Meeting Summary: Making Text Flow: Efficient, cool, clever and downright fun ways to format text in InDesign

Tue, Jun 2nd, 2009 at 5:45 PM

Edith Cowan University - Mt.Lawley

Event Details

Perth's fourth InDesign User Group meeting was held early June. The User Group has grown to almost 250 members since the group's start-up meeting on September 30 last year, and it's time to start thinking about our 1st Anniversary coming September!

Our June meeting was energetic and full of action and as the previous three meetings had a great member attendance. Marianne Young (guest presenter from Singapore (Ctrl Print)) and Cari Jansen co-presented on all things "fun-with-text" in InDesign.

Cari went a little crazy with underline, strikethrough, and paragraph rules incorporated in paragraph styles. She also showed some more practical uses of Next Styles, Nested Styles, and pushed text formatting to the limit with GREP styles. The latter have since been written up as GREP tutorials on her website (www.carijansen.com) and are accompanied by some video tutorials.

Marianne provided an insight into the greatness of OpenType fonts, explaining glyphs, show casing fonts with support for Stylistic Sets, and also demoed how cool it is to spiral text around a 'spring'-shape. She complemented Cari's session really well by adding real live examples in which Nested, Next and Object Style were combined to showcase the true power of InDesign's typographical tools.

In a short special feature session, Marianne also showed us editorial workflows with InDesign and InCopy as well as integration with some of the Ctrl Print products (CtrlChanges, CrossTalk).

Our meeting could have easily lasted another hour, and we ran majorly overtime... but we did have to stop somewhere...ending the evening with our usual give-away prizes, thanks to our sponsors.

Thank you

Ongoing Sponsorship:
Once again our User Group Meetings would not be possible without the generous ongoing support from:

• Adobe Systems (volunteers, major prize, idug web-site),/li>
  
• Aquent (lovely pizza & drinks) and


• Edith Cowan University (venue)

Meeting Sponsorship:
As sponsor for this meeting, I'd also like to say thank you to Ctrl Print, for sponsoring Marianne as our guest speaker as well as a prize

Volunteers:
Last but certainly not least, I'd like to say a big thank you to those User Group Members who volunteered with setup, registration and clean-up: Lynne and Geoff

Prize Sponsors:
The grand prize winner of the complete Adobe Creative Suite CS4 Premium software bundle was Paul Edmondson,thanks to Adobe Systems. Other prizes were generously provided by Ctrl Print (Track Changes software), O'Reilly Media (Real World InDesign CS4), InDesign Magazine (Years subscription). Thank you!

Comments from attendees

"It's great to have a demonstration in a casual environment. The instructors have made complex tools easy to learn. Can't wait to use GREP styles."

"This was my first meeting and it was fabulous."

"Informative & Entertaining!"

"Wow! I learnt heaps of stuff about InDesign that I never knew was even possible."

Next Meeting

We celebrate our first anniversary on Wednesday, 30 September 2009, with a meeting that has as theme "Creating Accessible PDF and Web Media documents from InDesign".

Chandi Perera, CEO of Typefi Systems, world-renowned guru on all things related to Publishing Automation, speaker at the O'Reilly Tools for Change Conference, will be visiting Perth as a guest speaker. Keep an eye out for the official meeting notification in your email-box... you can pre-register now.

I look forward to seeing you all again this Spring as we celebrate our first birthday.

Warm Regards,

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

Photos from this Meeting

See the photos