Minneapolis InDesign User GroupMeeting Notes Archive
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
The Twin Cities InDesign® user group met for the second time, again at Dunwoody Institute.
Charlie Townes started off the meeting by reciting some advantages of becoming a user group member. We learned how to get 30% off books by Adobe Press, and 20% off any title by Peachpit Press.
We had a good turnout on the night of the final presidential candidate debate, with 50 people deciding to learn more about InDesign. We were very pleased to have Tom Petrillo from Adobe in town to present us with the “Best Practices for InDesign Transparency.”
Having just finished giving this presentation at the 2004 Graph Expo in Chicago, Tom provided us with great up-to-date information on understanding, applying, and processing different types of transparent features in our designs and layouts. There was a lot of technical information passed on, such as specific file import formats, proper stacking order, and the use of the transparency flattener’s preset options.
A good resource for this information is here in this PDF, “The Designers Guide to Transparency,” located in the Guides & Tutorials section of this site. There are many other guides in that section as well.
While questions were asked throughout Tom’s presentation, the Q&A afterwards brought forth a host of RIP (raster image processor) questions so specific that there was no doubt they came from actually experienced problems.
A panel of volunteer experts answered or provided leads to some of the questions. We learned about some plug-ins that helped with slug information, style sheets, and multiple undos. Information on these is listed below.
Tom pointed us to the Adobe resource areas that would help print providers with this type of information, such as the Adobe Solutions Network area for print providers:
And Tom also mentioned the direct-contact support for service providers at:
Email: Sp-resources@adobe.com
Some of the plug-ins that we talked about were Slug Cubed, from Triple Triangle, and Smart Styles, and Smart Catalog from WoodWing Software. Tom recommended a nice free plug-in from 65bit Software, called MultiDo.
Some other plug-ins we discussed were for creating crop marks. In the Third Party Plug-ins section of this website, there are all of those listed above, and also the names of a bunch of crop mark makers, each a little different depending on your needs.
Following the Q&A time we drew names for door prizes, and two happy attendees were each given a copy of InDesign CS. Four people received books, and someone walked away with a compact disc of InDesign templates from Adobe.
Unlike the presidential candidate debate that night, we ended out meeting with no debate on which page-layout program was preferred.
Thanks to all involved, and a special thank you to Tom Petrillo, from Adobe, for stopping by.
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