This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 57
I just got my copy of InDesign CS5.5! It’s sitting here, all shiny in its shrink wrapped box. It’s always such a bittersweet moment… trying to open the plastic wrap without breaking a fingernail or tooth… well, while I figure this out, take a look at these great links!
- I’m really enjoying reading Pam Pfiffner’s Best of the Blogs at CreativePro, including this fun one. Definitely check out the links to 892 Unique Ways to Partition a 3×4 Grid, innovative resumes, and more. (Disclosure: I’ve known Pam for something like 20 years! I guess I met her when she was about 12…) ;)
- I don’t usually blog about fonts, but I just noticed this new font called Akko from Monotype and I’m really enjoying it!
- Just noticed these short InDesign training videos. Of course, I have a few of my own at lynda.com, but it’s always interesting to see what other folks are doing!
- So how do the folks at Business Week produce their magazine? Here’s a video!
- Dan Rodney has a new update for his $20 Make Book Jacket script. Cool stuff!
- So Obama asked the state of Hawaii to release his birth certificate, right? FOX News interviewed our friend Jean-Claude Trembley about the veracity of the image. Unfortunately, the reporter got a few things wrong. Here’s Jean-Claude’s blog post about the experience, and how he really feels. (No, this has nothing to do with InDesign, but how could I resist including something so topical?!)
- Should you link or embed your images? That’s the question posed in this blog post.
- By the way, here’s a data sheet (PDF) that shows what’s new in InDesign CS5.5.
Interactive
- Curious about the Adobe DPS tablet-publishing solution? If you’re an InDesign Magazine subscriber, you already saw this article about the Scientific American ipad app that Bob Levine, Mordy Golding, and Scott Citron produced. If you haven’t read it, though, check it out, now that it’s up for free at creativepro.com!
- How are large businesses taking advantage of digital tablet publishing? Here’s a fun overview from Adobe on what some organization, such as the US Marine Corp and Credit Suisse are doing.
- Meanwhile, if you’re more in an HTML5 kind of mood (for making ipad/iphone apps), the Baker Framework 2.0 has been released!
Okay, package opened… next step: Install!
Enjoy!
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Regarding the data sheet from Adobe … it’s so Orwellian it’s mind-boggling! They are rewriting history in their “New Features in CS4/CS5/CS5.5” matrix.
Here, in case anyone forgot, the big features in CS5 (barely a year old) were the *interactive* features like the Animation panel and such:
https://creativepro.com/roundup-of-indesign-cs5-features-honest-this-time.php
Was it all just a dream? Must be, since none of these are mentioned in the data sheet nor included in the feature matrix. Adobe treats CS5’s interactive features like the “crazy uncle in the attic that no one talks about.”
I am happy that CS5.5 came out aimed squarely at where the market is going, yes, but docs like this one just give me the willies.
Well yeah, but remember that many of the “interactive” things Adobe did were really “flash interactive.” So yes, they were “crazy uncle” kinds of things. ;) Now, the fact that none of those things work in PDF and their own DPS solution (or anything else that runs iOS) kind of back-burners them until Adobe can find a good next step.
I wonder at their audacity in continuing to advertise ‘Paragraphs that span or split columns’. The feature does not work except in very limited layouts and corrupts documents when used. And, yes, I have filed bug reports.
I refer to the Tutorials listed above and to ages as mentioned in another line above. The Indesign tuorials are by Erik Bernskiold from Sweden. I think Erik is not yet 21 and is prooving to be a real expert in Adobe apps and runs a web hosting program with great support and pricing. Check out Erik, the tuts and his site. He hosts and designed my buisiness website. His original forte was and is Photoshop but also WordPress and clearly now InDesign. You have to get past his very youthful sounding voice and the accent – easy to do but he is wise beyond his years. Enjoy!
In re linking vs. embedding, I had posted a comment on Barb’s web site, but it looks like it got moderated (?) out of existence (uhoh…).
The claim is made that “Lots of embedded images in one file means a bloated document, and a bloated document can be a sluggish document.”
Is that really true? It shouldn’t be. InDesign should be just as snappy accessing a large INDD file with embedded images as a file with external images. All the file accesses are random access, and it should only access the image data when it needs to, be it in the INDD file or elsewhere.
(Some filesystems may have issues with extremely huge files, like multi-gigabyte sizes. But that’ll be quite rare. And networks should support the random access file model just fine…)
I still agree with the party line that embedding is a bad idea…but only because of management issues, versioning, and extra copies. Also perhaps the time to actually embed the image.
@John: I agree with you that it should not make for sluggish files, but it certainly can cause file “bloat” and a large file may be unhelpful in other ways. For example, if all your images are embedded and your file gets corrupted (it can happen!) then you’re going to have an even worse day than if the images were linked.
That said, I generally have no problem embedding all but the largest files. It’s perfectly reasonable to embed logos, commonly-used symbols, and so on.
I don’t always agree with all the comments in all the articles I link to. But of course, not all of them agree with me. :)