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• • October 23, 2010 at 3:42 pm #57478
    jrcreative

    Member

    I'm fairly new to Indesign (working seriously with it for the last 6 months). I have a project that involves creating coupons, and assembling them into a coupon book. Right now I'm creating the individual coupons in Illustrator, and placing them in the coupon book in InDesign. Is this the best way to approach this?

    Another thought that I had was to create the individual coupons in InDesign, and then place the InDesign Files into the book. The main advantage that I can see would be the access to an outer stroke on text in InDesign, (which doesn't seem to exist in Illustrator), and there may be others, like the ability to assign a global expiration date for all coupons within a given book. (I haven't explored that yet, but I think it's possible)

    Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated. I'd like to hear some pros and cons to the different workflow options.

  • October 24, 2010 at 6:17 am #57481
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    It really mainly depends on what your coupons look like. If your design uses lots of Illustrator effects, you'd make them in Illy. If it's just the odd text placed here or there, you might as well create them entirely in InDesign.

    It's also possible to make it a hybrid: do the graphic intensive work in Illustrator and leave out all variable data. Place in InDesign, draw a text frame over it, put your variable data into that.

    … the ability to assign a global expiration date for all coupons within a given book. (I haven't explored that yet, but I think it's possible)

    Absolutely — look up “Text Variables” in the InDesign Help. It's a breeze.

    Oh — and on

    .. access to an outer stroke on text in InDesign, (which doesn't seem to exist in Illustrator) ..

    .. well … it's as straightforward as in InDesign. Select text; select “stroke” rather than “fill”, then change the color …

  • October 24, 2010 at 4:26 pm #57482
    jrcreative

    Member

    .. well … it's as straightforward as in InDesign. Select text; select “stroke” rather than “fill”, then change the color …

    ha… thanks for your kindness on the issue of adding a stroke to text (not laughing me out of the forum). I was actually speaking specifically of the OUTER text stroke in “Illy” (hope you don't mind of I borrow that phrase :)). There's a grayed out option in the stroke window, which is available for other shapes, but not for text. It's also not available if I choose a dashed line with the option where the corner is even all the way around (not sure if there's a special name for that setting, it's the one on the right). I'm using CS5 on a Mac. Maybe other versions are different. Anyways, InDesign seems to make the stroke on the outside, center or inside of text just fine.

  • October 24, 2010 at 11:58 pm #57486
    Roland

    Member

    jrcreative said:

    .. well … it's as straightforward as in InDesign. Select text; select “stroke” rather than “fill”, then change the color …

    ha… thanks for your kindness on the issue of adding a stroke to text (not laughing me out of the forum). I was actually speaking specifically of the OUTER text stroke in “Illy” (hope you don't mind of I borrow that phrase :)). There's a grayed out option in the stroke window, which is available for other shapes, but not for text. It's also not available if I choose a dashed line with the option where the corner is even all the way around (not sure if there's a special name for that setting, it's the one on the right). I'm using CS5 on a Mac. Maybe other versions are different. Anyways, InDesign seems to make the stroke on the outside, center or inside of text just fine.

    ---

    Three words: Illustrator Appearance panel

    As far as I'm aware there is indeed no way to apply an outer stroke to text objects in Illustrator, but you can move the stroke down in the stacking order and fake an outer stroke if you're using the Appearance panel, or even stack multiple strokes and/or fills that way.

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