariah Burke
Heres how to label placed images with their resolution, color space, and other data.
Anyone know of an InDesign CS5 script to find the effective PPI of each image in a document, and to put that information in a label on a new layer over the image itself? Someone recently asked the above question on Twitter. When I read it, I knew precisely what script the author needed only he already owned it, and its not actually a script. Plus, this non-script that every InDesign CS5 user already owns can display not just the effective PPI (the image resolution after scaling up or down) but almost any type of information about images in the document. (If the author of the question is reading this, I apologize that I cant remember your Twitter ID.)
Figure 1: A catalog of images.
Label Placed Images in CS5
The Need Consider a layout like the one in Figure 1. Lets say that its a catalog of images produced from a particular publication, project, or folder. Along with the images themselves, you might want to see and/or print information about those images. Such information could be limited to the effective PPI (the resolution of an image as affected by its in-document scaling) as used in a particular document (Figure 2, next page) or a bevy of data about each image, such as the image color space, file name, embedded ICC profile, actual PPI (the true resolution of the linked
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file), dates of creation and modification, and much more (Figure 3). Whatever image data you need, chances are InDesign CS5.x can put it on a page for you pretty easilyand without an external script. Effective PPI Labels Getting back to the original question on Twitter, lets start by putting the effective PPI atop those images.
Figure 3: Images with several pieces of accompanying data a designer or production artist might need to know at a glance.
Figure 2: Images bearing their effective PPI values.
1. Open your document that already includes linked images. On the Layers panel, create a new layer named __Image Info or something equally distinctive. 2. If you want effective PPI to appear when you print, move on to the next step. However, if you only want to see the effective PPI onscreen without the risk of it accidentally winding up in the print or PDF output, right-click the __Image Info layer and choose Layer Options. In the Layer
Options dialog, deselect the checkbox beside the Print Layer option and click OK (Figure 4). Now, even if the layer is visible, it wont print or be in your exported PDFs (unless you force non-printing objects to print in the Print or Export to PDF dialog boxes). In the Layers panel, the names of non-printing layers appear in italic. 3. Select the first image with the black arrow Selection tool, then right-click on the image and choose Caption > Caption Setup. 4. In the Caption Setup dialog, enter Effective PPI: (including the space) in the Text Before field. Leave the Text After field blank and choose Effective PPI from
Figure 4: Setting the __Image Info layer to not print.
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near the top of the Metadata dropdown field (Figure 5). 5. By default, the images effective PPI information will appear below the image, nestled against the frames bottom edge. To make the information appear within the image instead, leave the Alignment field as Below Image, but set a negative value in the Offset fielda value of about half the height of the image. If youre
Figure 5: Choosing to display an images Effective PPI.
6.
7.
8.
9.
doing this for multiple images, try to set an Offset value to a negative of half the height of the average image (Figure 6). Optionally, set a paragraph style for the label in the corresponding field, but definitely change the Layer field to __Image Info. Thus all effective PPI labels will end up on the layer you created for that specific purpose. Dont check the Group Caption with Image box; doing so will move the images to the potentially nonprinting __Image Info layer, too. Click OK, and, voil! Not a darned thing happens. Theres one more step to expose the information you just configured. Right-click on the image once more, and head to the Caption submenu on the context-sensitive popup menu. Select Create Live Caption. Bam! Theres the Effective PPI label, in its own text frame, on the __Image Info layer. If you placed the label on top of the image, as I suggested above, you might
Figure 6: The negative Offset value will place the label over the image.
want to give its frame a fill color so that the label stands out against the picture. A little inset spacing in Text Frame Options, maybe changing the paragraph horizontal or vertical alignment, might also improve its appearance and clarity (Figure 7).
Figure 7: With a partially transparent fill, text frame insets, and rounded corners (right), the labels appearance and clarity are greatly improved from the original (left).
