This Week in InDesign Articles, Number 85
What’s amazing to me is that you might be reading this in 2013 or 2014 and most of these links will still not only be good, but they’ll still be really relevant! We like to think that technology changes so quickly, but learning tips and tricks today will help you for months and years in the future.
- Jongware wrote a script that seems to work in InDesign CS3-CS5.5, which lets you check the version number of any InDesign file without opening it. For example, if someone sends you a file and you can’t open it, but you’re not sure what ID version they used, you could run this script and it will tell you.
- Liz Castro has released a free article called Using InDesign to adapt plain text for EPUB.  (This was going to be in her Straight to the Point book, but she cut it at the last minute.) Good stuff!
- Computer Arts magazine has a lovely brief article called 10 indispensable InDesign type tips to help you make better-looking layouts.
- Remember that lynda.com publishes two InDesignSecrets videocasts every other week (different than out own homegrown videocast). See how Colleen Wheeler helped me retaliate for Anne-Marie’s trick of pasting my face on a path (and learn how to turn on and off layers in placed graphics).
- And of course, Mike Rankin’s FX videos are also must-see at lynda.com. Here’s one on simulating 3-D shapes. (Many of these tips come from his ebook, which you can also buy with sample files to work with.)
- xkcd does some very funny cartoons, but this one about kerning is a must-see for any InDesign user.
- Hey, PEPCON is on LinkedIn now! Check it out.
- Couldn’t make it to TOC in New York? You can still check out the presentations here.
- Martinho da Gloria has updated his awesome (free!) LayoutZone add-on. You can now export PNGs of any selected object(s) right out of InDesign, which is awesome, plus interactive PDF and HTML. If you use this much, please click Donate on his site!
- Colin at Colecandoo is doing some really good work! Check out this great blog post on “going beyond stencil letters,” with its clever approach to Data Merge.
- Yes, you need the scripts that the folks at Premedia Systems are offering, such as the hugely useful Sort Tabbed Paragraphs Script. And yes, after you fall in love with them, you should click their Donate button.
- Keith Gilbert has written up a couple of good blog posts on his site you should know about, including: How to move a layout from InDesign to After Effects and How to break links between InCopy and InDesign.
- Are you using CS Review? It was a great idea that never really took off at Adobe. Now they’re shutting it down on April 12. You have been waaaaaarrrrnnnnned!
- We’ve mentioned Fotolia’s really cool CS Extension add-on for browsing, importing, and buying stock photos in InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, but they’ve made it even better and released it officially now. Check it out!
Enjoy!
Hmm the Layout Zone for exporting to PNG moved things around in the layers and ordered them incorrectly. Best to group everything first, that will combine to a layer, then export to PNG.
Also, the Convert Zone doesn’t work when working in Pixels.
Thanks for all the links. Very useful.
Has anyone else got the Fotolia plugin working in InDesign CS5 running on Windows 7 64 bit. For me it comes up with an error message when installing about an invalid token and fails.
@Stix: One of the developers wrote me about your problem: “They probably have an older build. Also, they might get this message if they haven’t uninstalled any earlier versions. It was developed in Window 7 64 bit, so there shouldn’t be a problem there.”
I had an issue similar to that Stix I had to use WinRar to extract the content and then run the file directly from the extracted content. And that has worked.
I have updated LayoutZone (1.3b3). This new version should fix the issues reported by @Eugene.
@ David & Eugene, no I had the latest one downloaded from their website (btw it still says it’s in Beta) and it failed, both when I double clicked on the file and selected it from with the Extension Manager. I tried Eugene’s trick (but I used 7zip instead) and it worked! It’s great now, loving it….