Reno InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

Monday, February 2, 2004

We were very pleased to have such a great turnout despite the snowy weather. Lisa Forrester from Adobe began the meeting at about 6:35. She introduced Allycia Lindsay (user group chair) and Sonia Dietrich from Mac-O-Rama. They described the purpose of the group and talked about planned quarterly meetings. Lisa announced that everyone attending the meeting would receive a gift — the InDesign® Success Kit!

Presentation

New Features of InDesign
There are so many great new features of InDesign. Lisa covered an astounding number of items in just a few short hours. Here are the highlights for those of you who missed the meeting:

New workspace preferences allow each user to customize the user interface.

Palettes are “pop-up,” so they hide at the edges of the workspace.

The Info palette shows detailed information about the selected item.

Double-click on a text frame to get the text cursor with the selection tool!

New Document allows you to save document presets.

Document window also allows the user to create slug information settings (in the area outside of the live print area of a document).

Added view options allow user to view print mode, slug mode, bleed mode, or layout.

Separations preview offers ink limit and separation modes.

BONUS: Creative Suite includes “Version Que,” which allows the user to view and organize files. Version Que also automatically checks a file in and out when a user is editing the file. Also saves “versions” of each file, with comments.

Colors…Mixed ink group allows the designer to choose inks and create a palette of the possible combinations. Great way to combine inks for two-color jobs.

Custom glyph sets — make your own custom set.

Import Excel tables, and strip formatting if you choose.

Convert rows to “header rows” that display on every page on the table displays.

Convert to Footer does the same at the bottom of the page.

New strokes: Stroke Style Editor

Story Editor: Brings up word processing box for editing, with an option to choose text display for user in view mode.

Nested styles: paragraph styles. New styles can be created within this dialog box. The Paragraph Styles palette lists the nested styles. Using complex and multiple styles within text is good for nested styles.

Multimedia within files: Create a separate layer. QuickTime movies, Flash, MP3, and audio can be embedded. Control-clicking on a movie will bring up movie options. Good presentation platform.

Export functions: PDFs: X-1a, X-3, Acrobat® 6.0 layered (new to CS). X-1a will be the lowest common denominator to export files for prepress and ads. Can now include the slug option on export.

Package for GoLive®: In GoLive, open up the page that is being worked on. Open the InDesign Package. Drag and drop elements into the GoLive page. Graphics can be resized, cropped, and changed to GIF, all in GoLive.

InDesign CS PageMaker® Edition and the PageMaker Plug-in Pack

The PageMaker Plug-in Pack offers some good features from PageMaker that have been missing from InDesign previously. Highlights include data merge capabilities, the InBooklet SE (build booklet feature), and the PageMaker toolbar, including bullets and numbering. Can convert PageMaker 6.0 files to InDesign. Also features the template browser.

Questions and Answers/Tips and Techniques

Tip: Importing Word file, select Show Import Options dialog box, switch from platforms (PC or Mac). Strips out PC proprietary characters. Style names will import into InDesign. Named identically between the programs, it keeps the same style names, but takes on the InDesign attributes. Option: Clicking on the style name will strip out the formatting.

Tip: Edit “copied-and-pasted” Illustrator® files in InDesign. Preferences, file handling and clipboard, copy as AICB, preserve paths in Illustrator. Copy and paste directly from Illustrator to InDesign. This converts the Illustrator file to an InDesign vector-based object that can be edited in InDesign with the direct select tool.

Highlights of the Question-and-Answer Session

Q: PDFs print smaller in Acrobat 6.0 than in InDesign.
A: In the Print dialog box, choose “none” for page scaling. Otherwise, Acrobat will automatically scale the document to “fit to page.”

Q: What is the most flexible way to work with Illustrator files in InDesign?
A: It’s best to use native Illustrator files within InDesign. See the above tip for how to copy and paste Illustrator files into InDesign and preserve their editability.

Prizes

Four lucky people won Total Training packages, and our luckiest winner of the evening, Melissa Gillis, won a copy of Adobe InDesign CS!

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