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10. Now that you have one image label, lets get the label onto other images, exposing their respective effective PPI values. Do not go back to Step 1. Instead, copy the label frame you just created and pastecareful to remain on the __Image Info layeratop each of the other images in your layout. You can also Option/Altdrag the label frame from one image to the next. If you have many labels to create, use Edit > Step and Repeat. The data in the label (the bit after the static Effective PPI: ) will automatically update to reflect the effective PPI of the image behind it. You wont be labeling subsequent images with the data from the first; the metadata in the labela Live Caption objectwill always be from the image it touches. You now have your images labeled with their effective resolutions. If you go back and scale those images, the label updates to reflect the new resolutions.
More Informative Information Labels To expose more information about each image, something like Figure 8, the process is identicalwith one extra step. 1. If you already have effective PPI labels on your images, remove them. Regrettably, while InDesigns Live Captions update when the image changes, they dont update when you change their definitions
Figure 8: A more detailed image label created the same way.
(for example, if you change what label it should show in Caption Setup). Instead, each change to the Caption Setup requires recreating the Live Caption object. 2. Return to the Caption Setup dialog box. Leave the bottom section options unchanged from the previous setup (unless you want to change them) and instead focus on the upper section, where you had previously defined the Text Before and Metadata comprising the effective PPI label. 3. Leave the effective PPI line alone but click the plus sign to its right to insert a new line. 4. From the Metadata field, select the information you want in your label. It can be anything from the images date of creation, modification, placement into the document, or output (of the InDesign document itself ), to the actual resolution of the original image file; the color space or ICC in the image to the transparency,
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Figure 10: The Place dialog with the Create Static Captions option enabled.
skew, or rotation transformations applied to the image; from the photo credit to the location the shot was taken (if those values were entered into the images metadata). Once youve chosen the information to expose, add a label to identify that information to the Text Before field, and, optionally, something in the Text After field (for example, PPI to communicate the measurement system). 5. Repeat the last two steps for each new piece of information you want in your
label. Each line of metadata will be output to the Live Caption object text frame as a new line, a new paragraph. Figure 9 shows the data set I configured. 6. Click OK, then generate your first label by right-clicking on an image and selecting Captions > Generate Live Caption. 7. Following the instructions in steps 9 and 10 of the previous section, style the caption text and frame, then get copies onto the other images. Automatic Labels During Place InDesign can also automatically generate the information labels at the moment you place one or more images into the document.
Figure 9: My settings for creating the more detailed image catalog label.
1. First, configure the labels you want in Caption Setup. All the options you used above are available. 2. Choose File > Place and pause in the Place dialog. Note that you must import an image through File > Place, at least the first image, rather than using any of the other methods of placing images. 3. In the Place dialog, select your desired image (or images) and check the option to Create Static Captions (Figure 10). Now click the Open button.
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4. Unless you had a frame selected already, your image(s) will create a loaded cursor. What you may not notice, though, is that images arent the only things on that loaded cursorthere is also a small bit of text. (Youll see the cursor has a small 2 on it, indicating two objects, image and text.) Place the image into the document. The cursor is still loaded with the label data you configured in Caption Setup (Figure 11). Click on the image you placed and youll drop a text frame containing that label. If you loaded multiple images for placement, each will be followed by a Live Caption object.
Figure 11: After placing the image, its static caption is also ready to place.
When using this technique, there is something very important to keep in mind: Captions created at place time are not live. Theyre static captions, meaning that, after creation, they wont update to reflect changes to linked images they describe. If the image changes, youll need to delete the automatically generated caption object and recreate it by selecting Captions > Generate Live Caption or Captions > Generate Static Caption from the context-sensitive menu or the Object menu. Exposing image data about assets in a document or library is a common need for
many creative workflows. The solution isnt a script or plug-in, but the smart use of an included feature.
Pariah S. Burke is a print & digital publishing workflow expert who trains and consults around the world as principal of Workflow:Creative. He is the author of Mastering InDesign CS5 for Print Design and Production (Sybex, 2010) and other books; the publisher of a series of creative pro Web sites, the WorkflowNetwork.com, and; host of a series of Webinars and online events that inform and empower creative professionals.
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InReview: Productivity Tool
By Bob levine
this plug-in brings Excel-like powers to indesign.

