New York City InDesign User GroupMeeting Notes Archive
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
The first 2003 meeting of the New York InDesign® user group started the year off with a bang.
Playing to a packed house of over 65 members at the New School, the evening was titled “InDesign Extensibility: AppleScript, Plug-ins, and More.” Although our AppleScript presentation had to be put on hold due to the illness of TECSoft’s John Thorsen, the evening had plenty to offer.
The event opened with a brief welcome and introduction by chapter representative Scott Citron. Following Scott, Jason O’Grady, of Managing Editor Inc., demonstrated TruEdit 2.0, a cross-platform, folder-based collaboration tool for workflow management and editing by designers and copywriters working in Adobe InDesign and Adobe InCopy®. A powerful editorial tool with the look and feel of a word processor, InCopy enables perfect copy-fitting in InDesign, with its native XML story format providing easy cross-media publishing.
Learn more about Managing Editor Inc. on this website.
After Jason, Andy MacBride walked the audience through the ins and outs of Smart Styles from WoodWing Software.
The awarded-wining plug-in Smart Styles delivers powerful formatting capabilities to InDesign users. This unique product combines the object, table, and smart text styles into super-powerful “smart styles”. These “smart styles” are conveniently stored in libraries and can be applied with a simple drag-and-drop of the styling attributes. All page item style properties are applied as part of a “smart style,” including stroke, fill, drop-shadows, transparency, corner effects, number of columns, inset, and more.
Learn more about WoodWing on this website.
Next up was GLUON president Peter McClard. Peter presented two of GLUON’s premiere InDesign plug-ins, Cropster and ProScale.
ProScale ID can scale items, selections, pages, or whole documents. It can scale nonproportionally, and does not distort elements with tons of options for what to scale and what to keep proportional. It supports multi-undo (even if you resized your whole document), and has a visual scaling tool and a proprietary “fit-to” menu.
Cropster ID sets up guides and crop marks for trimming, bleeds, safety, and folds. It also creates special marks for folds and gutters. You can add a logo, colorbars, custom information, and place guides and marks around selected items. It can also save presets of any of its settings, for easy recall.
Peter rounded out his demo by briefly showing GLUON’s JobCapture, a turnkey system that intelligently and automatically tracks working time and activity on any document in standard applications such as Adobe Illustrator®, QuarkXPress, Microsoft Word, and more.
Learn more about GLUON on this website.
Following a quick break for some more pizza and drinks provided by Adobe, Scott Citron showcased the current suite of InDesign plug-ins from ALAP. Among those demoed were the new InPathfinder and InModify, plus InStarBurst, ItemMarks, InPrint, and ALAP’s well-known imposition plug-in, InBooklet. For InDesign users missing the Pathfinder feature of Adobe Illustrator, ALAP’s InPathfinder will be a welcome addition to their plug-in arsenal.
Scott finished up the night by presenting two powerful Photoshop plug-ins from nik multimedia — nik Sharpener Pro! and the Macworld magazine 4-1/2-star-rated (February 2003 issue) nik Color Efex Pro!. For Photoshop® users, these filters are must-haves, and must be seen to be appreciated.
Wrapping things up, Scott and Jane Incao raffled off a crateful of goodies. Among the items raffled away were several books (new titles from Adobe Press, thanks to Jeff Warnock), two copies of Smart Styles (thanks, WoodWing), one copy of TruEdit with InCopy (thanks, MEI), three copies of the GLUON plug-ins (thanks, Peter McClard), two copies of InBooklet (thanks, Rachel Keenan of ALAP), one copy each of nik Color Efex Pro! Photo Abstract Set, nik Sharpener Pro! Inkjet, and nik Color Efex Pro! Photo Design Set (thanks, Janice Wendt of nik multimedia, Inc.), and one copy each of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 and Adobe InDesign 2.0 (thanks, as always, to our good friends at Adobe).
Learn more about WoodWing on this website.
Learn more about Managing Editor (MEI) on this website.
Special thanks again to Michael Randazzo of the New School’s Computer Instruction Center for hosting us for the fourth time since our inception. Finally, a special, special thanks to the indefatigable Gary Cosimini and Joe Smith of Adobe, for all their help and continued support of our group.
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