To change your colors afterwards in Indesign, you would need to either search and replace and change the colors, or delete the color swatches and replace with black.

I don’t understand why you would want to do it in color, even though it’s going to print in black & white only. Sure–it might look better when viewing on screen, or if printing color files from the InDesign file, but all that prettiness doesn’t matter in the long run–it’s going to be printed in black & white at the final stage.

I’m in book publishing, and if it’s a black and white job, we do it in black and white at all stages. If it’s color, we do it in color at all stages.

I think, for you, it would just be easier to do the job in black and white and forget about the color.

Concerning the head.

Let’s say I have text paragraphs and above some of them I have a head (let’s say it’s an ingredients for a cookbook):

FOR THE CAKE
This is an ingredient
This is another ingredient
And another.

FOR THE FROSTING
This is an ingredient
This is another ingredient
etc.

If I want space above or below those capitalized heads, I would need to add space above/below in the paragraph style sheet.

If the whole thing is on 14 leading, and I only want space above the heads, I would add 14 points space above.

If I wanted only a half line above and a half line below, I would add 7 points above and 7 points below.

Does that make sense?

I personally never “align to baseline grid.”

Though I do set up baseline grids, I never use that align feature, and it’s exactly for that reason.

The secret is keeping everything on even lines. Let’s say your leading is 14 point leading. You want spacing to equal 14.

For example, my main head needs space above and below. I might add 10 points above and 4 points below. That equals 14. That way the text following is on even lines. The head itself won’t be, but the text following will be.

When you have align to baseline grid turned on, any spacing is overridden, so it’s best to keep it off.

And that’s how I do things. If it’s a simple novel or something, there’s no problem with using it. But I make it a habit to never align to baseline grid.

Issue has been solved. Darlene emailed me the file, and it was a case of chapters not being threaded together. There were also some blanks pages that were linked to each other, but nothing in them.

But all has been fixed.

Darlene–you can’t post a screenshot directly in the forum, but you can if you put in a hosting site (such as drop box, 4shared, etc.).

Or, if you need, I can post my email address and you can send it to me for me to look at.

*****
David–I see your point about the terminology. I guess old habits die hard for me. I am so used to calling text boxes linked, as well as referring to text wrap as runarounds. I blame it on my old Quark days, as well as the folks I work with who still use the outdated terms.

It sounds like Chapter two is not linked to the rest of the chapters that follow. You will need to link the last page of chapter two to the first page of chapter three.

If you don’t want to do that, then just go to the first page of chapter three and do your edits.

If you want to trust it, Artwork Abode, be my guest. I see nothing wrong using something like that to transfer files back and forth, but I would not be comfortable with it being my main server.
And it’s always possible for it to go down. Maybe not for a long period of time, but it’s possible. And there have been several GMail outages in the past.
But then again, it’s just my personal opinion.

I think it’s a very good price. It could easily cost you twice that if you went to a professional typesetting house.