Adobe added support for creating tables in version 2.0, way back in 2002. While there have been a few improvements along the way (notably the addition of table and cell styles), the feature has essentially remained unchanged since. Most notably, tables are still static. That is, theres no feature within InDesign to sort a column of names or to sum up a row of numbersboth easy tasks in a spreadsheet program. Enter Active Tables, a new plug-in from DTPTools. Active Tables is compatible with Mac and Windows versions of InDesign and InCopy from CS3 to CS5.5. Installation The Active Tables installer searches your computer for InDesign and InCopy installations and gives you the option to install Active Tables in any or all of them. If you install in more than one version of InDesign, you have to activate each of them at launch; however these multiple activations only count as one activation for that machine, so you dont need to buy multiple versions. How it works Installing Active Tables adds three new panels to InDesign: Formulas, Names, and Tables. By default, all three are in one panel group, which you can open by selecting Window > Active Tables and choosing any of them. However, I found it easier to pull them apart by their tabs and work with them as separate panels (Figure 1, next page). You may, as well.
InReview: Active Tables
Active Tables DTPTools www.dtptools.com $79 Mac and Windows, InDesign CS3CS5 Rating:
ratings Key
Not worth it even if its free Not recommended Average Exceptionally good A must-have
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The Tables panel (yes, you now have a panel named Table and a new one named Tables) tracks all of the tables in your document. You can give each a unique name or you can accept the default of table 1, table 2, and so on. Clicking on the name of the table takes you directly to that table for editing. In the Names panel, you create variables for calculations; for example, a named calculation for figuring sales tax or hourly labor
Figure 1: The three Active Tables panels.
rates. This is quite handy for anything that might be subject to change. Finally, the Formulas panel is where most of the magic takes place. Insert your cursor in any table cell and either manually enter a formula or use the panels cell selection tools to create formulas. This is also where you can assign cell formating for things such as currency, thousands separator, and number of decimal places.
Working with Active Tables When selecting or creating a table once Active Tables is installed, the table will have row and column labels similar to Microsoft Excel. Rows are labeled numerically and columns alphabetically. If you have a cell selected, the labels will be highlighted in yellow (Figure 2).
Figure 2: My cursor is inserted in cell B2, indicated by yellow highlights.
Your preference choices include turning off the labels, displaying them on all tables, or the default choice of displaying them only on any selected table. Turning on preview or presentation view mode in InDesign will also hide the labels.
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Active Tables is capable of a wide range of calculations from simple (addition, multiplication, subtraction, etc.) to complex (min, max, conversions, and more). The format for the formulas should be quite familiar to Excel users. For example, adding a column of numbers can be calculated by entering sum(a1:a7). Are you unfamiliar with this syntax? No problem, because Active Tables includes a
dropdown menu in the Formulas panel to help you out. Speaking of formatting, Active Tables has a wide array of choices for formatting data. You can make numbers display as percentages, currency, or fixed. There are settings for currency symbols, decimal places, and thousands separators (American commas versus the European dot, for example). Each of them is capable of custom settings similar to Excel. In this way you can show numbers in thousands or millions if so desiredThis is a nice feature for anyone working on annual reports or other documents with large numbers. Noting that numbers are presented in thousands, $4,350,000 will be displayed as $4,350. DTP Tools has integrated the formula options into InDesigns
Figure 3: Active Tables integrates with the paragraph styles dialog allowing you to easily assign character styles to negative or positive numbers.
paragraph styles dialog box (Figure 3). Among the options here is the ability to assign different character styles to negative and positive numerical formulas. For example, if the design calls for red figures for negative, Active Tables would apply them automatically. Integration with InDesign Active Tables stays out of the way until you need it. Depending on your expectations, this could be good or bad. You cant just enter information in a table and perform Active Table functions to it. Instead, you have to enter the contents as a formula. The simplest way is to insert your text cursor in a cell and then use the Formula panel to enter the data. If you prefer to enter a formula or data directly in the cell, you can: Start by typing = and then the data or formula. Then, with your cursor still in the cell, right-click and choose Convert Text to Formula from the contextual menu
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Figure 5: The hours and rates in the sentence are driven from the variables set up in a table on pasteboard while the total is a formula which multiplies the two. If either number changes the product updates automatically.
(Figure 4). This is particularly helpful when placing tables from Excel or Word where the data is already in place. The only exception to the need to convert data to use Active Tables functions is sorting alphabetically, which works on any column or row of text without any special treatment. Entering data was a bit cumbersome at first, but I got used to it quickly. You can edit
formulas in several ways. The easiest is to insert the cursor in the cell and edit the formula in the formulas panel. However, for editing a number of cells at the same time, youll need to select the cells and convert them back to text. Edit them and then convert them to formulas again. This sounds more complicated than it actually is. Have you ever wanted to transpose a table, changing the rows to columns and columns to rows? With Active Tables its a simple procedure. Select the table, right click
Figure 4: Converting text to data or formulas for Active Tables is accomplished from the contextual menu.
and choose Transpose Table from the contextual menu. More than Tables While it may be called Active Tables, many of the features of can be used anywhere in an InDesign document. Formulas, for instance, can be calculated anywhere you have text flowing and can be based on data anywhere in the document (Figure 5) . Answers the Needs Active Tables adds spreadsheet functions that Ive seen requested by InDesign users time and again. For anyone working with tables in InDesign, buying this plug-in is
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Figure 1: After launching the plug-in youll see this dialog box, which allows you to add a grid to a new or the existing document.
almost a no-brainer. From the simple ability to sort alphanumeric data to more complex spreadsheet functions, DTP Tools has filled a long-standing need for those working with financial documents. Note that this review was written using a release candidate version; DTPTools released version 1.0 on May 24, 2011.
InReview: Help for Grid Creation

