Atlanta InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

Monday, January 12, 2004

Thanks to all the folks — both familiar faces and new faces — who pried themselves away from their fireplaces to join us for the first Atlanta InDesign® user group meeting of 2004. Thanks to Noha Edell’s passionate (and often hilarious) presentations at the Driven By Design Tour, many local InDesign users have begun to discover us. All attendees will receive InDesign Success Kits from Adobe, which include Total Training videos, a Quark-to-InDesign conversion guide, and Robin Williams’ excellent book How to Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works, as well as other nifty stuff.

I hope that the overview of graphics issues (and a few tricks) was helpful as you become more adventurous. It’s not just a “TIFF and EPS” world any more. I would like to clarify one point: If you’re creating your finished art in Illustrator®, *of course* it’s fine to add your drop-shadows in Illustrator (once you’ve set your rasterization preference appropriately). The advice to “add the shadows in InDesign” is applicable only if you're going to place your art in an InDesign page. And it was meant to illustrate (pardon the pun) that InDesign *can* add the shadows, not to imply that InDesign’s shadows are any better than Illustrator’s. I apologize for any confusion that might have been generated.

Thanks to those who brought up trouble-shooting issues: Several problems were the result of “oddball” behavior caused by translating QuarkXPress files. In one case, grouped items translated with an incorrect stacking order. Changing their stacking order fixed the problem. In another case, white text in the QuarkXPress file became black text when converted with InDesign 2.0. InDesign CS translated it correctly. However, if that text was copied/pasted into a new Quark file, that new file translated correctly in InDesign 2.0. So perhaps there was some corruption in the original Quark file that was ignored by InDesign CS. InDesign can convert only QuarkXPress 3.x and 4.x files: If you have QuarkXPress 5.x or above, a file must be backsaved to QuarkXPress 4.x for the trip.

Many thanks to Phil Gomez, our intrepid (and stealthy) photographer, for images of our biggest group of attendees yet.

Best regards,
Claudia McCue
Atlanta InDesign User Group

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