Cleveland InDesign User Group Home Meeting Summary Archive Discussion Forum

Our January 30th meeting, held at the Cleveland Institute of Art, had a great group of 41 people in attendance. Our topic was “Using Adobe InDesign With Other Creative Suite Applications.”

During the networking portion of our meeting, April Clark, our newly-appointed co-chair, encouraged dialog from the audience by offering free Photoshop CS2 books to volunteers as incentive. This led to discussion about horizontal white space in tables with .25 inch strokes, exporting PDFs vs. creating PostScript files, and using the Convert Direction Point tool to create curves out of corner points. April also demonstrated one of InDesign Magazine’s tips of the week — using the Effects panel to assign and drag effects from stroke to fill to text.

You can sign up for FREE InDesign Tips of the Week at  http://www.indesignmag.com/tipofweek.php.

Mari Hulick then introduced local designer, Pat Lally. Pat discussed ways to ”avoid doing anything twice” in InDesign by reminding people to use styles, the eyedropper, and snippets. He showed ways to ”Edit original” Illustrator and Photoshop files directly from InDesign using the context menu, Links panel, or Option/Alt double-click.

Pat demonstrated how to load swatches from InDesign and Illustrator and discussed when to place Illustrator (.ai) files vs. copy/paste. He also demonstrated various ways to work with Photoshop files in InDesign — turning layers on and off and activating Photoshop paths as clipping paths.

Pat opened up a sample PDF to demonstrate using and migrating comments to clearly mark changes to InDesign documents emphasizing how Adobe Acrobat’s Comment and Markup tools can help both InDesign users and clients. And finally, Pat briefly discussed exporting InDesign files for XHTML/Dreamweaver and using XML.

Comments from attendees:

”Good tips I can actually use. Nice Job!”

”Great presentation. Maybe a little less info — my head was spinning by XML! ”

”Good mix of information. This topic could probably be continued in another meeting.”

”Very good — I learned quite a few things I didn’t know yet. ”

”Pat did a great job!”

Mari Hulick and April Clark
Co-Chapter Representatives
Cleveland InDesign User Group

Photos From This Meeting
Photos are available from this user group meeting.
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