Grid Calculator Pro Designers Bookshop www.designersbookshop.com $99 (limited time) Mac and Windows, InDesign CS3CS5 Rating:
Bob Levine is a New York-area designer and consultant. He can be reached via his website, www.theindesignguy.com.
By scott Citron
Grid usage among designers falls into two camps: those who use grids and those who dont. Developed after World War II by a small group of mostly Swiss designers in response to German designer and typographer Jan Tschicholds classic book, Die neue Typographie (The New Typography), the Grid System provides a hidden framework for text and graphic page items. Although excellent books can help designers understand the Grid System (see Resources on page 17), theres never
been a product to facilitate grid creation in InDesign with as much sophistication and flexibility as Grid Calculator Pro (GCP). According to Abraham Georges, GCPs creator, the product developed out of Georges frustration when asked to create a Swissstyled layout as a design student in Sweden. The GCP plug-in creates a new menu item labeled Designers Bookshop in InDesign, with which you launch the product. If youve already created a document, a preliminary dialog box appears (Figure 1) asking whether you want to edit the existing file or create a new one. If you choose to create a new document, GCP reminds you that CS5s new Page Tool cant be accessed when the plug-in is open.
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Figure 2: Provided youre not scared off by the complexity of this dialog box, youll eventually reap the benefits of Grid Calculator Pro.
Likewise, the GCP plug-in wont apply a grid to any document with multiple page sizes created with the Page Tool. Clicking OK brings up a non-modal dialog box that only a software engineer or NASA scientist can love (Figure 2). Across the top of the dialog, a row of radio buttons give you access to three main functions of GCP: Document Setup; Margins, Columns and Rows, Preferences and Presets. Collapse, the fourth button, simply collapses the dialog and gets it out of your way. From here the going gets tough. Real tough. In defense of Designers Bookshop, they provide training videos and PDFs on their website. Unfortunately, the training material was thick as molasses and only added to my overall frustration with the product. But if youre persistent, you might begin to see the light, as I finally did. The easiest way to start with GCP is by using the Basic Grid System area in the upper left of the Document Setup dialog.
Here you specify the document size and the leading value of your body text. Next, move to the Font, Size and Image-lines area of the dialog box. Once you select the font family, style, and size of your body text, GCP knows where to create image lines for your document. Image lines are grid lines that echo the x-height or cap height of your body text. I used 12 pt Minion Pro on 14.4 pts of leading, which yielded an x-height of 5.542 pts. To create the actual lines I simply clicked the Apply button to the right of the x-height field (Figure 3, next page). Grid Calculator Pro also interacts with Paragraph Styles and InDesigns Layers panel. Once you apply a document grid, Grid Calculator Pro automatically generates a custom paragraph style named [Pro Ed. Paragraph] whose size and leading
perfectly match your grid. Likewise, GCP populates the Layers panel with two new layers named [Pro Ed.] Text and [Pro Ed.] Images. Thats helpful because you want to be able to hide and show these guides while you work. If you couldnt, the layout might be too overwhelming. To set margins and columns, you click the Margins, Columns and Rows radio button at
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Figure 4: This dialog is a helpful when youre building a document to match elements youve already designed.
the top of the dialog. This pane of the dialog (Figure 4) is useful for building a document to match elements youve already designed. Obviously, GCP offers even more. But since this is a product review and not a user manual Ill stop. Once you start to understand Grid Calculator Pro, youll wish you had it years ago. But despite it being an awesome plug-in, its a victim of its own complexity. Most of us havent the patience to spend the time it takes to understand
this product. Had I not agreed to review GCP, I know I would have given up on it long ago. Years ago, Josef Mller-Brockmann, one of the key Swiss practioners of the grid system, said, The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee. It permits a number of possible uses and each designer can look for a solution appropriate to his personal style. But one must learn how to use the grid; it is an art that requires practice. How right he was.
Scott Citron is a designer and publishing consultant in New York City and an Adobe Certified Instructor in InDesign, InCopy, Photoshop, Lightroom, and Illustrator. He is the current head of the New York InDesign Users Group and is the author of Professional Design Techniques with Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Adobe Press, 2008) and Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques (Adobe Press, 2010), co-written with Michael Murphy. Hed like to hear from you: scott@scottcitrondesign.com.
Figure 3: Here we see how the gray box aligns to the x-height of the type, indicated by a green horizontal grid.
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InBrief: New & Improved Products
By Jeff gamet

