Orlando InDesign User Group

Meeting Summary

Event Details

Initially, after our usual meet and greet over pizza, Adobe's Noha Edell called the meeting (103 members strong) to order. The desire was expressed for additional volunteers to keep our chapter running smoothly.

At 7:00, Noha announced that we would be doing something completely new. This meeting was to be a ground-breaking one: our speaker, Michael Murphy, was to come to us via live podcast! While the connection was being worked on, our own Mark Poulalion stepped up to the plate with a short lecture about cool examples of what CS3 provides for flexibility of type (such as enhanced Drop Caps and find/change). He touched briefly on the topic for the evening, the GREP/query dialog box, just as Noha got through, via cell phone, to Michael.

Michael, after greeting our chapter, immediately took us into the world of CS3's advanced find/change, via via Query/General Regular Expression Parser (GREP). GREP allows the user to query for specific types and styles of text by precisely expressed criteria, altering the found text's characteristics at any level, such as punctuation, order, and uniformity at the metacharacter level, to name a few. The levels of searchable characteristics are practically unlimited, as are the changes one can call for.

When a specific style or group of characteristics is likely to be applied often in various documents, the desired set of changes to characteristics can be saved via window/workspaces within InDesign. The next time you need that style, you can apply it as a style at the creation of the new document. Typestyles were never so readily assigned and adjusted!

At the bottom of this page, there's a link to download Michael’s GREP handouts. (Use the one called "indesign_grep_mmurphy.pdf.") In this handout, you'll find a link to an XML file that you can download, install in your InDesign CS3 Query folder, and then experiment with.

Thank You

Our thanks go to:
• Peachpit for books
• CREATE magazine for gift subscription and magazines
• O'Reilly for books
• Wiley for books
• Markzware for Q2ID conversion program
• Stocklayouts for Brochure Design Cards
• Kelby Training for complimentary subscriptions
and
• Adobe for our Big Prize of the evening -- the complete CS3 application.

And thank you to our new volunteers, for coming forward at the end of this meeting: Mark Poulalion, Joanna Cisneros, and Faith Amon will assist with 1) locating local speakers, 2) prizes, and 3) picking up food. If we missed any new volunteers, please let us know! (And thank you again!)

Comments from the evaluation sheets

“Michael Murphy is genius — so glad you have him tonight. Even though there were some tech glitches, it was still one of the best meetings ever. Bring Michael back again: I’d pay to have him here.”

“It’s good to explore the new features of ID CS3. I’m only using the features that I need.”

“GREP looks like fun! Well explained and super examples. The problems with initiating the Connect meeting were gracefully handled. I enjoyed the camaraderie.”

“Tonight was great! Venue is terrific. I loved the focus on a single aspect of ID to get really in-depth on its capabilities.”

“I appreciate the effort that was put into the remote/connect meeting. It was really neat to learn from Michael.”

“Michael did a great job introducing/explaining GREP. I am looking forward to trying it out at home.”

Next Meeting

Mark your calendars: Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, May 20th, and you won’t want to miss it — especially you folks who work with photos in your InDesign projects.

Douglas Mitchell, Adobe Certified Instructor and of course a member of our esteemed User Group, will give us a comprehensive walkthrough of “Digital Photo Handling — from Photoshop to InDesign and Beyond.”

PDF File/s

• indesign_grep_mmurphy.pdf - Delete