Meeting Summary: InDesign CS5.5 Reveal

Wed, Jun 29th, 2011 at 5:45 PM

Edith Cowan University - Mt.Lawley

Event Details

It's been well over a month since our InDesign CS5.5 new features meeting. Although the weather on the day was anything but inviting, a small group of members made it out to ECU Mt. Lawley for this meeting.

Cari provided an overview of new features and publishing technologies, with a focus on publishing accessible PDFs, EBooks (EPUB) and interactive digital magazines with the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. This gave a good idea of the publishing possibilities InDesign CS5.5 brings to the table.

We were introduced to the new Articles panel and methods for anchoring objects to text, which assists not only the defining of content order for Accessibility purposes but also for EPUB and HTML export.

We also looked at the new tagging options available for Paragraph and Character styles, which help us generate PDFs that are much more acceptable when read with screen-magnifiers, screen-readers or braille-readers. And we reviewed some of the Accessibility features and tools that ship with Adobe Acrobat X and Reader X.

In going a little more technical than usual, we also took a sneak peek at how enabling export tagging options can give us control over the Cascading Style Sheets that can be created during EPUB/HTML export.

Lastly, we had a sneak peak at the new Overlay Creator in InDesign which is added to InDesign as part of the Digital Publishing Suite toolset, and helps us build those engaging interactive digital magazines for iPad or Android devices such as the Motorola Xoom or the new Samsung Galaxy Tab 2.

General feedback of the night was that the evening provided a great overview of the exciting time we've entered as we venture into electronic publishing, yet some aspects were a little daunting for new InDesign users/members.

We hear your feedback and during our next meeting we'll be travelling "back to the basics". Keep an eye out for that meeting invite.

Some useful links:

• Acrobat X Action Wizard for PDFs created with InDesign CS5.5


• Andrew Kirkpatrick (Adobe)'s PDF presentation "Accessibility for Everyone"

Thank you

Our meetings would not be possible without the generous continued support of our sponsors and volunteers.

Sponsors:

• Adobe Systems (adobe.com) for volunteers behind the scenes, major prize, IDUG website.


• XCite Logic (www.xcitelogic.com.au) for pre-meeting pizza & drinks.


• Edith Cowan University (www.ecu.edu.au) for their continued partial venue sponsorship (50%).


• Cari Jansen (www.carijansen.com) for organizing each meeting, presentations & payment partial venue sponsorship (50%)

Volunteers:

• A big thank-you also to User Group members Lynne and Peter for helping out with the room cleanup at the end of the meeting.

Prize Sponsors:

• The major prize winner - a copy of Adobe InDesign CS5.5 - was Peter Stuthridge , thanks to Adobe Systems (www.adobe.com).


• Also a continued thank-you to InDesign Magazine (www.indesignmag.com) for providing a year membership prize, won by new member Natalie.


• And our new sponsor Choice One (www.choiceone.com.au) for the door-prize raffle a beautiful bottle of wine and chocolates, won by long-time member Paul.

Comments from attendees

"Very good - did well to simplify a complicated topic"

"Interesting - Video in InDesign is something I wasn't aware of. Accessibility also of interest"

"Fantastic, Cari your knowledge is awesome. Very glad I came. Wanting to learn so much more..."

"As always enjoy Cari's presentations - even when things don't go as planned :) The look at ePubs was informative but daunting!"

Next Meeting

Our next meeting will held on Wednesday 5 October 2011. This is going to be a genuine ‘Back to the Basics’ meeting, in which we’ll cover the basics of text formatting using Paragraph and Character styles. Lock in the date today and keep an eye out for the meeting invite closer to the date.

Look forward to seeing you all again at the start of October.

Warm regards,

Cari Jansen
Chapter Representative, Perth InDesign User Group
Adobe Certified Instructor
perth@indesignusergroup.com