once you find the right add-ons, indesign is capable of even more than what adobe packed into the box . this issue, i cover products that unlock indesigns hidden potential, including a script to span footers across multiple columns, how to make grEP less intimidating, turning indesign into a spreadsheet, and bacon ipsum. Because everything is better with bacon.
akko
Fonts.com, $587 www.fonts.com Akira Kobayashis Akko is an easy-to-read font that marks the designers first solo design effort in several years. The sans serif typefaces distinct lines project an industrial yet friendly feel. This OpenType Pro font includes a nice selection of ligatures
and alternate characters. Its available in thin, light, regular, medium, bold and black weights with matching italics. You can also get Akko as a Web font.
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FontCase 2
layer Comps 2
DTP Tools, $40 www.dtptools.com Layer Comps 2 is a plug-in for InDesign CS and newer that adds a Photoshop-like layer composition to your favorite page-layout application. Layer Comps keeps track of layer visibility, editing states, guide visibility, and whether layers are printable, and you
Layer Comps 2
can enable or disable comp group settings. Version 2 adds support for page orientation and size, object size and page position, and exporting multiple comps to a single PDF.
FontCase 2
Bohemian Software, $30 www.bohemiancoding.com FontCase is a simple and inexpensive font management app for Mac OS X users that includes several sorting and type preview options. It sorts fonts by genre or user-made collections, previews all fonts in a group at the same time, lets users preview fonts as glyph sets, shows fonts in display or body copy, grabs the HTML code for specific glyphs, and can activate or deactivate fonts as needed. It doesnt include font auto-activation. A companion $.99 FontCase Viewer app for the iPhone and iPod touch shows previews of the fonts you select in the Mac version of the app.
script launcher
Peter Kahrel, free www.kahrel.plus.com Scripts can add lots of new features to InDesign, assuming you can get at them easily. Script Launcher lets you quickly find and launch installed scripts by typing the items name. It filters through scripts when you dont know the items full name, sorts recently used scripts to the top of its
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list, and automatically remembers the last script you used, too.
Script Launcher
implement the feature. Peter Kahrel wasnt happy, either, so he wrote Footnotes and Columns. This clever InDesign script set can split footnote text frames into columns inside a single column text frame, span a footnote column across multiple text columns, and convert static endnotes imported from Word into dynamic endnotes. The scripts require InDesign CS3 or newer.
Ecofont
Ecofont BV, $18.99 annual fee www.ecofont.com Ecofont is a font utility designed with the environment in mind. The application punches tiny holes into fonts during printing that arent noticeable at 12 point or smaller type sizes, reducing the amount of ink or toner used by up to 50 percent. Along with cutting down on the ink and toner needed to print text, the Windows-based utility can block graphics from printing, and
can force color text and images to print in black and white. The company says a Maccompatible version is in the works, too.
Using GREP in InDesign

