This Month in InDesign Articles, January 2017

David Blatner

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The best part of InDesignSecrets is that it’s very obvious what is real news versus fake news, and our alternative facts only happen on April 1 each year. The second best part of InDesignSecrets is that we get to connect a global community of InDesign users together. With that in mind, here are some of the wonderful resources by and for InDesign users going on, out there.

• Want to redesign a menu in InDesign? Here’s a fun before & after tutorial.
• Adobe is making oodles of money, thanks to Creative Cloud.
• If you’re a data merge fan, then you probably also want to know how to do data merge with Photoshop and Illustrator, too!
• Ooh, check out this awesome tutorial (and example document, made with Publish Online) on creating animations in InDesign.
• Here’s how the wonderful Margot Knorr Mancini distilled the past year’s publishing technology and industry news.
• Yes, the cost of Adobe Creative Cloud is increasing for users in some countries (notably Thailand, Chile, Russia, and others that have had significant changes in the exchange rate). Here’s an excellent in-depth look at why.
• Wow, check out this terrific list of 90 InDesign scripts!
• Monica Murphy wrote up a good description of the new “straddling footnote” feature in CC 2017.
• Accessibility (section 508) is always an important topic. Nice to see the State of Minnesota tackling making accessible PDFs from InDesign.
• Colin Flashman is back with another great video about Data Merge — this time on the topic of “data merging records into the same text frame.”
• What if the assets (graphics or text) that you want to link to are on the web (or in a service such as Box), not a local hard drive or server? Max Dunn explains how InDesign can link to a URL (with their commercial tools).
• Jeff Witchel explains the solutions to four “impossible” problems, including “Add Rounded Corners to a Table in InDesign.”
• In case you were still hoping to buy CS6 or the “creative suite,” you should know that as of this month, Adobe no longer supports or sells CS.
• Gallup tells us: Rumors of the Demise of Books Greatly Exaggerated. And, here’s some more nice thoughts about the value of books.
• Magazines, on the other hand, were a rollercoaster in 2016.
• I’m a sucker for cool business cards.
• And I definitely can’t resist this… yes, a quick brown fox (really did) jump over a lazy dog.
• Did you know that FrameMaker is still being updated? (It’s like one of those “I thought he was dead” jokes.)

(And, one last note: I hope you can join us at The InDesign Conference this year!)

Enjoy!