Meeting Summary: CS6 Launch Party

Thu, Jul 26th, 2012 at 6:30 PM

Sheps Center

Event Details

On a hot, muggy Thursday night, we met at The Cecil G. Sheps Center in Chapel Hill. Our meeting was sponsored by Adobe, St. Clair Software and Kerntiff Publishing Systems. Leading up to the presentations, we enjoyed pizza, drinks and food from Whole Foods.

We learned about some of the fun new things unveiled in InDesign CS6. Kelly Vaughn started off the meeting showing off the Recently Used Fonts area in the fonts menu. Although not flashy, it's a big time-saver and a development we're glad Adobe made.

Next up was a demonstration of the improved text frame fitting. By clicking on the bottom square of the text frame, you can cause the frame to snap to the perimeter of the text (which works with multiple columns and non-standard text frame shapes.) Further adventures in text frames came with an exploration of the Autofit Text Frames function.

The "View at Actual Size" view setting really does what it's supposed to, now. No more having to hold a ruler up to your monitor. http://indesignsecrets.com/heres-what-we-love-about-indesign-cs6.php

Flexible Columns was discussed. A boon especially to designers working in magazines and newspapers, you can determine fairly complex column resizing behavior for text blocks easily and quickly.

When it comes to links in document, the on-object link status indicator is worth paying attention to. Now you can easily see the status of whether something (be it image or text) is in it's most current state merely by looking at its frame. Objects and text can be linked from one location to another location within a document or between documents. If you're linking text from one place to another, you can refine and change what styles are used in the Link Options dialogue box. Borrowing from Illustrator, Align to Key Object is now available in InDesign.

The procedure for exporting a grayscale pdf was laid out. This is something that could save print designers a lot of time and headaches. You even have the ability to preview your document in grayscale. http://indesignsecrets.com/finding-export-pdf-to-grayscale-in-indesign-cs6.php

Kelly's section on Forms Authoring was highly instructive. You can now create a functional pdf form right from within InDesign. Already, form designers across the planet are throwing away their migraine medication.

Alternate Layouts and Liquid Layouts are two of the biggest feature additions in CS6. With Alternate Layouts, you can actually have several different versions of your document display in the pages palette. With Liquid Layouts, you can control how objects move and/or are resized when you use the Page tool to resize your layouts. http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-indesign-cs6/understanding-liquid-layout-rules/

Aaron demonstrated the use of the Primary Text Frame. Using this, you can create and manipulate editable text frames in your document from your master pages.

Kelly demonstrated a time-saving plugin for InDesign called PDF Stickies that enables you to convert InDesign notes to sticky notes accessible in Acrobat via the comments panel.

For the last demo, Aaron showed off some of the capabilities of the OS X application Default Folder X. It's primary function is to enable you to quickly navigate to folders on your hard drive (though it has a few other handy features.) http://www.stclairsoft.com/DefaultFolderX/

Finally, raffle prizes were drawn, good conversation was had, people went home.

Please take a few minutes to check out some of the developers we mentioned in the meeting:

Kerntiff Publishing Systems: They specialize in InDesign plugins for editorial workflows (for spelling, commenting, sticky notes, style overrides, etc.)

Tomaxxi.com: He has an extraordinary number of free scripts, including one to create forms from InDesign CS5. He also made an amazing interactive keyboard shortcuts guide.

St. Clair Software: They donated a copy of the amazing little app for mac, called Default Folder X (which is like finder on steroids). It allows you to more easily navigate to various folders, change file names within any Open/Place dialog box, add meta tags and comments to your files names, right within Open dialog boxes.

Check out our new Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/83726138@N06/

Thank you

Huge thank you to Katie Gaul and the Sheps Center, for allowing us meet in their building.
Thanks to Rebecca Evans for manning the signing table and raffle ticket sales.
Thanks to all of our members, who make our group amazing!

Job Opportunities

A local publisher is looking for someone after hours to do some InDesign training, specifically for setting up InDesign master pages. If interested, please contact Heidi Perov: heidi@unc.edu

Upcoming Industry Events

The Carolina Adobe User Group will be meeting next Thursday, August 2, at 5:30 PM in Chapel Hill. The meeting topic will be Adobe Bridge Essentials. For more information and to sign-up, please visit: http://carolinaaug.groups.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=post.display&postid=42744

Next Meeting

Our next meeting will be in September. Details to follow at a later date.

Photos from this Meeting

See the photos