OReilly, $9.99 www.oreilly.com GREP is an amazingly powerful tool for finding text patterns like phone numbers, headlines, and superscript items in InDesign documents. Unfortunately, GREP can be hard to wrap your head around, since it comes from
Footnotes and Columns

Peter Kahrel, free www.kahrel.plus.com InDesign may support footnotes in documents, but that doesnt mean users are happy with the way Adobe chose to
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Bacon Ipsum
the world of computer coders. Peter Kahrels Using GREP in InDesign ebook explains how to harness GREPs horsepower in terms people like us can understand. The book shows how to dynamically apply styles to layout items such as body copy and tables of contents, and it includes plenty of search and format examples to try in your own layouts. Using GREP in InDesign is available in PDF, Mobi, and ePUB formats, so you can view it on any ebook reader.
Bacon ipsum
GunGeekATX, free baconipsum.com Lorem ipsum is the tried and true option for filler text in layouts, but youve probably heard of other options, such as corporate ipsum, gangsta ipsum, and Klingon ipsum. Now theres bacon ipsum. The bacon ipsum
dummy text generator lets you fill your documents with copy thats, well, meatier than other fillers. The Webbased text generator lets you set the number of paragraphs, then grinds out dummy text that It includes pork, beef, and chicken cuts, along with an option to add some extra filler, too. You can copy the text bacon ipsum generates and add it to your documents. Just beware that clients who are vegetarian or have religious-based dietary restrictions may not find the text so tasty.
Jeff Gamet is a consultant and speaker on graphic-design technologies and Mac OS X. He is the managing editor for The Mac Observer, a contributing writer for Design Tools Monthly and Layers magazine, and the author of The Designers Guide to Mac OS X. For a free issue of Design Tools Monthly, visit www.design-tools.com. You can follow Jeff on Twitter at twitter.com/jgamet.
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InDex: Your Key to Our Content
The InDex
Cant find that article you saw in an earlier issue? Wondering whether we covered that obscure plug-in? never fear, the index is here.
The first issue of InDesign Magazine was published in July 2004. Since then, weve cranked out thousands of pages on hundreds of related topics. While its possible to use Acrobat to simultaneously search all past issues of the magazine for one word or phrase, many readers have clamoured for a formal index at the back of each issue. However, with 42 issues to account for, thats not feasible. Instead, the InDex will live as a PDF you can download for free. If you come across a topic you want to know more about, but its in an issue you dont have, youre not out of luck. We sell back issues at www.indesignmag.com. If the topic youre looking for isnt in the InDex, you have one more way to search: that PDF trick I mentioned. To make it work, all of your magazine issue PDFs must be in one folder. Open any issue in Acrobat, then hit Shift-Command-F (Shift-Control-F on Windows). In the Search window that appears, be sure that you click the radio button that says All PDF Documents in, and in the dropdown menu below that, choose the folder in which you placed your magazine issues. Youre on your way to finding anything in any PDF!
Index for issues 1 through 42, July 2004 through July 2011
MAGAZINE
Click here to download the index.
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Share the Know-How

While this PDF is for your eyes only, you can tell your friends about the great discounts they can enjoy right now: $20 off a one-year subscription (coupon code FRIEND), or $15 off a two-year subscription (coupon code FRIEND2). Send them to www.indesignmag.com/purchase.php.
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MAGAZINE

June | July 2011

Book Design Basics

Also in this issue

I N D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E 42 June | July 2011

From the Editor in Chief

I N D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E 42 June | July 2011

Celebrating the art of print design

I N D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E 42 June | July 2011

InSide: Table of Contents

I N D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E 42 June | July 2011

Creating a new standard

I N D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E 42 June | July 2011

Book Design Basics

I N D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E 42 June | July 2011

I N D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E 42 June | July 2011

I N D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E 42 June | July 2011

I N D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E 42 June | July 2011

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Print Solutions That Will Make You

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The Secret, Hidden Files of Adobe InDesign

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InDesign Lock Files

Figure 2: An InDesign Lock file.

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Keyboard Shortcut Sets, Menu Sets, and Workspaces

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Audio and Video

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New Page Sizes

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InStep: Data Merge

Designing with Data

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InStep: Data Merge

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InStep: Data Merge

1. Understand the Components

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2. Plan, Design, and Decide

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InStep: Data Merge

3. Start with the Data

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