United States of AmericaThe CASAT/UNR office
Event DetailsOur Leveraging your Layouts (Part 1) meeting attracted a few newcomers, along with some of our more familiar, friendly faces. Our chairperson, Jim Cooper, started out with a demonstration of the InDesign Data Merge feature. He used a catalog-type sample datafile to automatically place pre-styled name, description, price text and graphics into a layout. He mentioned that this same feature could be used in real-estate offices to present all available properties. In keeping with the "leveraging" theme, he used the same data file to re-page all listings in an alternate setup.
Many of his examples included techniques developed from "live" production scenarios. The next "leveraging" file contained two print layouts and a screen-friendly PDF layout, along with some 200 pages of flowing text. Within 10 minutes, he had three examples of how a prospective publisher’s book could look. He explained how this process utilized the "Story" features of InDesign and briefly mentioned how careful stylesheet creation minimized manual intervention in creating a good "look" overall.
During the second half of the meeting, we saw how to use careful stylesheet creation to create a table of contents. We were also introduced to InDesign Tagged Text as an option for streaming in large amounts of data from an outside source. In Jim’s example, he created a full index from the placed InDesign Tagged Text file. He said that is one under-utilized aspect of automation (maintaining index entries on a database). To end this segment, he exported a PDF (intended for screen-reading) with the TOC and index entries hyperlinked to their displayed page numbers.
We also got a brief introduction to the InDesign / InCopy relationship. We saw how certain areas of a layout can be "checked out" for edit, while other areas can be protected by the InDesign production artist from unwanted or inadvertent changes. Our presenter suggested that at least one InCopy license could be incorporated into work environments, for the "track changes" function alone.
Overall, the meeting went pretty smoothly, though there was not enough time devoted to how-to’s for some. There was also a segment on graphic "swapping" for alternate print/PDF layouts that drew a few boos and mixed reviews. We concluded right on time, with our usual raffle.
Special thanks to our kind hosts, CASAT
The Center for the Application of Substance Abuse Technologies provides training, technical assistance, evaluation, research, and other services to support prevention, treatment and recovery from alcohol and drug addictions. CASAT is part of the Division of Health Sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno and houses two major substance abuse disorder national programs: (MWATTC) and (WCAPT).
Thanks also to Adobe, The University of Nevada - Reno, Peachpit Press (www.peachpit.com), and Apsiva (www.apsiva.com) for their enthusiastic support.
