Ryerson University
Event DetailsAgenda
The meeting started with Jason giving a brief update on the status of the User Group. To date we have 722 registered members, with 122 members registered for this meeting. Sebastian announced the support of a new InDesign User Group Sponsor, Loop Enterprises. Loop has been a big Adobe supporter for many years, and tonight we were very excited to announce that Loop donated an 8GB iPod Nano as a giveaway prize. Sebastian introduced Casey D'Andrea, who represented Loop enterprises at tonight's meeting.
Sebastian encouraged all InDesign user group members to actively participate in the session. He also put a call out to any members that would like present at an upcoming meeting, with an offer to assist anyone that would like to take up the challenge. It is always great to see different presenters, and anyone who is interested in presenting should email Jason (jlisi@ryerson.ca).
After Jason's introductory notes, Sebastian started with some key points with regards to OpenType fonts and InDesign's type engine. To demonstrate how accurate InDesign's rendering engine is, Sebastian zoomed into some type at 4000%!
After a good discussion on fonts, Sebastian began an explanation of how text styles work. The issues surrounding the unalterable "none" style and "Basic Paragraph" were discussed. Default styles will be applied to every text frame, so it is important to understand how the defaults work. The other thing that should be considered is if you have both a Paragraph Style and Character Style selected as a default, it will affect how your text works.
After some more detailed discussions on how and why to change the Basic Paragraph style, Sebastian explored the different ways that kerning can enhance the look of typographic elements. Specifically, he discussed how tracking and kerning, as well as baseline shift, can be controlled precisely with well-set keyboard shortcuts. Optical kerning was also discussed and demonstrated, showing how optical kerning can save time by automatically controlling kerning between letters that usually have to be kerning manually.
When creating styles, one way to increase productivity and maintain consistency is to base one style on another. By basing styles on a parent style, the new style will take on all the characteristics of the parent style, plus any modifications (overrides) that you make. This makes modification and changes extremely efficient.
The discussion progressed to a more detailed explanation of OpenType. Sebastian explained that OpenType is really a merger of PostScript and TrueType technology, and helped phase out the difficulties that Multiple Master fonts created. Thanks to the double-bit encoding, OpenType fonts can hold extended character sets, which allow for greater flexibility outside of the traditional western character set. OpenType fonts are cross-platform compatible, and allow for identical fonts for both Mac and PC (even the names)! Some really cool examples of discretional and contextual ligatures were shown.
After some great discussions, Sebastian demonstrated Paragraph Style basics, and then went into the power of nested styles. Through the presentation, Sebastian stressed the importance of naming your styles well. For example, if you create a new style based on an existing style, include the name of the style that is being referenced in the new style name. Remember that for nested styles, any character can be used as a trigger or delimiter, and there is infinite possibilities for nested styles. The "end nested style" character was explained and demonstrated.
After a short break, Sebastian continued with the fundamentals of styles, and how they can be applied to larger scope applications.
The discussion progressed from text styles to table styles. Before you can create your table styles, you need to fully define cell styles. This is because they can be called upon at any time. The same principles and practices for creating text styles should be maintained with cell styles. There are some drawbacks to table styles that make them less user-friendly than text styles. For example, you cannot create table styles as easily as text styles due to the numerous cell styles that are required to generate the table style. Cell styles also "trump" table styles, so things like alternating fills have to be defined in cell styles, not table styles.
The next topic of the evening was list styles. Any glyph can be used as a bullet, and new in CS3, you can add items after the bullet. With regards to number edlists, we can use a "list" that allows us to sequence numbers. This can allow you to have a point number one, with sub-points a, b, c, etc. This is very powerful for things like quizzes.
Next, Sebastian took a look at the new text-wrap features of CS3. You can avoid creating paths merely for text wrap in InDesign by wrapping to alpha channels that are inherent in the image file. Remember that with CS3, the image you are wrapping to does not have to be above the type. It can be below, and even on a different layer.
The meeting ended with a look at object styles. When the eyedropper is set to pick up object settings, you can apply some effects and such to new objects. This does not work with text however, since things like drop shadows are not text attributes. The eyedropper does not pick up transparency effects on text: you have to select the object style. This is however, very finicky and hard to control.
During the meeting wrap-up, the draw for the iPod Nano took place. Congratulations to Len Goins for winning the iPod, and thanks once again to Loop Enterprises for their support.
A very special thank you to Loop Enterprises for their generous support for this meeting!
This was an amazing meeting with lots of insights and great dialogue. For those of you who missed this meeting, you will certainly want to make up for it on the next one. The details will be released shortly, but I can tell you it will be amazing! For those who came, as always, your participation and support made this a fantastic meeting. Please keep it up!
See you all at the next meeting!
Jason
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Canada